Winter Garden E-Book

Beryl Bainbridge

• Herausgeber: Daunt Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 232

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

When quiet, reliable lawyer Douglas Ashburner begins an extra-marital affair with Nina, a bossy, temperamental artist with a penchant for risky sex, he finds it all a terrible strain. Needing a break, he does not head off on the fishing holiday he tells his wife is the plan. Instead, he flies to Moscow with Nina, as a guest of the Soviet Artists Union. It's not long before Ashburner regrets his decision: he promptly loses his luggage, the food is dreadful, he receives a baffling phone call from someone claiming to be his brother. When Nina slips out to lunch and never returns, things go from bad to disastrous to downright hallucinatory. Winter Garden is ripe with scathing wit, eccentric characters and a richly morbid atmosphere, and is for fans of Kingsley Amis.

Leseprobe

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‘Brilliant … marvellous comedy … A tour de force.’ Observer 

‘Bainbridge’s scene-by-scene command is awesome, with great waves of mood and texture evoked by the leanest, most ironically austere bits of narrative and dialogue … full of talent and pleasure and intelligence.’ Kirkus Reviews 

‘I wish it had not stopped.’ Sunday Times

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The following titles by Beryl Bainbridge are also available or forthcoming from the publisher

A Weekend with Claude

Harriet Said …

The Dressmaker

The Bottle Factory Outing

Sweet William

A Quiet Life

Injury Time

Young Adolf

Watson’s Apology

An Awfully Big Adventure

The Birthday Boys

Collected Stories

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Winter Garden

Beryl Bainbridge

Daunt Books

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For Brian McGuinnessvi

Contents

Title PageDedication12345678910111213141516171819Daunt BooksAbout the AuthorCopyright

1

1

One morning early in October, a man called Ashburner, tightly buttoned into a black overcoat and holding a suitcase, tried to leave his bedroom on the second floor of a house in Beaufort Street. It was still dark outside and he had switched on the light. Hovering there, unable to take that foolhardy step onto the landing, he heard the whine of the filament; any moment the bulb would give out. Thinking of the blackness to come, he said, ‘Are you sure you’ll be able to manage?’

His wife, propped on pillows in the bed, struggled to keep her eyes open. She asked him, in a voice querulous with fatigue, what on earth he meant. 2

Though poorly phrased, Ashburner had thought it a reasonable question. Throughout twenty-six years of married life, between midnight and dawn, with the exception of his wife’s two confinements, a funeral in Norwich which had obliged her to stop overnight and a three-day business trip he himself had made to Santander, they had never been separated. Inadequately he mentioned the coal that had to be brought up in a bucket from the cellar and the dinner he usually prepared for the dog at seven o’clock. ‘There’s also the possibility,’ he said, ‘that the television set may break down.’

‘It’s only you that bothers with the fire in the drawing room,’ his wife reminded him. ‘And I’d be delighted if the television broke. You know it gives me a headache.’ She closed her eyes. She was generally tired in the morning and always exhausted of an evening. ‘You’d better hurry,’ she urged. ‘You don’t want to miss your train.’

Ashburner began to have difficulty breathing. He remembered Nina’s telling him that people with murmurs of the heart, not yet diagnosed, often adopted a crouching position. Cautiously he lowered himself onto his haunches and almost immediately pitched forward onto his knees. 3

‘Have you gone?’ his wife called.

‘I’m tying on labels,’ Ashburner said, and he reached up and clung to the brass rail at the foot of the bed as though to stop himself sliding into an abyss.

His wife’s reaction to his sudden and peculiar need for a complete rest, arising so soon after their summer holiday in Venice, had been both sporting and unnerving. Ashburner hadn’t wanted to be prevented from going, but he had anticipated a fair amount of resistance. Indeed, if his wife had played her cards right – expressed her opposition in some female manner, like bursting into tears – he would have abandoned his plans entirely; only a rotter would rush thoughtlessly off, blind to a woman’s distress. But she hadn’t objected. On the contrary, she had sent his old tweed trousers to be cleaned and fetched down his waders from the attic. Last Wednesday she had bought him a map of the Highlands. It had been her idea that he should leave the car at home and travel by rail. ‘After all,’ she told him, ‘we both know how het-up you become when overtaken.’

‘I can’t deny it,’ he said.

‘And if you can’t find a decent loch straight away, or a suitable hotel, you can always hire transport.’ 4

‘That’s sensible,’ he agreed. ‘I expect I shall be moving about quite a bit.’

‘Two weeks in the open air,’ said his wife, ‘drifting in a rowing boat, will undoubtedly set you up for the winter.’ It was true that severe blizzards were reported to be raging in the north of Scotland, but then he had never been a man to feel the cold.

If she had uttered one single word of reproach, Ashburner might have made a clean breast of things. Even now, when it was obviously too late, he longed to experience that same heady sensation of martyrdom which had prompted him as a schoolboy, accused of some group misdemeanour, secretly to approach his housemaster and claim sole responsibility for a breach in the rules.

‘I may not be able to telephone you,’ he said, hauling himself upright. ‘There may not be a telephone.’ His wife had slumped further down the bed and lay with both arms raised above her head, palms together in a diving position. ‘On the other hand,’ he said, ‘you may be out.’ According to Nina, his wife’s posture, seeing that she wasn’t on the edge of a swimming pool, was evidence of back trouble. ‘And I’m not sure that I’ll ring the office. They’re bound to 5start pestering me. You’d better just tell them I can’t be reached.’ He thought he sounded insane.

His wife grunted. Ashburner knew she wasn’t likely to dramatise his absence. Later in the week, when she met her friend Caroline for lunch, she wouldn’t give the impression that her husband was in the first stages of a terminal illness or that he was heading for a nervous breakdown. She would simply say he had gone fishing.

‘Well, I’ll be off then,’ said Ashburner loudly. He picked up his suitcase. It would be unwise to kiss her again. When he had done so earlier she had ticked him off for digging his elbow into her shoulder.

His wife remained inert. The covers had been partially pushed back as though she had intended to leap out of bed and perhaps make his breakfast. There were two roses appliquéd at the front of her nightgown, one on each breast. Ashburner was uncomfortably reminded of several things Nina had said to him less than a week before. She had remarked that it was clear, from certain observations he himself had made, that his wife lacked any deep awareness of birds, of flowers; that she was innocent of theophanies, of mystical experiences, and 6those desired flashes of consciousness so essential to development. In short, she was a woman with no vocation for living. Since Ashburner had, to his way of thinking, been painting a fairly exciting picture of his wife, sketching in her sense of fun, her ability to spot an antique a mile off, her qualities as a mother, illustrated by the optimistic manner in which, during numerous rain-filled holidays on the beach at Nevin, she had sung Thesunhasputhishaton, he had been caught off balance. He could have kicked himself afterwards for not mentioning the extraordinary occasion when his wife saw her Uncle Robert, dead for five years, materialise in a bus queue at Hendon. Nor had he cared to mention the winter garden, a name his wife gave to the sunken yard behind the house, a paved area devoid of earth and so called because even in summer it lay as dark as the grave. Though his wife might have scored, poetically speaking, from the coining of such a phrase, he had known that Nina would immediately pounce on her choice of words and ludicrously interpret them as yet further proof of an abhorrence of sex. For different reasons he had kept quiet about his wife’s habit, indulged in throughout the warmer nights 7of June and July, of stepping down into the winter garden with a skipping rope. To have hinted that his wife was trying to improve her figure, springing up and down in the moonlight, would have inflamed Nina. She was never consistent. She would doubtless have told him that his wife was shaping up to throw herself at anything in trousers. Of course Nina enjoyed needling him, and on this particular evening she had drunk almost two bottles of champagne; but in pointing out his wife’s supposed failings, she had only exposed his own: he had never had any flashes, desired or otherwise, and his awareness of flowers was admittedly poor. In his view, as he told Nina, the things either poked up out of the ground or lolled in vases. Stung, Nina had gone further. She had suggested that his wife was frivolous – all that laughing she apparently went in for at dinner parties and on the telephone.

At the time Ashburner had dismissed Nina’s remarks as absurd, but at this moment, gazing down on his slumbering wife, bulky in her pink nightgown, he felt distressed. He wondered whether the night before, when he had made love to her, those slight tremors of her body had been due to stifled hilarity. 8He rammed his suitcase against the side of the bed. His wife fluttered one hand, encased in a blue cotton glove, in a queenly gesture of farewell.

Ashburner descended the stairs so forcefully that a shallow wardrobe, standing with its back to the skirting board in the hall, rocked violently. Its door, in which was set an oval mirror, swung outwards. He was confronted with an image of a face similar to his own, wobbling, as though reflected in water.

He went up the hall and into the kitchen to say goodbye to the dog. The dog, lying on its horse-blanket beneath the radiator, ignored him. Ashburner looked inside the knife-drawer for a pencil, thinking it would be a nice idea to scribble a note to his sons, and then remembered they no longer lived at home. Entering the hall once more he side-stepped the wardrobe and pausing only to shoulder his fishing rod left the house.

9

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Enid had hoped to arrive at the airport before the others. She’d planned to be sitting down when Bernard appeared. She wanted to be the one who would wave, call out, draw attention to herself. She was therefore flustered, having gone through passport control, to see Bernard almost immediately, sprawled on a plastic couch in the middle of the departure lounge, drinking out of a paper cup. Spread out on the floor in front of him was a collection of carrier bags. Nina stood behind the couch, leaning against a balding man who was clutching a fur hat to his chest.

‘Got your bath plug, love?’ asked Bernard, as Enid approached. He didn’t bother to get up. He 10was wearing his old mackintosh and a pair of adventure boots threaded with bright yellow laces.

‘Say hallo to Douglas Ashburner,’ ordered Nina, as though Enid was a child at a tea-party.

‘Hallo Douglas Ashburner,’ said Enid, and she shook hands with the balding man.

Enid didn’t know Nina all that well. Over the years they’d met at various dinners and at exhibition openings but hadn’t ever been close. She knew Bernard very well. She wasn’t sure how well Bernard knew Nina. Neither Bernard nor Enid had met Douglas Ashburner before.

As guests of the Soviet Artists’ Union they had each been told they could bring a friend, at their own expense, or husbands and wives if they wished. Nina’s husband, the brain specialist, renowned for his remark that he’d never seen a painting yet that wasn’t improved by a decent frame, was far too busy and successful to travel, and Bernard never took his wife anywhere. Enid wasn’t married.

‘I feel rotten,’ said Nina suddenly. She swayed on her feet to prove it. Ashburner escorted her round the couch and sat her down beside Bernard. ‘She doesn’t look rotten, does she?’ he asked, appealing to Enid. 11

‘Not very,’ said Enid. But she was aware that Nina, who normally carried herself like Joan of Arc at the stake, chin tilted as though she smelled the straw beginning to burn, was now slumped against Bernard, her head resting on his shoulder. Nina was famed for her beauty. Enid couldn’t see it herself, but everyone else saw it at a glance. Nina had bold blue eyes, black hair that she sometimes plaited and legs like a principal boy. She had never been known to lose an argument.

After a few moments Ashburner went off to fetch a glass of water. There was no room for Enid on the couch, so she stood there looking anxious. ‘Is it her head or her stomach?’ she asked, speaking to Bernard as if Nina was already in a coma. Bernard didn’t reply. He sat there, pushed sideways by the weight of Nina, staring gloomily at the floor. He detested illness.

‘Should anything go wrong,’ said Nina faintly, ‘please be kind to Douglas. He’s a good man.’

‘Of course,’ whispered Enid, and gritted her teeth in case she laughed. Twenty years ago she and Nina had been at the same boarding school in Norfolk. It didn’t mean anything. Enid had been fifteen at the 12time, and Nina was two years younger. They had never been in the same class. Even in those days the thickness of Nina’s hair had distinguished her from others. In summer the mildest of breezes sent her panama hat sailing from the top of her head to bowl across the grass.

Ashburner returned with a cardboard cup full of water. Nina sipped and sighed. No one could make up their minds whether it was a good idea or not to send for the St John Ambulance Brigade.

‘Probably not,’ decided Bernard. ‘We might miss the bloody plane. Think of the arrangements at the other end.’

The thought was sufficient to revive Nina, who privately regarded herself as leader of their little group. After all, she had been to Russia twice before: once to Leningrad with a party of students from the Slade, and again when she had visited Moscow for three days in her capacity as wife of the brain specialist. When their flight was announced she rose pluckily, though she clung to Bernard for support.

Ashburner, who had no hand luggage, was obliged to carry Bernard’s paper bags. He consoled himself with the knowledge that he would have looked 13dreadfully conspicuous supporting Nina. As it was, if he was spotted by anyone it might just appear he was alone. The fact that this was Heathrow, not Euston Station, could, if the unthinkable happened, be put down to amnesia.

From the moment of arrival at the airport he had found himself in a state of increasing nervousness. He had greeted Nina too coldly; he had uttered the words ‘Oh it’s you’, instead of clasping her in his arms. She hadn’t understood his predicament, his inability to collect his feelings in the midst of such activity and bustle. Inside he had felt anything but cold towards her, though he had been taken aback by the clothes she was wearing. Nina had punished him by going on for at least ten minutes about some friend she was dying to see again in Moscow, a regular humdinger of a man called Boris Aleksyeevich Shabelsky. Ashburner had been stunned by the fellow’s unpronounceable name and the realisation that she was dying to see anyone other than himself. Moreover she had bullied him into opening his suitcase. Several packets of nylon stockings slithered to the floor; he could have been mistaken for a commercial traveller. And now she was ill. 14

‘I don’t mind telling you,’ he confessed to Enid, ‘how worried I am. She’s not talking off the top of her hat, you know. She’s a very strong grasp of medical matters.’

‘Has she?’ said Enid. She had to stop herself from breaking into a run to catch up with Bernard, who was now striding through the hurrying crowds, one hand grasping Nina’s waist as he propelled her forward in the direction of the flight gate.

‘And she mentioned it earlier,’ Ashburner said. ‘At the luggage counter. She gave me some pills to put in my suitcase.’

‘What did she mention?’ asked Enid.

‘About being under the weather,’ explained Ashburner. ‘She hoped I wouldn’t catch it.’

‘That was kind,’ Enid said. Glancing at him she was momentarily shocked to discover that he seemed to have sprouted a quantity of glossy black hair.

Ashburner, searching the broadwalk ahead for a glimpse of Nina, was disconcerted to see that Bernard was dragging his left leg quite noticeably, obviously parodying his companion’s infirmity. Seen from this distance he resembled an inebriated tramp; but then Nina herself, for some extraordinary reason, was 15wrapped in a moth-eaten fur that was coming apart at the seams. Why on earth wasn’t she wearing the mink coat her husband the brain specialist had given her only last Christmas? Even as Ashburner watched, she reached up and pulled Bernard’s ear. Clutching each other at the waist they stumbled towards Gate 23. Such intimate tomfoolery accentuated the gap between Ashburner and Nina. If he had behaved in a similar manner, depend upon it, she would have shaken him from her like a louse from a blanket. 16

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In the queue for seat allocation, Nina was pale but upright. She looked at Ashburner in his fur hat and smiled heroically.

‘Feeling better?’ he said.

‘A little,’ she conceded, and turned her back on him almost immediately.

Ashburner was alarmed by her indifference. He feared there was worse to come. ‘I do feel,’ he said, anxious to show his authority, ‘that we ought to sit in the front of the plane.’

‘I want to smoke,’ snapped Bernard. 18

‘I was thinking of Nina,’ explained Ashburner. ‘Besides, should anything go wrong, the back end is always the first bit to fall off.’

‘In that case,’ Bernard said, ‘she’ll need a fag in her hand.’

No one bothered to ask Enid where she wanted to sit.

Hampered by his assortment of carrier bags, Ashburner had difficulty handing over his boarding pass. When eventually he entered the aircraft and struggled up the centre aisle to the rear of the plane, Nina was already seated, positioned between Bernard and a man in horn-rimmed spectacles with a briefcase on his knee.

‘Ah,’ breathed Ashburner and stood there, undecided.

‘Do get settled,’ pleaded Nina. ‘You’re causing a blockage.’

It took Ashburner some time to stow Bernard’s belongings satisfactorily in the overhead lockers. Pieces of charcoal and several tubes of oil paint spilled onto the lap of the man with the briefcase. Bernard stared impassively out of the starboard porthole as though it was no concern of his. 19

‘You’re in my seat,’ protested Ashburner, at last. Now that he was actually aboard, his rightful place was beside Nina.

‘Sorry, mate,’ said Bernard. ‘Once down, I stay down.’ And he slapped his leg obscurely.

Face mottled with annoyance, Ashburner joined Enid on the other side of the aisle. He had been warned about the man’s rudeness. Bernard’s first appearance on television, in a programme featuring his work, had been noteworthy. Standing in the back garden of his dark little house in Wandsworth, he had pointed graphically at an upstairs window and referred to his unseen wife as the first Mrs Rochester. He had called the interviewer a prick for confusing an etching with an engraving. He had answered every question with such evident overtones of commercial insanity, giving vent to a burst of insensitive laughter when describing the death of his cat, lost under the wheels of a corporation dust cart, that he had become an overnight celebrity. He was never off the box.

I can’t compete, thought Ashburner. A man in my position has to mind his ps and qs. He muttered audibly enough for Enid to hear: ‘What a nerve the man has!’ 20

‘He can’t help it,’ said Enid. ‘He’s had a hip replacement. He’s got a steel ball-and-socket thing.’

Ashburner’s cheeks glowed redder than ever. He felt as though he’d been caught throwing stones at a cripple. He leaned forward in his seat to attract Nina’s attention.

The man with the briefcase nodded at him and smiled.

‘Don’t look now,’ muttered Ashburner, turning to Enid, ‘but that fellow seems to know us.’

‘He’s probably a member of the KGB,’ Enid said, and she studied the emergency exit procedures.

She was dismayed by the size of the aeroplane, having expected something larger. She wondered if perhaps they were being flown out on the cheap. She had travelled three times by air, twice to New York and once to Los Angeles. On each occasion she had enjoyed watching a film. Her headphones had blocked out the noise of the engines and she had scarcely known she was flying.

‘I don’t like small planes,’ she told Ashburner. ‘I don’t think they’re as safe as big ones.’

‘On the contrary,’ Ashburner reassured her, ‘they’re safer. Think of all those fellows during the war, limping home on a wing and a prayer.’ 21

He had just begun to tell her of the miraculous return of a Wellington bomber whose tail hung by a wire from the fuselage, a story he’d come across in Reader’sDigest while waiting for a dental examination, when the aircraft began to roll along the tarmac.

Enid bent over her knees and stuffed her fingers in her ears.

Nonplussed, Ashburner craned forward to look at Nina. The man in spectacles gave him a second, conspiratorial smile. Nina was talking to Bernard; sensing she was being watched she glanced over her shoulder. Ashburner was struck by the anxiety in her eyes. This woman loves me, he told himself, though many wouldn’t realise it.

Nina fluttered her fingers at him, a gesture so reminiscent of his wife’s dismissive wave of farewell that he was further cast down. Hurtling along the runway at a hundred and twenty miles an hour, he considered the probability that at this very moment his wife was unbolting the back door of their house to let the dog out to do its business. The sickening wrench he experienced when the plane left the ground and climbed into the sky made his heart pound in his breast. It wasn’t only the ground he 22was leaving. It came to him in one of those flashes so often described by Nina, that his wife saw him in much the same light as the dog, a creature so dependable and infirm as to be thought incapable of straying beyond the confines of the winter garden.

Ashburner ached to confide in someone and had to wait fifteen minutes before Enid removed her fingers from her ears.

‘Are we up?’ she asked. She refused to look out of the porthole.

‘Well up,’ said Ashburner. He ferreted in his mind for the right words. ‘I haven’t known Nina very long,’ he began. ‘I expect you know her better than I.’

‘Hardly,’ said Enid. ‘We’re not intimate.’ Now that Ashburner had taken off his fur hat she thought he looked like a troubled baby. It had something to do with the firmness of his pink cheeks, and his round, puzzled eyes.

‘But you’re in the same line … art and that sort of thing.’

‘Nina’s gone into lumps of metal,’ Enid said. ‘I work mainly in oils.’

‘But,’ persisted Ashburner, ‘you do know her.’ 23

Enid was often underestimated. Her pleasant smile and unremarkable features made her appear neutral. She had been made a prefect at school, and the subsequent discovery that she had cheated in the maths exam had caused astonishment. ‘I’ve never been to Nina’s house for dinner,’ she said, ‘if that’s what you mean. Or to her cottage in the country, or to her studio in Holland Park. But once I had a long chat with her husband about India. He’s keen on rugs.’

‘Ah,’ said Ashburner and fell uncomfortably silent.

He too had never been to Nina’s house for dinner. He had, however, visited it in his lunch hour without being offered a morsel of food. Instead, Nina had encouraged him to make love to her standing up in the kitchen. ‘Just get on tip-toe,’ she had urged, ‘and lean against the door.’ It was in case her husband the brain specialist came home unexpectedly. Buttocks perilously close to the brass knob of the door, his transports of love had been tinged with theatricality. It wasn’t quite the real thing. He found it terribly difficult to keep his balance, and his knees trembled violently. He wasn’t a fit man, being overweight, and the muscles in his calves seemed to have wasted away; 24if he had fallen on top of her the consequences could have been fatal. Nina was quite right of course, it would have been in bad taste to cavort in the marriage bed, and it was bad luck that the sofa in her living room was upholstered in velvet. There was a leather couch in one of the consulting rooms on the ground floor, but mostly the door was kept locked. Ashburner had suggested they line the sofa with a protective layer of newspapers, but the idea – and who could blame her? – hadn’t appealed to Nina. He was fearful, to the point of paralysis, of discovery. Nina usually stripped below the waist but insisted he retain his trousers. Such a welter of cloth and dangling braces rendered him helpless. Had Nina’s husband returned – apparently he was in the habit of rushing home quite gratuitously for a ham sandwich – Ashburner would have been hurled forward onto the scrubbed pine table, ready for carving. Nina herself pretended to require that added edge of danger. She told him a ridiculous story about D. H. Lawrence who, disguised as a character in one of his novels, actually made love to a lady called Clara on a railway line. ‘We should do it in all sorts of places,’ Nina had cried, remembering something else she had read. ‘In shop doorways and on the tops of buses.’ 25‘Perhaps,’ Ashburner had replied doubtfully. He knew for a fact that Nina hadn’t used public transport for at least ten years. All he required was a decent mattress. If she had truly wanted him to give her pleasure she would have arranged things differently, he felt. He had come to this conclusion on the frantic occasion when, imagining she heard footsteps climbing the stairs, Nina had manhandled him into the lobby and thrust him inside a fitted cupboard near the door. As it happened, it had been a false alarm; but, cowering there, his bare knees pressed against the brain specialist’s summer overcoat, a faint smell of anaesthetic clinging to the fabric of the collar, Ashburner had been frightened enough to become introspective. In this sort of affair, he had realised, there was always someone who loved and someone who played the clown, and possibly they were the same person. She takes me for granted, he’d thought. It’s not a thing a man can tolerate.

‘When we took off,’ he observed sadly to Enid, ‘he held her hand.’ He looked sideways in the general direction of Bernard. The man with the briefcase, a miniature bottle of vodka at his elbow, raised his glass ingratiatingly. 26

‘It doesn’t mean much,’ said Enid, though she didn’t like to be told. ‘Neither of them likes flying.’ An hour ago she had cherished the illusion that it would be she who sat beside Bernard, shoulder to shoulder, as they were hauled upwards through the clouds.

‘His nails are filthy,’ Ashburner said. ‘Quite indescribable. He must have mended a puncture on the way.’