BERYL BAINBRIDGE

Injury Time

1977

THE PUBLICATION OF Young Adolf brought Beryl Bainbridge into my life. For whatever reason, I failed to have her sign my copy, but she did sign two of her previous novels. That Hitler had spent some months before the First World War in Liverpool with his elder brother Alois was a fantasy that powerfully confused fact and fiction. Born and brought up in Formby, just outside Liverpool, she interpreted all experience as desolation stretching away into immeasurable distance.

She lived by herself in a part of London colonized by men and women much like her, talented in one or another of the arts. A creeper cloaked her house, and inside it was a junkyard. Stuffed animals in glass cases or under bell jars cluttered every space. Out of one wall jutted a plaster cast of a chorus girl’s leg, from the Locarno Ballroom in Liverpool. A crucifix had been remodeled as a candlestick.

Her father, the youngest of nine children, had left school at the age of nine. “The general impression my mother gave was that he had married above himself.” When she was eleven, she joined the Young Communists and later was briefly a Catholic. “I was terribly wanting my mother’s approval but doing everything not to gain it.” In 1954 she married, but her husband soon emigrated to New Zealand. His mother broke in and fired a revolver. On the stairs was the bullet hole, none too well replastered.

More often than not, a Bainbridge novel reaches its climax with a grotesquely contrived death. My copy of Injury Time contains a bundle of notes from our conversation, and one of them reads, “To have a sense of well-being destroys your personality.” I coined a word for her: murderee.