A Weekend with Claude

A Weekend with Claude was Beryl Bainbridge’s first published novel, but not the first she wrote. My edition is the 1981 revision of the original 1967 publication. It’s an absolute revel of a read. I bought it accidentally at the start of the year when it was in the sale section of my local independent bookshop.

Because I own it, I decided to sort of join in with Beryl Bainbridge Reading Week, hosted by Annabel at AnnaBookBel this year. I’d like to read more by Bainbridge, which is partly why I took advantage of the half price sticker.

A Weekend with Claude is only my third Bainbridge book. Almost a quarter of a century ago, I borrowed Injury Time from the library. I enjoyed it, but didn’t make time for more Beryl until I won a Folio Society voucher seven years ago and used it to acquire a copy of Every Man for Himself. I enjoyed that, too.

A Weekend with Claude was Bainbridge’s first published novel, but not the first she wrote. My edition is the 1981 revision of the original 1967 publication. It’s an absolute revel of a read. I admired Bainbridge’s way with words and her understanding of human nature, but I found myself wondering what the first edition reads like. Bainbridge would have been around 35 years old when it was first published, not a slip of a lass by any means, but she clearly thought this early novella needed refining, returning to it as she approached 50. Perhaps, having set the story around the character of Lily, she felt the older Shebah needed some attention. I looked around online for a comparison, but couldn’t find anything to enlighten me.

The Claude of the title is an antiques dealer moved out of London with his wife and young family, subsequently abandoned by the wife who, while Claude is hospitalised by the shock, returns to clean him out of antiques and children. Now he lives with Julia, mother to another child of his, wearer of red slippers and a better fit for him than the first wife ever was.

The story begins with the purchase of a desk by a young couple. The wife finds a letter and photograph inside the desk, which Claude won’t let her keep. It’s from an old friend, Lily, and marks a weekend in 1960. The details of the weekend come to light through the memories of the people involved: Lily and her friends Victorian Norman and Shebah. Lily’s current boyfriend Edward doesn’t get a voice. Lily, Norman and Shebah each get a chapter, alternating with the scene in Claude’s present day kitchen, where he and Julia share their memories of the weekend with the young couple. It’s an interesting way to see people from multiple angles, and recognise how, as hinted at in my recent read of No One You Know, we can never truly know ourselves or be known by others.

Lily was my favourite character. She isn’t entirely likeable but she is amusing. She scandalises her friend Shebah with her modern attitude to relationships. The purpose of the weekend at Claude’s is for Lily to cover over her pregnancy by her ex-boyfriend Billie by persuading Edward to marry her and pass off the baby as his. Lily charges her friends with making her look good to Edward. The plan almost works. The unfortunate thing is that each of these friends has as much hatred for the others as they have love and nobody is to sticking the knife in if it makes them feel better about their own sorry existence.

As I read, I thought about the setting. 1960 wasn’t ‘The Swinging Sixties’ of legend. It was still partially the Fifties. Claude, we learn, was in the RAF during the Second World War, which ended only fifteen years before. Claude is older than everyone else, bar Shebah, but not truly old. He is a proto-hippy, perhaps someone who might have been influenced by the Beatnik movement, bringing him to a belief in the futility of rules and morals that constrain, choosing a life more dissolute and approaching what would become known as Free Love.

Shebah is in her sixties, making her a very late Victorian baby, an Edwardian child, attaining adulthood in the Roaring Twenties. Her moral code is that of an earlier generation, but her theatrical background and dramatic demeanour make the younger people think of her as almost like them. She’s a tragic figure, pitied and ridiculed by the others, a sort of jester in their midst. It’s not a role Shebah would choose, but she is lonely so has no real choice.

Victorian Norman was my least favourite character. He claims an allegiance to Marxism, but he is performing the role of man of the people. He disdains his friends for their complicity with the trappings of bourgeoisie while sponging off them. He’s an adolescent in a man’s body. He’s cruel and two-faced, more so than the others.

In the present day section, there is the suggestion that convention is reclaiming its hold on the young, that the pendulum of the 60s’ swing is slowing. The young couple who buy the desk are conventional in a way Shebah would recognise, and yet there is a tension there, a sense that the wife would like to be more like Lily. Claude ends up returning the letter to the desk, for the wife to find later, but not before he reads it again and so lets us into its secret.

I’m glad to have dipped my toe back into Beryl Bainbridge’s writing. I’ll keep an eye out for more of her books that I can accidentally buy.

Read 20/11/2023-27/11/2023

Read for Beryl Bainbridge Reading Week.