A WEEKEND WITH CLAUDE AND ANOTHER PART OF THE WOOD

Lorna Sage has suggested that Beryl Bainbridge's ‘career began abruptly in the 1970s’. Sage mentions ‘a couple of earlier, more rambling novels’, but notes that they have been ‘stricken from the record’ (Sage 85). These stricken novels are A Weekend with Claud (1967; revised edn 1981) and Another Part of the Wood (1968; revised edn 1979). After a career as an actor and an attempt to find a publisher for an earlier novel, ‘The Summer of the Tsar’, A Weekend with Claud was finally accepted by New Authors Limited, a Hutchinson imprint aimed at publishing first-time novelists. The follow-up was published by Hutchinson's main imprint. Both novels see an unlikely group of acquaintances thrown into close proximity on a weekend away, with the prospect of disaster never far from the horizon. To those familiar with Bainbridge's work, these sound like set ups for typically Bainbridgean comedies of awkwardness and misunderstanding, and in many ways they are, though they lack the sharpness and economy of her later work, a change reflected in the heavy editing of the revised editions later published by Duckworth: the only added material in the revised novels was the additional ‘e’ that found its way into the title of A Weekend with Claude. Although not among Bainbridge's most accomplished works, A Weekend with Claude and Another Part of the Wood nevertheless hint at what was to come and contain many interesting parallels with her mature novels.

A Weekend with Claude opens with an unnamed husband and wife visiting an antique dealer, Claude, to buy a desk. The couple are well-to-do and reserved, and are unsettled by the bohemian Claude, with his dishevelled appearance, disarranged home and ease of manner; Claude begins expounding upon love, sex and childcare almost as soon as they sit down to tea: ‘It was as if he had shown her a pack of obscene photographs’, the woman thinks, unnerved but also attracted (WC2 15). In one of the desk drawers the woman discovers a photograph and a letter.