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This was an enormous relief to me. Nicola was now ten minutes away from Blandford Street by bus, in a beautiful house with a park nearby and two other children to play with, while Nanny had a
baby to look after, her dearest wish. I visited every week, miserably
aware of how unsatisfactory this was, and I felt guilty. Nicola and Julia went to a school a short bus ride
away, and Josie and I embarked upon a cautious friendship that has ripened and warmed to this day.

Josie was tiny, with a complexion like the best porcelain and a face that Gainsborough might have painted. Aside from the high forehead and fashionably neat, rosy lips, she had wit and
intelligence that sparked from her eyes. Her husband, whose name was Michael but was invariably called Bumbo, was a lawyer working in a bank. He had a passion for architecture, looked like the
nicest kind of bear and had, as Josie described to me later, ‘a well-furnished mind’. But at first all I noticed about them was that he was kind and extremely courteous and that she was
also generously kind and very highly strung. The only stipulation that Michael Behrens made about this arrangement was that Josie and Bumbo weren’t to know anything about our affair.

In March, just before my twenty-sixth birthday,
The Beautiful Visit
was published. I was in Paris when I read my first review – a cool, but friendly piece by Francis Wyndham in the
Sunday Times
. I also had a very good review from Antonia White, best known for her lovely novel
Frost in May
. I’d started by then on my next novel, the construction of which
I’d thought about far more carefully than I had with the first. It was to be about a marriage, told backwards, from the time when it broke up, to the couple’s first meeting. The idea of
stripping people down to their raw beginnings seemed to me to have interesting possibilities.

That spring I went to my first Cape party. I didn’t know any other writers, and I felt they would all know one another. I dressed carefully for the occasion in a black skirt and stiff
satin shirt of duck-egg blue that had been made for me out of a piece of material I’d bought in an antiques shop. It buttoned all the way up in small satin-covered buttons the size of peas.
Jonathan Cape conducted me up the large first-floor room to the far end where, grouped around a piano were Rosamond Lehmann, Cecil Day-Lewis and Cyril
Connolly. I was
introduced, and Cyril said, ‘Do all those buttons actually do
up
?’ I was so dazzled by this group, all of whom I knew by sight from the jackets of their books, that I was
virtually speechless. I’ve always found walking into a room full of people, known or unknown, slightly nerve-racking, but William Plomer and Daniel George, both editors whom I’d met,
looked after me.

At some time during the late spring, Jill Balcon invited me to a drinks party in her flat in Pimlico. It was very jolly – Siriol was there – and I ended up making corned beef hash
for the late stayers. A small, fair girl called Audrey Dunlop and I took to each other. As Joanna was leaving Blandford Street to live with her mother, I invited Audrey back. She’d been in
Paris for several years, and had left, I came to know, largely because of an unhappy love affair. She was a designer, looking for somewhere to live, and soon afterwards she moved in. She wanted to
occupy the top floor, so we moved the kitchen and dining room down to the first floor where Joanna had lived. She also wanted to redecorate. This inspired me to do the like. We went off to Coles
together, as they made easily the best wallpapers. I turned my bedroom into a dressing room and put a divan in the sitting room. Audrey chose a dignified grey paper with a gold pattern on it. I
went for stripes, two different reds, like the passages in the Royal Opera House, for the dressing room, and the same width of stripe in a yellow and cinnamon brown – a terrible mistake: it
dazzled. Coles recommended the Beswick brothers to hang the paper. They came to measure, two jolly little men, quite young. Len was very quiet and Stan rather noisy, with a laugh exactly like an
empty tin can tumbling down uncarpeted stairs. On the day they started work, they brought a very old man with them. He was almost bald, with large protuberant red-rimmed eyes, like a bulldog.
‘We’ve brought Mr Edwards,’ they said. ‘It’s just the right-sized job for him. Now, Dad, sit down and have a cup of tea before you start.’ Mr Edwards was panting
heavily with excitement. ‘You won’t have to worry,’ they said. ‘He’s taught us all we know. Been at it nearly fifty years.’

He was incredible. He would take one look at a mantelpiece, slash the paper, and it would fit exactly: he never measured anything. My walls were still bulging with weak old
plaster, but he managed to give the impression that the stripes were straight. There is a peculiar joy in watching someone do anything as well as that. Mr Edwards kept a book, the brothers told me,
that recorded every single paper he’d ever hung, and included several palaces, they said with pride. The brothers came back at midday to see that he wasn’t overdoing it. It was the
beginning of a long association with them: they hung papers for me in four subsequent houses. Eventually Stan left to become a greengrocer, Len told me with quiet contempt. It was Len I got to know
best. He always wore white overalls with white shoes, and always brought a packed lunch. He never played a radio while he worked.

In August, the IWA staged a Festival and Rally of Boats at Market Harborough. By now Tom Rolt and Angela had parted and Tom was very much in love with a girl called Sonia Smith, who’d been
an actress and then married a boatman. Tom had resigned from the council, so the main effort of staging the event fell to Robert, and he did it very well. A play was to be performed in the Assembly
Rooms. Robert wanted the piece to be light entertainment, and chose Benn Levy’s
Spring Time for Henry
. The cast of four were Barry Morse, Nicolette Bernard, Carla Lehman and,
surprisingly, Pete, who decided he would like to have a go. He was very good in it. The farce was on the short side, and it was decided to have a curtain raiser. I’d written a two-hander
called
Illusion
and showed it to Nicolette and Barry, who both said they’d like to do it. But Robert couldn’t bear the idea that a play of mine would be performed. He was
adamant, and decided upon Schnitzler’s
A Marriage Has Been Arranged
instead. It went very well, but I was desperately disappointed not to have this chance of seeing my play performed
by professionals. Eventually it was consigned to oblivion.

The festival was a great success, largely because it put the idea
of waterways as a recreation on the map. The IWA ceased to be a small society of cranks with wild bees in
their bonnets and became a body whose influence is still felt today. It’s interesting that this began just as its core was splitting. A civil war had started, with Robert and Tom vying with
each other for the claim that
he
had started the whole enterprise.

The ghost stories were published by Cape that autumn, and were fairly well received. Reviewers speculated on who had written which story, and usually got it wrong. That autumn I told Robert I
was leaving him: I couldn’t deal with the constant rows, scenes, the general exigency that he imposed. I told Ray first, said I was afraid that I was letting her down. I’d earlier told
her I’d fallen in love with someone else, and I couldn’t love two men at the same time. She said she completely understood: Robert
was
impossible – she wasn’t sure
how much more she herself could stand of him. Yes, she agreed, he would be very angry and resentful when I told him, and she would have a bad time, but it couldn’t be helped. We agreed to
keep in some sort of touch when possible, and I faced Robert.

He was as angry as I’d expected, of course, but I couldn’t help noticing that there was more anger than grief: he felt utterly betrayed, he said. I didn’t retort that
philandering hardly went with a deep lifelong romantic love because I realized that I didn’t care enough to justify myself to him. It was a relief to recognize that he’d only loved me
in relation to himself. Then I wondered if that was how I was. Could I only see myself in the reflection of other people’s eyes? This was an uncomfortable thought, but I was twenty-seven, and
wasn’t able to harbour uncomfortable thoughts for very long. I was better at justifying things to myself than I was to other people. I
had
tried to be what Robert wanted; I’d
tried, but I couldn’t keep it up.

I walked home from Gower Street to Blandford Street slightly dizzy with the sense of freedom. I’d lost my job with the IWA and would have to find something else, but I could wear what I
liked,
go to bed when I pleased, would no longer have the continual apprehension about Robert’s state of mind when I next saw him. He’d taught me a great deal, and
I’d got him published, so what credit there was seemed more or less balanced. I was amazed at how unsad I was about the whole thing. I got home to Audrey, who was drinking black coffee and
designing clothes for Margaret Rutherford’s part in a television play. She was delighted. ‘I never liked him,’ she said.

The following spring, I was invited to the party at which the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize was to be awarded. In those days it was for a novel by an author aged less than thirty, and Jonathan Cape,
who was there, had entered
The Beautiful Visit
. It took place in a dusky little sitting room in a house in Maida Avenue. The contenders had been narrowed down to three of which I was one,
but I was none the less dumbfounded when they said I’d won, and I was handed a cheque for fifty pounds amid many kind con-gratulations. ‘I suppose you realize I shall expect ten per
cent of that,’ Jonathan said, with his crocodile smile.

The ladies of the committee flew at him. ‘Outrageous! Out of the question!’

He backed off, trying to imply it had been a joke, but I don’t think it was. Worse was to come. Robert wrote, in his capacity as my agent, that
he
expected ten per cent of the
prize. I knew by now that that
was
outrageous and wrote an angry letter back, saying at the same time that I didn’t want him to be my agent any longer.

And so I kept my riches to myself. Some months later, A. D. Peters wrote to me saying that he would like to represent me. At the time, he was the most respected literary agent in London, and I
felt flattered to be asked. I was invited to lunch with him at his office, an eighteenth-century house in Buckingham Street, Adelphi, near Charing Cross. We had smoked salmon, pork pie and a green
salad that he dressed himself. He was a stocky man, with large, slightly protuberant blue eyes and a quiet voice. He was also extremely shy, but as I was nervous at this first encounter, I was
struggling with my own shyness. Conversation was jerky and stilted, with silences during which he busied himself filling my glass or helping me to food. He asked me what I was
writing, and I told him about the novel to be written backwards. He seemed doubtful about this, but said, ‘You must do what you want.’ This was the slow beginning of a long,
affectionate relationship that lasted until his death. I still miss him. He was Danish, although his English was impeccable, and he would never use his first names, so everyone called him Peter
Peters.

We are in 1951 and I’d reached the age of twenty-eight. It took me the following four years to write
The Long View
: I was still struggling with the whole business of writing a novel
– its structure, its proportions, and, above all, saying what I wanted to say. But they weren’t the only reasons I took so long: another was the need to earn immediate money.

I can’t see now how I managed this. Audrey was also hard up, but I suppose that between us we made Blandford Street as civilized as it could ever have been. Our bills were small. There was
no central heating to pay for. We didn’t use the telephone as people do now and we walked everywhere or went in buses. But we managed to employ someone to clean our house once a week. Mrs
Downs was large and pale with a fringe – she looked like an elderly Katherine Mansfield – and her general view was that life was awful, but had to be got on with. She began every day
with ten aspirin and a cup of tea.

‘But you
do
have a holiday every year,’ I said once, trying to find a gleam of light or pleasure in her life.

‘Oh, we ’ave
’em
.’

‘Where do you go?’

‘We go to Cheltenham and sit under some trees.’

It didn’t sound much fun. ‘What else do you do?’

‘
’E
goes fishing, or
reading
. They both give me the creeps.’

She was utterly good-tempered, but when I tried to imagine her happy or pleased about something, I always failed.

Another reason that my novel took so long was my preoccupation with love. Love seemed to me the most desirable, the most important of human emotions. As far as sexual love
was concerned, I was older but not much wiser. But every other aspect of love – intimacy, affection, being first in each other’s lives – I wanted, as much as I wanted to write.
The problem of how to combine them was far in the future. I thought that if I could get love right, everything else would follow naturally. I don’t write this to imply I was unusual: most
women feel the same in varying degrees, I think.
My
instincts were cowardly and I seized opportunities with a lack of discrimination, a kind of reckless bravado that, if I’d been less
ashamed of my timidity, I would have ignored. Furthermore I was lazy with my writing; I’d not yet learned the kind of discipline necessary for serious work. My lack of education showed here:
I’d never had to swot for exams, write essays to order, read books I found difficult, or do any of the things that university might have taught me. So I frittered away much of those four
years.

Not that it felt like that at the time. I was seeing Michael four times a week. Audrey and I – thrown together by the most casual chance – lived in parallel as it were, for much of
this time. Audrey was small, with very short blonde hair, a rose and white complexion, a firm little nose and mouth, and large, pale blue eyes whose habitual expression denoted both intellect and
humour. She’d been properly educated. She had one brother whom I hardly ever saw. Her father had been a master at Eton during the war, and Audrey, who was rather in awe of him, depicted him
as extraordinary, witty and fascinating. Her mother had weathered, from his eccentricity and brilliance, into a wanly smiling cypher. They came occasionally to tea bringing with them Audrey’s
dog, a corgi called the Little Lion because, her father said, he always tried to look like one of the lions in Trafalgar Square. Audrey was scraping a living as I was. She seemed able to make
anything with her hands, and was particularly good at designing simple, ingenious clothes, and this got her a job doing one garment a week for a daily newspaper.