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When I approached Chatto to ask for two weeks off, Norah was unexpectedly kind. Of course I could go, it would do me good. It was agreed I should look for some American books for Chatto while I
was there. They paid my air fare and I’d saved about fifty pounds for general expenses.

Michael and Roger saw us off at Heathrow and pinned particularly vulgar, vast orchids to our winter coats. As soon as we took off Lorna said, ‘Horses’ Necks.’

‘What?’

‘Whisky and ginger ale. It’s my airplane drink.’

We had two each, then tried to sleep. Flying across the Atlantic took far longer in those days: the plane stopped at Shannon to pick up passengers, and again at Gander in Newfoundland to refuel.
We staggered off the plane in Boston eighteen hours later to face disgruntled Customs men who tore the orchids from us with much accusatory comment.

The house was called Gwyn Careg. I remember little about it, except the vast kitchen that was engulfed in a hygienic pandemonium after every meal. The family fascinated me. When we arrived it
was to find Lorna’s sister, Sheila, who’d recently married a French count, Jean de Rochembeau. They were still on honeymoon. When I first met her, Sheila was wearing a sea-green
dressing-gown made for her by Dior. It trailed behind her on the ground and it was undoubtedly the most glamorous dressing-gown I’d ever seen. Jean hovered in her wake: he was small and dark
with a constantly mournful expression. His English was poor, but as the girls spoke impeccable French he’d little incentive to learn.

Their mother didn’t arrive until some hours later. She was
accompanied by her best friend, Aline, who lived in Rome, where they’d both just been. After the
briefest of acknowledgements, they flopped down on two sofas with a small table between them and continued the game of Scrabble that they’d started on their plane. Loelia de Talleyrand was
very tall and, though not exactly beautiful, had an air of majesty. She always sat with her back straight enough to satisfy the most exacting Victorian; her iron-grey hair was always beautifully
dressed and her clothes were glamorous and impeccable at any time of day or night. She was always very nice to me, but I sensed that relations with both her daughters were enigmatic and
unsatisfactory. Lorna certainly didn’t feel loved by her, and both girls disliked Heli, their stepfather.

We spent only a few days there and I remember nothing of it except that we experienced the tail end of a hurricane called Flora. It was my only experience of a hurricane and I remember the
extraordinary hush that descended before it reached us – a sort of dead stillness of a kind that happens in a theatre sometimes when the house lights go down before the curtain rises.

Lorna and I went to New York, she to stay with relations and visit friends, I to visit publishers and agents in my search for books for Chatto. Reality struck me at this point. When I’d
been there with Pete, I’d been the much spoiled and protected guest of his friends. Now I was on my own, with hardly any money and knowing practically nobody. I had kept in touch with Robert
Linscott: we’d written to each other steadily for the last five or six years. I rang him at Random House and asked if I could stay with him. He agreed, and I met him that afternoon and he
took me back to his apartment. It was very small, and he said I’d have to sleep on the sofa in his sitting room.

I stayed with him all the time I was in New York and he was unfailingly kind and patient with me. I’d brought my three-quarters finished novel,
The Long View
, with me for him to
read. I’d expected that he’d be full of encouraging – even flattering – remarks, but he was curiously silent, only suggesting that he should
give the
script to Robert Haas, the vice-president whom I’d met in the elevator on my first night so many years before. Meanwhile, I trudged all over the city seeing people. I longed to take back some
wonderful work for Chatto to publish. I had dreams of being so successful that they’d send me over every year. Everyone was courteous – Chatto had a good name – but it was long
after I got home that it dawned on me I’d been fobbed off with all the scripts they’d despaired of selling to anyone.

I was always hungry. A sandwich cost the equivalent of ten shillings, and I couldn’t afford many of those. Bob fed me in the evenings, and once took me out to dinner with William Faulkner
and a pretty, dark girl called Jean Stein. Faulkner was small and quiet. He lit up only when he spoke to Jean with whom he was clearly much enamoured. He treated her as though she was a young
princess out of a magic dream. Otherwise he seemed shy and withdrawn. Afterwards, Bob told me that once a year he came to New York for six to eight weeks, turned up at Random House every single
morning and sat in Reception until one of the editors or senior officials took him out to lunch. It was fine for a week or two, but after that, Bob said, they drew lots for who should lunch him.
Occasionally, he sat and wrote a story, but this didn’t happen very often.

At the weekend, Bob took me to his house in Massachusetts. We went by train to Williamsburg and then he drove into the country. His house was beautiful, clapboard, with bare wooden floors and
little furniture except books. There were woods round the house, and he took me to see the beavers. It was early evening and, while we waited quietly, we saw a raccoon eating frogs on top of the
beavers’ dam. Presently a beaver swam from his island nest and drifted slowly along the dam. He was testing it for leaks, Bob said. The beaver’s expression implied that a leak was
unlikely. While we were watching there was a sound like a rifle shot and the beaver swam – much faster – back to his island. The sound had been other beavers’ tails slapping the
water as a danger warning. I remember that evening with pure delight.

Robert Haas asked me to lunch to tell me that they really didn’t feel they could publish my new novel. This was a shock. Haas said they were worried about the order of
it: a novel couldn’t be written backwards – all the tension of the story was lost as the reader always knew the ending. Perhaps with my second draft I’d rearrange it and do it the
right way round? I wouldn’t. Then he suddenly gave me a hundred dollars ‘to buy yourself a nice dress’. He was a kind man, and I knew he felt I’d come down in the world and
that turning down my book was – among other things – a financial blow. It was, of course, but the money was much less of a disappointment than the rejection. I left lunch in a trance of
gloom, bought myself a black velveteen coat for exactly a hundred dollars, and wrote to thank him and tell him.

Back home I started work again at Chatto. Norah was very nice about the quantities of scripts that deluged them from New York. I think one or two were published, but made little mark. Meanwhile,
I’d been given another job. Cecil handed me a typescript one morning and asked me to make a report on it. It was a biography of Bettina von Arnim – an early nineteenth-century romantic;
both she and her mother had been girlfriends of Goethe. The material, of course had been in German, and Arthur Helps was a brilliant translator, but his well-stocked mind rambled over time and
place with nomadic abandon and the book was like an immense heap of sand. When I reported this, Cecil and Norah said they agreed, but they thought, with considerable sorting out, there could be a
good book. Would I like to collaborate with Mr Helps to this end?

Sometime during the months after my return from New York, I left Michael. Of the evening when I told him, I remember just a feeling of despairing unhappiness. Michael was very good about it.
After he’d asked me if there was anyone else and I’d replied that there wasn’t, he didn’t argue or try to change my mind. ‘I haven’t a leg to stand on,’
was the only thing I recall him saying. I think it was a shock to him; Michael’s feelings normally only appeared
momentarily on his face before he became closed, stoic, or
bland or debonair. I know that he was sad – ‘
Oh
! I shall miss you, Jenny’ – but I don’t know whether he was as sad as I was. Come to that,
I
didn’t
know how unhappy this separation was going to make me. After he’d gone and I’d cried myself out, I felt simply a general kind of despair. I thought I was cut out just to be a kind of
extra for people. There would never be anyone who would take me seriously or put me first in his life. I wanted much the same as everyone else – to love one person, to live with them, to have
their children. But I also wanted to be a writer, and it was here that the most serious difference between the sexes revealed itself to me. Men could be novelists, prime ministers, doctors, lawyers
and
fathers. It was a much trickier combination for women. None the less, tricky or not, it was what I wanted.

But as the working days and empty evenings went by I began to miss Michael. ‘If you want me for anything, just ring up,’ he’d said. It would have been so easy. But somehow I
knew I’d made the right decision, and having made it, I couldn’t go back on it. I worked in the office, but had no energy to write.

There were some distractions. Jill and Cecil had moved to a house on Campden Hill. My goddaughter, Tamasin, was born. I used to go to supper with them, sometimes
à trois
, sometimes
with their friends. Once or twice the poet Henry Reed was there. He told wonderfully funny stories of his war: arriving in some Midland digs, unpacking his case – almost entirely full of
books – watched by his landlady who looked at them with great distaste and finally said, ‘Books are a thing I
never
read.’ And later, taking him down to the narrow kitchen,
where the family were having their tea, and down the back garden, where she remarked, ‘There is the privy.
If
you should ever care to use it.’

Cecil and Jill were both good laughers, and I saved any jokes or stories that came my way for them. The only time I met Robert Frost was at dinner there. Cecil had edited a collection of
Frost’s poetry, and he gave me a copy. Frost started to inscribe it to me,
with lines from
The Road not Taken
, got it wrong and insisted on a piece of paper to be
pasted over the mistake and inscribed afresh. He and Cecil were very good together. Both had craggy faces crowded with incident. Their foreheads were like Clapham Junction – indeed, both of
their faces looked thoroughly lived-in. I wish I could remember more about that evening, but a disagreeable feature of being unhappy is an incapacity to live in the present, which subsequently
means a patchy memory of the past.

I have very little memory of the rest of that year. Robin married Nadia, the dancer he’d met in St-Tropez. Ray had left Robert, and now had a new flat in Paddington and was far happier.
I’d begun collaborating with Arthur Helps on his book.

This wasn’t made easier by the fact that he was incomparably ancient, and lived in the west of Ireland. He would turn up at Blomfield Road at eight thirty a.m., saying, ‘I thought we
might have a happy day at the British Museum.’ Each time I had to explain I had to go to the office and couldn’t. His mind was like a vast cupboard, presided over by an enterprising
jackdaw. Facts of every kind tumbled out whenever the door opened. My job was to assemble this material into some sort of comprehensible order, and this often meant excising his ruminations about
the state of Europe in Bettina’s day. Once, having discovered that she had paid a long visit to Vienna, I wrote to ask him if she’d met Beethoven. A postcard came back that said simply,
‘Not interested in music.’ Never mind, I wrote back,
did
she meet Beethoven? Then half a dozen letters arrived that they’d written to each other. I knew a little about
music and was therefore able to exploit this small seam of information, but I reflected gloomily about all the things I didn’t know that Mr Helps might not have been interested in. Oh well, I
thought, I must just do the best I can. My novel lay untouched for months.

At Christmas Michael sent me a case of brandy. I opened it and burst into tears.

One morning – it must have been a blurb-writing day – I noticed that Cecil seemed unusually absorbed by a proof copy he was reading. When I asked what it was, he
said it was a travel book by Laurie Lee. ‘It’s his first prose work.’

‘Is it good?’

Cecil said it was a bit purple in parts but, yes, it was good. ‘He’s written some very good poetry,’ he added. Later, when Cecil had gone out to lunch, I looked at the book. It
was called
A Rose for Winter
, and I was enthralled by it. He could write about anything – a sunrise, a city – in a manner that was both fresh and familiar. His language flowed as
naturally as a spring of water whose depths are never obscured by muddy uncertainty – a revelation to me then, and an enduring pleasure now.

I can’t remember where I first met Cathy and Laurie, almost certainly at a party somewhere. They were enormously popular, I soon discovered, and it was easy to see why. Laurie, when he
chose, was a natural entertainer and a natural musician. He usually brought his guitar to parties and he and Cathy sang – Spanish songs, folk songs from either England or America. This might
have been awful, but with them it wasn’t. They never did it unless it was clearly wanted, and they never did too much. He was always wonderful company, funny, dry, and perceptive.Cathy, far
younger, was beautiful and tall, and had thick, rich corn-coloured hair and very large cornflower-blue eyes that sparkled. There was something majestic about her, but her manner – she was a
very humble person – was
both frank and self-deprecating. She loved Laurie and had learned how to be his first lieutenant. I loved them both on sight.

Soon we were going to supper with each other. When she was staying with me Nicola, who at that time was very fond of dancing and wonderfully unselfconscious about it, danced
sardanas
with
Cathy. Laurie was always very sensitive to the young. He’d ask them questions in a grave and gentle manner that always got a response. In
A Rose for Winter
he goes up to a Spanish
child standing by the sea and asks her, ‘What would you like most in the world?’ She answers, ‘To go in a boat on the sea to find my father.’ I quote this as it illustrates
so exactly how Laurie was with children. He always seemed to know precisely what to ask them, could reach their heart’s desire in seconds.