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It was during these early months of 1958 that my brother Colin brought a new friend of his back to Blomfield Road. Sargy Mann was at that time working in Oxford. He and Colin had met through a
mutual love of jazz – I think Sargy was playing drums even then. He was a tall, immensely thin young man, with reddish hair and thick glasses. He was mostly very serious, but also the only
person I have ever met who actually shouted with laughter. We didn’t talk much then, he says now I always had my nose in a book, but he and Colin talked a great deal about jazz in which
I’d no interest. But he was to become a very great friend.

Francis Wyndham and I became friends too. He adored cats and came to see mine. He introduced me to several writers, including Muriel Spark whom he brought to dinner one night with a very angry
Jamaican writer whose name I now forget. I remember that Francis had a fairly violent row with him and I noticed with interest how Muriel watched them expressionlessly – like a bird
witnessing a road accident. She had me to supper in her house in Camberwell – it was the time of
The Bachelors
and
Memento Mori
– both of which I reviewed. I loved her
murky funniness and her wonderful economy with dialogue, but I always felt vaguely frightened of her.

During the early months of 1958, Peter Peters invited me to a lunch party he was giving at the Caprice. The other guests were Jack and Margaret Huntingdon and Alec Waugh, brother of Evelyn and
author, in his own right, of fairly popular novels. It was a very enjoyable party as a result of which I got to know the Huntingdons well and went to dinner several times at their house in
Roehampton, where they lived with two small daughters and two
responsible corgis. I’m not sure I ever saw Alec again, but he used to write to me and send me small,
intricate scarves from North Africa or wherever he happened to be.

Margaret Lane, Margaret Huntingdon’s professional name, had been a novelist and a journalist – she’d had a world scoop by interviewing Al Capone, but later became a biographer
and a novelist. Jack, apart from being an earl, was a mural painter and a Labout politician. They also had a house in Beaulieu in the New Forest, and a sailing yacht.

For about a year, I’d been involved in the Ouspensky Society, introduced by Jim Douglas-Henry, whose mother was also a member, and whom I’d been seeing ever since
the drink with the Van der Posts. It was a movement based on the teachings of Gurdjieff, and originally put into practice by P. D. Ouspensky. Meetings were held every week in small groups, when the
whole membership got together in a house bought specifically for the purpose. I was informed that this philosophy of life was a unique way of becoming a better person, something I was anxious to
achieve. It is a philosophy based on the life of civilizations and on the convergence of science, philosophy, art and religion in the search for ultimate truth. On a more practical level it looks
for simple methods of finding an inner stillness. Although I liked and became friends with some of the members, I soon found the secrecy of it rather silly and self-regarding. There were all kinds
of rules about this. If you met another member in the street when either of you was with someone outside the society, you had to treat him or her as a stranger. As the months went by, I sensed it
wasn’t popular to have friends
outside
.

Matters came to some sort of head in the spring of 1958, when the leader of the sect announced that he didn’t care for members living together outside marriage. And so, in April, I got
married with another pair of dissolute members.

Why
did I marry my second husband, Jim? There was no single reason, rather a collection, not one of which, by itself, would have
swayed me. But, put together, they
became a formidable reason for marriage.

He was an attractive man and, like all con-men, he was possessed of a considerable charm that he knew exactly how to use. I wanted children, and Jim said he did too. I was tired of being taken
to dinner by a series of men who, baldly speaking, seemed to expect me to pay for my dinner by going to bed with them. I was sick of the inevitable scenes and longed – as Mrs Patrick Campbell
said – for the ‘deep, deep peace of the double bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise-longue’. My mother had known his, and although she told me that Jim’s father had been
regarded in her family as something of a black sheep, this did nothing to nullify the fact that I knew very little about him. Apart from the Van der Posts, who introduced us, he also knew Dosia
slightly, and I’d met and liked several of his friends. He was unattached and he was extremely interested in the Ouspensky Society. All this was reassuring, and I wanted to be assured. I was
charmed, and when I fell in love I became more credulous. The fact that he had no visible means of support did not present itself as any kind of warning. He said he loved me? Then of course he
did.

A few weeks before the wedding, Jack and Margaret suggested that we might like to take their boat across the Channel and down the rivers and canals to Marseille, as they wanted to do some
cruising in the Mediterranean. It was agreed that we should go, with a friend of the Huntingdons who was a very experienced sailor and a young boy, called Kip, to whom they wished to give a
holiday. Kip Asquith was tenuously related to the Huntingdons since his stepfather, Peter Cameron, was Jack’s cousin.

The yacht,
Sharavogue
, was built for Atlantic racing, so the rather rough crossing to Le Havre, though exciting, wasn’t spoiled by terror. She drew six feet below the water, which
made for stability. Her draught, however, became a serious problem when we reached the first canal. French working boats –
péniches
– are far larger than English narrow
boats, even when fully laden.

At Lyon, we were told that the Rhône was so dry that year that no boat drawing six feet could hope to get down it. Eventually, we managed – loaded inside a
péniche
that was returning, empty, to Marseille. The
Sharavogue
had to be chocked up inside the hold of the working boat, and this meant that we had to creep about in her with
the utmost caution, lest we disturb the chocking. When the captain of the
péniche
finally invited us into his cabin for a drink, it was the best part of the trip. We took off our
shoes – working-boat cabins are impeccably clean. What fascinated me was the similarity to the interiors of English narrow boats: the same wooden walls, scratch-combed and hung with pieces of
coarse white lace, on top of which perched china plates with lacy edges. Like old gypsy wagons, the decorations in the boat were international. It was as a result of this trip that my daughter met
Kip, in London at Blomfield Road.

I worked for
Queen
magazine until 1960, when I was fired suddenly, with no notice. I was desperate: the salary had been keeping several heads above water, and I panicked, as so many
people fired summarily must do. I went to Francis Wyndham to ask him why. Francis was very uncomfortable – no, no, it was nothing to do with my writing. Somehow, that day, I discovered that
Penelope Gilliatt, who wrote the theatre column, had seen the salary book and found that I was being paid more than she. I asked for an interview with Jocelyn Stevens, the editor. By now, fear had
made me reckless. I told him that he simply couldn’t sack me without due notice unless he’d some cogent reason for doing so. He muttered something about magazines needing a change, so I
said all right, but I needed three months’ notice in order to find another job. He agreed to this: a respite.

Marriage hadn’t lightened any of my financial responsibilities, which were heavier than I’d envisaged. About six weeks after we were married, Jim had handed me an account for
handmade shirts from a firm in Jermyn Street. The sum was ninety pounds. ‘Goodness, Jim,’ I said, ‘how are you going to pay that?’

He replied, ‘You’ve got a private income. You can pay it.’

I couldn’t afford simply ‘to get on with another novel’ as Peter Peters and others advised: I had to have some part-time job for a regular salary. Earlier, I’d been
offered a reviewing job on the
Sunday Times
, and had turned it down, as it seemed wrong to review in more than one paper. The regular spot was no longer free, but I was offered some novels
from time to time. This, like the odd television job, was too chancy. I’d imagined that if I wrote a novel that was well reviewed, Cape would sell a great many copies, I’d earn my
advance and then, twice a year, royalties would be there. I’d published five books in all, and nothing of the sort had occurred. I earned my advances, and sometimes a little more. I’d
earned nothing more, and hadn’t expected to, from the short stories or the biography with Arthur Helps. But the novels! I’d certainly had hopes and dreams about them.

My contemporaries, and those younger than I, were being published in paperback, which in those days meant Penguin. But Jonathan Cape wouldn’t allow me this, and the terms of my contract
with him – unsurprisingly – gave him the whip hand. It was hopeless, therefore, to keep counting on being able to earn my living as a writer, even though that was all I wanted to
be.

I wanted to write, but my next novel was just a vague notion, set nowhere, uninhabited by people, and often quite difficult to discern in the densely unhappy climate of my life that provoked a
kind of paralysis in me. I’d got myself into a marriage I didn’t in the least understand, and I’d no idea how to get out of it. Indeed, I thought I shouldn’t even
have
such a notion. I had to trust that prolonged association with the Ouspensky Society would enlighten and generally improve me, but something there, too, was deterring me. When I’d
finished
The Sea Change
, the man running the society had insisted upon the novel being read by his secretary to vet it for ‘leaks’. I couldn’t respect this, but as
I’d written nothing that had anything to do with them or their views, I handed the manuscript over and got it back with some sententiously irrelevant cuts. At the
time I
let this pass, but even the idea of a recurrence made me feel a good deal of contempt for both myself and the society. At any rate it wasn’t a good place to start the long business of a new
novel. Jim had got a job with Harlech Television and had a flat in Bristol where he spent most of his time.

And then one of the kindest men I have known came to my rescue. Cyril Frankel was a member of the Ouspensky Society. I’d first met him when he and his friend, Stephen Andrews, a Canadian
painter, were living with John Allison, my doctor, in Eccleston Square. Cyril had now moved and had bought a short lease on two houses in Wilton Place because, he said, he wanted the fun of living
somewhere both large and grand if only for a while. He was a film director and, like so many of them, was looking and waiting for something to turn up. When it did he asked me to go and see him
with a view to our working together. An American producer, Raymond Stross, who looked as if he’d been very badly carved in wood, had recently married Anne Heywood and wanted to star her in a
film. He had got hold of some newspaper cutting about a young woman being stalked. He wanted Cyril to direct it if a scriptwriter could be found.

I became the scriptwriter. The work had to be completed within six weeks and I’d be paid six hundred pounds. Every morning I went to Cyril’s house, was given a cup of real coffee and
was shut into a large bare room that contained only a table, a chair and a typewriter. I didn’t know how to deal with where the camera was while people were talking or doing things. Cyril
said don’t worry about that, just make the people and write the story and he’d turn it into a shooting script.

There were a few strictures. First, Anne Heywood insisted that she should be called Tracy in the film. She wasn’t really Anne Heywood. She’d been born with the enchanting name of
Violet Pretty and from there it was only possible, nomenically speaking, to go downhill. Second, her husband in the film was to be Richard Todd. Time was the third.

I managed to write a script that they eventually used. Cyril was extremely kind. He had a way of making sudden treats, taking me out to a meal, or to a film, or inviting
people to lunch whom he thought I’d enjoy. I think he knew how confused and unhappy I was and wanted to cheer me up. He was gentle and discreet and had a very warm heart. I also found I
enjoyed writing scenes for people to act: when I am writing a scene in a novel, I always envisage where the people concerned are – when they move and generally how they dispose themselves
– and now I’d actually watch them doing it.

The film was shot at the studios in Bray outside Dublin, and I went there to rewrite the chase sequence at the end as it was now to be shot on the roof of a block of flats, which altered the
whole thing. I spent two days there and saw nothing of the city.

Raymond Stross, Anne’s husband, was all set for doing another film, again derived from a newspaper cutting, and again with Cyril and me. This time, Mr Stross said, he would pay me much
better: I should have six thousand pounds for a script. The new film was to star Anne as a good girl gone to the bad. After a long spell in prison she forms a friendship with an older girl, and
together they escape. In the train going north, the older woman goes to a lavatory while the train is stopped and when she comes back Angel – for so she is called – has vanished and is
never seen again. The fact that this was a ‘true’ story impressed everyone greatly, except me. Readers, and particularly would-be writers, always place undue significance on ‘the
true story’, ‘the real character’ – usually an elderly relative – that they know would be the making of your next novel. These characters are always packed with
eccentricity and wit and are bound, their owners feel, to prop up the shaky structure of make-believe.

Researching Angel entailed a visit to Holloway prison where she’d been an inmate. It also, more surprisingly, included several visits to the journalist Godfrey Winn, who’d written
the original piece about her. I went to lunch in his perfect little Regency lodge
outside Brighton. Godfrey was one of those people who are presented by others as caricatures of
themselves. He was gay (madly gay, they would say), keen on interesting people (a howling snob, they would say), and emotional (wildly sentimental, they would say). Actually, he was all of these
things in moderation, had been extremely courageous in the war and was good company. There was some kind of deal going on between him and Raymond Stross, and his brief was to tell me as much as he
knew of Angel. He did all of that, and I wrote the script. I showed it to Cyril, of course, indeed I was still writing in his house, and he seemed pleased. But Messrs Stross and Winn thought
nothing of it: it wasn’t merely not quite right, it was utterly and mysteriously wrong, since none of them could say what it was that they didn’t like. It gradually became clear that Mr
Stross, while he wanted his wife to be a prostitute and go to prison, expected none of it really to be her fault. She was to be the innocent victim of circumstances always out of her control.
Anyway, they not only didn’t want a second draft, but also refused to pay any of the money promised. Eventually, through Peter Peters, I went to law and was awarded the six thousand pounds,
whereupon Mr Stross proved to be bankrupt. The first film, entitled
The Very Edge
, came out. I went to the press show with Cyril and, seeing the uneasy smiles of the critics, knew it was
no-go. Some of them apparently called it ‘The Very End’, but actually it was a decent little film, earning no superlatives in either direction. It turns up on television from time to
time.