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But a good agent isn’t simply a matter of money. There has to be a degree of mutual trust for integrity to have a chance to keep its head above ground. There was one occasion when I was
offered the opportunity to write a biography of the Queen Mother. The money I was offered seemed astronomical to me. I thought about it and decided that I could only do it if source material was
made available. To this end, a kind friend arranged for me to have lunch with Queen Elizabeth. She was one of Her Majesty’s most trusted ladies-in-waiting, and was personally very keen that I
should write the book. The lunch, though a cheerful occasion with the Queen Mother charming and nice to me, yielded no agreement about source material. I told Jonathan I really felt it would be a
pointless exercise and he instantly agreed. He never tried to persuade me or make me feel I was making a mistake.

Kingsley would write every morning, despite what must have been the most frightful hangovers. He taught me a lot about discipline. If you were professional, you worked, whatever else was going
on, whatever you felt about the rest of your life. He was drinking more heavily all the time.
Never
before working, but always after it. One of the difficult things about living with someone
who drinks is that they intensely resent you not doing the same. There were several reasons why I couldn’t. I hated feeling drunk. I’ve always had a fairly strong head and therefore
getting drunk for me meant that the day afterwards was unbearable. A hangover for me might not have been as powerful as it was for
Kingsley, but I wasn’t used to them.
Also since the jaundice, years ago, I fell extraordinarily ill for days afterwards when I drank too much. Finally my writing would have been utterly incapacitated and I was finding the beginning of
the first novel I’d attempted for some time hard enough as it was.

It’s odd to think that in those desperate days of our crumbling marriage I even contemplated joining Kingsley in his drink, but I did. I’d long stopped trying to encourage him to
drink less. With Monkey gone, the increasing numbers of evenings that we spent alone were more and more to be dreaded.

The night before the shooting of
Something in Disguise
was to start, I went to bed early, since I had to get to the studios in Richmond by nine o’clock. Often when I did this
Kingsley – balked of the scene he felt like having – would follow me up the stairs to go on having it. This time he was past doing that. I couldn’t get to sleep and lay waiting to
hear him come up. My feelings for him were extremely confused. Sometimes I felt that everything was my fault, sometimes I hated him, sometimes – and this was the worst – I felt
frightened of him. The dislike and anger were so potent I shrank from it, became dull and ineffectively conciliating. I didn’t know then, as I do now, that conciliation makes the conciliated
more aware of the effectiveness of their bad behaviour so consequently they increase it.

Anyway, as I was nearing sleep, I heard a most awful crash and knew that he must have fallen on the stairs. I found him lying on a landing. He was on his side, and he was smiling. I helped him
up, and got him into his pyjamas and his bed. I asked if he hurt anywhere, and he said his shoulder. He was sitting up, and I made him stretch his arm out, flex it and clench his hand. He was able
to do all that without pain and I concluded that his arm wasn’t broken. I made him a cup of tea with sugar in it for the shock, and when he’d drunk it he instantly fell asleep. The next
morning as he still complained of pain in his shoulder, I made an appointment for him with John Allison and arranged for a taxi to take him there.
He said I must come with him,
and I said I couldn’t as I had to be at the studio. When I got back in the early evening, he was enraged. He’d broken his arm very high on the shoulder where it couldn’t be
splinted, it just had to heal itself. ‘And
you
, of course, are so taken up with your own life that you couldn’t be bothered to come with me.’ This went on and on. At one
point I wanted to remind him of an occasion when I’d had to go to be X-rayed for TB, and he’d not come with me. Anton Felton, shocked by this, had driven me. Kingsley’s shoulder
did heal, but he never forgave me.

Sometime in the late spring of 1978, Mrs Hopkinson suggested I do a women’s group with a colleague of hers with whom I think she’d worked in Holland. I had, by now, taken part in
about three different therapy groups. They were mostly one-day affairs and I’d learned one useful thing from them. When I watched other people working on their own problems, the solutions
often seemed easy to me. If this was so, others must think the same of me, so if I could understand my own nature, there
was
a way forward. I’d no idea about the length of time, or the
degree of determination that this would take.

This was where I met the therapist, Jenner Roth, who arrived a bit late, because, she said, she’d just got back from a holiday in Corfu. She was wearing jeans and a dark blue sweatshirt:
her hair was cut very short, and her face reminded me, in some inexplicable way, of a tulip. That first day of the group I felt, as I usually did, very much the new girl among a number of
experienced people, and it took several sessions for me to feel brave enough to take part. But I perceived and respected her remarkable skill: she was the first person I had ever met who could say
anything to the people with whom she worked without bruising their sensibility.

Then something awful and quite unexpected happened. Mrs Hopkinson’s partner died very suddenly, and she said she couldn’t work with me any more. It was an extraordinary blow at first
and I felt lost and abandoned. I kept recognizing that it was incomparably worse for her, and as the weeks went by my transference
fell away and, with it, the sense of abject
dependence. I discovered that, beneath or beyond this painful state, I did love and care about her, and also found that there were many small practical ways I could be of use.

It took me longer to pluck up the courage to ask Jenner if she had any time for me. ‘I wondered when you’d ask,’ she said. When I first started working with her, I was nervous
– afraid that perhaps the transference would simply move to her. When I said something about this she just replied, ‘I don’t work with transference,’ and I felt free of
it.

Kingsley was unexpectedly sympathetic about Mrs Hopkinson’s tragedy, and said that of course I should help her in any way I could. I went to Ursula Vaughan Williams, who had become a great
friend, and immediately offered Mrs Hopkinson, or Kate, as I now called her, a room in her house.

This seems to be the moment to say something about Ursula, who was – is – one of the most generous-hearted people I have ever known. Her generosity extends far beyond people to every
living creature. She used to leave a saucer of milk and regular meals on her doorstep for a tramp cat, and one evening, returning to her house with her, we saw four slugs drinking out of the
saucer. ‘Plenty for all,’ she murmured, and went to fetch the milk bottle. For years she cooked her cleaning lady a proper breakfast which she ate while reading the
Daily Mirror
before she started work. She bought thick woollen socks for the local fishmongers as she felt that their work entailed cold feet. She and Ralph had been in love for many years, but didn’t
marry until his wife died, after which there were five years of bliss. When he died, she told me that she now understood about Indian suttee. When someone was once being rather po-faced about meek
people she said briskly, ‘If the meek are to inherit the earth, I’m leaving it.’ She knew about grief and people in need and was tirelessly kind to those who came her way.

For about a year and a half I worked with Jenner, tried to help
Kate get her life together and struggled with my hairdresser novel
Getting It Right
. Then, in the early
summer, Kingsley said the Powells, Anthony and Violet, were going on a Swan cruise from Southampton, down the coast of Spain and Portugal and finishing in Nice. They suggested we should join them
and Kingsley, to my surprise, seemed keen to go; I was delighted. Kingsley invited the Fussells, Paul and Betty, to join us.

It didn’t start very well. I confused British time with continental time so that we reached the dockside just as they were drawing up the gangway and we nearly missed the entire trip. The
ship was Greek. There were lectures on the sights we were to see, and the passengers were rather more serious than cruise passengers usually are. We ate all our meals with Violet, Tony and the
Fussells – Kingsley was very fond of Tony, who was wonderful company, full of gossipy anecdotes, sometimes ironical but never malicious. The three men took charge of the conversation. The
food was pretty awful, and we stopped at a number of places – Mont Saint-Michel, Oporto and Lisbon. But I can’t remember much because, the moment we were alone, Kingsley’s
irritation with me was like the atmosphere before an impending thunderstorm, and this dominated the cruise for me.

I dreaded being alone with him. To add to my dread, a Greek steward formed a kind of farcical passion for me and Kingsley accused me of inviting it. In fact, I had to work out ingenious ways to
avoid the man. We finally reached Nice where we were to part from our friends. Kingsley and I were to take a train to Brive where we were to stay with Joy and Richard Law.

Joy was a very old friend of mine from the Blandford Street days, and she’d bought a little house not far from Sarlat, in the Dordogne. The Fussells were to stay the night in Nice, and we
went with them to their hotel and had a final meal together. The Powells had flown home. Kingsley was dreading the train journey; he was never a good traveller. A good deal of his anxiety had
rubbed off on me, made worse at the beginning by my gaffe about timing
when we’d sailed from Southampton. He deadened this by drinking steadily all afternoon, and by the
time the Fussells kindly accompanied us to the railway station, he was surly drunk. I felt their relief at parting from us. We left Nice early in the evening, and Kingsley drank and slept through
the journey to Brive where Joy met us. I could hardly get him off the train. The first question he asked Joy was where Richard was, and she replied that he’d not been able to get away, but
she had a painter and his wife staying.

It was a difficult ten days. Kingsley was writing an account of our cruise for the
Sunday Times
, and fortunately that gave him something to do. He only worked in the mornings, and the
rest of the time he made it clear that he wasn’t enjoying himself. Joy behaved through it all with the utmost courtesy and good manners. She devised trips for us, took us out to lunches, and
did everything in her power to make the visit a success. Although he showed brief bursts of animation at lunches, Kingsley remained obdurately determined
not
to enjoy it. He kept repeating
that he wouldn’t have come if he’d known Richard wasn’t going to be there – to me, fortunately, not to Joy.

When we got back to London and unpacked he couldn’t find his piece about the cruise. Instantly he accused me of destroying it. He was serious. This shocked me probably more than anything
else that had happened between us. The idea that I’d destroy
anyone
’s writing, let alone his, made me realize how much and how thoroughly he disliked and despised me. Of course I
told him I couldn’t understand how he could think this, but it only made matters worse. He said I liked to think of myself as somebody who I most certainly wasn’t. ‘I know you,
you see,’ he said. I said perhaps he’d left the piece behind in France, got in touch with Joy, who after a search, said she was sure it wasn’t there. In the end I got
Kingsley’s suitcase out and found it, in a zipped compartment. When I gave it to him, he said simply, ‘Oh. You’ve found it, then.’

During the months before the cruise, I’d been trying to work with Jenner on my feelings about my marriage. I repeatedly told
her I couldn’t leave him, as he
couldn’t bear being alone. At one of these sessions she remarked, ‘I wonder what he would do if you were run over by a bus.’ And later, that night I thought, He’d be all
right. He’d find someone else. But the mere thought of leaving terrified me then. Where would I go? How would I earn my living? My earnings from novels wouldn’t keep me –
I’d have to find another job. I was fifty-six, and unlikely to find anyone else with whom to share a life. If we parted, this would be my third failure at marriage. Also, and it seems strange
now, considering the previous few years, I still loved him, or at least loved how we had been together. He never called me Min or Piney now. He was angry with me because he didn’t want but
needed me, and I was withering from his dislike.

Apart from Jenner, the only other person to whom I’d talked about my marriage was Ursula. She listened carefully, as she always did, and said, ‘If you leave, you must come to
me.’ I’d not expected this kindness and, looking back, I can’t think what I’d have done without it. Gone were the days of really cheap rented flats. Anyway, this offer was
made before I’d taken the decision to go.

That happened in Edinburgh. Dickie and Patricia Temple-Muir had suggested that we come for a fortnight of the festival. At that time Dickie owned half of the Roxburgh Hotel and we were to stay
there. Kingsley liked Dickie: he was convivial and amusing and a very good host. When we arrived in our room there was a welcoming bottle of whisky and Dickie got full marks for that. We went to
one play,
Watch on the Rhine
by Lillian Hellman, which hadn’t worn well: it confirmed Kingsley’s view of the theatre that none of it was any good. So when another play for which
we’d bought seats was on, he refused to go. He also refused to let me go. He didn’t want dinner in the dining room, but wanted sandwiches and drinks in the room.

Then Gaia Mostyn-Owen, who had a charming little castle outside Edinburgh, invited the Temple-Muirs and us to lunch. Claudio Abbado, who was conducting a series of concerts at the
festival, was there too. It didn’t take long for Kingsley to become extremely offensive to him. The subject was Mozart, and Kingsley told him, in so many words, that he
didn’t know what he was talking about. It was a large lunch party, and conversation virtually stopped at this. Abbado looked at Kingsley with some curiosity, then turned to our hostess and
changed the subject. After lunch Kingsley went to sleep, and I went for a walk with Dickie and Patricia. ‘He’s not always like this?’ Dickie asked.