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I didn’t want to write about Peter and his friend directly, so I created Gavin Lamb, who lived with his parents in Barnet where his father was a builder. Every day he goes to an
old-fashioned hairdresser where he cuts and dresses old ladies’ hair with kindness and tact. He is thirty-one and a virgin because he’s terrified of women. The novel charts his breaking
through this fear and his efforts to find the right partner. Gavin is based on either of our painter friends, but they made me realize how many people there are whose multifarious interests give
them another – often unacknowledged – dimension.

I was doing a gardening piece once a month, taking over from Anne Scott-James in
Good Housekeeping
, and I’d received my advance of five thousand pounds for the
novel. But I needed to start something else, and had two ideas that I found paralysing.

Eventually I asked Mart to come for a drink and told him about them. One was to write a novel that was a present-day version of
Sense and Sensibility
. It had occurred to me that
sensibility had become more fashionable and I’d started to block out the first six chapters from Austen’s novel. The second idea was one that had lain in the back of my mind for a long
time. I wanted to write a trilogy about a family going through the last war, taking the story over ten years starting in 1937. When people wrote about that time, it was
largely
in terms of the battles fought; family life was merely a background. I thought it would be interesting to do it the other way round. England had changed so much during the war, but this
hadn’t been much written about. Mart said immediately, ‘Do that one.’ And so I began on the ‘Cazalet Chronicle’ with
The Light Years
in 1982.

Getting It Right
came out – pretty quietly. It got some good notices and one or two bad ones. The most cheering and maddening thing was getting a postcard from Victoria Glendinning
saying what a smashing novel, and what a pity it had come out when it wasn’t her week to review novels in the
Sunday Times
. It
was
a pity: I could have done with one really
enthusiastic review by someone of her status.

I settled in to writing the new novel, in between making my garden, getting the house straight and having the occasional party. But to aid finances I needed a lodger. There was a large room on
the top floor that had a view of St Paul’s on the street side and of the square of gardens on the other, plus a small bathroom on the half-landing below. I asked friends, and one day a young
man turned up, had a good look at it and moved in. His name was Jonathan Burnham, and he was working for Carmen Callil, the new publisher at Chatto & Windus. He was a natural and inspired cook,
and soon we were cooking for parties we gave together. He became a great friend and has remained so.

This was a time when I renewed old friendships – I’d hardly seen Dosia Verney, for instance, who had married Andrew Verney some years after Barry died, because they didn’t get
on with Kingsley or he with them. They had moved from their lovely house by the river to Wandsworth and I made a supper to take them for their first night there. It was lovely to be back with
Dosia. I also encountered Jack and Margaret Huntingdon’s eldest daughter, Selina Hastings, whom I’d last met when she was a schoolgirl in Roehampton, and was touched and rather amazed
that she remembered me. She became a close and true friend. Shirley and
Bill Letwin were also extraordinarily kind. I used to go to dinners with them when I was with Kingsley,
but they didn’t stop asking me when I was on my own, as some people did. It was at their house that I met Sybille Bedford.

I’d first heard of her when I was working for Weidenfeld, who published
A Visit to Don Otavio
. I was deeply impressed with that book. It was beautifully written and had the hallmark
of true originality. I said how very much I should like to meet her, but George Weidenfeld looked at me and replied, rather dauntingly, ‘Mrs Bedford is a
very
intelligent woman.’
So awe was added to homage and nothing happened. But there she was, years later, standing by the fireplace in Shirley’s drawing room. We were both very shy, and it was some time before we
became the friends that we are now.

More friends have accumulated since then, but even at this early stage in my separation from Kingsley I’d begun to realize how good it was to be free to make friends without having to
contend with a partner’s disapproval. Fay and Tom Maschler were splitting up, and I saw a good deal of Fay while that was going on, and subsequently we attempted to liven up society by giving
suppers in each other’s houses. After the first, we had to ask people to bring some wine with them. We were also on the Evening Standard’s Theatre Awards Committee for two years, and
occasionally, when Fay was away, I did her restaurant column for her.

About two years after it was published, an American director optioned the film rights for
Getting It Right
. Eventually he and his producer, Charles Evans, arrived in London to see whether
they thought I could write the script for the film. The director, Randal Kleiser, said he wanted to make the film as soon as he’d read the novel. It was a surprising film for him to want to
make: hitherto he’d made
Grease
with John Travolta,
The Blue Lagoon
, and other markedly commercial movies. It was agreed I should write the script. I didn’t know then the
passion that everybody concerned with movies has for endless drafts – a process I’ve always hated, and
managed to avoid when writing novels. It need not take very
long, I thought, as I began on the first. I’d have to leave the novel, but would soon get back to it.

In fact, the script took the best part of two years, while we went through three producers and many rewrites. Randal was very good to work with and we became, and are, friends. I went to New
York for a week to stay with him in his amazing apartment, which had an enormous flat roof on which I longed to make a garden. Randal took me to a nightclub that was all the rage. Entry to it was
difficult and much prized. It contained a series of tableaux – mostly of people who were just about to start something, or had just finished whatever it was – the enigmatic fatuity of
which reminds me now of elements of the Turner Prize. He took me to the theatre, too, and to private screenings of movies.

Charles Evans, the first producer, was effortlessly offensive. We had meetings in his office about the script and then were put into a fusty little room with no air-conditioning for hours to do
our homework, with a plate of wizened sandwiches for lunch. He treated me like an impoverished secretary who, at any minute, he might sack. He didn’t last long. The next producer was far
nicer, but he went off to run the Disney enterprise in Paris. The third producer, Jonathan Krane, saw the picture through.

I spent a week in Los Angeles staying with Randal and rewriting parts of the screenplay. He had a house in the hills above town with a swimming pool and horses, dogs, and a pig he was keeping
because he was going to make a circus movie that needed one, and he wanted to learn its ways. One Sunday morning, he took me to watch an audition for this film. It took place in a concrete garden
lot of a studio. The audition was for minor parts, and a sad, garish crowd queued to do their turn. The most pathetic was a very old ex-clown who came on with a square yard of wooden board which he
placed on the ground and proceeded to do an effortful, shambling tap dance on throughout which he fixed a smile that made me want to cry. As he was picking up his board,
Randal
said to his assistant, ‘We’ll have to find something for him.’ One of the things I loved about Randal was his tender heart.

The film was shot in England, and casting sessions began there. In the end it starred Jesse Birdsall as the hero, Lynn Redgrave, Helena Bonham-Carter and Jane Horrocks, with a strong supporting
cast. Then they decided to ask John Gielgud to play the vulgar seat-belt manufacturer and, to my surprise, he accepted the part. I’d always admired him deeply, but the one thing he
couldn’t manage was to be vulgar. He arrived immaculately dressed, was courteous and patient during rehearsal, but his accent was definitely wide of the mark. Randal, being American,
didn’t notice. The film was premièred in 1986. Randal said it was a cult movie in the US but it didn’t do well here, largely I think because anything extreme in the way of
behaviour was cut out. Americans couldn’t take more than a pastel degree of realism then, which is funny if one thinks of movies now. Violence of one kind or another seems always to get by,
but Helena’s part, which was an anorexic who had eating binges and was also bulimic, was pared down, and that of a heartbroken gay man who is left by his partner was also compressed so that
it had no real meaning. There were some very good performances, and I, at least, learned a lot.

While this film was being set up and made, another film offer turned up. My agent rang to say that a producer called Jonathan Cavendish who ran an Irish company, would like to see me for a
project they had in mind. Jonathan came to Delancey Street to tell me about this. They wanted to make a film about Somerville and Ross, the two Anglo-Irish ladies who had collaborated as writers
for many years.
Experiences of an Irish RM
and
The Real Charlotte
were their best-known books, it seemed like an interesting idea and I agreed to do it. The director was to be Peter
Sykes, and Jonathan took us both to Ireland to Castle Townsend where the Somervilles had had their house in Drishane. It was my first trip to the country in Ireland, and I loved it. I also got to
know Jonathan, whom I have loved ever since.

I’d stopped having one-to-one sessions with Jenner, who had said she thought it would be useful for me to have some with Terry. This was a good move for me because I
still felt anxious and unsure of myself around men.

I’d thought that once we were divorced, and Kingsley felt safe with his household arrangement with Hilly, we might become friends. I couldn’t have been more wrong. He maintained an
implacable resentment towards me for the rest of his life. My wanting to be friends with him, he wrote, or said, was further evidence of my gross insensibility about what I’d done to him. He
was painfully open about this, in interviews and in the two novels he wrote after I’d left. For years I found that very hard to endure, because it wasn’t how I felt and because he was
intent on wiping out anything good that there’d been about the eighteen years we’d spent together.

Apart from that, therapy was giving me a steadier view of myself. I could see my faults and weaknesses more clearly and could forgive them, which in turn meant I was in a better position to do
something about them. I learned things slowly and often I only realized I
had
learned them later. I discovered my lack of discrimination, for instance, and my neediness. ‘It’s no
good being a bottomless pit,’ Jenner said to me one day. I realized the difficulty I had with confronting anyone if I thought they were going to mind it, and my subsequent resentment when
I’d not done so. And I noted my presumptions about people that rested only on what I
wanted them to be. As I learned to be less critical of myself, it became easier not to
make adverse judgements about other people.

Insights of this kind don’t, of themselves, alter one: they merely further the possibility of change. Change was something I passionately believed in – change being movement, and
movement life. I began to feel more responsible for myself, and this enormously helped the old bugbear, self-pity. This last was something I thought I’d vanquished years before, but I now
recognized it would always lie in wait.

Faults are rather like weaknesses in the immune system: I found I had to work at protecting myself from them. I knew by then that I couldn’t afford to stop working, there was nothing to
feel smug about, but at least I was beginning to find my way around myself and could consequently deal with issues. Some people will dub all this indulgent self-absorption but, in fact, feeling
good, or at least better, about yourself enables you to be of more use to other people. It also promotes the chances of living in the present – something that children are so good at and
adults so poor. I’d spent a great deal of my life after childhood being an adolescent; a stage that most people think occupies a finite number of years. So I am openly and deeply grateful for
the opportunity therapy has given me to grow up.

After I’d reread some of their work and also a biography of Somerville and Ross, I realized that there was no way their lives would fit into a dramatic structure needed for a film. So I
suggested I did a film script that wasn’t biographical and was only very loosely based on the idea of two women collaborating and living in Ireland. Jonathan Cavendish agreed.

When I’d finished a first draft that was considered promising, we went to Ireland again, this time to look for locations. By now a new director was involved, Philip Saville, who announced
that he could only sit in the front of the car. Despite this – I don’t much like spending most of the day in the back of a car either – it was a fascinating trip. I have always
loved looking at houses anywhere,
and many of those we looked at – all within a reasonable distance of Dublin – were both beautiful and romantic. They were often in
varying stages of destitution: buckets in their lofty halls catching water that dripped or streamed through the exquisite plasterwork of their ceilings, drunken shutters hanging by a single screw,
and walls blotched with advanced damp. Sometimes the houses were empty. Once or twice they were still inhabited by owners frantic to rent. I think we spent about three days doing this, and no
certain locations came out of it, but I enjoyed it immensely, not least because I liked Jonathan so much.

Shortly after this I met his girl. Lesley was tall, with long blonde hair and a beautiful, clear-cut face. She never wore makeup, because she said she looked silly with it. She made commercials
for television and she was very good at it, but she never talked about her work and didn’t seem to think it mattered. I loved her at once. She had a great affinity with dogs, and my dog,
Darcy, who had taken the place of dear Rosie, now dead, the longest-lived cavalier spaniel on record, often went to stay with them when I went away for weekends.