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One morning, Malcolm Sargent’s secretary rang up and said Sir
Malcolm wondered whether I’d dine with him that evening. He was one of Nicola’s godfathers and
was very friendly with K. I said, yes, I would. He took me to an obscure little restaurant where the food was extremely good – ‘Entirely black market,’ he said. Conversation was
innocuous. He talked of my grandfather’s choral works – Malcolm was wonderful with choirs – and of the Kennets. ‘How do you get on with Lady K?’ he asked. I was
carefully, diplomatically enthusiastic, saying how much she loved Nicola and how kind she’d been.

When his chauffeur drove us back to Edwardes Square, I asked whether he’d like a drink. He said yes, and told his chauffeur to return in half an hour. I left him in the drawing room and
went down to get the whisky and soda he’d opted for. When I returned it was to find him without his trousers. I told him that anything like that was out of the question, fighting down panic
with the reassuring knowledge that I wasn’t alone in the house. Unabashed, he put on his trousers again. He did hope I hadn’t misunderstood him, he said, as he left. I wondered what he
meant.

He was incorrigible. Some time later, Pete said we must have him to dinner. It was to be a party of about eight, black tie, of course – everyone changed in those days. When he arrived, he
said he would so much like to see his dear little goddaughter. She was asleep, I said. ‘Take Malcolm to see her,’ Pete said. ‘She looks very sweet, even asleep.’ There was
nothing for it. I took him upstairs to her cot. He gave her a cursory look, then seized me, tearing one of my shoulder straps. I escaped down the passage to the nursery where Nanny was sewing. I
said I had somehow torn the strap and could she mend it quickly, which she did. After that, I took care never to see Malcolm again, except in company.

Pete was painting, mostly wildfowl, but he was also drawing some people and I encouraged him to make a book of his drawings, which he eventually did.

In November he had his first post-war show at Ackerman’s. I was helping to hang it, and as it was cold, I was wearing two pairs
of trousers. I was up a small ladder
when it became apparent to me that Queen Mary was at the bottom looking up, and that K was indicating I should descend at once to give her a bunch of flowers. It’s quite difficult to get off
a ladder in two pairs of trousers and curtsy, particularly with any grace. Queen Mary, looking at me with some distaste, said, ‘Is this a
boy
?’

Also in 1945 Pete and I took Dosia to the nursing-home to have her first baby. Barry and she didn’t have a car, so Pete drove and I sat with her, already in labour, in the back seat.
She’d chosen to have the baby in Blackheath – a long drive at the best of times – but that night there was fog, and the whole thing became a nightmare. Pete was very good and
steady, but said afterwards he’d been terrified of losing his way. I rubbed Dosia’s back when she gasped with pain and prayed that she wouldn’t have the baby in the car because
I’d no idea what to do if she did. We got her there, and Adam was born.

Some time in the spring, my parents rang and said they wanted to come and see me – that morning. Was Colin all right? I asked. It wasn’t Colin.

They came and stood agitatedly in the drawing room and my mother said, in tones of high tragedy, that Robin had married a girl in Arizona – without getting his CO’s consent. She
pulled a letter out of her bag and gave it to me. It was disingenuous, written, I could see, with a view to winning my parents round. Hope, Robin said, was twenty-one years old, a marvellous girl,
great fun, with a deep nature. She liked to sit quietly in churches from time to time. I could see that he was fairly worried about what sort of reception he would get. He was to be demobbed and
was returning in July. Hope would follow later when she could get a place on a boat. It was startling news – Robin was twenty – but I certainly didn’t see it as the disaster that
clearly my parents did. It seemed rather exciting. I also realized from this visit that I’d been promoted to a grown-up, and said cautiously that she was probably very nice, and wasn’t
it lovely that he was coming home? I’d lost touch with
Robin and had little or no idea of what his life, training as a Spitfire pilot, had been. Now he would go straight
into the family firm as my father had done, and with an American wife, like my uncle.

Eventually, my parents left, and I recalled later that there had been an air of unease – particularly with my father – that went beyond what they’d come to tell me.

During that year I persisted with my novel, often writing it at night: that gave me the twofold advantage of peace and quiet and not having to go to bed with Peter. We had had some fairly
acrimonious rows about my dislike of bed, but they gradually died down, and I suspected that he’d found someone else. He was looking for somewhere to keep wildfowl, and spent some time on
these searches. I didn’t accompany him.

Gavin Maxwell used to come and see us in the winter. ‘He comes to London then to litigate,’ Pete said. Gavin was a tense, volatile creature, with beautiful manners and huge amounts
of energy that he seemed unable to place to his advantage. He’d had a brave war, which ended in training Polish paratroopers in Scotland. They would come back after a drop, having been
caught, imprisoned and sometimes tortured – with no fingernails, for instance – and simply say, ‘Train us better this time.’ He took up shark fishing after the war which, he
thought, would be a good commercial enterprise, but Gavin and commerce never blended well. Pete said he was very unhappy about an affair, and would keep him talking in the evenings until the last
Underground train had left – ‘Or he might kill himself.’ I didn’t see him for years after, by which time he had taken up with otters.

One day my father, whom I saw occasionally – more often than my mother who was still in Sussex – asked me to lunch at his club and told me that he was deeply in
love with a lady called Ursula Beddard. He’d been in love with her for ages, he said, and the situation had become so serious that he thought he would have to leave my mother to live with
Ursula. I’d met her as she had come to parties at home in Lansdowne Road before the war. I felt very sympathetic – I’ve always felt sympathy for lovers. He would so like me to
know her, he said. She was living in a rented cottage in Hampshire and he would like me to go down and spend a night with her there. ‘I so want you two to get to know each other,’ he
said, ‘and I think it would be much better if I wasn’t there the first time you meet.’ So I went.

She had three sons; the two eldest were at school and the youngest upstairs asleep. She was very welcoming and charming, told me how much she adored my father, and how worried she was about my
mother’s reaction if she was left. By the time we’d had several drinks and dinner, which she’d cooked, I was confiding in her – something I’d not have dreamed of doing
with my mother – and told her how miserable my marriage was. Afterwards, my father said she’d simply
loved
me and how glad he was that his two favourite women had got on so well.
She was very good-looking with hyacinth eyes, dark hair and a habitual expression of slightly noble sincerity. She knew about unhappy marriages, she said, as hers had been one for a long time.

After the meeting, my father confided in me a great deal more. He couldn’t decide whether he should tell my mother that he was leaving her while she was still living in
Sussex, or whether he should find a house for her in London first. He took me out to lunch to ask me what I thought. I felt he should find a house for her that he knew she liked before breaking the
news. I couldn’t believe that she knew nothing about his affair – or, indeed, affairs of many years – but he seemed sure that she didn’t. I also had little idea about how
she would feel, except that whatever she knew or didn’t know, it would come as a great shock. Better, I thought, for her at least to have a home, rather than find one by herself. I still
don’t know if this was right, but my father, who really wanted his mind made up for him, decided it was. So my parents began to house-hunt in these dishonest circumstances. They settled for a
small one-storeyed house in St John’s Wood, Clifton Hill, the same road that I’d lived in during the war. It faced north and south, so one side of it was always dark. It had three
bedrooms and a sunny garden at the back. My mother thought it was perfect, and my father was guiltily agreeable to anything she wanted.

I now come to Robert Aickman. I’ve not wanted to write about Robert, I suspect because I am uncomfortable about my behaviour with him. However, that is not a good reason for leaving him
out – indeed I can’t, since he exercised a strong influence on me for several years.

He came into my life almost imperceptibly; I’d first met him before I was married, when he came to lunch with Ronnie Jeans one day, bringing his wife Ray, who was Ronnie’s secretary.
I didn’t like him very much: he seemed rather supercilious, and I thought he despised Ronnie. Then, long after, when I was at Clifton Hill, he wrote out of the blue, asking if he might come
to tea with me. I kept an open house, and could think of no good reason for refusing him – in those days I didn’t think about such things. He came and talked about the theatre, about
which he seemed to know a great deal, but I found him heavy going. Later, he asked me
to go to a play with him. He turned up from time to time; nobody in the house took to him
much, but he was quietly persistent. I used to put him off a lot, but I never stopped him coming. I think at that time I felt mildly sorry for him.

He was unprepossessing: he had thick horn-rimmed spectacles through which his small brown eyes looked out with an almost cynical intelligence, thick brown hair scraped back from his forehead and
held firmly in place with a good deal of Brylcreem. He had a large, but not insensitive mouth, and a pale, almost colourless complexion. He had beautiful hands, and a voice whose tone implied, with
some irony, that he thought little of anything apart from the arts. He was devoted to all of them, seemed to have read everything, gone to every play, opera, film and concert, looked at pictures
and had an encyclopedic knowledge of England. There was nothing usual about him, neither his appearance nor his demeanour. His conversation was wide-ranging, and imbued with his knowledge and
opinions. I discovered gradually that he was the only child of an architect; that his parents had taken virtually no notice of him from an early age. He was reading
The Times
when he was
four and preparing his own meals. They lived in a small house in Stanmore, a suburb of London, and he got a scholarship to a school in Highgate. Fairly early on in his life, his mother left, and he
continued to live at home with his father. It was an extremely lonely and unhappy childhood. His father died and he inherited some money – I never knew how much but it enabled him to live
modestly, spending it on his many interests. He was a pacifist, one of the few to go through a tribunal and be released from any work connected with the war.

He asked me to lunch with Ray at their flat. They lived on the top two floors of 11 Gower Street, the house where Jonathan Cape and Wren Howard had begun their publishing concern.

The flat had a bathroom on the mezzanine, and an office, lined with books, with a desk and typewriter and two easy chairs in front of the gas fire and a door that led to their bedroom. On the
next
floor there were two little attic bedrooms, and a small, charming dining room that led to a tiny kitchen. Ray was a tall, large-boned woman, with a face reminiscent of a du
Maurier drawing, but enlivened by remarkable eyes, blue and shining with intelligence. She had a high, rather childish-sounding voice, and she clearly adored Robert. Conversation was easier in her
presence, and we all got on very well. Robert told me that she, too, was an only child, and that her mother had committed suicide.

Thereafter I saw them at irregular intervals. I didn’t invite them to Edwardes Square, as Robert said he hated parties and Ray was conditioned to dislike what Robert disliked. But often I
saw Robert alone, and he wrote constantly to me. Ray said how good I was for him, as he was very depressed.

I can’t remember exactly when he exclaimed that he was in love with me and had loved me from the first moment that he saw me. ‘You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever
seen, let alone met in my life.’ This was water off a duck’s back: I’d never cared much for my appearance, and took this compliment to be something people always said in these
circumstances. But the fact that he loved me was a hook. I was flattered to be so important to such an unusual and intriguing man. I had – how clearly I see it now – a great hunger to
be loved, to
be
in love. I was well aware my education had been sketchy: here was someone who apparently knew everything and wanted to teach me. Also, I was anxious about my novel; Robert
and Ray ran a small literary agency and were professionally informed. Robert read my novel and, after much encouragement, went through some of it with me, giving me my first lesson on the
pluperfect tense. He wrote himself, he said, mostly reviews and articles for the literary magazine
Nineteenth Century
. I think at the time he’d had very little published.

Once, I spent a weekend with them, and I realized how continuously and completely Ray looked after him. The weekend was strenuous: a rich fare of cinema, a concert, a picture gallery and a train
taken to somewhere in Buckinghamshire where we went for a marathon walk, finishing at a place where we could all have
tea. He wouldn’t go to bed until about one a.m., and
at midnight had an extra meal, of yoghurt, bread and butter. I went home exhausted on Sunday evening.

Gradually, I got to know more about them. Ray said they’d only married to stop her being called up. They’d been living together and one morning Robert said he’d been reading
the paper and had decided to marry her. Neither of them wanted nor even liked children. So, as we became more intimate, I admitted my lack of maternal feeling and how awful I felt about it. Their
response was shockingly different from any I’d encountered before. Why should I like children? None of their friends had them: they made civilized life impossible. Ray called them wombats.
‘Not that I’m against wombats,’ she said, ‘but I wouldn’t want to live with one.’ There was a great deal of this: it was an insidious influence I am ashamed to
have succumbed to.