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But the main tenor of all our conversation – what everything came back to – was that everything had declined. Before the beginning of the century, life had held more promise. The
arts, architecture, hotels, food, clothes, furniture, the governance of the country – everything you could think of – had been better. Robert was particularly incensed by the closure of
the tram system. This was later to lead to his interest in canals and the subsequent foundation of the Inland Waterways Association. There had been nothing, since those unspecified and halcyon
days, but a steady diminution in all standards. We were approaching the end of a civilization.

I asked Robert if he’d told Ray that he thought he was in love with me. Of course he had, and she didn’t mind at all. Theirs was a marriage of convenience. They were very fond of
each other, and Ray only wanted him to be happy. This, like so many things that Robert told me, was only half true. By now they both knew my marriage was in trouble and were sympathetic. It was a
relief to have people to whom I could talk about it.

One day, I was having tea with Ray and I said, ‘Robert seems to be in love with me.’

She said she knew that. ‘As long as you don’t want to marry him,’ she added. I said, truthfully, that I didn’t want to marry anyone ever again in my
life.

I now have to describe another incident that occurred sometime in the spring. It had started when I was in the Isles of Scilly with Marie. She’d said then that if I ever felt the need to
sort myself out, she knew a man who could help me. I told Peter I wanted to do this, and he agreed.

Oswald Schwarz was a psychiatrist of Freudian persuasion. He lived in a small ground-floor flat very near Leinster Corner. I began to see him twice a week. He was small, and seemed extremely
old, was almost bald, with spectacles and dark violet smudges under his eyes. My visits consisted mostly of my telling him things and him encouraging me to continue. He seemed to be on my side, and
I became increasingly anxious to tell him everything and gain his good opinion. After a time, he asked if he could come to the house and meet Peter, who was perfectly sanguine about this, so it
happened.

Afterwards, he said he could see I was in a very difficult situation. I thought he must know everything, and turned him, I suppose, into a father figure. One day he said to me, ‘Do you
know Cecil Day-Lewis?’ I didn’t. ‘He is making poor Rosamond Lehmann dreadfully unhappy. He is a wicked man.’ I knew of Rosamond Lehmann, of course, but had never met her.
He sighed, and returned to the matter in hand.

Then, because I was going to be away for some weeks, I told him I’d not be able to come for a while. He asked me to change my hour from three p.m. to five p.m.. I agreed. When I arrived, I
saw that there was a plate of cakes and a small bottle of wine on the table between us. ‘For a little celebration,’ he said, ‘as you’re going away.’ At the end of the
session, he lunged off his chair suddenly, knelt before me and enclosed me in a vice-like grip. ‘I love and adore you and want you,’ he said, and made a further lunge to kiss me. A
shock. For a split second I was paralysed. Then I pushed him with both hands so hard that he fell back.

I rushed out of the flat, leaving my overcoat and bag in the waiting room. I ran up the street to the park, looking back, terrified that he would follow me, where I realized
I hadn’t the money to get home. I hailed a taxi and sat in it, shaking. I felt frightened and betrayed; nothing was safe, nothing could be trusted. I recalled, fleetingly, the first bad time
with my father, and pushed it down where it usually stayed, airless and subdued by deliberate lack of attention. Thereafter in my life, whenever real intimacy or trust seemed to loom, I withdrew to
avoid any possible ambush. At home, I got Nanny to pay for the taxi. ‘You look upset, Mummy, would you like a cup of tea in the nursery with us?’ I said I had a headache and was going
to lie down.

That was the end of that. ‘Oh, darling, you never stick to anything,’ Pete said, when I told him I didn’t want to go back to Dr Schwarz. The next day a young man delivered my
coat and bag. I never saw or heard of Dr Schwarz again.

At some point, Robert and I became lovers. I never found him physically attractive, but in all other ways I was, under his spell. He became my mentor; he taught me things that I was eager to
learn. He made verbal love to me, which I enjoyed. He flattered me, telling me how good and wonderful I was, and this sank into me like water into dry sand. I confided in my father about this
affair, and he, immersed in his own, was understanding.

And then, in 1946, when I was nearly twenty-three, it was decided that Peter and I were to go to New York, where Peter would have a show of his paintings and we would also do some broadcasting.
When I broke this news to Robert, the balloon went up. How could I leave him? And to go to America, the place that
he
had always wanted to go to. How could I be so callous as to make him so
unhappy in this particular way? I did point out that I was still married, that I could think of no valid excuse for
not
going. There were endless scenes about it: he wouldn’t be able
to survive without me; I might never come back and this would ruin his life. Ray, though she was far more reasonable – realistic – about
this, took it all at
Robert’s level of drama. The date drew nearer; eventually, it was agreed I should stay at Gower Street the night before we sailed, and my father would drive me down to Southampton. I
don’t know how I swung this with Pete: I suspect that he knew what was going on, and chose not to talk about it. Anyway, that was what happened. Pete went down the night before with our
luggage and his paintings, and I spent a tear-torn night at Gower Street, from which my father collected me very early in the morning.

We sailed in the
Aquitania
, with four hundred GI brides. It was the roughest crossing, the captain said – we sat at his table – that he’d known for
twenty years. Thirty-foot waves assaulted the ship, and almost all the passengers were seasick. I lay on my bunk a good deal of the time, reading Charlotte Brontë’s
Shirley
, and
managed not to be sick. Pete, who was illustrating Paul Gallico’s
The Snow Goose
, searched the ship for a suitable model for Fritha, but with the general prostration and the fact that
the brides were unexpectedly a series of ‘no oil paintings’, he had to fall back on me. I stood for hours, holding a pillow, which he turned into the wounded snow goose. The crossing
was so bad that we stopped at Halifax where we stayed the night in a boarding-house; our bedroom had the curious feature of an enormous creeper growing up one wall. There we had the choice of
continuing by ship, or flying south over Canada to New York, and Pete opted for the latter, as the ship was going to be late.

I’d never flown before, and the small planes were unpressurized, which hurt my ears throughout the flight. We stopped at Monckton where we had lunch in a hotel and then proceeded in
another plane to New York. The view of Canada – frozen lakes and endless evergreen forests for hour after hour – reminded me of Sibelius.

We arrived in New York in the early evening, and the moment we got to our hotel, photographers rang to say they wanted to take our pictures because of the party we were going to that night. We
struggled into our evening clothes and went through the session,
then took a cab to Park Avenue where there was to be a large dinner party. In the lift – or elevator, as I
learned to call it – was a small grey-haired man with his wife. ‘Are you going to this party?’ he asked as we ascended. Yes. ‘What do you do, then?’ he asked.
Light-headed with fatigue and the strangeness of everything, I said I was writing a novel. ‘I should like to see it, ‘ he replied.

‘If I’d said I build bridges in South America, would you pop down to look at them?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I am a publisher.’ He turned out to be Robert Haas, the vice president of Random House.

Everyone at the party seemed so
old
. I sat next to a handsome saturnine man, and when it was my turn to talk to him I said, ‘This is all rather like
H. M. Pulham
Esquire
.’

‘I am John Marquand,’ he replied. The Pulitzer Prize winner’s gently satirical society novel had been published in 1941 to great acclaim. I was too cowed to think of anything
else to say to him.

The first thing that had struck me when we got off the plane in New York was the lights. The whole city seemed ablaze, and although the blackout had ceased in England, there were no huge
buildings lit up at every window. There was also the food. The first dinner party was full of rich food, and I assumed this was because it was a grand occasion – the Pulitzers gave it –
but
all
the food was like that. Our first morning we had breakfast in our room and I ordered a boiled egg – a treat for me. Two eggs arrived, with muffins, toast, masses of butter, and
cream for the coffee. My liver couldn’t stand up to this: at the end of a week, I felt sick, and could hardly eat anything.

A glamorous life ensued. There were a great many parties, where everyone drank very dry martinis for hours before settling down to enormous steaks, baked potatoes dripping with sour cream and,
to top it all, most of the men accompanied it with a large glass of milk. Pete’s show was hung and opened, and a lot of rather grand people came. He sold a good many of the pictures, and also
got commissions to draw portraits.

People were very kind and made a great fuss of me. One of Robert Haas’s daughters took me shopping. This was another heady revelation. After years of clothes rationing
and utility garments, the sight of racks and racks of lovely things was intoxicating. I had my twenty-third birthday party on the sixty-seventh floor of Radio City in a club. A great many people
came and gave me wonderful presents. I was getting used to being the youngest person everywhere.

But there was a nagging fly in the ointment. Robert was so miserable about my being in New York that I felt it was disloyal to enjoy myself too much. How misplaced loyalties can be! He wrote me
long, despairing letters almost every day and, of course, I wrote back, but he wouldn’t really have known if I
had
abandoned myself to the excitement and pleasure of being in a foreign
country. On the other hand, there was no doubt that I was being disloyal to Peter. I was unhappy a lot of the time and, worse, felt I
ought
to be so. Sexual life with him had been over for
some time, at my request. It is hard to say whether he minded or not. Pride was involved and he minded in that kind of way. From time to time he made halfhearted scenes, but he was proud, too, that
I was – from his point of view – ‘a success’.

He was extremely generous with money, and let me buy anything I wanted. The only thing that couldn’t be procured, which I wanted most, was entry to a Toscanini concert or, at least, a
rehearsal. Impossible, everyone said.

Pete was asked to draw a portrait of Walter Pidgeon, the actor, then at the height of his fame. He took me with him to the hotel where Mr Pidgeon lived, since he’d found that if I read to
sitters they were more inclined to sit still. Pidgeon turned out to fidget if he was read to. He wanted to be told stories, preferably funny and risqué ones, about the war and London. I did
my best, but soon ran out. I searched my mind for anything that might amuse him and recited a fairly dirty limerick that had been current during the Blitz. The session ended, but during it Pete had
mentioned that he was going
to Chicago the next morning, catching an eight a.m. plane to fulfil another commission. ‘Are you going too?’ Walter asked me. I
wasn’t.

The next morning, at precisely eight a.m., the telephone rang. ‘Mrs Scott? I have someone on the line for you.’ It was Walter. ‘Just give me your room number and I’ll be
up,’ he said.

There was a slight pause while I thought what to do. Even if I didn’t tell him, he might still find out – did the door lock? Then, in tones of shocked severity, I said, ‘I
can’t think what you mean. Of course you can’t come up.’

There was another silence and then he said, ‘You must forgive me. A terrible mistake.’ I said nothing. ‘What can I do to show you how sorry I am?’ A wonderful thought
occurred to me. I said coldly, as though granting a favour, ‘You can get me a seat for a Toscanini rehearsal.’ He did. This was one of the most ruthless exploits of my life, but it was
worth it. I also heard Jascha Heifetz, who was a disappointment.

Robert Haas and his family became my friends. He asked for my manuscript and gave it to the chief editor of Random House, a man called Robert Linscott, who took me out to lunch and said he would
be very interested to see the novel when it was finished. Linscott was a very attractive man in his fifties; we became friends, and remained so for years. We indulged in mild, but regulated
flirtation, something quite new to me, and very pleasant. Someone else suggested I should send the novel to Scribners, where Maxwell Perkins read it, and said much the same as Linscott.

I was generally spoiled, but I think the most delicious treat was that the people at Scribners took me to Brentano’s bookshop and told me to look round and make a pile of any books I would
like. I remember Mo, my grandfather, saying that when he was sent to Germany as a young student, where concerts and opera abounded, he felt like a dog being let out into a field full of rabbits;
that was how I felt in Brentano’s. I collected all kinds of books about opera for Robert, poetry, stories by Ambrose Bierce and works by William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and other
novels or classics I didn’t
possess. I thought I was meant to select a single volume from this list, but, no, I could have the lot. They’d crate them to go back in
the ship with us; riches. I went shopping for clothes, shoes and stockings – nylons, almost unheard of in England.

I made a list of all the people I wanted to give things to and bought them presents. I bought two years’ worth of pretty frocks for Nicola, and shirts and ties for Pete. The exchange rate
at the time was five dollars to the pound. I knew nothing about money, the dollars felt like tiddlywinks and I used them like a greedy child. After years of lacking pretty or new things the
temptations were continuous and completely frivolous, and I succumbed to them. I didn’t buy anything extremely expensive, but it all mounted up. Bill Kennet had once said he liked Tabasco
– unobtainable during the war – and I bought him a crate. My father had long finished his Havana cigars, and I bought him a box of fifty.