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There was something else I bought regularly. Men on the street corners displayed trays of tiny turtles, their shells painted in bright glossy green or yellow, which they sold. Pete said
they’d die, as their shells would let in no air. So I bought them, cleaned their shells with nail-varnish remover, washed them in soapy water, and then put them in the bath in our hotel. They
cost about ten cents each, and as the days went by it took longer and longer to transport them to the basin, have a bath and then put them back again. Pete entirely approved of this, although he
did point out that the more of them I bought, the more the men on the street corner would find it worth procuring new stock.

Robert’s letters kept coming, and although I wrote back faithfully, selecting what to tell him, and saying quite truthfully that I loved and missed him, it was sometimes a relief when we
were asked away for weekends, where there could be no letters. We stayed with Arthur Harlow, the owner of Pete’s gallery, and his wife in their vast gloomy house up the Hudson River. We
stayed with the Lloyd-Smiths, a very rich family with two daughters, Ginny, recently married, and Clara, very attractive and
soignée
. She was the
first girl I saw
wearing blue jeans, a man’s shirt, and polished idlers on her bare feet. She looked wonderful.

I was, however, haunted throughout the trip by chronic backache and a slight, but continuous feeling of nausea. Pete said I should see a doctor, and as my cousin Nemone Balfour, now living in
New York, was married to one, I went to him. He was Russian and had a very successful practice. He told me to lay off butter and cream and not to overdo it. Then he said, ‘Eleanor Roosevelt,
a great friend of mine, has recently lost her husband and I have to write a letter of condolence. Would you read it, and see if you think it’s the right sort of letter?’ I did, but
found little to say. However, he thanked me and refused to be paid for my visit.

Marie Paneth had asked me to look up her old lover, Heinz Hartman, now living in New York, and tell him about her. This I did. He practised in an apartment on Park Avenue. When I rang, the
over-protective secretary told me to make an appointment. I said it was a personal matter and I particularly wished to speak to him. He came on the line, sounding very guarded. ‘It’s
about Marie Paneth,’ I said. His voice changed completely. He was extremely glad to have news of Marie, whom, clearly, he loved. He asked for her address, thanked me again and again for being
in touch and that was that.

Pete and I did some broadcasts; he was very good at it, and I had to talk about London during the Blitz. Afterwards, someone involved in the programme came to me and said, ‘We had our
small privations too, you know. It was often quite difficult to get cream.’

Sometime during those weeks I managed to lose the sixty pages of my novel. I was frantic and Bob Linscott took a lot of trouble looking for them, but to no avail. I had a dim recollection of
having put the manuscript down in the ladies’ loo at a restaurant, but this was later, after we got back to England. There was nothing for it but to rewrite it.

One of Pete’s pre-war friends was a French zoologist called Jean Delacourt. He now ran the Bronx zoo, to which we went. During our visit it was arranged that we’d take back some
snakes, various
kinds of turtle, and some alligators for English zoos. When the day came for our return – we were sailing in the
Queen Mary
– the crates of
creatures duly arrived at the dockside. When the porters saw huge crates marked ‘Alligators’, they refused to move them into the ship. Pete went to the other two crates, rubbed out
their labels, and put ‘Fragile. Cabin only’. So, our cabin contained sixteen snakes, and sixty turtles, including my rescued ones. We let the turtles out, and I became used to Pete
saying, in the restaurant, ‘My wife would like two lettuces and a small saucer of raw minced beef in the cabin.’ When he said we must let the snakes out of their sacks to give them a
drink, things became trickier.

‘Won’t they bite and escape?’

‘They’re not poisonous, so their bites won’t matter, and we’ll put them in the bath for their drink.’ This we did and none bit us, but one garter snake escaped. I
saw its head sticking out of the overflow pipe of the bath, and when we tried to catch it, it withdrew completely. ‘It may turn up in Lord Halifax’s bathroom,’ Pete said gloomily.
The Halifaxes, next door, came to tea in the cabin to see the turtles. They were friends of the Kennets, and Pete knew them slightly. The snakes weren’t mentioned. One morning, as I was
washing my hands, I found the little snake tied in an elegant reef knot round the hot tap. I got Pete, and he retrieved her. He and I collaborated about animals more than we did about anything
else. It’s sad to me now to think that this, the most serious and interesting part of his life and nature, was so overwhelmed by war and guns. It struck me again what a great naturalist he
was – not simply someone who was interested in wildfowl but an all-rounder, although his greatest passion was always wildfowl.

We left New York with much else besides the reptiles. I’d no idea of it then, but I’d spent nearly all of the money that Pete had earned from his exhibition. He was uninterested in
money, but I still think of this with shame. If he’d ever told me to stop spending, I would have, but he never did. I don’t think he had much more idea of money than I. He’d
always earned it easily, and his wants were simple.

Conflict and confusion had been growing steadily in me for months. My marriage was hopeless, but I could see no way out. Guilt about my failure with Pete, and my complex
feelings about Nicola blocked me. A chief feature of guilt is paralysis; on one hand I felt I should be able to love Pete and have a family with him – I hated the idea of Nic being an only
child – on the other, I couldn’t bring myself to do something that felt wrong. Without trying to excuse myself, I think now that, as some people eat or drink when they are unhappy,
I’d resorted to buying things in an attempt to compensate for failure, unhappiness and the misery of blaming myself. Pete was a gifted and interesting man; he was never wittingly unkind to
me, but he didn’t understand that my youth presented him with responsibilities as well as advantages. I could never really talk to him seriously about anything – he wasn’t
interested in me, really, or in anyone else, in that way.

As so many men do, he wanted me to settle down to marriage and a family, so that he could pursue matters that did interest him. He was thirty-six, had always known what he wanted to do, and had
been successful all his life: he was full of optimism, confidence and energy. I was twenty-three, precocious in some ways, but essentially immature, even for my age, and I’d succeeded in
nothing. I wasn’t fulfilled in any way, had very little confidence. We had reached a point, had perhaps been trapped there for years, when it didn’t seem possible to talk about these
things. The only time when there had been honest and real communication between us had been the night he spent with me in Stratford. But when I thought of leaving Pete, panic assailed me. I had no
money, no training except in acting which I’d more or less given up as a possible career. I had nowhere to go. My novel, half finished, might never be published, and even if it was, I knew
enough from Robert and Ray to understand it wouldn’t provide me with a living.
And
there was Nicola. How could I earn my living and keep her? I realized that at least some of these
difficulties had to be solved.

We were met at Southampton by K, Nicola and Nanny, and Marie Paneth. But before that we had to get through Customs. Pete managed the crates of turtles and snakes with an easy
charm and they weren’t unpacked. But my copious luggage was looked at. ‘Do you always travel, Madam, with twelve dozen pairs of stockings?’ the Customs man asked after he’d
opened the drawer of my cabin trunk.

‘Always,’ I said, trying to look that sort of person.

He shrugged, but he let me through.

And there was Nicola wearing her winter coat and white socks, with her silky honey-coloured hair tied at the side with a blue velvet ribbon. I’d always thought her the most beautiful
child, and in these few weeks she seemed to have grown. I lifted her up to kiss her, but she’d never liked me doing that, and wriggled to be put down.

K was clearly delighted to see Pete. When we reached the car with her chauffeur, she said there wouldn’t be room for everyone, and that she would drive with Pete to London; the rest of us
were to go by train. I didn’t mind this because it meant I could ring Robert and tell him I was back, but Marie was incensed on my behalf.

Robert was clearly relieved to hear from me. ‘When can I see you?’ I didn’t know, but I’d ring him as soon as it was possible.’ ‘Make it soon, my dearest
love; I ache for you. I can’t endure life without you. Ray sends her love,’ he added.

In the train I managed to tell Marie I’d seen her friend in New York and that he’d asked for her address. We all went back to Edwardes Square and had tea. Pete
dined with his family that evening; I received a half-hearted invitation, but said I was tired. I bathed Nicola and she told me about a person she’d invented, a Mr Leafie, who wore winter
combinations and lived in the dirty-clothes basket in the bathroom. ‘Quite often his wives die and we have a funeral tea.’ He was clearly a rather frightening character, rather like
Robin’s Ciggi. I once asked her how he was, and she laughed nervously and said, ‘Oh, he’s full of beans. He’s been eating beans all day at the office.’ That evening,
Nanny had another go at me about Nicola having a little brother.

Some time later, when Pete was on one of his hunts for a suitable place to keep wildfowl, I spent my first weekend with Robert in his father’s house at Stanmore. Ray had provided a couple
of lamb chops and some bread, and we set forth by train on the Friday evening.

The house was half-way up a hill from the station, a detached, rather dark place with small rooms and a neglected garden. Indeed, the whole house had a Miss Havisham-like air. It was thick with
dust and very cold. All the curtains were drawn and the kitchen was full of dirty crocks that had long waited to be washed up. There were two gas fires, one in the sitting room and one in the large
bedroom. There was spinach in the garden, Robert said, I had only to pick it, and we had supper of the chops, enormous amounts of mashed potato and the spinach. Afterwards, Robert played me very
old records of Rosa Ponselle and Giuseppe Martinelli singing the main arias from
Aïda
– all new to me. I was entranced.

It’s difficult to describe what extraordinarily good company Robert could be; I was dazzled by how much he knew and how greatly he cared about Verdi, for instance, whose music I’d
never heard. He was full of esoteric pieces of information: he introduced me to Wyndham Lewis, to Norman Douglas, to opera, to ballet, to the earliest films, and all this was interspersed with such
repeated,
romantic asseverations of love, for my beauty, my wonderful character, my general
goodness
, that he scored a double, as it were, to my head and my heart. It was
a wonderful respite from what I felt about myself.

He could also be very funny, the more so because it was unexpected. He had a great sense of irony, always aptly employed. He’d always been unhappy, didn’t fit in with modern life. He
couldn’t get on with men much, but he’d always loved women, who, he said, were far the superior species. He was full of sympathy for what he called my most wretched situation. Marriage,
he said, was an impossible institution and he deplored it. He was interested in psychic phenomena, knew Harry Price, the famous psychical researcher, and had once spent a night at Borley Rectory,
the most haunted house in England. He read aloud to me Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’, and Russell’s
History of Western Philosophy
.

He concealed from me his neurotic fears. Then it was all romance and the amazing chance that he’d found me and how wonderful our life would be together. The privations of the house, which
I got to know well – the dust, the lack of any hot water except from the kettle, the dreary light, the cracked gramophone – were nothing to me. To be with someone so tender, so
admiring, so knowledgeable was more than I felt I could ever have hoped for. I loved him, and wanted to do anything that would make him happier. During that summer I lived an uneasy, unresolved
life, three-quarters of it at Edwardes Square, and the rest with Robert.

Peter had found the place where he wanted to have his wildfowl, at Slimbridge on the Severn marshes. When he first went there, there was only a small cottage, and we stayed at an inn nearby. It
was a bare and virtually treeless place except for a small clump in which there was an old duck decoy. The only time I went there I was ill, and the prospect didn’t hearten me. I’d not
learned to appreciate wild geese; I’d not then become interested in gardening, and it was miles from anywhere. I remember that we went to Berkeley Castle, where Rob Berkeley lived; it was his
land that Pete
was to lease. At that point, Pete didn’t talk about living there, but I could see that he had it in mind.

During the winter of 1946 – soon, I think, after Christmas, K became ill. Since I’d known her, she’d always had heart trouble, but this was different: it turned out to be
leukaemia. I went, with Peter, to see her at St Mary’s where she lay in a small room. I don’t think she can have wanted to see me much, she knew that our marriage was breaking up, but
she was very gentle and dignified, and as one thing I knew for certain about her was her love and intense enjoyment of life, I could recognize the enormous courage she was using to deal with her
death. I also knew that her passionate love for Pete, and desire that everything should always be perfect for him, meant that she must be desperately unhappy at having to leave him. I felt
I’d let her down in almost every way: I’d not made Pete happy, I’d failed to have a son, I’d been unfaithful, a spendthrift and a bad mother. I think it was the first time I
could see all of this from her point of view – possibly because she’d always seemed so powerful to me, and now was nothing of the kind. I remember asking Pete whether he thought that
there was anything I could do for her. He said she would like me to read to her, which I did on subsequent occasions. I never knew whether she actually
wanted
me to do that – probably
not – but she thought that Pete wanted me to, and that was enough. She died within a few months, in July, and Bill, Pete and Wayland scattered her ashes.