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Shortly after she came to Blandford Street, Michael introduced her to his cousin Jeremy Harris with whom she began going out. This graduated quickly to an affair, so there we
were: both in love, both trying to make enough money from designing and writing to live, both about the same age, and both unsure of what we wanted out of life. We’d get up rather late in the
mornings – at about nine a.m. – drink coffee in our identical grey silk pyjamas and earnestly discuss our feelings for Michael and Jeremy and theirs for us. Then we’d separate for
the rest of the morning to work. The Margaret Rutherford play fell through, and Audrey was living more or less on her earnings from the newspaper.

I’d struggle with the novel. I’d graduated, if one can call it that, from writing with great energy and ease and little apparent thought, to a painstaking crawl, where every sentence
was examined, found wanting and cast again. We had a sort of lunch. Audrey was always dieting but as I was very thin I didn’t bother. I ate what, if anything, came to hand. We spent hours
every evening getting ourselves ready for our dates, washing our hair, doing our faces, choosing and discarding clothes. Audrey, after her
séjour
in Paris, took clothes very
seriously, and taught me that one couldn’t take too much trouble. At about seven thirty, what the North Brothers downstairs used to call ‘the Boys’ would arrive in their
Bristols.

Other adventures sometimes happened. Nancy Spain read my first novel, and took me up. At the time she was – apart from her job on the
Daily Express
– editing a small magazine
that featured book reviews, and she employed me to write some from time to time. She also used to ask me to lunch at Wheeler’s in Old Compton Street where we invariably had oysters and Krug
champagne. Nancy was insanely generous, gave food and drink to anybody she met. She was lesbian, and in appearance rather like a large friendly blackish bird – this was augmented by a long
black cloak that she wore over her trouser suits. She once took me to lunch at Rebecca West’s house – somewhere in Berkshire, I think. Rebecca was married to a man who collected Sung
pottery, much
of which was displayed in wall cabinets with museum-like lighting.

After I’d known Nancy for several months, she came back to Blandford Street after one of our Wheeler’s lunches and asked me to go to bed with her. ‘I don’t think
I’d be any good at it,’ I said. I’d read
The Well of Loneliness
and was very anxious not to hurt her feelings. ‘Oh, come on, darling. Just pop into bed with me and
let’s see how we feel.’ So I did.

‘Well?’ The bright brown bird’s eye was fixed on me. Eventually she said, ‘Well, it doesn’t seem to be any good. Never mind.’ We got out of bed and put on our
clothes. And that was that. She continued to employ me, to ask me to lunch, and never referred to the incident again. In the summer, she invited me to go to Ireland with her to stay with Elizabeth
Bowen. I admired Bowen very much, but was still anxious of staying with people I didn’t know, and refused. How stupid that was. When I got to know Elizabeth later, I realized I’d have
enjoyed that visit very much.

That summer in 1951 I came out of the Underground at Notting Hill Gate to read on an
Evening Standard
poster ‘Peter Scott Divorces Actress Wife’. So I was
divorced, and Pete would be able to marry Phil, which he did a month later. Phil was the quiet girl whom Kit and Freddie had brought to the dinner party in Mon Debris before I’d married Pete,
and who had become his secretary after Liz had married Wayland. It really was past history; I wasn’t even an actress any more. I was hardly a novelist; I wasn’t anything.

Also that year, my friend Jill Balcon and Cecil Day-Lewis fell in love. He left his wife, and Rosamond Lehmann with whom he’d had a long-standing affair, to go to Jill. She told me that
Rosamond had exacted a promise from him that he and Jill wouldn’t see each other for three months. This they did, but Jill asked if I’d have lunch with Cecil so that she might have news
of him.

I don’t remember much about that lunch. It took place at Antoine’s in Charlotte Street and Cecil was there when I arrived. I remember thinking that he really did look like
everyone’s idea of a poet. He combined good looks with urbanity and romanticism, plus a beautiful voice with a beguiling Anglo-Irish accent. We talked, of course, about Jill and how much he
was in love with her and his anxiety that her parents wouldn’t approve of their marriage. It wasn’t, honestly, possible to reassure him on this point. I felt too constrained to ask why
he’d agreed to Rosamond’s three months – neither a stipulation nor a length of time likely to decrease any lover’s passion. The best thing I discovered during that meeting
was
that he loved to laugh: his beautiful craggy face would break into volcanic fissures of amusement and, as I later discovered, he was also wonderful at telling stories. I
could go back to Jill and say that he certainly loved her and how much I liked him. Three months wasn’t so long, I said, and then they’d be together. She’d had a long affair with
a married man whom she could hardly ever see. I had a sharp recollection of her at her twenty-first birthday party at her parents’ home in Sussex, ravishing in an ice duck-egg-coloured satin
dress, glittering and unhappy, because the person she most wanted there couldn’t come.

She once asked me if I wanted to marry Michael, and I said – truthfully – that I didn’t. ‘I couldn’t anyway. He
is
married – he doesn’t want to
change. He’s always had mistresses. I seem cut out for that post.’ But I did love him. I find it difficult to project myself accurately into the past, to
know
with any honest
certainty the extent and quality of enjoyed, endured past love. I certainly believed I loved him. I wanted to be with him, thought about him, desperately wanted him to love
me
: I was still
at the stage when my sense of self rested almost entirely upon how somebody else saw me. I wanted his affection and interest more than anything else in the world.

Shortly before I knew him, he’d become – rather suddenly – rich and was enjoying it very much. The disparity in this respect in our lives was extreme: he had two large houses
and servants, and in the summer took a large villa in the South of France to which he repaired for a month’s holiday. I enjoyed being taken out to good restaurants for dinner, indeed it kept
me going physically, but I refused to be helped in any other way – with one exception. He would take me to buy everyone Christmas presents, but not for me, and I minded. It didn’t last:
the third Christmas after we’d met he gave me a very pretty seventeenth-century crystal and enamel ring that I still have and love. He also gave me a cat – a Siamese – to whom I
became devoted. But that was all. He tried to lure me into a more salubrious flat, pretending that the rent was much lower
than it really was, but even the fictitious reduced
rent was almost twice that of Blandford Street. I knew he’d be paying the difference, and refused. The
patron
at the Étoile once asked me why I didn’t lunch there on my
own, and on hearing I couldn’t afford it, offered me a table in the window and a free lunch whenever I wanted. I smelt a rat there, too, so that never happened.

But I did find hard the month that Michael went away in the summer. I imagined him swimming and sunbathing and having delicious drinks with friends in beautiful places, while I baked in my hot
little house in London where I couldn’t even see a tree from my window.

The second summer in Blandford Street in 1953, after I’d been ill for some time, my father suddenly suggested I should go to the South of France to stay with friends of Ursula called Zunz.
They lived outside Marseille and would love to have me. ‘They’ve had a rough time in the war,’ my father said, ‘and Ursula says they are very hard up. So if you go and I pay
a decent amount of board money for you it would help them.’ I found that Wayland and Liz were taking a car and going down there and thence to Italy: they’d give me a lift. There’d
only be the fare home, twenty-one pounds in those days by air. Before I went, when I’d dined with Ursula and my father, she said, rather mysteriously, ‘I wonder how you will get on with
René.’

The journey with Liz and Wayland was very enjoyable. We stopped for a night in Paris, went to a nightclub where we danced. I found a partner to dance with who I thought was a friend of Wayland.
We stayed in a wonderfully cheap and basic hotel for five shillings, and the next morning we set out for Chartres. Now there were four in the car, as the ‘friend’ had joined us. It
wasn’t until we reached Chartres that it was revealed that he was no friend of Wayland, who’d thought him a friend of mine: he’d simply attached himself to us and remained silent.
He vanished as unobtrusively as he’d arrived.

Liz and Wayland were inveterate sightseers, particularly addicted
to churches. I discovered on that trip that while I didn’t mind looking at churches – I
preferred the small simple ones – what I really enjoyed was looking at the countryside. By the time we reached Provence, I was entranced. In Arles we shared a room meant for a couple and
their child, after we had sat drinking
fine à l’eau
to the sound of a thousand frogs. I noticed how beautifully the French kept their trees – avenues of planes bordering
long, narrow roads, geometrically planted poplars, terraces of vines, and further south, the elegant pines.

In Marseille Wayland said we should have a serious lunch before they dropped me at the Zunzes. That, too, was a revelation to me, the first time I had
oursins
, sea urchins. We watched
French families going through course after course and particularly a pale, very pregnant girl with her family and the waiter’s solicitude about what she would like to eat and drink. She drank
Vichy water and toyed with a small piece of fish.

The Zunzes lived in a suburb east of Marseille in a small house with a pretty garden. Doreen Zunz was English, a tall blonde with a face that, when she wasn’t animated, was set in a kind
of dramatic despair. René was short and dark with mournful brown eyes. He was Jewish and I was too ignorant then to know how dangerous and difficult his life must have been during the war.
It was never mentioned, although he did say how hard he was finding his work – some kind of import business. They were both very welcoming, asked after Ursula and my father. The first thing I
learned was that their only daughter, Betty, had died of meningitis when she was barely twenty. This had wrecked them. Doreen spoke of her constantly, saying how happy, how full of life, how clever
and gifted she was – ‘It has made the end of my life.’ She’d taken refuge in chronic ill health, was often in bed, or simply lying down on a sofa. I asked René about
her illness. He muttered something about heart trouble, but then said, ‘She will make no effort – that is what is wrong.’

The Zunzes were generous hosts: rich, nourishing meals
appeared at regular intervals cooked by someone who came in every morning and evening. However, I couldn’t eat
them. In those days, I had bouts of being unable to eat that sometimes lasted for weeks. This seemed to be one of them. I was very tired from my illness, but encouragement to build up my strength
by these kindly people was of no avail. I’d sit before an immense juicy steak and delicious salad, trying to swallow the first pieces of meat, my stomach heaving, and wanting to cry from
embarrassment. ‘I’m so sorry. I don’t eat much,’ I had to say. But at least, I thought,
they
were eating it. It was obvious that they didn’t usually have steak
or many of the other things with which they tempted me. Doreen didn’t drink, but René enjoyed wine and brandy. He invented a drink of brandy and red Cinzano that I liked. It became a
ritual every evening.

They wanted to take me out, to sightsee, to bathe, but I was an apathetic guest, didn’t want to go anywhere or do anything except sit in the garden and read and write long letters to
Michael. I was missing him, and almost as soon as I got back to England he would be leaving for his summer holiday. I told Doreen and René about him and they immediately suggested I ask him
to come and stay. René drove me to Marseille where I sent a telegram to Michael, inviting him, although I knew he wouldn’t come. Then René took me to a shoe shop, as I needed a
pair of sandals. We stopped at a bar on the way home and he said how much they liked having me to stay and how good it was for Doreen to have someone new to talk to. ‘And I,’ he
continued, ‘I very much mind talking to you. You’re someone who makes life worth living for.’ That was the beginning, although I’d no idea of it then.

Generally, they treated me in a parental way, indulgent and affectionate: they desperately wanted me to have a good time. They gave a dinner party for me, invited four or five friends, all
French, to meet ‘an English author’. I was amazed at the general respect that my being a writer incurred, completely unlike England. The trouble was my wretched – or rather,
non-existent – French. Nobody in the
party was any better at English. Doreen and René were forced to do a lot of wearisome translating. From all the fuss about
preparations beforehand I realized it had been an unusual occasion for them. I think they couldn’t, in the ordinary way, afford to entertain.

Doreen never left the villa, although René sometimes took me for drives. We’d drive along the coast further east, until we could look down from the road on to small rocky coves with
water the colour of Quink. My first sight of one of these was so beautiful in its distant intensity – the absence of people, the pale pristine sand that edged the astonishing sea, I can see
it now – that it became a treasure imprinted in my mind’s eye. René had stopped the car as I wanted to look, and after a while he asked if I wanted to go to a beach and swim. It
seems astonishing to me now, but I didn’t. I simply wanted to look at it. There was a lovely scent of hot pines – far out the sea was glass, the sky was milk.

I was only staying for a fortnight, but half-way through the atmosphere slowly became charged with undercurrents that felt dangerous before they became explicit. Doreen became spiky; she
constantly snubbed René and was rather ceremoniously polite to me. One evening when he’d brought me a drink in the garden where I was writing, he asked if he might stay and smoke a
cigarette. When he had lit our Gauloises, I asked him what was the matter.