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‘What matter?’

‘Doreen seems rather upset about something. I feel she is angry.’

‘She is unhappy because she
knows
.’

‘Knows? What?’

‘That I am in love with you. Desperate. As
you
must know,’ he added.

I’d no idea of it. And then I realized that wasn’t entirely true. I
had
noticed he paid me a great deal of attention. I knew he admired me – he’d become rather
jokingly gallant. I’d rather basked in his evident approval of everything I said. I’d flirted with him. I took, I can see it now, the usual line that people who don’t reciprocate
love
do. ‘You don’t really love me,’ I said. ‘It’s simply that you’re bored and don’t see people much.’

‘Oh, no. It’s not like that.’ He smiled at me with wounded eyes.

‘Anyway, I am in love with Michael. You know that. Doreen knows that.’

‘And to either of us it makes no difference.’

There was much, much more of this, until eventually I began to feel quite angry, and said we should both go and talk to Doreen, have it out. She was lying on her bed. A scene that might have
been out of a bad play followed, in which each one of us became – more awfully – ourselves: Doreen the martyr, René the tragic romantic, and I the self-righteous prig. Repetition
congealed these attitudes until they made us nothing but what we said, or retorted, or moaned, or sneered. The room became airless with exaggeration, lies, recriminations, excuses and
self-justification. Round and round we went. I lost my temper in the end and told Doreen to stop being sorry for herself, to get up and
do
something – anything. I said if I had to live
with someone who behaved as she did to René,
I
’d want someone else in my life. There was much more, all in the same bracing, brutal vein. At the end of it, Doreen said,
‘You come here, you ruin our lives and then you speak to me like that.’

‘It’s all right. I’m going. I’ll go tonight. I’m sorry. It’s all been the most awful mistake. I shouldn’t have come.’

There was a short, shocked silence. Then, ‘Oh, no!’ They united at once in insisting I stay. Of
course
I must stay till the end of my holiday. René said he would make a
nice cup of English tea and we’d have it cosily in Doreen’s bedroom. No, no, she would get up and come down, and perhaps she would find something I might like to eat . . .

The scene was over: I was being placated. We drank tea and brandy in the hot, dark sitting room and Doreen chatted as she had on the day I arrived. She asked more about my father and Ursula, and
I understood that she didn’t want them to know anything about the bad play. René drank a great deal of brandy and backed her up in a spiritless manner.

That night in bed I was haunted by their inexplicable
volte-face
, but contempt was quickly quenched by thoughts of what I’d actually have done if they’d
agreed I should leave. Where would I have gone? I had almost no money. I didn’t even know how far the airport was. The craven extent of my fears extended to my terror of even trying to use a
French telephone. This sort of thing has bedevilled my life – it still does – but this was the first time that I recognized it. In many practical matters I am singularly both craven and
inept.

They each gave me a book on parting. Doreen’s was inscribed in French, ‘Pour Jane, amour toujours, Doreen’, and René gave me a copy of Stendhal’s novel of
Napoleonic mythology,
La Chartreuse de Parme
, in French inscribed in English, ‘For Jane who makes life worth living it’.

Back in England, Ursula was unexpectedly curious to know how I’d got on. After a bit, I looked her straight in the eye and said, ‘Did you have an affair with René?’ And
she answered, ‘Not for very long.’ It made some matters, at least, clear. Doreen hadn’t been crying wolf. There had been wolves before.

‘A slice of life,’ Audrey said, when I told her about it.

René wrote me two or three letters after I got back to England, love letters of a resigned, depressed kind: he never expected us to meet again, but his feelings would never change. He did
not mention Doreen, and asked me to reply to his office address. I wrote back once to them both, thanking them for having me to stay, and that was that.

In term time I continued to go to Hanover Terrace to see Nicola and to look after her on Nanny’s day out. Every week I took her to the Mercury Theatre in Notting Hill
Gate for ballet lessons. She’d reached the age when she was mad about dancing. I never knew how good she was at it because minders weren’t allowed to watch the class, so week after week
I used to sit in the little changing room that smelt of damp overcoats and hot little girls. It was odd to be there again. When I’d been Nic’s age, my mother and Mimi Rambert had
started ballet classes for children there, before the Gothic chapel became a theatre. Walking about Notting Hill Gate with Nic to and from buses, I half expected to hear Mimi’s parrot shriek,
‘Hold yourself straight, child!’ which so frequently assailed me whenever I’d gone out alone in those streets.

Looking back on this time, it’s easy for me to see that I’d got into a rut. The same things happened week after week: I struggled with the novel, which seemed interminable. Writing
had become an anxious challenge that I dreaded and frequently evaded. I still hadn’t learned how to work, didn’t write regularly, or for regular amounts of time. When I reviewed what
I’d written I was both besotted and defensively critical. The book had to be marvellous – otherwise why go through all this agonizing effort – but it wasn’t, was it? It was
nothing like as marvellous as it ought to be because, I told myself, I was simply too lazy and preoccupied to put it first. And, of course, the sneaking feeling that it might be no good
anyway
, however hard I worked at it, recurred in the night and left
me with nothing – back to square one: no good at anything I’d tried to do and no good at
what I wanted to do most. One thing spurred me on. I sent Peter Peters some of the novel and he wrote back a long letter saying that, although he liked the characters and the writing, one simply
couldn’t write a novel backwards: it was an impossible way to trap the reader into wanting to know more. I’d have to turn it round and it would work. This I absolutely refused to do.
But the disagreement was profitable: I became determined to prove it could be done.

On top of this, other parts of my life weren’t going well. I spent five evenings a week with Michael when he wasn’t away, which meant I saw few other people. Our relationship
hadn’t altered from what it had become in the first few weeks after we met, but
I
had changed. I loved him more than he loved me and I wanted more time with him – in the day,
when we could do things together. He did take me, about twice a year, to Paris, which was wonderful. We’d spend all the mornings walking and looking at pictures, and then a splendid lunch,
more pictures, and a kip before going out in the evening. Occasionally, there, we met other people – a young financier once, who wanted Mike to invest in some project of his. He dined with
us, said he was far from well, and could hardly eat anything. He and Mike discussed this project during dinner, while he sipped Vichy and crumbled a piece of bread. He was very quiet, courteous and
withdrawn, seemed uninterested in whether Mike joined him in his enterprise or not. When he’d finished his consommé, he excused himself and left. ‘What did you think of
him?’ Mike asked me.

‘He seemed very nice.’

‘Would you trust him?’

‘Yes,’ I said, rather startled. ‘Why?’

‘He wants a lot of money. I thought that as a girl, not to speak of a
brilliant
novelist [he always teased me about that], you would have deeper perception than I .’

‘He seemed perfectly honest to me,’ I said, flattered to be asked.

Mike trusted him and he turned out to be a first-class con-man, the first I ever met.

On another occasion we met Pat, a business friend of Mike who lived in Paris with his Hungarian wife Edith, and we all had dinner. Edith was tiny, dressed by Dior, with masses of expensive
bracelets on her little stick arms. She ate an enormous dinner, then disappeared for a long time. Eventually, Mike wondered where she was, and I said I’d go to the ladies’ and see if
she was all right. She was being prodigiously sick. She was quite cheerful about this, repaired her face and returned with me to our table where she started with gusto upon her second
terrine de
canard
. ‘My wife is something of an Old Roman,’ Pat said, wryly, as she went through the whole dinner again.

Nicola was having sore throats too often. I didn’t want her to go through my medical experience as a child and took her to our family doctor, who agreed that her tonsils should come out.
The afternoon before she went into the nursing-home I took her for a walk in Regent’s Park. She was rather silent. I asked her if she was worrying about having her tonsils out and added that
there would be ice cream afterwards and no more sore throats. We were walking on grass by the lake, which was crowded with ducks, and she interrupted me saying, ‘I wouldn’t mind
anything
if only I could find an egg.’ I started to say that ducks didn’t lay eggs in the open grass when she found one. Everything went well after that and the operation was a
great success. But I still felt out of my depth as a mother. One day Josie, with whom Nic was living, said, ‘I notice that you do all the dull things that mothers have to do for their
children, but you never have any fun with her.’

This was quite true, and I could hardly bear it. ‘Why do you say that?’

She looked at me very kindly. ‘It just seemed to me rather sad for you both.’

I wanted to throw myself on her, to tell her how unnatural and bad I felt, to confess everything, and somehow be comforted, or
advised, or even absolved. But I didn’t:
our relationship had progressed only so far as good manners and propinquity allowed. Another bar between us was my affair with her cousin Michael, of which she knew nothing as he had told me not to
tell her.

And then one day I went to Hanover Terrace to find Josie wasn’t there. She’d been taken to hospital. She had TB; she was very ill. Better go and see her, I thought. I bought a bunch
of flowers and went.

It was an awkward visit. She was lying in bed propped up by pillows, looking like a small, fragile bird in a nest, rosy and comfortable. She didn’t seem pleased to see me, and wasn’t
very forthcoming about her condition. She’d been feeling increasingly tired, and turned out to have lost an alarming amount of weight. Eventually she’d have to have an operation, but
she had to put on some weight first. I didn’t stay long, but when I went over to the bed to say goodbye I got a shock. She was terrified: she was so filled with fear that she could hardly
deal with ordinary intercourse. She was cut off, isolated. I’d never encountered anyone so frightened, and my first instinct was to do all the wrong things – put my arms round her, ask
her about it, do anything to minimize her feelings – all really to make
me
feel better. For once, I didn’t do any of that. ‘I might come and see you tomorrow,’ I
said, as casually as I could manage.

‘If you want to,’ she replied. The studied indifference, ungraciousness even, was unlike her.

Walking back from the hospital I tried to think about what she needed. She must have friends far closer than me: indeed, she probably didn’t count me as a friend at all. We’d not
thought of each other in that way. But, then, if she
did
have such friends, she wouldn’t have been so locked in with her fear. I’d go tomorrow.

I saw her every day for three months. Fortunately, they moved her to a branch of the hospital that was ten minutes’ walk from Blandford Street, so it was very easy. And that is how I got
to know and love Josie, who has remained a wonderful friend ever since.
While they were fattening her, before she went to hospital in Midhurst where she was to have a series of
horrendous operations, she
did
talk to me. It began with a letter, and went on to conversation. When she went to Midhurst, Michael lent me a car and a chauffeur so I could go once a week.
The whole business took the best part of a year and she ended up with one lung after a great deal of pain. But she lived, is still living; her nature, like Jane Bennet’s in
Pride and
Prejudice
, her integrity and taste are second to no one else’s and her kindness illimitable. A friend of mine once remarked that one could throw one’s bread on the waters and get
back cake, and that is what happened to me with Josie.

Mike had a friend, Roy, with whom he did business and we occasionally dined with him and his girl. Roy’s affair with her broke up and Mike said he was distraught about it. ‘He has to
go to Monte Carlo to do Onassis’s deal with the casino, and I thought you might like to go with him – lovely hotel, nice place and a little holiday for you.’ So I went. We stayed
in the Hôtel de Paris in adjoining suites. The manager was solicitous and accompanied us to the rooms. There was a door that joined the suites; he tried to open it with a flourish and found
it locked. He sent for a key: there was none to be found. I’d said several times it didn’t matter, we didn’t need the door to open, but he put this down to English inhibition and
took not the slightest notice. I enlisted Roy to back me up – it made no difference. A locksmith was sent for, and after some skilful fiddling, the door was opened.
‘Voilà!’
The manager disappeared, wreathed in broad-minded smiles.

In the daytime, I walked about Monte Carlo while Roy had his meetings with Prince Rainier and Aristotle Onassis or their representatives. In the evening we dined in the hotel, and Roy sat,
hardly eating, telling me how unhappy he was. Once, at my request, he took me to the casino, where I lost a few francs. ‘I can’t stand gambling,’ Roy said.

‘I thought you did it all the time,’ I said.

‘That’s why.’

By now I’d got to know several of the people who worked with Mike. He’d bought a bank, and they all seemed to be doing very well, although there was a blip when
everything went wrong and Mike said we couldn’t afford to go out to dinner as rigid economy must set in. For weeks I made dinner – I wasn’t an experienced cook, but he never
complained and I enjoyed the increased domesticity.