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Paul took me to a doctor, and in no time I was on a table, unconscious, then conscious again. ‘Please get on with it.’

‘It’s done.’

I felt weak and weepy and not at all relieved. Paul was very kind to me. He said we must look for a flat, somewhere to live together. He was still without a job, and although he was reluctant to
talk about it, his daughter’s school fees had to be paid and he didn’t have the money to pay them. Could I lend him anything? I’d no money, so I sold my jewellery for a few
hundred pounds. I also had my beautiful piano that the artist Robin Darwin, a friend, had been housing for me in his flat. I sold that for four hundred pounds.

Audrey and Jeremy were now engaged, and the marriage was to take place quite soon. It seemed that Blandford Street was coming to an end, and I wasn’t sorry. The lack of garden and not
being able to see a tree from any of the windows was cumulatively depressing.

And then, one morning, Audrey came down to my room to say she was terribly sorry to hear the news.

‘What news?’

She looked aghast. ‘About Paul. Surely you know. He’s gone back to his wife.’

I hadn’t known. It was a complete shock, so much so that I didn’t believe it, but then things Audrey told me made me. Paul was back in his job, everyone in the office knew about it.
I knew then that although he’d made a date for six that evening, he’d no intention of turning up, and I felt furiously angry. I rang him at the office. He sounded uncomfortable.
‘I was going to write you a letter.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I want you to come round this evening and tell me yourself to my face what you’ve decided to do.’

He agreed, and he came. I can remember little about that last meeting except his discomfort, his forays into boyish charm to lighten the occasion, and his embarrassed attempts to comfort me. The
distance between us – the chasm that had opened – now seemed to stretch back over the whole affair. I do remember at one point that I said, with a stab of perspicacious hostility, I
supposed he’d got crabs at the Bag of Nails, a venue for prostitutes, and hadn’t liked to tell me that either. He shrugged and said he couldn’t deny it. Two drinks and he left. He
was sorry, but he had to be going. He sounded as sorry about having to go then as he’d earlier said he was about going for ever.

I listened to his steps on the stairs, the first and then the second door slamming, and resisted the illogical temptation to go to the window and watch him walk up the street. He must have been
lying to me for weeks, I thought drearily. I’d not asked him what had made him change his mind; humiliation always provokes salvaged pride, and now I didn’t even want to know. To be so
easily taken in implies dishonesty to oneself, but I didn’t recognize it then. For the ensuing weeks, I cried a good deal, was sorry for myself and either bad company or none at all.

I think now that somewhere inside me I knew that marriage to Paul would have been disastrous; that really we had very little if anything in common. If I’d been able to see the South of
France interlude as simply a light-hearted affair I shouldn’t have been so miserable. I was unwilling to accept that I was the sort of woman who had light-hearted affairs: it didn’t fit
with my grandiose and romantic view of myself. And so, I lied to myself.

About a week after Paul left, Michael rang me and asked me if I’d have dinner at his house. I was hesitant, not sure that I wanted to see him, but he was very persuasive – gentle and
persuasive.

That evening I saw a side of him I’d never seen before. He was almost delicately tactful, didn’t attempt to puncture my shaky
dignity, and seemed to know
instinctively how much and in what way to talk about what had happened. At one point he said, very quietly, ‘I know you’ve had a rotten time,’ and I realized he knew about the
abortion, which I couldn’t bear to talk about. Before I could say anything, he said, ‘Pick up the cushion beside you.’ There was a large cushion lying flat on the sofa. I picked
it up, and under it was my jewellery. ‘I couldn’t get it all back,’ he said, ‘but most of it’s there.’

It was so unexpected; I put my hands over my face to stop myself crying and failed. It wasn’t that I had the jewellery back, it was what he’d gone through. I started to say this and
he said, ‘I know. It’s not so much that you’re glad to have it back, it’s the trouble I’ve taken to get it.’ And gave me one of his large white handkerchiefs,
with a gentle sardonic smile. And so, a short while later, I was back with him. It wasn’t the same. I felt differently.

At first I didn’t even recognize this, I was bruised and humiliated, and was pretty slow on self-awareness anyway. But two things happened that forced me to understand my situation. The
first was that, her marriage to Jeremy imminent, Audrey made it clear to me that I wasn’t to be asked to the wedding. She was quite cold about it, said simply that with Michael’s wife
there and Jeremy’s father and stepmother, it would be too embarrassing. I was very hurt. I was supposed to be Audrey’s best friend, but she was becoming respectable, and I
wasn’t.

When I told Michael how I felt about this, he became evasive, but finally admitted that my presence would make things awkward – it wouldn’t really ‘do’. We had a scene,
and I said bitterly that I supposed I’d always be excluded whenever he, and people like him, thought fit. ‘Oh, no, Jenny darling, but really you’ll always be
there
.’
On your terms, I thought, and afterwards, when he’d gone home, I thought that really everything was on his terms. He saw as much of me as he wanted, and otherwise I didn’t affect his
life in any way. But mine
was
affected.

I grasped then what the idea of marriage with Paul had been.
I’d been caught by the idea of total commitment, although in the case of Paul that would clearly not have
worked. It struck me again that I saw things as I wanted them to be rather than how they actually were. My relationship with Michael was predicated upon some future unspecified change – that
he would love me more, that he might marry me. What evidence did I have for either of those notions? He hardly ever said he loved me, and only seldom threw out an odd hint that one day things might
be different. I’d clung to those odd moments, and had regarded them as secret truths. Now I saw that they were nothing of the kind.

My first novel, though well received, hadn’t made me any money. Jonathan Cape, who had a profound distrust of paperback publishing, had refused to allow me to be
published by Penguin. I’d earned out my advance of fifty pounds, and that would seem to be that. As for
The Long View
, I seemed to have been struggling with it for ever. I simply
didn’t work hard or consistently enough. Lack of money forced me to do any odd jobs that came to hand, so work was constantly interrupted, but it wasn’t really a valid excuse. I was
lazy, locked up in my emotional life. Above all, I was afraid I couldn’t actually write well at all. I was worried that I wasn’t, after all, going to be the greatest living novelist,
and this, at my age, meant I was no good. Such extreme notions are commonplace in the young – the vast spectrum between being great and being no good tends to get ignored. There is a great
difference between wanting to be a writer and wanting to write, and this isn’t always obvious in the salad days of a writer’s creative life, and sometimes never.

For the rest, Audrey was leaving Blandford Street shortly so I needed to find a new lodger. I hadn’t the energy or heart for it. If only I had a garden, I thought, I should be happier.
Then one turned up. Michael told me that Roy – with whom I’d gone to Monte Carlo – had found a maisonette for his girl in Blomfield Road by the Grand Union Canal, and another was
going next door. The rent was two hundred pounds a year, which was very low. I went to see it. It consisted of four rooms, a large sitting room looking out on to the garden, and a smaller one, with
a minute
kitchen carved out of what once must have been the wine cellar. Upstairs there were two bedrooms and a bathroom. The garden was large, about the size of a tennis court,
and unkempt. Although I knew I’d have to find a lodger to help with the rent, I was utterly entranced by the prospect of my own piece of ground.

The flat had no heating, but there was an open fire in the sitting room and I brought my trusty gas fires for the bedrooms and dining room. Len Beswick papered the walls and I painted the
woodwork. The garden was a weed-ridden jungle and Michael paid for the entire plot to be ploughed as a moving-in present. This was wonderful, as I couldn’t have dealt with the initial stage
myself. I knew little about gardening and had no idea about design, so my garden ended up with a rectangular lawn, a wide bed running down the sunny side and a narrow one opposite. The bottom of
the garden was dominated by lime trees – then, I didn’t know their nasty little ways. I bought two camellias, white and deep rose, a white may tree and a forsythia bush. Friends gave me
bits and pieces from their gardens.

I am hazy about dates, but I think I moved to Maida Vale in the winter of 1953 when I was thirty. It was clear that if I didn’t have a lodger, I must get some sort of job that meant a
regular income. Cecil Day-Lewis suggested I should work at Chatto where he was an editor.

‘I don’t know how to be an editor,’ I said.

‘You’ll learn soon enough.’

In those days Chatto & Windus operated rather like an old-fashioned family firm, presided over by Norah Smallwood and Ian Parsons. The office was an immensely tall old building off St
Martin’s Lane, with very few rooms on each floor and an ancient lift. Cecil’s office was at the top of the house, on the sunny side – it was baking hot in summer – and there
was a parapet outside where pigeons ate the duller pieces of the innumerable buns that Cecil and I consumed.

The work involved reading new scripts that flooded steadily in
every day, marking up accepted ones, and sometimes reading and making notes where any changes seemed desirable
or necessary. Each new manuscript had to be sent to Norah’s or Ian’s office, accompanied by a report summarizing the book and recording whether the reader thought it should be
published. Cecil was very good at sifting the real dross from the possible gold. The shortest report I ever saw from him read, ‘Pah!’ Four times a year we spent two or three awful days
simply writing jacket blurbs for forthcoming books. One of my first jobs was to edit a very long and immensely dull book about travels in Africa. ‘What’s it like?’ Cecil asked,
after a day or two. I said it was like being trapped in a train with someone who told you every single thing that had happened to them for the last six months. ‘Plough on,’ he said.
‘He’s under contract and Norah is quite keen on him.’ Once I’d got the hang of things, Cecil and I worked alternate weeks, although sometimes we’d overlap if there was
a deadline on getting a book to the printers.

Cecil was an exceptionally beautiful man with a marvellous forehead creased and mapped like the tributaries of a river. He had a well-shaped head with thin iron-grey hair, and blue eyes. The
rest of his face was full of mobility, amusement and concern – it was a very lived-in face and the more handsome for it. He dressed to suit his persona – he was more than debonair, he
was glamorous. He had one trick that was unique to him: he could purr continuously, like a cat.

From time to time Norah would burst into the room without warning. Sometimes she had an author in tow to whom she was proudly showing the offices. On these occasions she was gracious,
introducing us to them – this is Elspeth Huxley, or Iris Murdoch. When she was unaccompanied she worried at us like a small terrier. ‘Eating
again!
’ she would accuse,
looking at the greasy paper bags held down by doughnuts like paperweights.

‘It’s all the frightful books you make us read,’ Cecil would reply, in his weariest, most polite voice. He always managed to make her laugh, and eventually I did the same. It
was the passport to being in
her good books. She bullied people who were afraid of her, but underneath it all she was an extraordinarily kind woman. Her husband had been killed
in the war, and she subsequently gave all her considerable energy, loyalty and devotion to Chatto.

That winter I was ill: it started as flu but went on and on, and eventually I had to stop work and stay in bed. It took weeks to recover and when I did it was with a deep depression. I had no
energy for writing, I didn’t like living alone, and I could hardly drag myself to the office every other week to earn the six pounds that barely kept the wolf from the door. I was also going
through another bout of not eating and I remember the misery of sitting in restaurants faced with enormous menus and finally asking for something like a piece of cold chicken only some of which I
managed to force down.

My relationship with Michael had become hopelessly static. It was clearer and clearer to me that I ought to leave him, but I’d not the strength or courage to do it. Someone I’d met
at a party with Audrey before she married said he’d fallen in love with me. He was married – as, it seemed to me, every personable man was – and, although I liked him, he
wasn’t for me. I told him I was with someone else, but that didn’t deter him. He asked if he might take me to my office in his car every morning on the days I went there. I agreed
– ungraciously, I’m afraid – largely because it got me out of going on the Underground in the rush-hour.

And then, out of the blue, I was invited by my friend Lorna to go to America with her and stay in her family’s house in Connecticut. Lorna Mackintosh came into my life indirectly through
Michael whose friend, Roger St Aubyn, was her lover – she later married him. Her mother, Loelia, was an American heiress who’d married Ali Mackintosh, a 1920s playboy, very charming but
not wildly responsible about money. She eventually divorced him and took her two daughters to France where she married a French duke. He was short of money and she liked the idea of being a
duchess. There was a house in America, a flat in Rome and a house
at St-Brice, outside Paris, which had once belonged to Edith Wharton. Lorna had spent much of her childhood in
Connecticut. The house there had a farm and it was the place she loved best. In spite of this, she’d had an unhappy childhood. She was small and blonde, with a fair skin and blue eyes and
features that would have suited Holbein. We became friends immediately.