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In those days Laurie was frequently ill – had chest infections, fevers and epilepsy. Sometimes we’d have supper in their bedroom, with Laurie propped up on pillows, playing his
guitar quietly. When he was better he played his fiddle. Music wasn’t a random entertainment or special-occasion pleasure with him: it was an essential continuous background to his life. In
spite of his delicate health, he had a profound distrust of doctors. ‘They came for me last week, but I hid,’ he said to me once, with a shrewd look of stealthy triumph.

If I had to think of one word that encapsulated Laurie, it would be ‘discrimination’. One expects a poet to be discriminating about words, but Laurie was discriminating about
absolutely everything, his surroundings, his friends, what he ate or drank, other artists’ work, and how he treated other people generally. Discrimination informed all of his life. It took me
years to understand how weak I was in this respect, but I could recognize it in him. He could be a prima donna, sometimes a bully, but he was never unkind or insensitive to anyone who was
vulnerable.

He loved to tell jokes – sometimes I suspected he’d invented them. He once told me that when he went to the opening of the 1951 Festival of Britain the invitation said, ‘Medals
may be worn.’
‘I hadn’t any, so I pinned a catherine wheel to my jacket.’ Then he was introduced to an actress in a strapless gown called Sabrina, whose
reputation rested largely upon her breasts. ‘Something came over me. I took off the catherine wheel and pinned it to her front.’

‘What did she say?’ I asked, fascinated.

‘F
e
ncy!’ he said gloomily.

Some time during these two years my brother Colin came to stay at Blomfield Road. He’d left Cambridge and was in the throes of a breakdown. He didn’t want to tell me what was the
matter, and I never asked him. He was seeing a psychiatrist three times a week and the rest of the time he was remote, withdrawn and sometimes in tears. I became more and more worried about having
to leave him to go to the office every morning, and eventually asked him if I might see his doctor. He didn’t mind, so I rang to make an appointment.

When I saw this man I found him thoroughly hostile. He seemed to think I’d come to try to worm out of him my brother’s problem. When I said I hadn’t, he was offensively
incredulous. Why
had
I come, then? I’d come because I was increasingly anxious that my brother might kill himself and I wanted to know if there was anything I could do. His reply was
that, on the whole, he thought it unlikely, that
he
knew what he was doing, and it really wasn’t my business. It was all very well for him: he saw my brother for three hours a week;
all the other hours Colin was in my house. We parted with mutual aggression, but I couldn’t feel either respect or trust thereafter. Eventually, my brother recovered enough to find a
dilapidated house in Kensal Road that he rented and started his business of making hi-fi sets.

Colin’s leaving our mother and coming to me did nothing for my relationship with her. She
did
try to find out from me what was the matter, and I don’t think she believed me
when I said I didn’t know. Of course, she missed him – poor thing. Great-aunt May, who’d been living with her, became senile and she had to put her in a nursing-home. I went to
see May there, and the spectacle of
her poor mind revolving in a smaller and smaller circle was shocking. My mother was now alone, bitter and unhappy. I knew that all the
feelings I’d had for her when I was a child had gone, replaced or overwhelmed by a fog of boredom and impatience.

Why, I wondered, as I waited for a bus home after caring for her one evening when she was ill, were these feelings so strong and hardly ever lightened by love or concern for her? She was very
unhappy – perhaps had always been so – but she was an intelligent, gifted woman. She had, when it was allowed to surface, a good sense of humour and she could be very generous. It was
just that she was so continually sorry for herself. And then I saw that a good deal of the time
I
was exceedingly sorry for myself. I recognized that the faults we most dislike in others are
the ones we fear in ourselves. So began a battle within myself to eradicate this nauseating characteristic, a battle that lasted – with brief false summits of premature triumph – for
the next thirty years.

Insights are inspiring but, practically speaking, they are of no more use than a sign that says, ‘To the North’. It may be where you want to go, but it doesn’t tell you how to
get there. I made a shaky start on my self-pity.

That autumn I took Nicola to see Lorna’s lover who was a GP. As we left the block of flats where he lived, Michael emerged from a car. We couldn’t avoid each other. He looked
stricken, and I was hardly able to stand. We said something, a taxi mercifully arrived, and I bundled Nic into it, following her as fast as I could. In the taxi tears began pouring down my face and
I saw dimly that Nic was regarding me with impartial curiosity. ‘Sorry, darling, I just feel a bit sad.’

‘Poor you,’ she said.

Sometime after Christmas, James Sutherland’s sister, Moira, asked me to a drinks party. ‘Sorry it’s such short notice, but it would be lovely if you could come.’ I
accepted. Moira had been married to Humphrey Slater and subsequently to Derek Verschoyle. She lived in a smart little house off Montpelier Square. The room was full of
people
but, except Moira, I knew none of them. I’ve never been good at parties and can never think of things to say to strangers.

I was just beginning to wish I’d not come when a man, whose back had been turned to me, suddenly whirled round, saw my empty glass and seized it. ‘You need more drink,’ he
said. He was no taller than I, with a bullet-shaped head and thick brindled hair brushed straight back from his forehead with a parting so low on one side that at first it was hardly visible. He
had high cheekbones and eyes that were now sparkling with flirtatious curiosity. ‘Let us begin at the beginning,’ he said. ‘Tell me your name.’ He had a heavy accent –
not Russian, Polish perhaps? Then I remembered my grandfather’s friends, the d’Aranyi sisters, brilliant violinsts both, and thought that maybe he was Hungarian. I told him my name, and
waited.

‘And what do you do?’

I said I worked as an editor at Chatto & Windus, and that I wrote novels. He went on asking me questions of an innocuous nature, but what struck me was his energy. He positively crackled
with it; it was as though if you touched him you would get an electric shock.

‘Shall we go out to dinner?’ he said, not as if it was a question. I agreed: I felt drawn to him and intrigued. ‘Find your coat and we will say goodbye to Moira.’ As I
was putting it on, I said, more out of politeness than anything else, ‘Do you write?’

‘Dar
leeng
! Don’t you know who I am?’

‘No.’

‘I am Koestler. Arthur Koestler.’

I must have looked blank, for he suddenly burst out into torrents of laughter. ‘She doesn’t know who I am!’ he shouted across the room to Moira. ‘Do you
really
not
know? You’re not pretending?’

‘I’m sorry, but I’m not.’ I noticed that several people in the room were looking at me with indulgent contempt. Then I remembered Bob Linscott writing to me about
Darkness at Noon
and the impact it had made in America. ‘Oh, yes. You wrote
Darkness at Noon
.’

‘
Vich
, of course, you have not read.’

‘Which I’m afraid I’ve not read.’

In the street, as we walked to a restaurant, I apologized for not knowing him.

‘It was very shocking,’ he said, and I noticed how lightly he wore his fame; he was neither pompous nor arrogant and he took an almost childish pleasure in his success. But, I
realized later, it hadn’t shifted the bedrock of his nature.

At dinner, we learned a few more facts about each other. That we had the same agent: ‘Oh, if Peters has you, you may be some good.’ That I’d been married and had a child:
‘Good, darling, that is out of the way.’ And that he also had been married but his wife had died. ‘But I still see Celia of whom I am extremely devoted.’ Celia? Celia was
Mamaine’s twin, he said impatiently, the Paget twins, surely I’d heard of them? No. He looked at me pityingly. They weren’t only beautiful, they were very clever and everybody
loved them. Celia was now married to another Arthur. ‘A very good man, which I am not.’ Many of his remarks ended upon this slightly challenging note. As he talked, seldom drawing
breath, he ate and drank a surprising amount speedily, and all the time I felt his intelligent eyes – grey, sardonic, faintly mocking us both – appraising me. It was a little like
sitting opposite a box of indoor fireworks.

‘Now we go to my house,’ he said. There was no question of a question this time.

His house, on the corner of Montpelier Square, was tall and painted grey inside and out.

‘How pretty you are!’ he exclaimed, as I sat shivering on the floor in front of his ineffectual gas fire. I’d never been called pretty before, and it made me feel neat and
charming.

‘I will drive you home in the morning, but we must be out of the house before nine. Mrs Watson comes at nine, and we must not shock her.’

This anxiety proved so important that we were up, dressed, had
consumed a cup of excellent coffee and were speeding across Hyde Park in his open two-seater by eight
forty-five.

‘I will not stay, darling, I must get back to Mrs Watson. But I shall call you later when she has gone.’

It was Saturday and I didn’t have to go to work. I had a bath and fell into bed to sleep till midday when he called.

The next evening he said, ‘I have decided that we should get married, darling. I think that would be a very good thing to do.’

I was mesmerized. I wasn’t in love – though much disposed to the idea of it – and I made one of the very few sensible decisions of my life. ‘I won’t marry you now,
but I will come and live with you for three months and see how we both feel.’

‘
Vary
sensible, Janee. That is what we will do.’

So that is what we did. Mrs Watson mysteriously disappeared, and Mrs Bridgeman came to Montpelier Square. I moved in with some clothes and a small inlaid dressing table, all of which was kept in
Arthur’s dressing room. I continued to work every other week at Chatto. Life became rich but incredibly exhausting. Arthur had boundless energy. His regime was to write all morning – he
was deep into his book about Kepler – to eat a snack lunch of salami and cheese, to sleep for twenty minutes after it, and then to spend the afternoon arranging the rest of his life.

He wrote articles; people came to see him from all over the world. He adored parties and going out to dine with friends. I was quickly introduced to a number of them. The most important were
Celia and her husband, both of whom I loved on sight. Celia, like her sister, was asthmatic; her health was generally delicate. Arthur, who’d been a prisoner of war in Japan, had joined the
Foreign Office afterwards, from where he had gone to Japan with his first wife, a Polish war heroine. They had a daughter called Cecilia. His wife died, very suddenly of acute diabetes, and later
he married Celia. He left the Foreign Office and they bought a house at Crondall in Hampshire, where Arthur and I used to go and stay. Celia was very musical and Arthur loved music. She was the
only
woman with whom he was never in the least irritable or impatient, and for someone of his volcanic nature this was an accolade.

There were other friends, sometimes we went out to restaurants – I remember an evening with Stephen Spender for whom Arthur was writing a piece. They had some kind of argument, and then
Stephen suddenly leaned forward across the tale and said, in his soft, pedantic voice, ‘But, then, Arthur, you’re sometimes a very stupid man.’ The intent was mischievous and
fortunately taken so. He took me to dinner with Louis and Grizelda Kentner, warning me that our hostess was a superb cook. He always said something of the kind about the hostess – she dressed
impeccably, she knew how to entertain. All this was to put me on my mettle when we returned the hospitality.

Those occasions were an ordeal for me. They frequently took place on weekday nights when I’d been working all day. I’d get home just before six, with a three-course dinner to
produce, the table to lay, and I had to change appropriately for the evening. Arthur’s obsession with perfection and his capacity for bullying began to emerge. In those days, I wasn’t
an experienced cook. I became terrified of making mistakes, dreaded being openly snubbed by Arthur in front of his friends. I remember with gratitude Laurens Van der Post defending me one night
when Arthur hadn’t liked a pâté I’d made. ‘It seemed to me delicious,’ he said, in such a way that Arthur subsided.

Arthur had written his four volumes of autobiography, and when I’d finished
Darkness at Noon
Celia advised me to read them next. She was quite right: I learned a great deal about
Arthur that would otherwise have remained unknown to me – chiefly his astonishing courage, moral and physical, equally matched, a rare, remarkable combination I’d never encountered
before.

Somebody told me that
Darkness at Noon
, which had sold four hundred thousand copies in France, had been the single most powerful influence that had stopped the French voting Communist
after the war. Arthur was then a lone but influential voice against
the Soviets and constituted a real menace to their regime. I began to understand why he had an intercom on
his front-door bell – unusual, in those days – and he said he’d always answer the door. The possibility of assassination
was
present, although the only time he referred to
it was a mention of the gun he kept in his bedroom – but it was said with a kind of goblin gleam of secret ownership. Arthur could dramatize an unsuccessful piece of salami or the lack of
coffee spoons on a tray but, to me, he never dramatized his own life.

There began to be a pattern about our living – a gradual accumulation of small rituals that he particularly enjoyed. Part of him wanted a cosy – a word he often used – life of
regular domesticity, but a far larger part was quickly, irritably driven mad by the prospect. He embraced the ordinary as some do a bank holiday. Real life was a moody, tempestuous business hardly
to be borne.