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I suppose one reason for the blackness that descended upon me was the subconscious knowledge that I wasn’t learning from my mistakes. Ignorance – at any level of consciousness
– is usually painful. The first thing that made me smile was when I went to Peter Peters’ office with some work, and saw Margaret Stevens who, knowing Arthur well, was aware of
everything. She looked at me with great kindness and said, ‘Never mind. We’ll soon have you signing books at Harrods.’ The kindness and the absurdity let in a little chink of
reality and light.

And here I have to write a bit about my appearance. I find this embarrassing and difficult, but in trying to be truthful, I can’t leave it out. It had dawned on me – rather slowly,
as I’d been raised to feel plain and clumsy – that I wasn’t considered plain. There were two reasons for this. The first was that I’d also been brought up to dismiss
flattering remarks as bad for one’s character: a bad character would accept them, a good character wouldn’t. The second reason was that I’d never much
liked
my
appearance.

Since I was quite young I’d had visions of a smaller, elegant creature with luxuriant auburn hair, sea-green eyes and a dazzlingly white skin. I think now this started
with the fairy tales when I was small. I’d paint pictures of princesses in the books, whose hair was golden dark auburn, and I’d also change their invariably blue eyes to green. I
didn’t have a single one of these desirable attributes, so when told I was beautiful I neither believed nor agreed with anyone.

This didn’t stop me trying to do the best I could with myself. I was quite capable of spending what time and money I had in efforts to look more attractive. I remember Wayland, who’d
been talking to me while I was dressing for a party, saying, ‘I say, Jenny, you don’t get any plainer, do you?’ And my thinking, I should hope not. I knew by now that a number of
people regarded me as beautiful. But much in the way that rich people don’t want to be loved simply because they are rich, I didn’t want to be loved simply for my appearance. People
need to be loved for themselves, whatever that might mean. I was certainly far from sure what it meant then. I simply felt I was making a hash of it, and underlying that foggy conclusion lay the
dread that I
wasn’t
anything else. I still had the desire to write, but depression leaks energy – like pain – and all that summer I couldn’t write. This has always
been a downward spiral for me: I couldn’t write because I was depressed, and not being able to write confirmed and strengthened the depression. Repetitive experience can be brutalizing: the
less I understood my experiences, the more I repeated them, each time becoming less aware of what I was doing.

One hot day, Colin said he knew I was unhappy, and why didn’t I ask Laurie and Cathy to supper? ‘They’ll cheer you up.’ So I did.

My affair with Arthur had never been secret. I’d never mentioned it to Laurie, but I knew that evening that he understood. He asked me what I was doing in the summer. Nothing –
working at Chatto every other week. He was going to stay with the Devas’ on Jersey in September, would I like to come
with him? ‘You look as though you need a
holiday.’ I would, but would they want me? He said he’d find out.

A few days later, he rang to say that the Devas’ didn’t have room for me, and before I could say never mind, in as undisappointed a voice as I could manage, he said, ‘So
I’m going to take you to Spain for two weeks.’

‘With Cathy?’

‘No. Just the two of us.’

‘Won’t she mind?’

‘Of course she won’t.’

I have to say here that it never crossed my mind that this trip would result in my loving Laurie. I loved him, of course, but I thought of him as a friend, as indeed I did Cathy. I believed,
which was true, that Laurie had planned the trip to help me get over Arthur and the consequences. I’d never been to Spain and to go with someone who spoke the language and knew the country so
well made it both an adventure and reassuring.

We travelled third class. We sat opposite each other on hard slatted wooden seats on the night train from Paris in a packed carriage with companions who proved more silent awake than asleep,
when most of them snored. Laurie put his feet up on the side of my seat. He had taken off his shoes and his socks smelt of hot Stilton cheese. He closed his eyes and I did the same, but it was too
uncomfortable and I was too excited to sleep. The train stopped once or twice during the night and by the time we reached Gerona our carriage was more than half empty. Out on the platform, blinded
by the rich golden light, I saw Laurie greet a group of people – Rodrigo Moynihan being the only one I knew. ‘Bang goes our hideout.’ He always pronounced the E in hideout making
three syllables of it. When I asked him why, he said that that was how he’d read it when he was a child.

We walked from the station, carrying our bags for what seemed like miles. It was nearing noon, and the sun was like a scorching searchlight. Just as I felt I couldn’t walk any more, we
stopped and
went into the small hotel, whose hall was as cool and dark as a cave. Minutes later we were ensconced in two little rooms on the top floor. We’d sleep now,
Laurie said, and go out later.

I remember feeling very thirsty, but there was no water in the room. I began to undress, but in the middle of that was overcome with the desire for sleep, and fell on to the hard white bed,
straight to oblivion.

When Laurie woke me it was dusk. We walked through streets, some narrow and dark with fleeting cats and old women knitting in doorways, and some wide, lined with shops and yellow lights and
crowds of people drifting slowly along as though in a dream. There were young men together, and girls linking arms – shirts and dresses dazzling white – and small children in starched
frocks. There were babies, heads covered with little damp curls, decorated with tiny gold earrings and crosses on spidery chains.

We stopped when Laurie found the bar he wanted. It was large, dark and cavernous and smelt of spilt wine on wood. Laurie introduced me as Isabel – ‘They wouldn’t be able to say
your name’ – and I was looked at with courteous approval. There were no other women in the bar. I asked for a glass of water, which Laurie watched me drinking with impatient distrust.
‘You don’t want to drink too much of that.’ Then we had wonderful light aromatic sherry – glasses filled to the brim slapped down quivering on the bar before us. Little
thick white saucers with prawns, or glistening olives appeared. I was content to eat and drink and listen to Laurie deep in conversation with the barman and other customers. For the first time in
months I felt completely carefree: everything was new – wonderfully foreign – the present filled me with joy.

I only remember fragments of the next two weeks. After one night in the hot little rooms, we left Gerona, went in a bus to Estartit by the sea. Then it was a simple fishing village with one
small
pension
. Outside the doors of the fishermen’s cottages were one or two, three or four large stones. Laurie said they showed the night-watchman the hour in the morning that the
fishermen
wished to be called. On the beach where we swam we were suddenly surrounded by a cloud of young girls who descended upon Laurie like butterflies, chattering to each
other and to Laurie, and laughing at everything he said. Whenever we went out of doors, they would always find us. They sang Spanish songs with Laurie, and we danced
sardanas
in our bare
feet on the sand.

We didn’t stay very long. The morning that we left – perhaps it was
why
we left – the dining room at the
pension
was suddenly flooded with a busload of British.
They were subdued, and talked to each other so quietly that the room resounded with people saying ‘podden’ to each other. ‘Oh these poddens!’ Laurie said, ‘Dropped all
over the place like little trench mortars.’ We left when the bus came, accompanied by a stream of girls and their younger brothers and sisters.

I hadn’t known we were going, and I didn’t know where we were bound. I didn’t care. I was enclosed in a magic capsule with Laurie. A continuous happiness possessed me. I fell
steadily in love and there was nothing dire about it, no anxious speculation about the future and no agonizing about my past – particularly the preceding months with Arthur. It all fell away,
leaving me light and free to enjoy each day. Laurie never mentioned Arthur. He had the most sensitive discretion about my failings or unhappiness. Although he could be brutally dictatorial when he
felt like it, he was gentle, tender and discerning to those who were more accustomed to being dismissed as dull or shy.

In Gerona again we stayed in a hotel frequented by the picadors from the local bullring. It was a warren, much larger than it looked from its modest façade, with a restaurant on the
ground floor that spilled out on to the pavement where the picadors sat for hours with friends and a drink on the table before them. Laurie procured for us what he described as a simple room and we
dumped our baggage and spent the evening in the bar we’d been to before and ate out somewhere afterwards. We returned late, but the café and restaurant were still crammed with people.
The harsh fluorescent
light made their faces dramatically pallid and their enlarged eyes clashed with the glint on rings and gold fillings. We threaded our way through the
tables – populated entirely by men – to a door to the right of which was the restaurant, visible through its own glazed entrance. In front of us a dark staircase rose steeply.

We climbed up three floors on each of which was a narrow landing with a row of doors each side. On the third floor Laurie led the way down the landing and stopped at a door. ‘We are going
to share a room tonight. Because it’s
cheaper
.’ He’d described it as simple, and indeed it was, with four walls, the door we had entered by and a small double bed. There
was no window, but a naked bulb hung from the ceiling distributing a weak yellow light. None of this mattered in the least. Laurie produced a bottle of brandy from his bag: I hadn’t seen him
buy it. ‘We haven’t any glasses.’ He unscrewed the cap, took a swig and handed it to me. ‘Go on, my typical Kurd.’ He’d earlier joked about how tired he was of
travel books with pictures of swarthy natives robed in blankets, squinting at the camera, and usually captioned ‘A typical Kurd’. It had become a term of affection.

I’d become, suddenly, desperately nervous. This brink – this, by now, familiar brink that had so many times simply ended in a slow slide of isolation and disappointment – was
before me now and the thought of repeating it was paralysing. I began to try to say I wasn’t – I couldn’t – but he interrupted, ‘Don’t say any of that.
I’ll find you.’ And so he did.

That night, which was so amazing for me in so many ways, also contained comedy of a frenzied kind. I woke some time later with a desperate need for a lavatory. ‘You’ll have to go and
find one,’ Laurie said. I got up, put on my long white cotton nightdress and went on to the landing, lit by another ailing bulb. I walked up and down the corridor: all the doors were
identical. In desperation, I tried one. Instantly an enormous man in a string vest sat bolt upright in bed, saw me and held out his arms. I shut the door quickly and ran down the stairs, but the
other two landings were
the same. Just doors with nothing to indicate that large men in string vests weren’t inside. The restaurant, I thought, there
must
be one
adjoining it. I opened the glass door, half expecting it to be deserted by now, but no, it seemed as full as ever with people eating and drinking, and now staring at me. I saw a waiter passing:
‘
Toiletta
?’ He indicated with his shoulder – he was carrying a large tray – towards the centre of the room where there was a sort of barricaded hexagon whose walls
stopped a foot from the floor. To this I went.

I suppose the sight of someone in a nightdress with long hair streaming down her back and bare feet wasn’t usual, for conversation had all but ceased as I stumbled into what turned out to
be a kind of
pissoir
clearly designed for men. It served, but then I had to face the return journey. This time there was a collective display of good manners: people continued to talk and
ceased to stare as I practically ran through the place and up the stairs back to Laurie.

The next day Laurie took me to the bullfight. It was very hot, and the stands round the arena were full. I have never seen another, or in the least wanted to, but the elements of elegance,
cruelty, courage and skill, the squawking circus music, the dramatic ritual, the informed appreciation of the crowd, all combined to lift it to something more than a spectacle of simple crude and
brutal bloodshed. Although the bull, however strong his courage, is doomed, he has a fighting chance of inflicting damage on his opponent. For his part the matador, in his rich, stiff, Goya-like
attire, has grace and skill added to his courage. That afternoon, a young matador was carried out of the ring having been gored, though not fatally. The final bullfighter, kept to the last as he
was the most experienced and famous, gauged his passes with the cloak to a hair’s breadth.

Later that evening, I sensed that all wasn’t well with Laurie: that he was in danger of having an epileptic fit. The prospect was alarming: I wasn’t sure I knew how to help him. I
suggested that
we buy him a guitar, and playing it seemed to do the trick. The guitar store was also the workshop where the instruments were made. When Laurie had tested and
chosen the one he wanted, he tried to commission a much better one for a friend of his. They only made guitars for real, professional musicians, they said, and Laurie confirmed that the recipient
would be a worthy owner. ‘It’s for Julian Bream,’ he said. He’d bring the owner to collect the guitar, and they wouldn’t be disappointed.

We went back to the coast after that, ending in Port Bou where we swam. I remember one day we talked about writing and Laurie said that nobody who looked as I did could be any good at it. I was
so incensed by this that I knocked him off the rock he was sitting on into the sea.