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We had lunch. I managed to ask when he was going to Los Angeles and he said in two months. Otherwise he talked about his
new book,
The Roots of Heaven
, which had just
come out in England and been well reviewed. He was married, he said, to Lesley Blanch and that would never change, but she lived in Menton and wasn’t coming to the States. I knew of her books
too.
The Wilder Shores of Love
had been the latest.

We had coffee back in the sitting room, and as soon as he’d finished it, he stood up. ‘I have to go. I have very much to do before I go back to Paris tomorrow. Will you consider what
I have said and call me at my hotel this evening? I am sincerely in love with you and pray that you will come.’

He kissed my hand and went. I sat at my desk and tried to think. I recollected several things Arthur had told me about him. He was Lithuanian. Gary wasn’t his real name. He’d had an
amazingly brave war as a fighter pilot, bringing his plane – seriously on fire – back to England, landing it and escaping before it blew up. He’d been badly wounded. He had the
Légion d’Honneur. But all this was really beside the point. The point was that someone I hardly knew was inviting me to change my life utterly – go and live in another country
and become a recognized mistress in a diplomatic life . . . Why had he chosen me? He said he was in love with me. How could he be? He knew me no more than I knew him.

On the other hand, I’d always believed that one day someone would come along and sweep me off my feet. Romain might be the one, and if I was feeble about it I would never know. The thought
of leaving my house and living somewhere foreign did, in truth, terrify me, and my terror was the clincher. I
had
to do things that frightened me, to rid myself of that weakness. It was
sheer madness to up sticks and go and live thousands of miles from my home with a man I’d only met twice in my life. Of course it was. He was attractive and looked both intelligent and
gentle. I liked him for not attempting to pounce on me.

That evening I rang him and said that before I made up my mind I’d like to spend a week with him in Paris to see how we got on. That was an excellent idea. The next morning he rang to say
that if I caught the train for the two p.m. ferry the following Friday, he would meet me at the Gare du Nord.

So I packed my best clothes and set off for Paris. By the time I had paid for the taxi to Victoria, I realized I had very little money, far less than I thought I had. I had, in fact, exactly ten
shillings and no francs. Perhaps I could buy a sandwich? But supposing he didn’t meet me, I’d need the ten shillings – and actually ten shillings wouldn’t be enough anyway.
I searched my bag again for the three pounds I’d thought was there, but it wasn’t.

‘How amazing to see you here!’

A tall man was standing over me whom I didn’t immediately recognize, until he said, ‘We met in Paris with Michael Behrens.’

‘Of course I remember.’ He was the man with the tiny wife who had eaten two dinners.

‘I was just going along for a spot of lunch. How about you?’

‘No, thanks. I think I’m going to skip lunch.’

‘Oh, no! Please let me give you some. I shall be so bored by myself.’

So I had lunch with him. He was obviously very curious about why I was going to Paris. As he didn’t mention Mike again, I guessed that he knew that we weren’t seeing each other. In
which case . . . I could see him speculating.

‘Is anyone meeting you?’

‘Yes, at the Gare du Nord.’

Much later he said, ‘Well, if you don’t mind, I’ll just make sure that you
are
met. I have a feeling that you haven’t got much money on you.’

‘I haven’t, as a matter of fact. I left it at home by mistake.’

‘Ten quid?’ he suggested.

‘Ten shillings actually.’

‘Good God! Let me lend you some.’

I refused – although he seemed kind, I didn’t trust him. ‘I must say, you’re an extraordinary girl. Supposing you
aren’t
met?’

‘I’m sure I shall be.’ But I began to feel anxious about that.

It was dark when we arrived, but I could see Romain – he looked dashing and romantic in a fur hat – standing on the platform.

‘It’s all right,’ I said, ‘I am being met.’ I didn’t much want to have to introduce the men to each other, and managed to avoid this by not attracting
Romain’s attention until my train companion had gone.

‘You look very beautiful.’

‘You look like someone in a Russian novel.’

He smiled; he liked that idea.

The week wasn’t a success: it wasn’t awful, but it lacked momentum. I didn’t fall in the least in love with him and, for his part, I think I must have disappointed. My
inability to speak, yet again, came into it. It made me awkward and dull with many of his friends. He took me about a great deal – I suspect to get other people’s opinion of his plan.
He took me to his tiny attic room office at Éditions Gallimard, his publisher. It contained a bed, a chair, and a battered open suitcase full of the manuscript of
Racines du Ciel
. He
gave me sheets to read, but his writing was of the kind that, though large, was illegible. Then, as we went down a flight of stairs, he said, ‘I want to show you something.’ He opened a
door. ‘Look!’ It was a large and beautifully furnished room, with a grand piano and rugs on the polished wooden floor. ‘Camus,’ he said bitterly. ‘Camus gets this
room, and I get an attic.’

We met Camus later in the week, at Les Deux Magots, the famous literary café: he was sitting against a wall, with newspapers spread all over his table. In spite of Romain’s feelings
about their rooms, they seemed to get on well and plunged at once into an animated discussion of French politics. This was disappointing to me, as I’d naïvely imagined that when writers
got together they talked about writing. Camus was a very beautiful man – one of the few I have ever met – and I watched him, unnoticed, while he and Romain had an explosive argument
about some minister or other. At the end of it they were completely amicable, almost as though
the argument had been simply a violent game that had run its course and ended in a
tie.

At the end of the week, Romain asked me to go home and think about his proposition. I said I didn’t think it would work, but he was insistent I go home to think about it that I agreed. I
went home with some relief; it had been a small adventure, but nothing more. I think he must have been relieved when I said I didn’t want to join him. He went to LA, met Jean Seberg and
eventually married her.

I come now to one of the worst things I did in my life. I fell in love with Cecil Day-Lewis, and when he made advances to me, I succumbed. The affair was, in fact, a very brief one, because I
felt so awful about betraying Jill. It would be easy to make excuses – I was essentially lonely. I longed for a mutual love, and particularly the affection that goes with being in love with
somebody whom I’d had time to get to know and who I felt knew me. I didn’t want someone to whom I just looked good and was worth making a pass at. But none of that, I very soon
realized, excused me. I had to put an end to it, and I did do my best to do that in the right way. I thought that if I told him I couldn’t go on with it because of Jill, he might take it out
on her. So I thought I had to lie, and tell him it simply wasn’t working for me. I did this, not taking into account that almost any man dislikes being turned down in that way. He was
bitterly hurt, resentful, called me a whore – which I suppose I was – and wrote letters long afterwards to this effect. I left Chatto and didn’t see either Jill or Cecil for a
long time. I am trying to write this without hindsight; I thought at the time I was giving up someone I could truly have loved, but with whom I’d never expected any future. I was extremely
unhappy, and I think I felt I’d done the most I could do by going; it expiated at least some of my guilt about the affair at the time. I wasn’t able, then, to recognize that such things
need not happen if they are resisted in the first place; I thought that they simply struck one – like lightning – and that one had no choice.

It was 1958. I had to find another job as lack of money was pressing again – just as well, really, as it forced me to get work. I went to Weidenfeld & Nicolson, and
was hired as a deputy fiction editor working under Barley Alison. We worked in a small office in Cork Street, whose space was considerably reduced by the tottering piles of manuscripts that
occupied the major part of it. Barley was tiny, dark, courteous and often extremely funny. Australian by birth, she’d been for some years at the Foreign Office. I don’t know how she
moved to being a publisher, but the life clearly suited her. She loved writing and writers, and she was always kind to me.

Occasionally, George Weidenfeld would hold meetings in a room further down the house that was so dark he was frequently holding pieces of paper at different angles to catch enough of the musty
light to read them. One afternoon he took me to tea at the Ritz and intimated that we might get married. Before I declined this kind offer I had a wicked urge to accept – simply to see the
look of horror on his face.

Once, Barley went on holiday for two weeks and I was left alone with the scripts. Haunted by the countless authors starving in basements and bed-sits while they waited for fame and fortune from
their uniquely important contributions to literature, I worked longer and longer hours trying to clear the formidable backlog.

But then one day, I went to have lunch with Peter Peters and he asked me how my book was going and I said it wasn’t because by the time I got home in the evening I was too tired to write.
There
was a pause. ‘How much do you need to live on while you’re writing it?’

I looked blankly at him. I never knew how long any writing would take me. ‘Just a rough idea,’ he urged.

‘Three hundred pounds?’ It seemed an awful lot, but surely I could finish the book with that. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Give in your notice to Weidenfeld and I will send
you a cheque.’

And so my few months with Weidenfeld came to an end, and I settled down to serious work. I’d discovered that working every day in the mornings made the process dynamic, and that after a
few weeks, I didn’t exactly look forward to but began to live in the book when I wasn’t writing it. Things I hadn’t consciously thought about fell into place, almost as though
they were somewhere I had really been.

I can’t remember much about the rest of that year. I wrote a couple of short stories. I wasn’t short of money and could, when I had friends to dinner, buy a leg of lamb instead of a
shoulder. Mrs Grodzicka still made nearly all my clothes. I know that later that year while outwardly, on a practical scale, things appeared to be going quite well, inside I felt rotten. My
new-found energy for work drained away. I felt the success of
The Long View
had simply raised expectations from my publisher and agent that I’d certainly be unable to fulfil. The two
completed novels had been a fluke. I’d flip through them despairingly, wondering how on earth I’d managed to do even that. Anything more that I attempted to do would prove me a
fraud.

The rest of my life was equally hopeless. I couldn’t find anyone with whom I could irreproachably fall in love – someone with whom I could share my life. I reflected again that I was
simply the kind of person who was designed to be a second string. The more I thought about this, the more inescapably true it seemed to be. Looking back now, I can see that I was dangerously
unaware and the few things I did know about myself were neither consoling nor inspiring. I was lazy, and where writing was concerned this was
inexcusable. I was also a coward:
the only way to discover whether I’d be any good at writing was to go on doing it, and I was terrified of taking that risk.

I also felt overwhelmed by a series of misconceptions – like a small range of mountains that blocked the view. Some of these I might well have been born with; some were inculcated by my
parents and nannies; some I no doubt painstakingly fabricated for myself. ‘Boys are better than girls’ was an early one – my mother, nannies and even our cook, Emily, made plain
their preference. ‘You’re a remarkably stupid little girl,’ a music mistress had once said to me when she was trying to teach me key signatures. An elderly cousin I overheard
rhapsodizing about Robin ended by saying, ‘Jane’s a plain little thing, but she seems to have a nice nature.’ At eight years old I didn’t care in the least about my nature,
I wanted to be as beautiful as the day, like in
Five Children
and It
.

At least at that age – and for some years afterwards – I’d thought I knew what I was going to
do
, how I was going to spend my life. Marriage and the war had deflected my
desire to work in the theatre. That little flame of ambition guttered quietly for years and finally went out. I’d failed both at marriage and motherhood, and writing had assumed a different
hold on me. There was none of the excitement and fun of working with other people, of playing to an audience, of being applauded, and setting about the next play. Writing was solitary, difficult
work, where self-criticism had to be constantly alert. A day or a week’s work was merely a few more drops in the bucket, and the end of the story shifted maddeningly a little further out of
reach, like false summits on a mountain, or a mirage in the desert.

I knew my life was neither happy nor productive, but I’d no idea how to change it. How could one change, and how much? This dilemma sparked the idea for my next novel. I wanted to write
about what people could change in themselves, and what was immutable. There were to be four main characters: an ageing,
successful not-quite-first-flight playwright, much older
than his neurotic wife. He was to be the offspring of an unhappy mixed marriage: an Irish Catholic father and a Jewish mother. I called him Emmanuel Joyce. He was to be married to a woman from a
more privileged background, and they would have had a child who died in infancy. She, unable to have another and distraught by her loss, takes refuge in chronic ill-health. She was to be called
Lillian. Emmanuel should have a faithful lieutenant, a much younger man who admires him, and who acts as a manager. Jimmy knows that Emmanuel is periodically unfaithful to Lillian. The novel should
open with the attempted suicide of Emmanuel’s secretary and her departure. The final character was to be a girl they hire to replace her. She was to be nineteen years old, the daughter of a
West Country clergyman, and it would be her first job. She would become the catalyst. I wrote the novel from the four points of view of these characters, enabling the reader to know more about them
than any of them knew of themselves.