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A few weeks after we’d been in Basil Street, it was past midnight and we were reading peacefully in bed, when the doorbell rang. Ever since Sitges, we’d been
nervous of being doorstepped. Kingsley said he’d go, but I got up as well and followed him. Ours was a flat where all the rooms led off a long passage with the front door at one end. Kingsley
was now walking back from it followed by two blond-headed boys. ‘This is Philip and this is Martin,’ he said, ‘and this is Jane.’ They looked at me, impassive, too weary
even for the brink of hostility, and I looked warily back. We were all trying to conceal our shock – they hadn’t known I’d be there, and we’d had no warning of their
arrival. I cooked bacon and eggs and left them with their father while I made up beds.

There followed a week of grandiose treats, punctuated by long and often tearful sessions spent by the boys alone with Kingsley while he attempted to explain the situation to them. But you
can’t do that, really. They didn’t want their loyalties to be torn and any efforts to explain why he’d left their mother to live with me could only do that. Emotional protocol
dictated that they should distrust and even dislike me. They were in their early teens: they’d lost their home in Cambridge and now, they feared, their father. In this situation everyone
behaves in a younger manner than his or her age, reverts to an earlier period of childhood. The boys wanted scenes that would hopefully lead to Kingsley recanting, possibly returning with them when
they went back to Majorca. Kingsley wanted them to love him, to forgive him – even to love me, whom
they’d known for barely a week. And I wanted us all to be happy
and understanding and kind to one another. One can see at once that none of these reactions could ever have been appropriate or, at least, if any of them were to be achieved it would take time.

Later, Kingsley’s daughter Sally came for a week, very merry and self-possessed. She was twelve years old and seemed more curious about the situation than anything else, but she was also
keen on having as many treats as Philip and Martin had had.

It was about then that I realized Kingsley’s complete indifference to money, and his natural and chronic generosity, meant that he preferred not to consider finances. He’d stopped
teaching and was now living purely by writing. Hilly would need money to live, and the children to be paid for. It was clear to me that I had to sell Blomfield Road to buy somewhere larger. Monkey
– from now onwards I shall call my brother Colin by that name – loved looking at houses, as much as Kingsley hated it, so it was with him that I found an Edwardian villa on Maida Vale.
The lease was a short one of about fourteen years, but it only cost two thousand pounds, which left me with six thousand from Blomfield Road. We needed this to rewire, plumb and regenerate what had
become a near wreck – it had been occupied for years by an old lady who had finally lived in just one of the rooms with her cats. It had five bedrooms, a double drawing room and a study for
Kingsley, plus a bathroom, and a kitchen in the basement. There was an octagonal conservatory at the back of the house and a large garden with fruit trees that backed on to Hamilton Terrace. Monkey
and I both fell in love with it and when I took Kingsley to see it he was so enchanted by the sight of a defunct fridge in what was to be his study – ‘I could make
any
drink in
here!’ – that he was all for it.

Peter Peters rang up one day to say that his client, Evelyn Waugh, had agreed to be interviewed on television. This had happened only once before with John Freeman. Since then he’d refused
all offers, but now, approaching sixty, he’d consented to one
more interview provided a woman conducted it. The BBC had suggested me, and Waugh had rung Peter to ask if he
knew anything about me. ‘I said you would’ve read his books and wrote novels yourself, and were altogether a suitable candidate.’

We met, with Christopher Burstall, the producer, at Browns Hotel. I admired Waugh deeply, but had been warned that he could be difficult.

‘Ah, Miss Howard. And have you had anything to do with literature?’

‘Only spasmodically, Mr Waugh.’

At lunch, he explained to Mr Burstall that one used one’s knives and forks beginning at the outside. He produced a piece of paper on which were written, he said, the questions he was
prepared to be asked. The interview was to start the next day and was to take two afternoons, as they wanted to shoot enough to edit for an hour-long programme. The questions were very
run-of-the-mill, and unlikely to elicit much. I asked some of them, and then I decided, when I knew that a reel was coming to an end, to put in one of my own. Waugh was still playing games. During
each interval when they reloaded the camera he asked things like, ‘When is Miss Howard going to take off all her clothes?’

At the end of the second afternoon, I was asked to ‘amuse’ Mr Waugh while they took reaction shots of him. Amuse him! How on earth could I do that? In the end I told him in some
detail about my lack of education which he seemed to enjoy, or at any rate he remained benign throughout. But the reply that most interested me was when I asked whether he preferred to be anxious
or bored. ‘Oh, bored every time is the answer.’

I’ve observed writers many times – particularly poets – who are in that state. They don’t
like
boredom, but the alternative is too fearful for them. Kingsley, I
was to discover, was no exception. The chief and most arresting feature of Waugh’s face was his beautiful eyes: of a clear blue they were marvellously alive,
seeing
eyes that sparkled
with intelligence and perception. Even Kingsley, when he
did his very funny impersonation of Waugh’s face – with its apoplectic edge of congested rage –
couldn’t manage the eyes.

The interview was transmitted later that spring and I was disappointed with my part in it, but fascinated by Waugh. There were many stories of his trying, and usually succeeding, to discomfort
people. I remember Kingsley asking Anthony Powell, who knew Waugh very well, what it was about him that made him do this. Tony said he would think about it, and came back at teatime having solved
the problem. ‘He’s
mad
, you see.’ Not a complete solution.

In the late summer of 1963 we went to Majorca. Hilly and the children had come back to London, where she rented a house in the Fulham Road. I’d sold Blomfield Road with
vacant possession in June, and had bought Maida Vale. Kingsley had rented the house in Soller for a year so it seemed best to go and make use of it.

Monkey came with us to Majorca in his car. Our house was about a mile inland. It stood by itself, surrounded by cultivated fields. It wasn’t a prepossessing place but there was a charming
lady who did everything for us. At that time I’d have been happy anywhere with Kingsley, but with the beautiful island, the impeccable summer, with Monkey and Kingsley liking each other, it
was entirely cloudless. People came to stay with us, including Robert Conquest and his wife Caroleen. They stayed the longest because Bob and Kingsley were working together on a project that was to
become
The Egyptologist
– the idea was Bob’s – an elaborate satire. They enjoyed talking about it, egging each other on.

Bob was the most completely intellectual man I’ve ever met. When he wasn’t talking to Kingsley he would walk up and down with a book in his hand, oblivious to anyone in his way.
Caroleen said he did this up and down the passage of their mansion flat in Battersea, and therefore opening a door on to the passage was hazardous. Words, and word play, were his recreation. His
more serious side was devoted to political history. After Koestler, he was
the man who had pointed out the evils of Communism in Russia at the time when it was fashionable to do
the opposite.

We went to Deya to see Robert Graves, whom I’d met before on a book programme. Robert took me down to the beach to bathe and somebody there was playing music very loudly on a transistor.
Robert went over to him and told him to turn it off. He refused, whereupon Robert seized the machine, stalked into the sea and threw it powerfully into the waves. There was no reaction from the
owner. When we’d bathed we lay above the beach – pine needles in the sand – and he asked me if I was in love. I said, ‘Completely,’ and he smiled and said one should
always be in love.

I thought then how many poets feel that – so many of them doing their best work when they are young. A satisfactory or comfortable marriage is beside the point: they crave the frenzied
ecstasy, the obsession. Then I thought, Kingsley’s a poet – and I had a fleeting chill. We always think when we’re in love that it is like nobody else’s love, but I suspect
we’re more like everybody else at those times than at any other.

I’d been asked to chair six television programmes through that summer and had turned them down because I wanted to be with Kingsley. The producer asked me if I’d do the first
programme at least, and I agreed. Afterwards she took me to a restaurant in Kensington Church Street and sitting opposite us were Gavin Maxwell and his bride whom he’d married that day. After
my host left, they asked me to come and sit with them. I remember that half hour particularly, because we were all three so exhilarated: we were all – if only temporarily – in love with
our lives.

Some years before I’d stayed a couple of nights with Gavin at Glenelg with two otters and an otter keeper. In the morning I went for a walk with one of the otters. Tekko rambled about,
picking a few dandelions, which he carried for a while, until we got to the seashore where he concentrated upon tearing limpets off rocks. After a while, he clearly saw I wasn’t joining in
and gave me one – a gesture I shall never forget. Gavin’s temperament was much like
his otter’s: generous, exuberant, highly strung, inquisitive and, above
all, charming.

I went back to spend my last night at Blomfield Road lit up by all the warmth and excitement. At last, I thought, life was everything I could ever have hoped for and it had come about in a
situation that had seemed to have no chance of any permanence. As my bad dreams decreased I was more able to enjoy and trust Kingsley’s love, to take in his affection and approval, to enjoy
doing anything for him that added to his comfort. Being away from him for thirty-six hours simply afforded the luxury of a joyful return. I lay awake that night for a long time, thinking how
miserable I’d been in this place and how wonderful it was to be starting again in Majorca and Maida Vale.

In the autumn we left Soller and went to live in a hotel in Pollenza in the north of the island. It was a modern building that could have been anywhere. There was a small beach nearby, but it
was getting too cold to bathe. Kingsley was deep into
The Anti-Death League
and I was nearly done with
After Julius
. Monkey had gone home and was going to try to find us somewhere to
live while Maida Vale was being done up. We lived for several weeks at Pollenza – working all the morning in the small bedroom, going down in the claustrophobic lift to the huge dining room
for lunch. Afterwards we’d read, sometimes go for a walk, and then work again until seven when we’d read the day’s work to each other over a drink. This was the only time I
rewrote a piece of a novel: Kingsley thought my first version of Julius’s trip to France wasn’t quite right, so I did it again. After the reading we’d go out to a bar where they
had a jukebox and we could play the Beatles’ records. We’d also made friends with a Jewish honeymoon couple with whom we used to drink green chartreuse. The hotel was emptying and
seeing Sondra night after night in different stunning outfits, I felt sorry that she hadn’t a larger and more interested audience.

In London we went back to a small top-floor flat in Keats Grove. Squirrels came in and rummaged irritably through saucers
of nuts or biscuits, slid down drainpipes if we
approached them, then racketed off through the dead plane leaves below. I was cooking for us by now. Kingsley was eating more and drinking less and said he’d never felt so well:
‘It’s my lovely life!’

I finished
After Julius
on a dark grey evening in November. The feeling after completing a novel is for me like no other. It’s as though with the last sentence, I have released a
great weight that falls away, leaving me so empty and light that I can float out of myself and look down at the pattern of the work I’ve made. I can see all at once what I have been pursuing
in fragments for so long. It’s a timeless moment, a kind of ecstasy – a state of unconditional love – that has nothing whatever to do with merit or criticism. Of course it goes,
dissolves into melancholy and a sense of loss. Parting with people one has been living with for so long and know so intimately is poignant: they are more lost to you than anyone you meet in life.
They remain crystallized exactly where you left them. Altogether, it’s an occasion that makes one feel very strange for some time afterwards.

I remember I finished about five o’clock, and Kingsley was working in another room, but he was deeply engaged, so I started making supper – Joanna and Terry Kilmartin were coming.
When we were eating I mentioned I’d finished my novel. Terry said, ‘That must be a good thing,’ and immediately turned to Kingsley to talk about him reviewing for the
Observer
.

While my novel was being typed, I concentrated upon furnishing Maida Vale. Apart from clothes and books, Kingsley had nothing, and the contents of my four-roomed flat weren’t going to go
very far. Kingsley was totally uninterested in anything to do with the house, which left me in control, and I enjoyed it all. Junk shops were very rewarding in those days and after the builder had
finished there was just enough money left from the sale of Blomfield Road for decoration and equipment. My brother Robin was often travelling the world to buy timber, and he formed an association
with a silk dealer in Rangoon that meant we could
have yards of beautiful material for our drawing-room curtains. Monkey and I saw builders on Primrose Hill throwing slabs of
black and white marble into a skip. We asked if we could have it, and they said yes, if we carted it away. Somehow we did that, and two art students laid us a marvellous floor for the conservatory.
Monkey’s friend Max Fordham was a heating engineer but had kindly undertaken to oversee our builders. He installed two factory gas heaters in the conservatory, which kept it warm, and I had
staging on stilts built with zinc trays for plant pots. Monkey was going to live with us, and apart from his bedroom, he had a workshop under the conservatory. Kingsley got a new little fridge for
his study, which greatly pleased him.