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I know now that these fears had always been there, but at Lemmons they’d been masked because the house was always so full of people. I’d hoped that the move to London might make our
marriage better, but this didn’t seem to be happening. Kingsley went to the Garrick Club fairly often, which he loved, and people came to dinner. Philip Larkin came to stay a night once or
twice. Although I knew him very little, I always felt drawn to him. He had the most beautiful smile and could be majestically courteous. I’d encountered him when we were both on the literary
panel of the Arts Council – an unfortunate committee that self-destructed, and I knew we’d agreed about its incompetence and futility.

Philip was one of Kingsley’s oldest friends, so after we’d had dinner I used to leave them to play jazz records and drink in the drawing room. We never went to Hull, where Philip was
librarian at the university; there was a rumour that he didn’t possess a table so that nobody could come to stay with him. We still went out to dinner with people, and Kingsley went regularly
to his Monday Club lunches at Bertorelli’s, where journalists, writers and economists with right-wing views gathered to gossip and enjoy each other’s opinions. But he never took me out.
We rarely went to restaurants and cinemas together.

Quite a lot has been written and said about his political views swinging from the left to the right. The truth was, I think, that he wasn’t a political animal, it was more that he enjoyed
the chappish company of people for whom politics was the social peg upon which they hung their conviviality. After the first few months in his company I never took his political views – of
whatever party – seriously, although I never told him so. He loved lunching and drinking with men, and I knew by now that he had little use for
women. He regarded them as
intellectually inferior, and often as ‘pests’, hanging about, getting in the way, and interrupting men. Women were for bed and board, and he’d ceased to be interested in either.
Still caught in the web of my transference, it was easy for me to concur in his views, at least as far as I had any part in them.

My sense of myself was so rocky that his estimation of me could hardly have been lower than my own. We seemed to be locked in some mysterious paralysis where his passivity about our
relationship, and indeed almost everything else in his life, and my ineffectual struggle to emerge from my psychological quagmire kept us trapped. I suppose I’d started to want to change
things, beginning with my perception of myself. And he did not. He preferred to grumble or be resentful. And yet, of course, life went on much as though none of this was of any consequence.

That first autumn in London Michael and Felicity Behrens invited me to spend ten days with them at a house inland of St-Maxime that they’d bought. Life there was very unexacting. We all
swam in the pool, and lay in the sun and played Scrabble and boules. But I was wrestling with my writing block – apparently never-ending – and missing my sessions with Mrs Hopkinson, so
I was depressed. I also had chronic backache and sometimes felt very sick. As the symptoms persisted when I got home, I went to our doctor, John Allison, who examined and then X-rayed me because he
thought there was something wrong with my gall bladder. He sent me to a surgeon, who said he would take it out the following week.

Mrs Hopkinson had earlier suggested it might be good for me to do group therapy, and had found me a group that she thought suitable and I was booked into it. The operation meant I wouldn’t
be able to go. I was doing a broadcast with Peter Ackroyd just after I heard this news and I was devastated and can remember blurting out to Peter about the operation. ‘Christ! I’d be
worried,’ he said. I didn’t tell him that it was missing the group I minded far more than the prospect of the operation.

The night before I went into King Edward VII’s Hospital for Officers, Kingsley took me up the hill to a restaurant for dinner. It was an extremely cold evening with
some snow that had turned to slush. When we got back, I discovered I’d lost one of my gold leech earrings. They were the first piece of ancient gold I’d bought and I loved them. The
next day, I retraced our steps up the hill, searching for it, and asked at the restaurant, but to no avail.

Kingsley took me to the hospital the following evening, saw me to my room and then left. It was eight thirty and I wasn’t used to going to sleep much before midnight. I felt abandoned
– and the time when Pete had left me at the nursing-home to have Nicola came back to me. I wrote a long letter to Mrs Hopkinson, during which John Allison came to see me and was kind and
reassuring. Very early in the morning, someone came and gave me an injection that made me feel comfortably irresponsible and sleepy. By the time they came to take me to theatre, I didn’t care
about anything.

When I came to, in my own room again later, there was Susie – John’s wife – sitting by the window knitting. It was immeasurably comforting to see her there and I am grateful to
this day for it.

Patients in private hospitals don’t usually see much of one another, but one morning, a nurse came and asked me if I’d stay with a child who was shortly going to have her tonsils
out. She was about six years old, very agitated, and kept asking where her mother was. They said the mother would certainly be there when she woke up. She’d promised, they said.

They left us together. The child was restless and unhappy, although she’d had her pre-med. ‘Tell me about the best day of your life,’ I said. And, almost at once, she started
to tell me and again, almost at once, she fell asleep. I stayed till the men came with the trolley.

About six in the evening she ran into my room, in a little white bloodied nightdress. She was crying, which clearly hurt. ‘She
didn’t
come. She
promised
! And she
didn’t.’

Later the mother, a real Knightsbridge lady, arrived in my room. ‘Just to thank you for being so kind to my little girl.’

‘It was you she wanted.’

‘Well, I’m sure you know what they’re like. I got caught up.’

‘I do,’ I said, wishing I was a basilisk. She smiled uneasily, and went.

The healing was slow and painful. It was impossible to turn over in bed, since I immediately felt that a rather blunt saw was grinding into action. I stayed about a fortnight in hospital. People
came to see me, Monkey and Kingsley, Dosia and Jill, and even Mrs Hopkinson, bringing an avocado. John Allison said I needed to convalesce and suggested Osborne House on the Isle of Wight where
patients from King Edward’s were allowed to go. He said Kingsley could come with me, but Kingsley refused – saying that he wanted to have Christmas at Gardnor House with me. So in the
end, kind Dosia had me for about ten days in their beautiful house by the Thames at Barnes. I slept for hours every afternoon and got up for supper with the family, but I was still very weak and my
wound wouldn’t heal in spite of endless salt baths. Finally, John sent me back to the surgeon, who plunged a pair of tweezers into my stomach and withdrew what looked like a piece of green
electric flex. ‘You’ll have to do without that, I’m afraid,’ he said heartily. The pain was so agonizing I couldn’t reply. But after that the wound healed.

Gardnor House was another matter: it was all stairs, and I could hardly crawl up and down them once a day, let alone cook or shop. So we found a nice lady who wanted to earn money in order to go
to India, and had a rather subdued and cheerless Christmas with her.

Weeks of no energy and depression followed. One strange thing happened. The kitchen had a window that looked out on to a tiny concrete yard about three feet square, perfectly flat and surrounded
by the house walls and steps up to the street. I was looking out of this window one January afternoon, and thought, If only I had my earring back, that would be something, and, suddenly, there it
was, in the middle of this small yard, glinting at me. I can’t explain it.
There was no way in which it could have lain there all those weeks undetected, but there it was
now.

Two things dominated my years at Gardnor House. One was my worsening relationship with Kingsley, who I now began to realize not only didn’t love me but actually
disliked
me. In
company he maintained neutrality; alone he was either surly or ceaselessly finding fault with me, until I became nervous of being alone with him. He was turning me into his mother, someone he both
required and disliked.

And then the thing I’d been dreading and trying to pretend to myself would never happen did happen. Monkey decided to leave us and buy a house for himself. I could see that this was
absolutely the right thing for him to do. He’d been working for some time as a director of a firm manufacturing hi-fi systems in Huntingdon, which meant that he was away all day and got back
late in time for dinner. But another factor that influenced him, I’m sure, was that Kingsley had turned against him, was endlessly sniping at him, putting him down, and grumbling about him
when he wasn’t there. This upset him profoundly, but it also made him see that he needed, quite rightly, to lead his own life. I don’t know whether I succeeded in concealing my misery
and dismay at the prospect of his leaving, but knowing it was the right move for him, I did try.

We went house-hunting for him as we’d done now three times before for the whole family, and eventually he found a small Victorian house in Tufnell Park that he really liked and wanted. He
put down a deposit, took out a mortgage and moved.

For the first time in our marriage we were living on our own. It was as though everything had happened the wrong way round. If we’d had more privacy in the early days, I thought, perhaps
we might have forged a companionship that transcended the early ‘love’part of our lives. Middle-aged marriages are more, rather than less, in need of this. But now we’d reached a
point where, with the children gone and leading their own lives, with Sargy married and gone, and Monkey in his own house, we had that privacy too late.

Kingsley wanted me there all the time. He’d go to his club for the better part of a day, or spend an evening there with his friends, but he resented my going out, which
I had begun to do in order to attend therapy groups.

I was desperate to get past the millstone of transference, and the groups that Mrs Hopkinson recommended might be a way out. I always tried to arrange that a friend or one of the boys would
spend those evenings with Kingsley. Still, not unnaturally, he resented my having any life outside the house. But when we had evenings alone, he watched television or read, and always ended the
evening drunk. He’d become quarrelsome and I learned that it didn’t take two to make a scene. I took to going to bed earlier and earlier. We stopped sharing a room, because he
wouldn’t allow me to turn over in bed since he said it woke him up and he couldn’t get back to sleep again. I couldn’t spend the night completely still without being awake. He was
angry about this as well.

There was one moment when all this was different. I was standing by the window of our bedroom one morning, looking out of the window and feeling very sad. He came to me, put his arms round me
and gave me a long, gentle kiss, and said, ‘I used to be so much in love with you.’ Before I could say anything, he turned and walked out of the room. It was like meeting a loving ghost
suddenly, who vanished before I could respond. I stayed by the window until I stopped crying. But that evening, after work, when I tried to talk to him, he’d retreated. Insulated by whisky,
he was withdrawn and dismissive. ‘I don’t think so, I don’t want to do that.’

During these months we were both working. Kingsley was writing
Russian Hide-and-Seek
and I was writing television plays. They had started for me at Lemmons when I’d watched some of
the
Upstairs Downstairs
plays, and I’d rung our agency, A. D. Peters, and said I thought I could do one. ‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ was the dismissive response. This
cowed me for a while, and then I thought again and rang and said, ‘Will you ask them if they’d like me to do one?’ The reply came back that they would.

I went to London Weekend Television Centre to be briefed. They were a remarkably professional bunch. Alfred Shaughnessy, John Hawksworth and Rosemary Anne Sisson had been
writing most of the plays, and they were outlining the next series. I was given a play that was to take place during the first Battle of the Somme, and was told three or four things that
had
to happen in it. Their knowledge of all the characters was impressive. When I asked whether Mrs Bridges had ever had a marriage or an affair, they said no at once.

I went away and wrote the play, calling it
Our Glorious Dead
, and subsequently I went to watch some of it being shot. It went well, was broadcast in November 1974 and won an award. They
asked me to write another but didn’t use it. As a result, however, I was asked to contribute one of six plays about love for LWT, and wrote a play called
Sight Unseen
, the inspiration
for which came to me while I was with Sargy as he had his cataract operations. I also wrote a television play that was shot in Manchester for a series about courtesans: it was about Skittles, who
had had an affair with the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. Then I adapted
After Julius
in three plays for Yorkshire Television.

This all gave me some returning confidence in my writing, although plays were an entirely different craft. I found that the only way
I
could do them was to make a shopping list of major
events in an act, then take a running jump at it, working very fast. I developed a good sense of timing, and wrote them mostly in one draft with subsequent cuts.

Then Thames Television commissioned seven plays from my novel
Something in Disguise
, and this time I had a script editor, Richard Bates, with whom I worked. In the end the plays were cut
to six and were broadcast in 1982. Moira Armstrong directed, and Richard Vernon, Ursula Howells, Elizabeth Garvie and Barry Stanton were among the wonderful cast.

Often when some treat or luxury was contemplated and not available to both of us, Kingsley would appropriate it. When I
protested, ‘Why should it be you?’
he’d say, ‘Because I’m older, richer, heavier and I earn more money.’ This was true and a joke, but the fact was that neither of us was earning enough. It was Tom Maschler
who introduced us to Jonathan Clowes. He had come to Lemmons, but I remember him more at Gardnor House. There were two things about him that reminded me of Peter Peters: he had a very quiet voice,
and he gave the impression of being shy. We both moved to him as our literary agent, and at once our financial situation looked up.