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‘No. He isn’t.’ It’s very horrible feeling ashamed for someone else.

Later that evening, when he wasn’t eating sandwiches and I wasn’t drinking whisky, he said, ‘I suppose I was rather offensive to that Italian chap.’

‘Yes, you were.’

‘Silly bugger. He’d got it all
wrong
, you see. He didn’t know what he was talking about.’

‘It wasn’t that. You just didn’t agree.’

‘And what if I did? Disagree?’

‘Well, it’s possible to disagree more gracefully.’

This was a mistake. I was being upper class and suggesting people shouldn’t say what they thought. ‘Like
you
– things are always boring when you dislike them or
you’re afraid of them.’

This was true, and I’d learned it. ‘I know,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry about it. I’m trying not to do it.’

‘Oh, yes, of course. You’re always trying to do the right thing. You always have to be
right
. You
have
to be right, don’t you?’

‘I expect so.’

He went back to his newspaper, and I lay on the bed and went to sleep. When I woke up, there was a half-bottle of champagne in a bucket beside the bed. ‘I know you like it,’ he said.
But these little crests of affection had become very rare, and the troughs of accusation, resentment and plain dislike had become deeper and more frequent.

It was during the end of our time there, when these troughs became continuous, that I realized I had to go. I began to think
how I could do this so it would be the least
difficult for him. There is no good way of leaving someone. However you do it, you will afterwards be accused of doing it in the most heartless way possible. I decided it would be best if I went
away for about ten days, then simply didn’t come back. He would have had ten days to get used to my not being there. I had, over the years, been to a health farm in Suffolk twice, largely to
have a bit of a rest from cooking and housekeeping. I arranged to go with Patricia Temple-Muir.

But first there were some people who had to be told. I went to our lawyers, and told them and wrote a letter for them to be delivered on the morning I was supposed to return to Gardnor House. I
told Mrs Uniacke, because it didn’t seem fair to walk out on her when she’d been faithfully with us for so long. She understood at once and was utterly discreet. I told Anton, who said,
‘I’m amazed you haven’t done it before.’ I asked him what it would be like, leaving and starting again. ‘Two years of hell,’ he said, and then things would
straighten themselves out. I told our friend and part-time secretary, Helen Benckendorf, because I wanted her to take Rosie, my dog. I was afraid that if I left her Kingsley wouldn’t let me
have her later. I told Jonathan Clowes and I told Monkey, because I’ve always told him everything.

The visit to Shrubland Hall, the health farm, was planned for the end of October to the first week in November in 1980. For some weeks before this, when Kingsley was having long lunches at the
Garrick, I removed suitcases of clothes to Ursula. I decided to take my quarter-written novel and my typewriter with me to Suffolk. As usual, I arranged for Kingsley to have some company in my
absence.

When the morning of my departure arrived, I came into the kitchen to say I was going. Kingsley simply said, ‘I see.’ He didn’t look up from his newspaper.

I was driving to the Temple-Muirs’ in Essex to have lunch there and pick up Patricia to go on. I’d thought that I’d feel exhilarated at actually leaving, but I didn’t. I
was unable to think. It felt like an escape I couldn’t yet believe in.

When I was within a few miles of the Temple-Muirs’ house, I got out of the car. There was a gate into a field, and I hung on to it to cry.
I
had gone. It was I
who’d taken the decision, had planned it as best I could, but hanging on the gate, it seemed a shock. From now on, I was on my own – something I’d always dreaded, and had never
really believed would happen.

The ten days at Shrubland Hall passed. I was very tired to begin with, but as I recovered, my dread of returning to London and to Kingsley’s reception of my letter increased. After
dropping Patricia off at her house, I drove straight to Ursula. She had a young composer occupying her two basement rooms, so I slept on the top floor next door to her, the room crammed with my
belongings.

The day after my return, a letter was dropped through the letterbox. It was from Kingsley. It said that although life with me hadn’t been much fun, it would be worse without me, and if
I’d return he would try to drink less and be a better husband. I was tempted, but I knew from perceived experience that people who drink as much as he did can’t cut it down for more
than a week or two: they then simply revert. I wrote back saying that if he’d stop drinking altogether I’d come back, and that I didn’t think drinking less would work. He
didn’t agree and divorce proceedings began their unwieldy way.

I have to say something, briefly, about money here. Kingsley had never been in the least interested in money, and I’d had to deal with it, with Anton’s help. When I married Kingsley
he had almost nothing after he stopped teaching. I’d only ever earned just enough
to keep myself. As we became better off, I suggested to him that all our earnings should
go into a joint account and that from it we should each have £1,500 in separate accounts to spend exactly as we individually pleased, on clothes or presents. This meant that the mortgage, the
house bills, the money for the boys, the car and holidays were paid for from the main account, and I had some idea of what we could afford. By the time I left, Kingsley was earning about eighty
thousand a year, and I was earning between three and four thousand. Clearly this was over. I now had to subsist on my private account and anything I earned. In the first six months this sum was a
hundred pounds. I was told I’d eventually get half the value of the house, but I didn’t want to ask for any sort of income, since it was I who had left. I’d never taken money from
either of my previous marriages, except for the small amount from Pete to spend on Nicola. It meant I was immediately in trouble for money. I had two banks, and went to the first, where I’d
been a client since 1946, and asked them for a loan of five thousand pounds. They refused, as I had nothing to back it as a guarantee. I went to Childs’ Bank where we’d had our joint
account, explained the situation and asked them for a loan. ‘Yes,’ they said. ‘How much?’ I closed the other account and banked with them.

I never used the loan, and this was entirely due to Ursula, who kept me for eighteen months, with my dog Rosie, who was an immense comfort. I’d written about half of
Getting It
Right
, and all I could do was finish it as quickly as possible. At first I worked in the back basement room in Ursula’s house. Later, the composer moved into a flat and I had the basement
to myself. I asked, through the lawyers, if I might take a few pieces of furniture from Gardnor House, and this was agreed. Ursula bought me a second-hand gas stove that we put in the coalhole, and
I cooked on that. A few days after I’d moved, I rang Jenner and Terry, her husband, and asked if I could come round. I could. I went, and when I got there and before I could say anything, I
started crying and cried for a long time and then they gave me a cup of tea.

Hilly and her third husband, Allie Kilmarnock, moved into Gardnor House – Hilly was to be Kingsley’s housekeeper so that he wasn’t alone. I didn’t
have to worry about that, which strangely I’d still been doing. After about a year, they put the house on the market. I’d been advised to ask for my half of the house plus the original
fourteen thousand pounds with which I’d bought Maida Vale. It was suggested I should claim the interest on it, but this seemed wrong to me. Kingsley’s lawyers refused at first to
believe I’d bought the house, and Anton had to produce the papers to prove that I had.

That first Christmas of 1980 was awful, and the months that followed are a dim jumble to me. I tried to work hard, but it was extremely difficult, since the moment I was alone, my situation, the
future, the anxiety about how on earth I was going to make out preoccupied me. I went to stay with Nicola who was now happily married to Elliot, her second husband, and went to some sewing classes
there. Paul and Marigold Johnson were kind to me, and had me for a weekend – took me to the Savill Garden at Windsor when the magnolia and tiny narcissus were out. My agent, Jonathan, married
Ann Evans, and she became a friend, and I stayed with them in Sussex at Penhurst. But, generally, I felt pretty cut off from the people who’d come to Lemmons so much.

Jenner and Terry had a son, Jodie, and they made me one of his guardians, if ever they should die together, which touched me very much. Ursula was utterly staunch, took me to Covent Garden and
afterwards round to meet Placido Domingo, whose huge, warm personality made me feel as though I was being enveloped by a cloud of sunshine.

Eventually, by 1983, the divorce came through, Gardnor House was sold and I could start looking for somewhere to live. Mrs Uniacke had been offered the choice of going with Kingsley to his new
house or coming with me. She chose to come with me. For months, while all this was going on, I used to drive up to the corner of Flask Walk and Well Walk, and she’d bring my fresh
laundry that she’d done, and take the next lot home in a bag. She did this secretly, and I was deeply grateful to her. I told her I didn’t know how much money I’d
earn, but that I’d try to find somewhere that had decent rooms for her, and she trusted me.

I searched and searched, and twice I thought I’d found the right place, but the first was very open to burglary and I was advised not to buy it. The second house, which I desperately
wanted, I offered for and the owner raised the price by five thousand pounds. I went home and did the sums. I could
just
afford it, if I did nothing to it. It was a small three-storey house
on a noisy road, but the large garden attracted me. I offered again, and the owner increased the price by yet another five thousand. I wept bitterly about this: almost anything made me cry
then.

Eventually, I found a house in Delancey Street, in Camden Town, a noisy one-way bus route, but it had a small garden and looked out at the back on to a large square of gardens. It was a narrow
four-storey house, with two rooms on each floor and one bathroom. I bought it, and had money left over to put in a shower and a kitchen for Mrs Uniacke in the basement, so that she had a bedroom
and a sitting room. Jenner and Terry came to help me move in the spring of 1983.

I spent my first night in the house alone, as it wasn’t ready for Mrs Uniacke, and lay awake for a long time in the dark. It was the third time I’d moved on my own – Blandford
Street after I’d left Pete, Blomfield Road after I’d left Michael, and now here. But those moves had had a different quality about them. I’d been frightened then at each prospect,
but they had also felt like an adventure, a temporary state from which something joyful would emerge. Now I felt I’d be alone for the rest of my life. Nobody would want a ‘bolter’
of fifty-six. I finally fell asleep just as I’d reached the uncomfortable notion that solitude was probably good for writing.

The builders arrived two days later. I found them by pure chance: Monkey and I had been looking at a pretty little house that
seemed unoccupied, when two men came out of it.
Monkey asked if we could see inside. They said it was sold, but they’d no objection to showing it to us. ‘The new owner has ruined it,’ one said. He was quite right: all the
original features of the house had been torn out, and replaced with nasty alternatives. But I was impressed that they felt this and told them I was looking for a house in the area, and that when I
found one, I’d like them to do the work for me. They gave me a telephone number and that was that. They were called Lennie and Jo Chapproniere. I asked them separately, at various times,
whether they were French, and one said yes, and the other said of course not. They worked for me for some months, and I became very attached to them. They were real Camden Town people. When I went
about with Lennie in his van looking for things like Victorian fireplaces, people would shout greetings to him in the traffic. Len Beswick came to hang the wallpapers as usual, in his tennis shoes
and white overalls, his lunch carefully packed.

I’d finished
Getting It Right
and sent it to my new publisher, Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson at Hamish Hamilton. I hoped desperately that this novel would be a breakthrough for me.
The idea for it had come from one small incident. At Lemmons we were always short of money, but the house needed constant renovation. Two of Monkey’s friends came to help us paint some of it.
They were gay, working class, and I knew they loved classical music because Monkey had got to know them when he made their hi-fi system for them. They usually came at weekends as they both had
jobs, and were often at dinner or lunch with a wide variety of our other friends. They were funny, interesting, devoted to each other and wildly unfaithful: they got on, or off with everybody.

One day, a rather intellectual journalist was talking at lunch about Bach and organ music. Peter, one of Monkey’s friends, who’d been listening quietly, interrupted him and disagreed
on a point. He went on to give a brief, but stunningly well-informed account of early seventeenth-century organs in Germany. When
he’d finished, he quietly filled his
mouth with fish pie and reverted to listening to Kingsley. Afterwards I asked Peter how he knew so much about these particular organs, and he said, ‘Well, it just came up in conversation,
didn’t it?’ After that I noticed that these nuggets of esoteric information were by no means confined to organs. Architecture, pictures, gardens, houses – at any moment
Peter’s well-furnished mind might reveal more. So I thought it would be interesting to write about someone who, on the face of it, had no cultural or educational advantages, who got along
perfectly well without any of that, but who’d acquired his interest – sometimes his passion – out of sheer curiosity and love of various subjects.