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I eventually finished the final draft of the script, which I called
The Attachment
, and Jonathan’s company started to raise the money to make it, but it didn’t come off.
Although they got most of the money, the last £250,000 eluded them.

I was also compiling a gardening anthology, which involved a lot of pleasurable reading, and was also well into
The Light Years
. I had realized fairly early on that I couldn’t get
everything into three volumes so it would have to be four. Jonathan Clowes had moved me to Macmillan where I met Jane Wood. Jane was my editor for the last three volumes of ‘Cazalet
Chronicles’ and beyond, and we got on at once – another friend for life.

Meanwhile, among my friends, some bad news was that Tanya Hobson got breast cancer. She and Anthony were determinedly optimistic about it, and she came to stay with me after her operation.
I’d known her a little when she was a young girl as she’d been
the best friend of Dosia’s stepdaughter, Ming. She married young and went to live in South
Africa, but the marriage didn’t work out so she returned to England and married Anthony. I was godmother to their third child, Charlotte. Tanya was half Russian, and one of the most lovable
people I have ever known. She was warmhearted, modest, funny, deeply intelligent and cultivated in the best sense of that word – interested in everything and discriminatingly appreciative of
much.

She seemed to recover completely, and Anthony wanted to take her to Jordan and Israel for a holiday. He invited me to go with them, and when I told Selina Hastings this, she wanted to come too.
The novelist Pauline Neville made the fifth of our party. I liked riding into Petra through the narrow, circuitous path cleft in the high rock more than I liked the city itself. I loved the desert,
which we drove through to reach the top of the Red Sea, which lies beside Israeli Elat, divided by barbed wire and machine-guns, where I’d stayed with my friend Nina Milkina some years
previously. Then, we’d walked into the desert and a few yards in had felt enclosed by the enormous silence. Driving, as we did now, the noise of the car obtruded and it became a more ordinary
place. After Jordan, Selina and Pauline left us to go home, and Anthony, Tanya and I proceeded to Israel via the Dead Sea, where Tanya and I insisted upon bathing in the hot, grey salty soup.
Thence to Jerusalem, a city more fraught with ill-will than anywhere I’ve ever been.

But Tanya’s health didn’t last: two years later she was seriously ill. I went down to Whitsbury to cook for her while Anthony was away. It was early spring and she was in remission.
Her eldest daughter, Emma, was due to be married, I think, in June, and she was hopeful of lasting until that happened. I realized, during that visit, how much I loved her. But a kind of shyness
had always prevailed between us so I couldn’t tell her this. Two months later, she rang me in London: ‘I’d hoped I might live long enough to see Emma married. Now, I’m
afraid I shall not!’ And then, before I could say anything, she said, ‘Goodbye!’ and rang off.

I couldn’t bear to go to her funeral, and later, when Anthony asked me for a weekend, I found it difficult to be there without her, but at least I could cry in my
bedroom. Funerals are inevitably public, and I always feel that it’s unseemly that I, whose loss must be far less than the family’s, should threaten their control by my lack of it. I
continue to miss Tanya. I can hear her voice now saying, ‘
Really
nice.’ ‘A virtuous Woman: mild and beautiful,’ as Shakespeare said. Charlotte, her daughter, often
reminds me of Tanya: Charlotte has written her first book,
Black Earth City
, and Tanya would have been – rightly – very proud of her for that.

Mrs Uniacke retired and went to live in a little flat quite near. The stairs had got too much for her, and in any case she was well past retirement age. I missed her dreadfully. It would have
been impossible to replace her, so I had to find someone to come in and clean, which I did, unsatisfactorily, for the remainder of my time in Delancey Street.

Then Andrew Verney, who was a doctor, retired, and Dosia and he moved to the country, to Pewsey. Dosia was very unhappy about this; she loved London and her friends, but she made the best of it,
and made a rather ordinary little house pretty and interesting, as all her houses had been. I missed her, but I could go to stay with them.

Another sudden blow was that Jonathan and Ann Clowes decided to live in France. Jonathan wasn’t well and they decided to cut down their clients to twelve and keep a small office in London.
I spent one last weekend at Penhurst with them and Ann told me the following week. She hadn’t said anything to me at the weekend because she didn’t want to spoil it for me. They’d
bought a flat in Villefranche, where they’d been staying for long weekends, and where I’d stayed with them. But now they were going to live there and look for a house further north. Ann
had gradually become a great friend and I knew I was going to miss her very much – especially as they had to stay out of England for a year before they could return to London. They were
selling Penhurst, with its deer, its bluebells and its black rabbit. Ann has a genius for friendship and
I loved her, so the idea of her living in another country meant great
despair to me. When you’re on your own, friends become more and more important. I’d not, at that point, begun to shape up to being solitary.

But the most serious anxiety during this time was Sargy, who was gradually going blind. Since he’d married he’d had three children and Franny was clearly the perfect wife for him.
Everything about his life seemed right and fruitful, and I saw them regularly at their house or mine. He’d had several operations on his eyes, starting way back when we were all at Lemmons:
he had developed cataracts at an unusually early age. Then, after he married, he used to come and stay at Gardnor House for a few days after eye operations, as he had to be very careful not to get
knocked or bumped afterwards. He was extraordinarily stoical about all this, although I remember him sitting one day at the kitchen table and saying, ‘I could bear anything –
anything
, so long as I don’t go blind.’

There had been some hope then, but there seemed to be none now. He had detached retinas and had already lost the sight in one eye, and the other seemed to be slowly failing. He used to teach at
the Camden Arts Centre when I was at Delancey Street, and came sometimes for tea between his classes. His sight then was so poor I made him get a white stick. He said he could hear traffic –
apart from bicycles, I pointed out, and he would be much safer if other people understood that he couldn’t see well. They were heartbreaking teas. He needed to talk about it: I remember him
saying that he almost wished that he
were
blind, that waiting for it to happen was perhaps the worst part. For anyone to become blind is sad: for a painter it’s devastating. Being
extremely ignorant, I went to ask a doctor whether it was possible to donate one’s eye to somebody else, and was told that it wasn’t. The cornea could be transplanted, but not the whole
eye. Finally Sargy had peripheral vision in one eye and he has never clearly seen his fourth child, Michael, who was born a few months before they went to live in Suffolk.

Sargy has continued to paint; the nature of his work has
changed a great deal and it would seem that his poor sight – while it may have changed his direction –
has in no way impeded his evolution. Now he paints huge, stunning pictures that ambush you suddenly when you are at the right distance from them. He and Franny have together transcended this
colossal blow with all the alchemy of courage and love. I have to add a story here. His son Peter, then aged about nine, was, walking home from school one day with a friend, who was overheard to
say, ‘I suppose your father is the best blind painter in Peckham?’ Sargy told me this. It was a good title for
his
autobiography, he thought, but Franny said it should have a
subtitle, ‘Do I take sugar?’ He’s known for finding decision, at any level, difficult.

They decided to move to the country, and spent several months searching for something that they could afford. The West Country, of which Sargy was very fond, proved too expensive, so they
settled for a house in East Anglia where several of their friends lived and painted.

After Mrs Uniacke went, I spent some time refurbishing the basement flat in order to let it. My older brother Robin and his wife rented it for two or three months, but then they had to go back
to their antiques business in Fareham. I put the flat on the market and got a charming young actress called Rebecca Pidgeon. She looked like a young Russian heroine, and David Mamet, her lover whom
she subsequently married, spent much time there. They used to sit in my garden having tea and toast after happy afternoons in bed.

But after nearly eight years there, I decided I must move. I’d never really liked the house, and parking my car, if I’d been out in the evening, became more and more difficult
– sometimes even frightening. Most of all the garden depressed me: it was small, and there wasn’t anything more I could do with it. North London was full of gardens, some much better
than mine, and it would be good not to be living in a noisy, dirty, one-way street. I put my house on the market and started to look for a new one.

The Light Years
had been published to a fairly quiet reception, and I’d begun upon the second volume,
Marking Time
. I knew that moving would be totally
disruptive, but the market in houses had risen enormously, and it felt like the right time to sell. Finding somewhere else proved hopeless. I wanted a flat with three bedrooms, one for a study, and
a decent garden, but there was nothing in North London to be had for the price I hoped to get for Delancey Street. Eventually, I teamed up with two friends who also wanted flats and we found a
large house in Dartmouth Park Avenue with about a quarter of an acre of derelict garden that seemed just right. It was on the market for £400,000. Having offered for it, we had it expensively
surveyed, only to be gazumped by someone who was prepared to pay £500,000. That was that. Meanwhile my house had been offered for and completion was to be in August 1990.

One morning Sargy rang up from Suffolk and said, ‘The house next door to us is going to be on the market. It would be lovely if you came and lived here.’ I hadn’t thought of
living in the country, and I knew hardly anyone in Suffolk: it seemed a mad idea. But then Nicola rang up and said, ‘Ma, you really should go and see that house.’ At that time she and
Elliot had thought of moving to East Anglia and had done some house-hunting. So I took one of my many goddaughters, Minky St Aubyn – who has especially good taste in houses – and we
went to see it.

We went by train and Fran met us at Diss. It was a lovely
summer’s day. Sargy and Fran seemed happy about their move, although everything was very new. It was sixteen
miles from Diss to Bungay. ‘One reason it’s so nice,’ Fran said.

I bought the house in about ten minutes. Nobody had told me that it was beautiful, and the moment I walked into the room that is now my study, I knew I wanted it. The affable owner, a man who,
it transpired, didn’t like living in any one place for long, showed us over it: three attic rooms on the top floor, five bedrooms on the first floor, and three large rooms and a kitchen on
the ground floor. The house, supposedly rebuilt in 1688, was now mainly mid-eighteenth century and had even retained its lovely windows with shutters, its pretty fireplaces, its door furniture as
well as the doors. A bow had been built on to the sitting room in 1840, but nothing had been spoiled. I didn’t know at this point that the property included a large meadow that ran beside the
river and a third of an island. I made my offer, then asked for twenty-four hours to reconsider before I clinched the deal.

When I got home I still wanted the house and the bargain was struck, subject to survey. But then I got really cold feet. What on earth was I doing, moving by myself to the country? True, I had
Sargy and Fran next door, but otherwise it was a foreign land to me. I told Jenner about it, and she said she’d like to see it, so we went again. She said afterwards she was worried that I
might be making the wrong move, but saw the point of the house, as my goddaughter Minky had. The survey proved to be all right, but a good deal needed doing inside to make it what I wanted. The
only staircase was spiral, which meant that anyone going up or down it in a hurry would probably break their leg. The two bathrooms were awful. The kitchen needed a complete facelift. There was no
sensible dining room, but I thought that could be solved if I had a conservatory built off the kitchen, big enough for people as well as plants.

Once all the plans were drawn up I went to America, supposedly to help publicize
The Light Years
, which was being
published that September. This trip was a farcical
failure. I was given a very nice dinner by my publishers, but they hadn’t really laid on anything for me to do. I was supposed to give a reading at Brentano’s bookshop at seven p.m.
When I arrived there was no audience. I asked how anyone was supposed to know that it was happening, and they told me they’d put a notice in the window
that day
. Nobody came. The loyal
workers in the shop said
they
’d stay to hear me. This was deeply embarrassing, but there was nothing for it but to plough on. They sent me to Boston, where I stayed with my friends
Elizabeth Taylor Mead and her husband Nick Dubrul. Elizabeth had been a member of Jenner’s women’s group and I had been very sad when she left to live in America. I was due at a
bookshop there but, again, nothing had been done to publicize the book and nobody came. The trip was bad from the point of morale, and must have cost the publishers a bomb. But I was now so excited
about the new house, that I didn’t care much about the publishing débâcle.

It was Martin who rang to tell me that Kingsley was dying. He was in hospital and they didn’t expect him to get home again. I asked Mart if he thought Kingsley would like
to see me. I asked it desperately – I knew really that he wouldn’t. Mart said he was afraid not. He said that Sally, his sister, was being a wonderful support. They were all seeing him;
he wasn’t alone. Mart rang me later to say that Kingsley had died on 22 October 1995. The funeral was to be private. There would be a memorial service later. It was a second parting, more
painful than the first since now there could never be any resolution. I realized that, until now, I’d never entirely given up hope of that – a hopeless hope. You can leave someone and
still grieve for them. He’d once said in a newspaper interview that the worst thing that had happened to him was meeting me. That’s not true for me: there were many things about him
that I still loved – and shall always love.