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Lunch was served by an Irish lady, dressed like a poppy, but at least she was intermittently there. As we ate he said the book would benefit from some cutting. I said I didn’t want to do
this, and he said, ‘Well, I will publish it as it stands, and you will learn that way.’ As soon as lunch was over, he became amorous and mildly blackmailing. ‘Of course, I could
change my mind,’ he said, as he pursued me round the table. Fortunately it had sharp corners that I was more agile at negotiating than he. In the end he gave up gracefully, the waters closed
over the incident, and it was never repeated. I got fifty pounds in advance of royalties.

I began to feel rich and professional. I wrote a couple of pieces for
Vogue
for Siriol Hugh Jones, their enchanting features editor who became a friend. Siriol – who died when she
was still quite young, of cancer – was one of those life-enhancing people: immensely funny, clever, warm and more gifted than her job
allowed her to be. She could write
well about anything, but there was always something perceptibly vulnerable about her which perhaps got in the way of her finding her true métier
.
I remember her coming to dinner one
evening – I’d progressed to giving occasional dinner parties – with a handsome young actor and saying, ‘This is Derek Hart: I am in love with him.’ Derek became a
well-known TV presenter on the
Tonight
show. She married him and they had a daughter, but the marriage went wrong. She became ill, and was valiant and funny about it –
‘
Birdseed
instead of my breast! Isn’t that an extraordinary thing to think of?’ It’s odd: I didn’t know her very well, but I still miss her and remember her
with great affection.

My friend Phoebe Noël Smith who’d been at Instow and with whom I’d shared a room brought her uncle Mathew Smith to dinner. He looked not unlike a friendly, enquiring prawn, with
glasses so thick that you could hardly see his eyes. One winter, Phoebe said he had suggested to take her and me to Brighton for the weekend, as he wanted to get away from things.
‘Things’ turned out to be various ladies, but although Phoebe and I had a good time poking about in the secondhand bookshops and staying in a luxurious hotel, Uncle Matthew, as we all
called him, was distinctly uneasy throughout. When we left the hotel, he was constantly looking behind him in case any of the ladies had discovered his hideout and were pursuing him. He painted
Barbara, the third occupant of the Instow ménage, a great deal: her beauty was both calm and voluptuous and suited him well. Uncle Matthew admired my dining-room décor (the only
person who did) with its intense pink walls and scarlet woodwork. He was a very modest man – seemed to fit in with any company – and although by then he must have been fairly old, he
didn’t seem to be any age at all.

But most of my life in terms of energy and time was spent in dealing with the IWA and Robert. I’d been promoted to being a member of the council and it didn’t take long to discover
that this all-parties association had spawned its own internal politics. Tom
Rolt, like Robert, was a man of many gifts. He’d been an engineer, had a passion for railways
and canals; it was his book
Narrow Boat
that had drawn Robert’s attention to inland waterways. They had things in common, such as an intense dislike of modern technology and
mass-produced artefacts, and nostalgia for the – carefully selected – past. They both loved and explored England; Tom lived on his boat
Cressy
with his then wife, Angela. They
also shared tastes in literature – notably ghost stories. Tom wrote a collection entitled
Sleep no More
that impressed Robert, who also began writing ghost stories and encouraged me to
do the same. They were a powerful combination when it came to running the IWA, which I think would never have achieved its eventual influence without either of them. But inevitably they began to
grate against one another, and council meetings became tense with unspoken criticism. Robert also started a flirtation with Angela that didn’t go down well with anyone.

However, the eventual break was several years off, and during that time we all, together and severally, made trips on various canals throughout the country. The most notable was in a small hired
boat called
Ailsa Craig
, in which we explored the northern canals with the Sutherlands and the Rolts. The lock dimensions were unsuited to the narrow boat, but for six weeks we journeyed in
it and its engine never failed to fail us. Somehow, between them, James Sutherland and Tom Rolt kept it going. I learned to work locks, cook suppers on a primus with steamers, and to steer. The
high point of our journey was the navigation of the Huddersfield Narrow Canal, which ran across the Pennines from Ashton to Huddersfield. It had seventy-four locks in its nineteen miles, all of
them in bad repair, and at its summit a tunnel, Standedge, that was three and a half miles long with adits to the main railway line, which meant it frequently filled with dense black smoke. We got
stuck in it, and had to remove our rubbing strakes, which gave us an extra three-quarters of an inch leeway. It was an adventure, and we were the last people to go through the tunnel.

I grew to love canals and narrow boats: their secretive beauty, the way they slipped though large industrial towns and into country at a speed so leisurely – less than
four miles an hour – that you could notice where you were. I loved the ingenious simplicity of the engineering: the locks that took you up or down and the occasional staircases that rose or
fell dramatically in the landscape. The tunnels dripped silently, sometimes with a towpath in them, sometimes not, and aqueducts bridged wide valleys. There was the amazing swing bridge in an iron
trough at the junction of the Bridgewater and Manchester Ship Canals and the wonderful hydraulic mechanism that lifted boats bodily from the river Weaver up to the Welsh section of the Shropshire
Union Canal. Thereabouts we went through a tunnel that had an inn at the end of it. In the inn there was a large portrait of a cow that had swum right through the tunnel, they said, and had been
given a pint of brandy to restore her. This event was spoken of as though it had occurred the previous week; in fact it had happened before the First World War.

The boat trips taught me a lot about the country that I might never have known. Robert and I slept in a tent that had to be pitched every night in pouring rain – it seemed always to rain.
But boats can bring out the worst in people. Robert, who was never handy in an ordinary domestic way, expected everything to be done for him. The only thing he wanted to do in a boat was to steer
it and, in the beginning at least, he was very bad at it. This made him cross, and he quarrelled with me, and argued with Tom, and was an uneasy member of the crew. All the same, that whole trip in
the north was a wonderful adventure to me, and I remember thinking,
Why
does he have to spoil something so exciting and enjoyable with black moods and scenes? Why can’t we just
be
in it without all this drama and tension? It was much the same feeling I’d had as a young adult, when I knew that my parents weren’t getting on, a bit like being shot at by
snipers when you were on a picnic.

I kept no journal or even a diary, and I am aware as I write this that although I have assembled the main events of these three years the order of them is shaky. Looking
back, I can see that my feelings about Robert were slowly, undramatically changing. In fact, our threesome was on the move: Ray had taken a lover about whom Robert knew nothing. She and I still
confided in each other and there was affection and trust between us, but in different ways our lives were beginning not to revolve around Robert.

During that time I’d learned much; I’d written more and had begun to earn money from it, and I was earning more from the increased IWA work. In fact, the money situation, though far
from secure, wasn’t so worrying. However, I hadn’t been happy and was inwardly rebelling against Robert’s despairing ideas about life. I was also managing to have some life apart
from him, initially made easy when he took Ray on country trips, but gradually not dependent upon that.

James and Anthea Sutherland had moved from London to a village outside Doncaster where James had a job. They very kindly let me take Nicola to their home when Nanny had her holiday. I did this
for two summers and she and I had some good times together. I began teaching her to read from a wonderful Victorian book called
Reading Without Tears
and she made great progress. She loved,
as all children do, being read aloud to: ‘Reege to me,’ she would say, the moment things looked like getting dull. There was also a cat that she called Plucifer, who entranced her.
She’d inherited her father’s love of animals, and her favourite afternoon treat was to be taken to the zoo, to which we went many times.

Once we went to the smaller mammals’ house, which contained pottos, kinkajou and tree pandas. It was presided over by a very old keeper, who took one look at Nicola and then invited her to
go through the house with him. He took animals out of the cages for her to handle and stroke. At the end of the tour, when I thanked him, he said, ‘It’s nothing but a pleasure. I used
to do just the same for her father when he was her age. I’d have known her anywhere.’
Indeed, as far back as I can remember, she’d always had the right touch
and confidence with any creature.

There was one awful moment when, with Peter, we were taken behind the scenes in the reptile house. Nicola put her hand into a tank that contained a horned viper, coiled to strike. Pete saw this
and said very quietly, ‘Take your hand out of there, darling,
very
gently,’ and she did. I broke into a cold sweat with fear, but no fuss was made. Pete simply told her never to
put her hand into any of the tanks.

She longed more than anything to have a dog, and Pete gave her a white Pekinese who combined extreme beauty with a cheerful disposition. He’d been called Butterfly of Mulberry, but she
called him Bushy and he was a great joy to her.

Robert couldn’t very well object to the time I spent with Nicola, but he made difficulties about other people, and I took to concealing from him any time I spent with friends. The fact
that I’d written a book that was to be published also caused resentment. Robert had ambitions to write, but so far he’d only written critical pieces for the
Nineteenth Century
.
He was writing ghost stories, but no magazines were accepting them. He also wrote a play, a Ruritanian romance, but nothing came of that either. Wanting to help him with this, I suggested we could
both write enough ghost stories to make a book that Cape could publish. We wrote three stories each, and Cape, though reluctant, agreed to do it. The volume was to be called
We Are for the
Dark
, and at that point, the stories weren’t individually attributed. I thought that this would ease the situation, but it didn’t really.

I hadn’t left my marriage
for
Robert; I would have left anyway. I’d never wanted to marry him, if, indeed, that had been possible, but I felt guilty that he’d become
more of an emotional responsibility than anything else.

At the beginning of 1950, when I was nearly twenty-six, Dosia and Barry asked me to a New Year party. I wore a beautiful dress that Peter had given me and my only grand piece
of jewellery, an opal and diamond necklace with earrings to match.

Dosia and Barry had moved from Bedford Gardens to a studio flat in Carlton Hill, a few yards away from our St John’s Wood wartime home. The studio was large, the perfect place for a big
party; everybody had dressed up and it was full of friends whom I’d not seen for ages, including Anne Richmond, now married to her Pete who had survived years in a Japanese war camp. Also
there were Marie Paneth and one of her sons, and Dosia’s youngest sister, Ruth, who arrived late with a young man called Kenneth Tynan, both looking as though they’d arrived late for a
very good reason. But there were also a number of people I didn’t know, among them a dark, glamorous man who asked me to dance with him. He wasn’t very good at it, which was reassuring,
because I wasn’t either. The party went on until one or two a.m., and somebody must have given me a lift home, but I don’t remember who.

The next morning I was woken by Joanna who said that a man with a big black poodle wanted to see whether I was as beautiful by day as by night. ‘Tell him certainly not,’ I said,
grumpy and hung-over. She came back and said he’d invited me to dine with him that evening: he’d left his address and would I come at about eight p.m.? His name was Michael Behrens, she
added: he’d told her to say this in case I’d forgotten. I’d known he was called Michael, but really
nothing else. I rang Dosia and asked her about him. She
said he worked in the City, was married to a very nice person called Felicity and had three sons. ‘If he asked you to dinner, I should go, Jane, no harm in that.’ But in one quite
serious sense there was.

I went, assuming that I was going to have dinner, with Felicity, in their house in Hanover Terrace. When I got there, and before I rang the bell, I noticed that the door was ajar, so I went in.
The sound of Mozart was coming from the floor above. I went up into a large, dark, mutely lit drawing room and Michael rose from a distant sofa to greet me. ‘I’m taking you out to
dinner,’ he said, ‘but I thought we’d have a tiny drink first.’ He poured us martinis and as he held out the glass to me I realized, with a shock, I was physically attracted
to him. It made me extremely shy and breathless.

He took me to the Étoile in Charlotte Street, in those days a modest, well-run French restaurant with hard chairs and little hanging lamps shrouded in red silk. The food was delicious,
but I couldn’t eat much. I’d fallen in love.

One admirable consequence of meeting Michael was that I found a much better home for Nicola. When I spoke of my anxieties for her, he told me that his cousin, Josie Baird, who lived next door to
him, had just had her third child and wanted a nanny, but was worried about the expense. They had a daughter, Julia, of Nicola’s age and he thought they might be pleased to have her live with
them and share Nanny Buss. I went to tea with Josie in her beautiful drawing room overlooking Regent’s Park. I felt she didn’t like me very much, but she agreed to see Nanny and Nic and
to discuss the finances with Pete, who was by then at Slimbridge having founded the Wild Fowl Trust. Everything was arranged, and Nic, Nanny and Bushy went to live with the Bairds.