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There came a weekend when Tessa was off for two days, when Mrs Uniacke was having
her
weekend off, the local doctor who’d been looking after Cecil was having
his
weekend off, and Jill and I were on our own. On Friday, he was very low and ill, but when Jill put him to bed he said, ‘I’ve had a
lovely
day.’ By Saturday
morning things were certainly no better, and Tessa said she’d come back at once. With a burst of inspiration I rang up Ursula Vaughan Williams. I didn’t know her then, but I knew that
Jill loved her and that she had a unique reputation for being the right person for anyone in dire need. She came at once, and she was.

My daughter, her then husband and their three children were coming to Sunday lunch from Gloucestershire. By the time I had realized that this wasn’t going to be the best day for it, they
were already on their way.

I saw very little of Cecil on Sunday, but after my family had gone I went in to him and asked him if he would like some tea. ‘It would be bliss.’ He drank from a small mug with a
bendy straw and lay back and closed his eyes. As Jill was snatching a few moments of much-needed rest and we weren’t leaving him alone by then, I settled down to read. He said, ‘When
are you going to begin?’ We’d abandoned
Emma
for
Pride and Prejudice
. I read him a chapter, and I thought he’d gone to sleep. ‘Read me one more chapter.’
When I’d read this, he said, ‘Marvellous stuff,’ and then slept a little. Tessa came back. Tamasin was there. Monkey fetched Dan from the station. Sean, Cecil’s eldest son,
arrived. During that long night’s vigil, we held his hand in turn and loved him through his dying. He slipped so quietly away from us that we hardly knew. He said once that he didn’t
fear death but rather the act of dying, and I hope that in return for all his courage and endurance, that night, at any rate, he was spared the fear.

He was buried near Thomas Hardy at Stinsford in Dorset. It was a quiet and private funeral. Jill gave him a chaplet of laurels made of leaves from our garden, and so he was left, crowned, beside
one of the poets he’d loved most.

For some days after that, none of us wanted the outside world. Ursula went home, Dan went back to school, and Tammy, I think, to Cambridge, but for the rest, the house
enclosed us kindly while we absorbed the shock.

A week or two later, the Spenders invited Jill and me to stay for two weeks in their house in France. It was an uneasy two weeks, although I felt that the Spenders were kind in just the right
way. For Jill, I think it was a very hard time. She was physically and emotionally exhausted, and for her I can only imagine that it used up some of the agonizing time to be got through. Shock is
not always something that happens suddenly to people, it’s more often the actuality of something they have long dreaded. It was the first time I’d been away without Kingsley since we
married. Harold Evans asked me to write a piece about Cecil for the
Sunday Times
and I agreed, largely because one or two people had written spitefully about his work during the months
before he died, and I wanted to set the record straight. Jill agreed to this, and I finished it while we were in France. It was well received and got many letters – including a bitter missive
from Rosamond Lehmann, accusing me, amongst other things, of deliberately choosing the worst possible picture of Cecil. It was taken when he was already ill – a family group with Jill and the
children. I wrote back briefly saying I was sorry the piece had upset her, and that I’d no control over what pictures the paper used for the piece.

All that summer, apart from writing a few short stories and doing my stint for
Brides
magazine, I was working on the programme for a festival in Salisbury. My friend
Geraint Jones was to do the music, and I the rest. It was the first festival of arts to take place there, and it meant that the problems of mounting it were ten times as difficult as they had been
in Cheltenham. For some reason, the slightest whiff of any festival brings all the amateurs out of the woodwork. Geraint and I had to remain firm about this.

If there was to be a festival that people would come any distance
to visit, it had to have professional – even international – artists in its programme. As
Geraint repeatedly and patiently said, there was nothing to stop the local amateur societies from organizing opportunities for their performances at other times of the year. If we were to get Arts
Council backing, or indeed any outside backing, we had to produce a programme that would interest them enough to help finance it.

Geraint did marvellously well. He conducted Handel’s oratorio,
Jephtha
, which had first been performed in Salisbury Cathedral and which Handel had written in the gatehouse to the
cathedral. I got a friend to collect and arrange an exhibition of Handeliana in the gatehouse. Walter Klein gave a Mozart recital. I got Angus Wilson to give a lecture on Dickens. Geraint imported
Paco Peña, a wonderful Spanish group who played and danced. Robin Ray produced a theatre programme, aided by Colin Welch’s wife, Sybil, in the Playhouse. Princess Alexandra agreed to
be our patron and to come and open the festival.

I arranged that Sargy Mann should have his first exhibition, a joint one with Patrick Procktor, a friend of Cecil Beaton, with whom I went to stay to talk about the programme. Ralph Kirkpatrick
was to give a recital of Scarlatti sonatas in the double cube room at Wilton.

We arranged a Festival Club, and our kind wine merchant, Christopher Leaver, organized a hogshead of decent red wine. Geraint, Winnie, his wife and a marvellous violinist, and I took a cottage
at Broadchalke where we and Ralph would stay. It was very hard work, but in spite of some setbacks, the festival had its high points, chief of which was Ralph’s recital, which was magical. He
said afterwards it was the best room for sound that he’d ever played in. When it came to an encore, he played my favourite sonata of all in my honour, one of the nicest compliments I’ve
had in my life.

The Salisbury Festival is now a large and very successful event, but that was the beginning of it. I became very attached to Ralph. It was said that when he met the Pope and was kissing his
hand, he
had an uncontrollable desire to bite it as he suddenly saw the interesting headline ‘Man Bites Pope’ as a welcome change from ‘Man Bites
Dog’.

Kingsley became very fond of Geraint and Winnie. Geraint had all the Welsh love of language and, besides being a very good organist and harpsichord player, he was a conductor for the Kirk-man
concerts for many years. Winnie, a fine musician in her own right, had, and still has that bewitching charm that comes from being directly and always herself. They lived near us, in Arkley, and we
saw them regularly while we were at Lemmons. Once we went with them to Normandy for a short holiday. They had a caravan in which they slept and Kingsley and I slept in various hotels along the way.
This was one of the last few holidays we had abroad together: Kingsley said he didn’t like travelling, or abroad, and preferred to stay at home.

And then, shortly after her eightieth birthday, my mother died. She’d been slowly diminishing for months and hardly ever left her room or, eventually, her bed. It became
increasingly difficult for me to communicate with her, because an awful artificiality had set in. When I went into her room, she’d turn off her radio and smile – a rictus –
displaying a pleasure that she, poor thing, evidently didn’t feel in the least. She talked a good deal about her death, but in a way that I found it hard to respond to – my death talk
on her terms quickly ran out. I felt pity for her, for her bitterly unsatisfactory life, and for her – she thought hidden – resentment. She resented any time I didn’t spend with
her, feeling neglected. She told my older visiting brother that I never gave her lunch, which was nonsense, but she was convincing enough for him to confront me seriously. She read a great deal,
had taught herself Russian when she was about seventy in order to read the great novelists in that language. She was too rheumatic to use her hands much, but she crocheted vast lovely blankets and
shawls. Her memory was, I thought sometimes, wilfully selective. She’d say, ‘I haven’t seen you for
days
,’
when I brought her lunch, having
brought her breakfast earlier the same day and sat with her the evening before. She resented all the people coming to the house, who she rightly thought deflected attention from her, and she often
said, ‘Why do you
do
it?’ When I said Kingsley liked them to come, she changed the subject. Kingsley resented the amount of time I spent with her, so whatever I did someone was
displeased.

My mother had few friends. She’d really always preferred the family – particularly her own – although she was also fond of many of the Howards. But she had only one remaining
brother now, who lived in Westmorland. He used to come down about once a year to stay a few days, and one or two faithful old cousins made the journey too. She was terrified of Philip and Martin,
and though she enjoyed Kingsley’s company when he dropped in for an evening drink with her, she felt she bored him and I’m afraid she was right. Self-pity was her stumbling block. It
was as though she was coated in it, like flypaper, we got stuck on the outside, and were paralysed – like flies – unable to penetrate further. Sometimes I used to feel unbearably sorry
for her, and the next minute exasperated, repelled. Monkey bore his half of the brunt, and although she loved him, it was never enough. Her chief consolation was my old Siamese cat, Hugo, who had a
good deal of time to spare, and spent it all with her. He sat on her bed all day in the attitude of a roast chicken and love passed easily between them – she had only to touch him and his
purr, like the starting up of a distant lorry, would gratifyingly begin.

Then, one weekend, when half a dozen people were staying with us, and Mrs Uniacke was having her weekend off, and I had taken her breakfast, I discovered she’d been incontinent –
something that had never happened before. It caused her agonizing shame and disgust. Monkey and I lifted her into a chair, and remade her bed, saying that it didn’t matter, it happened to
lots of people, it was just a piece of bad luck, but I could see that she wasn’t comforted. We stayed with her while she had breakfast and she cheered up a bit.

Outside her room when the door was shut, Monkey and I looked at each other. Monkey said, ‘
Poor
Mum.’

‘I know. She always said the two things she dreaded most were senility and incontinence. She’s far from senile.’

‘I should think that would simply make her mind the other thing more.’ We decided that we ought to tell her doctor because, apart from anything else, she
looked
so ill.

I’d never liked my mother’s doctor, but she did, so it had been pointless to say so. She didn’t turn up until about seven in the evening, and then she was in no good mood.

‘What’s all this I hear?’ She bent over my mother and listened to her heart for a minute or two. ‘There’s nothing wrong with you. You’ve got a perfectly good
commode. Why on earth didn’t you use that?’ My mother didn’t reply, simply gazed up at the doctor with frightened eyes. ‘Let’s see you get on it now. Go on. You know
you can jolly well do it if you try.’

Speechless, my mother began to struggle out of bed. I began, ‘Doctor, I really don’t think––’

She interrupted me. ‘Leave it to me.’ Then, to my mother, ‘You see? You can, when you can be bothered to try.’

It’s to my eternal shame that I didn’t turn on the doctor then – why didn’t I? I didn’t want to have a row with her in front of my mother, who was distressed
enough. But I suspect that cowardice came into it as well. There must have been a way of shutting her up
without
a row but I didn’t know how to.

The doctor told my mother to take a Valium and left. She had other calls to make, she said, and it was supposed to be her Saturday off. My mother murmured an apology, but she was breathless from
her efforts. As soon as she’d gone, I helped my mother get back into bed, and rearranged her pillow so that she could sit upright, which she preferred. I got her the Valium and kissed her
when she’d taken it. She was still trembling. ‘She shouldn’t have made you do that. If you want another pee, you ring your bell and
I
’ll come,’ I said, and then
that I was going to get her evening whisky, and that when I’d
cut the meat and served dinner, I’d make her a hot milky drink and stay with her while she drank
it.

‘You’re a good little nurse,’ she said. It was the nicest thing she’d said to me for – oh, years, and tears were hot in my eyes. I got the whisky, served dinner,
then heated some milk with Horlicks. When I took it in to her, she was dead. I picked up her small frail wrist, there was no pulse – but, anyway, I
knew
she was dead.

The knowledge that she’d died entirely alone, that I hadn’t been there to hold her hand, to comfort her, was one of the most painful experiences of my life. I picked up her barely
warm hand again to hold it now. Countless fragments of her life – or, rather, what I knew of it – flitted through my mind with soundless speed. I thought of her lying on the sofa at
Lansdowne Road, crying from the pain and shock of having all her teeth out; of her dancing to me suddenly in the drawing room – pent-up frustration translated into an amazing grace and
beauty. I remembered her reading aloud to me from Austen and Dickens, of being her lady’s maid when she dressed up for parties. She told me once – how did she manage to speak of it?
– of seeing a man undo his trousers when he met her as a little girl in the street. Diaghilev had told her once that the ugliest part of a woman was her knees but that hers were beautiful. I
thought of her gentleness and care when she dressed my six-year-old cousin Robert’s hand after it was shut in a car door, of her making me jump small jumps bareback on the pony with my arms
folded, and falling off and having to do it again. I thought, too, of her teaching me bar exercises with a riding whip, how different she looked when she laughed, and the smell of her skin –
Earl Grey tea with a touch of lemon. I remembered her voice when Nana had her stroke and she knelt on the floor with her in her arms – the tenderness, the love. I’d never heard her
speak like that before – ‘You’re a good little nurse . . .’ I had that. She’d not known then that I was going to fail her when she said it. I kissed her hand and laid
it back where it had been on her breast, and went to ring the doctor.