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The undertaker asked me whether I wished Mother to lie in the Chapel of Peace, but I said no: I wanted her to stay in her own room until the funeral. He approved of that.
‘The modern ones send them off nowadays at once.’

So for a week she lay in her coffin in a white shroud with a loose ruffle round the neck, and Mrs Uniacke and I dusted the room and put flowers in it and talked about her. Once I said something
about how the room smelt of violets, when we had none to pick. ‘It’s your mother,’ Mrs Uniacke replied. ‘They always get like that.’ I thought of the stories of saints
smelling of violets and wondered briefly how people could distinguish between sanctity and decay. I really could not think about anything, and yet the moment my mind was empty it was filled with
waves of self-recrimination. I kept trying to imagine whether she’d
known
she was dying, and if so why she hadn’t rung her bell. Perhaps she didn’t have time . . . It was
my fault for leaving her.

I asked my aunt Helen to come to the funeral and stay the night with us, and of course she came. She’d been fond of my mother, and I wanted there to be at least someone of her own
generation who’d known and cared about her. It was a comfort to me. Kingsley was kind, but I knew he felt nothing but relief. I asked Monkey what he felt and he said, ‘Nothing.’
He’d had the hardest time with her, as he’d lost our father when our parents separated and our mother had leaned on him to an unbearable degree. So it was with Mrs Uniacke that I went
to scatter her ashes in the small churchyard at Hadley.

For months after that, I was haunted by all the small unkindnesses I’d inflicted, most by default. She, like most people confined, longed to get out, and sometimes suggested that we go for
little drives in the afternoon, but there always seemed to be something else I thought I should do. How often had I staggered in with her breakfast tray, ungracious and clearly cross at having to
get up so early? I think the worst time, and there is no excuse for it, was when I told her she’d been drinking too much when she fell on
the fitted carpet and turned out
to have broken her hip. It hadn’t been her fault, Kingsley always made very strong drinks. It had been her birthday party and I’d bought her a long black velvet dress with a lace collar
in which she looked very distinguished. The Maudlings had come to dinner, Reginald was Home Secretary at the time; they were nice to her and, enjoying herself, she can’t have noticed how much
she had drunk. But that is what I said when she asked me how on earth she could have fallen down. I remember her stricken look and her silence, and also her courage when my brother and I lifted her
into bed, which clearly gave her agonizing pain. She simply gave a little gasp and didn’t cry out. All those years, when I was a child, I’d loved her, and when she became old and needed
my love, I’d failed her.

I began to understand that love is neither a conditional business nor an ever-fixed mark by arrangement. People always know somewhere inside them if they are not loved. No gestures, talk,
conciliation, pronouncements can prevail over that deep instinctual knowledge. So she’d known that of me, and to some extent I think it must have been mutual. After her death when I was
clearing up her papers, I found that she’d kept many letters from both of my brothers, but not one from me.

This was the time when I began to know that Kingsley no longer loved me and, curiously, I think this failure on his part was as painful for him as it was for me. He needed me, but he no longer
wanted me. There were still calmly comfortable times together, but they were increasingly dependent upon the company of other people. Alone, he hadn’t much to say to me, and his discomfort
led to endless criticism. It was my fault that he no longer wanted to go to bed with me, my fault if we were late arriving somewhere, and my fault if I wanted to go home from a party before he did.
Once, driving back at about two a.m., he suddenly said, ‘You’re driving on the
wrong
side of the road.’ I said I wasn’t. The drink and driving laws were dangerously
lax in those days, but I didn’t like getting drunk, and was always careful when I knew I had to drive back.
‘You
are
. You
always
have to be right,
don’t you?’ Before I could say anything, he seized the wheel and wrenched the car to the right-hand side of the road. I’d braked, but the car spun round so that we were facing the
right-hand ditch. If a car had come round the corner it wouldn’t have been able to avoid hitting us.

I took his hand off the wheel. ‘Shut up or I won’t drive at all.’ I had to reverse back to the left-hand side of the road and we proceeded in silence until he said,
‘Perhaps you’re right.’

It was this sort of thing I dreaded. Then something else happened that dominated the next several months.

Kingsley had met Elizabeth Taylor as briefly as I had, but he appreciated and admired her writing as much as I did. The Taylors invited us over to Penn in Buckinghamshire where
they lived. We were to go to lunch. We had drinks in their garden, and John, Kingsley remarked approvingly, was very good at making them. John had been a sweet manufacturer but was now retired. He
was a bluff, totally unintellectual man whose favourite occupation was felling trees and chopping them up. They had two grown-up children. Kingsley also got on with Elizabeth. I have always felt
shy with artists whom I very much admired – Sybille Bedford and Peggy Ashcroft are two who come to mind – and this made me alternate between silence and banality. None the less, it was
a very pleasant day. They told us that they always went to separate pubs in the evening, as Elizabeth liked to sit quietly listening to the pub talk.

Quite soon after this they came to spend the day with us. Elizabeth and I went blackberrying in our meadow, which she loved – she’d not done it for years. Later in the year, they
came to lunch. Kingsley took Elizabeth into the drawing room for drinks, but John followed me into the kitchen. ‘Liz has got cancer. I just thought you ought to know,’ he said. His tone
was matter-of-fact. ‘Now. Are you going to join us for drinks?’ In a minute, I said. I felt faint with anxiety. Nothing more was said.

They had lunch and went home at about five o’clock. As soon as they’d gone I told Kingsley, who was horrified. I couldn’t
imagine how John would manage to
look after her when she got really ill and what could we do? Kingsley put his arms round me, and said, ‘Anything you like.’ There were tears in his eyes. Most of us then thought that
cancer spelled death.

I started writing to her. She loved overheard sayings – anything faintly ridiculous. We had an old builder who suddenly said to me one day, ‘I had a friend who accidentally had a
letter from Poland.’ She loved that kind of thing. She was in hospital for a time, and when she came out I asked if they’d like to come for a weekend. I spoke to John, who said she was
better but still weak from the treatment and would need to spend a lot of time in bed. We agreed that I should put her in the room on the ground floor. I remember hunting in antiques shops for the
right jug to put flowers in her room. I found it: a pale lavender blue embossed with white china feathers. During that weekend she told me that she’d had a breast off. ‘Imagine if
it’d been the other Elizabeth Taylor’s breast,’ she said. ‘It would be headline news.’ The weekend went well; they didn’t have to think about food and Liz rested
and said it had been lovely. A repeat visit was arranged, but half an hour after they were due, John rang me: ‘I’m afraid the weekend is off. We got as far as your drive, but then Liz
was frightfully sick.’

After that, I used to go over to see her. She had a remission, and John was taking her for a trip abroad. They’d drive: she adored his old Bristol and was looking forward to it.

I’d just published my collection of short stories
Mr Wrong,
which I’d dedicated to her. I posted her the first copy, which she got just before they left. She wrote me a long
letter about it, and John said she burst into tears when she saw the dedication. But she wrote again from France, saying that she’d had to give up the holiday. Her back hurt so much that she
could hardly walk or enjoy anything. They were starting back that evening.

The last time I saw her she was in bed, very pale but her beautiful eyes sparkled with a wry amusement at the slightest sign of a joke. While I was there, the window cleaner came to do the
windows of her bedroom. ‘You look nice and cosy in there.’‘Why don’t you pop in with me?’ She’d knitted me an enormous beige muffler.
‘Not a very interesting present, but there is love in every stitch,’ she said. Not long before, when she’d still been able to get up, she made me a risotto for lunch, and as I ate
it I realized what an heroic effort it must have been.

She died soon after that. John rang me to tell us, and asked if Kingsley would say something at her funeral. This he did extremely well: it was, indeed, the best thing about the service.
Afterwards there was tea and drinks at their house, but I found I couldn’t bear to be with people, and went upstairs and sat on her bed.

She’d struggled during that last year to finish her last novel,
Blaming
, and Kingsley reviewed it for the
Observer
. Here is something he wrote about her:

Soon after her death John asked me if I’d write her biography. I refused because – among many of her Austen traits – she led a life that contained very little incident.
She’d asked Robert Liddell, the great friend of Barbara Pym and expert on the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett, with whom she had corresponded most, to destroy the correspondence. I miss her
still, and in particular feel deprived of all the novels she didn’t have the time to write. It was after her death that I got to know her daughter, Joanna, and we can talk about her sometimes
to our mutual comfort.

After
Mr Wrong
, I seemed to dry up. I still wrote my piece for Drusilla Beyfus every month, but otherwise seemed to have no capacity to write. I remember standing at the kitchen sink one
day
thinking, I can’t really be unhappy, because I never cry nowadays. I was so full of Valium and Tryptosil that I can’t now imagine how I managed to drive,
especially late at night after a long day. The thought occurred again that we’d not be staying at Lemmons. I’d no particular reason to think this, but it filled me with terror. My
greatest solace then was the immense, ill-kept but beautiful rambling garden. I’d planted a good many trees, and attempted to bring some order to one of the borders, and there was the rose
garden and the majestic cedar; the idea that I must leave all this was more than I could bear to contemplate. I dismissed the notion as fanciful and morbid.

It was about then that we went on a short holiday to Italy with Jim Durham, who’d recently married another Australian doctor called Nita. Kingsley had become much attached to Jim whom he
not only found good company, but whom – more unusually – he listened to and trusted. I’d once heard Jim remark that no woman over thirty-five was of much, if any, sexual interest
and he implied that such women weren’t worth having any real conversation with. He also said he never read novels written by people he knew, in case he found he didn’t like them.
Naturally he’d read Kingsley’s as he’d been reading them before he knew us. It seemed a silly point to me but my self-esteem was at rock bottom anyway.

He’d taken his car for the journey, and when I offered to take my turn at the considerable driving involved he turned me down. He and Nita did that. I felt like an anonymous outsider.
Kingsley had always said he had no interest in buildings or pictures, which we were going to Rome to see. With Jim his attitude to these pleasures changed and he became enthusiastic. Jim was only
too pleased to take him round and tell him about everything he was to see.

All my life, I have never wanted to be told anything about a picture before I have seen it. I need to have my own first impression to myself. So, in galleries I left them to it, and went round
on my own. I’m sure this was taken as me being contrary
and sulking, but the situation was such – Kingsley spent all his time talking to Jim, and Nita was wrapped up
in the new-found happiness of marriage – that to be on my own was a relief. I was also, I realize now, physically and mentally worn out when we went on this journey. But I was glad that
Kingsley actually wanted to go abroad again, and knew that he wouldn’t go without me: he needed, however grumpily, to take me for granted.

Jim was clearly trying to help Kingsley both with his phobias and his loss of libido. To aid the latter, he suggested that he go to a sex therapist and, to my surprise, Kingsley agreed. After
he’d been three or four times, he said she’d asked to see me. I went. She was an interesting mixture of shrewdness and naivety, and after a few minutes exclaimed, ‘From all
I’ve heard about you, I thought you were going to be simply
awful
, and you’re not, are you?’ I said I didn’t know. There were one or two more sessions with the three
of us. Then she asked to see me again. She asked me what I wanted, and I heard myself saying I wanted to stop smoking. ‘I know just the person for that,’ she said.

And so began my experience of psychotherapy. Once a week I went to a basement flat in South Kensington to spend exactly one hour with a young woman, Kate Hopkinson, who was about the same age as
my daughter. We discussed my addiction – why I wanted to smoke and what it did for me. I was fifty-three years old.

When I’d been going to her for three or four weeks, Kingsley said it had been suggested to him by his therapist that it would be a good idea if we went away for a long weekend with our dog
Rosie. We found a hotel at Woodstock that was prepared to take dogs and Kingsley wrote to Iris and John Bayley to say that we should be in their neighbourhood. They asked us to dine and stay the
night with them at Steeple Aston. The day before we were to set off, Victor Stiebel rang and asked if I’d lunch with him the following day, Friday. He usually arranged our meetings with some
notice, and I intuited that there was some reason for this sudden invitation, nevertheless I felt I couldn’t postpone the weekend and
said how sorry I was I couldn’t
come. ‘Of course you must go. Never mind, darling Jane. Goodbye.’ And he rang off.