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near-panic. These calmly pronounced reminders made no impression on the pair, who began scanning the company for someone else to talk to. David walked away from them and out of the party.
    (I had assumed, wrongly it seems, that David had told them, in very precise Anglo-Saxon terms, where to get off. A friend who was lodging in our Hammersmith house at the time assures me that David returned home early in a state of shock and disbelief. He had been wounded by their snubbing of him, offended deeply by their haughty rudeness. He had left them in silence, his dignity intact.)
    ‘I hear enough about books and writers,’ David would declare, on opening the front door to Angus (always accompanied by his companion, Tony Garrett) or to Iris (who often came alone). Since the other guests were not literary types, the conversation ranged over a variety of topics. Iris never cared to talk about herself or her work, and was happy to ask questions, beginning with ‘And what do you do?’ Angus, by contrast, adored being the centre of attention, and allowed David to tease him and even, on one occasion, tell him he was talking bollocks. ‘I do like your wicked friend,’ Angus once confided. ‘But he’s bad for me. He makes me feel so
camp
.’
    I remember two dinner parties made hellish by the self-importance of authors. Both occurred towards the end of David’s life, when his cooking was unsurpassable. I had admired a certain biographer for many years, but nothing in her writing prepared us for the onslaught of egoism we were subjected to that night. She made no comment on the food David had prepared with such devoted skill, and assumed he was a hired chef, to judge by her parting words to me. She arrived late, barged into the sitting room and demanded, in stentorian tones, if anyone present knew anything about death by drowning. A stunned silence ensued. It was her theory – a theory that dominated the conversation for virtually the whole evening – that Virginia Woolf had not committed suicide.
Au contraire
– Leonard had murdered her, dragged her body down to the river, weighted it with stones (the very stones found in her pockets) and ditched it into the water. It made sense, she maintained, at length. Leonard was Jewish and his wife famously anti-Semitic. What better reason had he for killing her?
    That evening, however, was – in retrospect – a mere foretaste of the horror to come. An old and dear friend of mine had developed an interest in the copious writings of an American named May Sarton, a tireless diarist, autobiographer, novelist and poet. She and Sarton had corresponded, and a friendship of sorts had begun. I was in Nairn, in the far north of Scotland, working on the opening chapters of my novel
Gabriel’s Lament
when a parcel containing a selection from Sarton’s vast output arrived. I took time off from writing to read a novel – I have forgotten the title though not, alas, the content – about an elderly woman being placed in an institution. I found the book insufferably sentimental. The central character is a saintly victim in a world of cruel doctors and nurses. My own first novel,
At the Jerusalem
, is concerned with an irritable and irritating widow coping with life in a home, surrounded by people who are neither saints nor demons. I phoned my dear friend and asked her what crime I had perpetrated to merit the punishment of having to read such twaddle. She advised me to turn to the diaries. I did so, but not for long. I soon wearied of details of book-signings and meetings with her devoted readers, who were all women and mostly lesbian. There were no insights into the work of other writers, and the bland prose was completely devoid of those charm-free asides that inform the liveliest published diaries – like those of the composer Ned Rorem, for example, who finds space in the latest entertaining volumes to savage each new work by his self-appointed rival Elliott Carter.
    Four months before Circe came