That was the theory, at any rate, though I often didn’t want to move on when they did, or they didn’t when I did, and it all went wrong; suddenly we were back on dry land; scenes on stairs, or outside stations. These often seemed to involve transport, which was fitting, given the men’s fleet-footedness. I remember one scene (though not the narrative context) when one gloriously dashing and polygamous swain, made voluble and highly persuasive by whisky but also insane and uncoordinated, was trying to persuade me we should leave an Intercity train, by the door, as we sped through the Oxfordshire countryside. I stopped him; at a deep level, despite my superficially risky behaviour, I always wanted to survive, and I did. Only once did I get to the point of asking for tranquillisers when something went wrong, for I have always been shy of medication, have never even taken a sleeping pill, though I go through phases of not sleeping. I remember sobbing on the floor at home, with the Valium pills in their packaging inside a paper bag three feet away on the table. I would go to the table, pick up the bag, open the packaging, take the pill. And the nearness of the possibility was so shocking that I stopped crying and got up off the floor. At some level I still loved my consciousness, even though it was a consciousness of pain and folly, and feared changing it, and losing myself.
I remember sex in a churchyard; in a garden; in a room at a party where no one else was; with a famous male-to-female transexual and his friend (not half-way concluded, for obvious reasons). And yet I daresay I was having less sex than people who had quietly married at twenty. But the rest of the time I read and wrote, and I never did anyone’s washing or cooking, which left me much time to get on with my writing, which I did in a solid and serious way, and I did not even think about babies. I was learning, very slowly, more about men, and something about what it meant to be a woman.
My best relationships then were with girls. My friend Barbara Goodwin, for example, a funny, brilliant, reed-thin redhead who knew more about everything than me, and taught me I could go to art galleries and theatres, and drove us to Yugoslavia, where I cooked hideous fry-ups of mackerel and we looked at huge stars over the unlit sea, and talked about Gilbert Ryle’s philosophy, and slowly revealed to each other the truth about our childhoods, as growing distance allowed us to discern it.
At first I read her comically wrong. She was a Somerville Scholar, like me, and with the tact of Oxford education at the time, we not only had different gowns from the ‘commoners’, we were also housed separately in swanky new rooms. (Commoners! The tactlessness was unbelievable. Well done, Oxford! At the time, though, I was thankful to be a little queen. I came from Billingshurst, I had to have something.) But Barbara had a room further up the corridor, and came in and out quite late at night. She was beautiful, with her pale heart-shaped face and thick red hair waving over her shoulders, and dressed exquisitely in 1960s fashion, velvet and ruffles, long boots and long earrings, a floor-length patchwork coat, beady-eyed fox furs. When she spoke, her voice was thrillingly aristocratic, with glowing oval vowels like small stained glass windows. I was in love with her; I longed for her to be my friend, but wouldn’t that always be impossible? She swept about alone and dated young dons. At the beginning of the second term, she was coming upstairs as I was going down. A small smiling man, balding and cheery, was carrying up her cases. I thought, I suppose it is her butler. I tolerated this amiable representative of the working classes but I wanted him to leave me alone with Barbara. Only after he was gone did I learn, amazed, that this man was in fact Tom Goodwin, her father, that the peerless Barbara was from my own class, was naturally stylish, and had taken elocution. We were class congruous. I need not be afraid! Our friendship came on by leaps and bounds. She drove down to Billingshurst; she met my father. She knew all about me and still liked me. She would be my friend for the rest of my life.
Barbara in Paris in 1982
In 1985—I was married, she wasn’t—we went on holiday à deux to a lovely old Victorian hotel in Swanage, and on a whim, visited a fortune-teller, Katina, who had a booth on Swanage pier. I have visited more than one fortune-teller, but Katina was in a class of her own. She was young, and though she said she was a gypsy, had no robes or earrings, no affectation or spookiness or mystery. She grasped my hand, looked into my eyes, and then spoke brightly, specifically, swiftly, without hesitation, in a down-to-earth voice that told me many things: my husband would work for the BBC (he had shown no signs of it, but she was right); our house would get subsidence; I would care for my mother. In retrospect I wish I had taken up the offer to tape her predictions, as Barbara did. Almost everything Katina told us came to pass. For Barbara she saw, and described with eerie accuracy, the husband she would meet two years later, a much older man in a powerful position, witty, erudite Michael Miller, QC, who would adore her, as Katina promised, and was married to her until his death last year. I enjoyed writing it on envelopes: ‘Professor Barbara Goodwin and Mr Michael Miller, QC,’ because part of me could never quite believe that life would bring such substance to the girls we had been; that we would end up with serious men, good men who wanted to marry us.