My precious cast of women friends, most of them made during those vital years for same-sex friendships, that time between leaving home and pair-bonding. Hilary Soper, my girlfriend from the age of eleven at grammar school, an identical twin of five foot ten; an accident of geography meant we lived only a few miles apart from seventeen to twenty-one. Hilary, with whom I’ve never had a cross word in nearly fifty years of friendship; who makes sure a sprinkling of cakes and jokes, postcards, small treats and kindnesses, are there to sweeten life’s lemon-peel spiral. When I think of Hilary, I see us wandering down a succession of long light rooms in the galleries where we often meet, looking at pictures as we tell our stories in a relaxed, amicable rhythm, for we have known for decades that we have our whole lives to explain ourselves; but when friends tell all, there are sadnesses, and our eyes meet, we feel it together, we want nothing bad to happen to each other, but we know the gallery stretches on past, we cast about for another picture, some sunlit Dufy or golden Bonnard. When we were girls, we seemed to have nothing, and the whole mountain range was ahead of us. Somehow, by the miracle of days becoming years, Hilary became a head teacher, raised a kind son, Luke, on her own, and now lives with an art expert, her gentle, handsome husband Alistair, in an old Sussex cottage full of books and pictures. How did it happen? How do things work out? How do men and women ever find one another?
Women friends, though, came easily. First Elan, Joy, Lydia, who lived with cats and dogs and rabbits and sewed the wing back on to a goose, and could have run a bank or a global company, then Pippa, Lesley, and shortly after, Grania, Nina and Rachel, Fatima, Carolyn; then Caroline, Hanna, Penny, Bernardine; most recently, vivid Ana, the dancer. So many kind and clever women. They are mostly still here: our story goes on.
Two other women’s names from my rackety twenties make me pause longer and look away. Tiny Australian Beverly Hayne, my friend when I finally staggered to London, delivered by Pippa in a rented van. Bev was a journalist for glossy magazines, with short red-gold hair, fine skin, a small bird-nose and neat little bird-feet, a husky voice, a breathless laugh—perhaps too breathless? She found me a job as a hotel receptionist, since I was sick of doing degrees, and paid for my first publishing party (and made so light of it I hardly noticed, but now I am amazed; so much kindness, though she also tended to quick bouts of annoyance: ‘Doncha just hate it when …?’)—the funniest, perhaps, of so many funny women, passionate, short-tempered, creative, inventive. She was irritated by my messes and excesses, but she thought I had talent, believed in me, and wrote a spoof autobiography for me, decades before this one, longhand, for my birthday, ‘My Life’ by Maggie Gee, complete with witty drawings to which she attached scraps of coloured satin, sequins, a feather, and bound it in cardboard sheathed in black silk. She had the drive and wit to become famous as a writer—but her Australian family were too poor and too rural to fix a faulty heart-valve when she was young, so the doctors forbade her to risk having children with sweet-tempered Andy whom she married in London, and though she had escaped from poverty, though her pluck and will-power took her halfway round the world, she died, one morning, getting up too quickly when her loving husband was away on a trip, in their chic modern flat, of a heart attack. She was in her mid-thirties, painfully young.
We had booked the first holiday of our married lives, but the dates clashed with the funeral. Andy said ‘Go’. Guiltily, we went to Portugal; I knew I shouldn’t, but oh, I wanted to, and we had little money, so the air fare we had already paid seemed enormous. I wrote a poem to be read at the service. I should have been there, to speak up for my friend, but Andy and destiny sent me somewhere different. On that holiday, in that fierce spring light, urged on by death, which made the shadows sharper, far away from rational considerations (we had nowhere to live, no security, but I was thirty-seven, time rushed onwards), I became pregnant with my daughter. It would never have happened if we’d stayed at home. You could see it as the final gift from Beverly’s friendship.
Girls, my girls, mes soeurs, my sisters.
Then there’s Kitty Mrosovsky, the aristocratic, literary beauty whose Russian father was a friend of Nabokov’s, president of Somerville JCR when I first saw her, hurrying gracefully against the daylight, in a narrow-waisted coat, her long dark hair pulled casually up under a Russian fur hat, calling to some out-of-focus girls in her wake. I never thought she would become my friend, yet she liked me, and invited me, later, to her tiny icy house near Arsenal, full of books and pictures and elegant poverty, because she had, I think, a minute private income which encouraged her to give up a prestigious university job and wager everything on being a writer. Perhaps all her life she gave up too much. She completed the definitive translation of Flaubert’s Temptation of St Anthony, with notes: but it was the study of a hermit. She wrote difficult novels, played piano sonatas, and banished grief with hot baths and yoga, and I was a little in awe of her, though she welcomed me, and was amusedly fond of the chaotic, excitable child I was. Like many of these friends, she mothered me, perhaps sensing there were things my own mother couldn’t give me; but she died of AIDS, too early to be wary, infected by a brilliant American boyfriend who was bisexual before anyone knew the dangers. He was African American, he taught at Yale, he was handsome and muscular and full of life. He wanted to marry her, but she refused. She was obstinate, reserved, fastidious, tender. She grew thinner, and withdrew from her friends, not wanting to bother them, not wanting to be ill, still hurrying down the street, still light-boned and graceful, and then too light, and suddenly gone. Her fate seemed bizarre, impossible. Her voice was beautiful; a light silver singsong. She had two sisters who adored her. That dangerous freedom. Death crept in from the horizon. We thought we knew everything; we didn’t see the future. We needed men, but men could destroy us.