It was at Hunt’s that she met her ex-husband, Stuart Armstrong. She had left school, and was biding her time, working at a photographer’s in Leyton during the day, and spending most of her evenings at Hunt’s in Highbury. (How Peter envied her freedom. And how impossible it would have been to introduce Peter to her new world.) Stuart was then studying art at the Slade, having left school the year before; he was an old school friend of Abe Solomon’s, from a grammar school in North London. Stuart, despite his name, is half Jewish, for his mother Luisa is a Portuguese Jew who left Portugal in the thirties. Michael Armstrong, Stuart’s father, is half Scottish, half Irish. The Armstrong household was an artistic household, priding itself rather ostentatiously on its spontaneity, its generosity, its easy-going good humour. Luisa knew a lot of painters, and appears in minor works of the thirties and forties, accompanied in some of them by Armstrong children born and unborn; she herself used to paint, but gave up without apparent regret, under the pressure of five children and a floating houseful of their friends. Michael Armstrong, now largely unemployed, was then a journalist, writing theatre and art reviews for a left-wing daily, since folded. What they live on now is a mystery, for Stuart doesn’t support them or indeed anyone, and although two of the other sons have reasonably respectable jobs in journalism, they are always, they claim, broke.

Kate fell in love with Stuart; Stuart fell in love with Kate. There was nothing surprising about this. Kate was an attractive girl, and Stuart in those days was an extremely good-looking young man, slightly effeminate, pale and fine-featured, with dark wiry hair and a seductive gentleness of manner. He was a romantic and read poetry. Kate liked that, and he in turn liked what he saw as her toughness, her familiarity with the back streets of Hunt’s kingdom. A perfectly proper alliance, it appeared. Kate fell in love with the whole Armstrong family, which she found warm, uncritical, friendly, a needed antidote to Hunt’s biting edge. The Armstrong home, a large, ugly, untidy house between Kilburn and West Hampstead, was full of talk and good meals and dangling strings of onions and vegetables arranged like fruit in wooden bowls. Real paintings hung on the walls. Kate had come across none of these things before. Nor had she ever been in a home with such a high emotional temperature: kisses, embraces, tears, endearments, shrieks of joy and despair were the stuff of daily life. Luisa, with whom Kate is still on good terms, made Kate welcome, encouraged her to stay the night at weekends (nobody ever stayed the night with anybody in Romley, in those days), talked to her, tried to teach her to cook; for the truth is that Luisa loves an audience, she is a frustrated performer, loves to be admired, to demonstrate how warm and wonderful she is. Kate was a willing accomplice in this performance. In those days, Luisa seemed to Kate the ideal mother, strong, resilient, adaptable, excitable, open-minded: a woman of the world, who didn’t mind looking at a twenty-year-old portrait of her own large naked pregnant body every day over the kitchen table. A far cry from Romley.