These things still worry her, but in those early years, sunk in anxiety about money, she could not contemplate them as calmly as she now does. Her life was at stake. She believed in Stuart, took his word and his friends’ that he was talented, but couldn’t help noticing his remarkable capacity for ruining his own chances, for doing the right thing at the wrong time. A perverse instinct for self-destruction. He used to be a neo-realist, before neorealism came in, painting pedantic little interiors, hygienic still lifes, toothpaste tubes and linoleum tiles, then moved on to collages of furry felt and plastic flowers and bits of looking glass. He dabbled in happenings, then moved on to abstract and semi-abstract patterns based on microscopic sections of plant cells and skin tissue. He managed to mis-time each phase with apparently deliberate ingenuity, annoying gallery owners and art critics by his lackadaisical but stubbornly inflexible approach. They got annoyed with themselves for being annoyed, for he was talented, but with so many more manageable people around, why bother to manage him? He was also a lazy bugger, and kept losing teaching jobs at art colleges by not turning up on time. He now lives alone in a small flat in Kentish Town, not far from Kate, knee deep in opened cans and unopened letters and sprouting potatoes. He has taken to painting mould, and Kate says he has plenty to paint. Stuart thinks, and says, that Kate overvalues worldly success. He deplores fashions in the art world, and the commercial exploitation of artists. He says there is no point in this kind of fame. Kate thinks it is not so simple. At times she wonders if it is her own success that has given him this defeatist attitude, and if so, whether she is guilty of the ruin of a fine career. But how can this be so, when she only started to earn money because he didn’t? Or is it, again, not so simple?

If Stuart had a flair for bad timing, Kate had exactly the reverse. She had a knack for finding the right thing at the right moment. She started to write new-wave women’s pieces sometime before they became fashionable, sharing her pregnancies and exhaustions and indignations with a shocked and enthralled public. Her lower-middle-class origins, onto which she grafted the language and opinions of the artistic and articulate middle class, proved an invaluable asset; she could communicate with a large audience. And she was bold. Squeamish editors tried from time to time to tone her down, but her faith in herself grew with trial, and proved justified; they had to admit that she was onto a winning streak. She was, unashamedly, a women’s writer, but men read her eagerly. She created a place for herself, and set a good price on it.