Nana vowed upon my first marriage never to speak to me again. She was hurt. I married a toff and then a Pakistani. I did not have a respectable job. I was horribly visible. My grandmother never knew the odd congruence — starting from so different a place — of her own emotions and those of my Parsi in-laws, who so disliked all the publicity I received, reflecting, entirely reasonably, that one pair of ridiculous fashion tights, credited as costing some shocking sum, might water a village in India, and that no proper wife, no proper person, no proper writer, appears in evening clothes not her own in order to help publicise a book that is in literary terms respectable.

My grandmother thought that the education she had effectively paid for had separated me from her and made me pretentious; she was fed in this apprehension by friends who passed her all the disobliging cuttings they could. An equivalent drip-feeding went on to my poor parents-in-law. Neither of these things — the separation, the pretension — was precisely the case, but it helps worsen the hurt to coarsen the terms, naturally, and my grandmother and my mother-in-law were each attached to private suffering, a plot laid out for one by starting to earn her living aged five on the stage and caring for a blind sister, and for the other, perhaps, by the Partition of India and Pakistan in the year of her marriage, for she was from Bombay and her husband, her first cousin, from Karachi.

That my grandmother and I did speak again is due to telephone calls, made by each of my husbands, and each call concerning the arrival of a child, her three great-grandchildren, separated from her, as she understood it, on account of the bitter prejudices that rack this country still, by class in three cases and colour and creed in one, and yet — when at last she met them in her final year of life — she felt them entirely hers, her great-grandchildren, the older of whom have her posture and her gamut of social smiles and the youngest of whom has her appetite for libretti.

I have at last started to let go of the dear stone, that cherished discomfiting notion that my grandmother did not love me or my mother.

She loved us too possessively, too angrily, too silently, in the way of the day. It was her stone, a stone axe, beautiful and held behind her lovely face like obsidian, never letting her yield. I won’t feed my own stone by rereading her hard, withheld diaries, but must instead recall that at the end she let me hold her hand day after day, whichever one she thought I was, my mother or me, and that she left me in her will an envelope of mica windowpanes for a solid-fuel stove, each the size of half a playing card, little slips of crackly pearl for feeling heat through and for looking through, into the fire in our pasts.

My mother very occasionally brought home from her trips to the grocer Young and Saunders, or from Rankin’s the fruiterers at the West End, a pomegranate, in tissue paper. She would give me a pin and two plates. (Is this the sort of thing to which people refer when they say, ‘We made our own fun’?)

Mummy would cut the pomegranate into four, put on my apron, which was modelled on a French child’s smock and sewn by her, in her constant search for rational and appealing clothes for children, and let me take the chambered, compressed, treasure apart, with one plate for the leathery but blushful skin and the membrane that you could look through, and the other for the pressed red jewels, which I was allowed to eat with the pin. So long did this task take — a whole afternoon — and so magical a treat was the process that I was not surprised, when I read in my anthology of myths, The Tanglewood Tales, about Persephone — to learn that she had tumbled to a pomegranate’s charms in Hades, and that the seeds were measures of time spent with or without a mother.

Painstaking effortlessness, curiosa felicitas, was my father’s, apparently idling, actually supercharged, gear. There may have been something irresistible to him about my mother’s lavish appearance and her extremer way. But it was also, time showed, at some level repulsive. The quick term for this is, I suppose, a fatal attraction. They were stuck under the net of convention and another net of passion that had charred to distaste on his side I think. All this is speculation.

In marriage, and this is less speculative, since I have twice failed to understand, to implement and to reverse the disintegration of this, we are, or I was, trying to answer the loss and absence that the other has felt. One hopes the other’s gaps will be filled by something that one carries within. But somehow instead we may create what we most have feared because it is familiar. Perhaps everyone but me knows this.

I saw my mother be craven to my father. Cravenness has no place between any two people. Craven is the claw of the mode most repulsive to me of any, that of ingratiation. I hate full frontal flattery and its oils the more, the longer I live. My father lived perhaps a little too sternly by the exigencies of understatement; my mother’s overstatement I know, because I am like it too, was authentic, was intensity of feeling, terribly banked down. I’m like them both, dry and pyrotechnic; but you need to keep powder dry. I don’t like slobber. It is the slaver kills and not the bite.

Marilyn Monroe killed herself in the August of 1962. I was already much taken by suicide, but only as a means of transformation, the death of one way of being in order to catalyse the birth of another, as in the Beast becoming Jean Marais in the film by Cocteau of Beauty and the Beast, to which my parents were attached and which they took me to see whenever it was showing. Cocteau himself had designed the programme and poster for the first Edinburgh Festival. That was one of my parents’ worlds, the Edinburgh arts world. When the Traverse Theatre was born, Mummy cooked for the actors. The Incredible String Band lived in one of my friend Janey’s father’s barns. Our street had the poet George Bruce and even Chopin had stayed in the Crescent some time before, no doubt on his way to visit Miss Stirling at Keir, where there was said to be a piano he had played. There were recitals in the Chopin house, which belonged to a musical family. I remember my mother making zabaglione for the mime artist Lindsay Kemp. I felt at once a bond with him, to do with discipline, extremity, outsiderness. I was drawn very young indeed to the company of gay men. A matter of talk and of establishing hidden ways to utter; puns, jokes, playing around. This line in transmission ran deep. My father totted from a skip quite late in his life an old ironmongery sign made of cast-iron letters. He reordered them up the stone stairs of the house: IRONYMONGER.

I read all I could about Marilyn’s death. I remember reading Life magazine, lying on my stomach, of course, on the floor of another family, and getting the first intimation of why she really did it that made complete sense to me. Life had silky pages that smelt of my lino-cutting set.

The words that made sense were, ‘Breasts, belly, bottom, soon all must sag.’ The alliteration, the coarse mimetic bounce of the words and the downward fall of the sentence added to its crude potency; the misogyny agreed with some knot within me of self-dislike, and I saw that that was one reason to die (or transform yourself, as I saw suicide at that time, before it had come closer), that Marilyn had shifted shape by choosing to stay the same, by dying. I collected information about female suicides long before there was one at home, whose case I have refused to study until recently. I was interested as a quite small child by women who kill themselves and that they will often choose to wear make-up to do so. This may have changed by now. Many suicides are drunk or otherwise chemically changed, and grooming, as I have cause to know, is not a part of the throes of advanced addiction. Women used to get into their prettiest underwear, their nicest negligee, in order to be negligent of themselves in the highest degree. I don’t know what happens now that there is so great a passion for pictures of women falling short of the impossible standards they have set themselves in life. And if we think at all, we know, even without seeing photographs of really dead beauties, that the prettification will in time be all undone: the mouth falls open, the stomach rebels, the bowels let go, the worm or the fire do their work.