As we worked on this chapter together and I gradually lost sight, Liv and I speculated as to what lies at the root of the changes that dictate fashion. I said to her that I’d always thought of it in two ways; that, as it were, there might be a cobalt mountain somewhere and therefore, to keep to cobalt prices high, blue must be the colour for the coming season. So I’d thought of it visually, the colours laid out as you see great heaps of pigment in soft triangles set in low brass bowls at the roadside in India.

The other way I’d thought of it is as an enormous sneeze of influence, so that everyone under the age of forty suddenly thinks that she has invented the notion of edging a cardigan with velvet or pinning an outsized rose on to her lapel. The great trick is the usual one with capitalism: how to make everyone feel that they are expressing their individual self by purchasing the very same thing as many millions of others. Who are the great sneezers of influence? People imagine that it is the fashion editors, but I think the truth is more mysterious and lies deep at the root of the levels of discontent with themselves that are imposed upon women and that we embrace with such delight and appetite.

I had, in London, broadly, two milieux when I first arrived there in 1976: homosexual men and grown-ups. Of course they often overlapped. The first world set me at my ease when I talked, as the purely heterosexual world did not quite. Drawn as I was to art historians, architectural historians and painters, I found myself often the only girl in a room. I was fond of dancing and with my close friend James Fergusson, an individual of impeccably sober mien, antiquarian bookseller and revolutionary of the newspaper obituary, I used to jump about a lot in gay clubs. Jamie is entirely of the marrying kind and I have the privilege of being godmother to his daughter Flora, who would be horrified to see how her father and I, whose common ground is fundamentally bookish and topographical since we are both Scots with a close interest in stone carving and every matter of calligraphy, font or letterpress, cut capers in the Embassy Club, Country Cousin and other dives. The other thing we did by night was drive in James’s Mini-Clubman van, looking at churches and the streets of the City. On these drives I would come closer to understanding my father’s detailed love of London.

What was I living on during these days? I sold a lot of my clothes, I didn’t eat unless I was taken out, I had a little overdraft, and I got mortifying jobs. I ghosted two books and modelled for Levi’s Jeans. It is a nice point that my first husband’s second wife was auditioned for the Levi’s job, but her bottom wasn’t big enough. I was conscious that I was wasting time and that I should be spending my days accumulating and building words or else teaching in some context or another. I wrote tiny pieces for the TLS, the Spectator, anyone that would have me. Essentially, these publications were doing me favours. I had no sense of building a career. I was flashy-looking but recessive.

The moment any form of recognition or success looked as though it might be looming, I scarpered. I longed for routine, for a project, for a means of making something with what I was fairly sure I had, some kind of baker’s gift to leaven things.

Instead I woke up every morning with my heart battering in fear of I did not know what as the cavalry horses trotted down Warwick Avenue in the dawn. If I had enough money I would buy a newspaper, occasionally applying for jobs. On the way to get the paper, I would say good morning to Stanley, the tramp who sat on the bench outside the house in Warwick Avenue. Of course he knew my name. I always gave him the money I didn’t have.

One day Stanley was reading a rather thick-looking book.

‘Good morning, Stanley,’ I said. ‘Is it any good?’

‘Don’t look, Candia,’ said Stanley. ‘I’m masturbating.’

I was reading all the time, munching through the shelves at Warwick Avenue and rereading Under the Volcano suspiciously many times, though I still didn’t know what was wrong. I remember overhearing Christopher Hitchens recommending The Blood of the Lamb by Peter de Vries to Martin Amis. I read it. I wanted that kind of steer on what to read next.

One or two properly adult friends had the energy and gumption to tell me to sit still and write a book, but I still hung back. My friend the publisher John Calman was angry at how I was, as he saw it, wasting my life by failing to write. He shouted accurate and therefore even sorer accusations of time-wasting and expense of spirit at me in an echoing restaurant. I took umbrage, mainly I guess because I knew he was right. We fell into a stand-off. John was murdered in France at the age of thirty-seven by a hitch-hiker who used as his weapon cooking knives that John’s mother had given him. Nothing seemed susceptible of redress. This talented wilful passionate man had cared enough to say what should have been said. He paid me the honour of interfering as too few adults had in my wilful self-sabotage. If I had been attentive to John then, some disasters of my own if not of his life might perhaps have been averted. It is dreadful like a red spider shot into the head to think of his end. I dream of it never less than once a month, hoping to have reversed it by the time I waken. His mother outlived her son.

A new lodger came to Warwick Avenue. She had superabundant talent but also required system. When first she came to live with us the contained, feline Angela Gorgas was executing a series of quasi-tantric Indian miniatures for the Playboy millionaire Victor Lownes. Angela was angel-like, too, from every angle, actually embodying the entirety of her implausibly suitable name. She had hyacinthine locks, sooty eyes, a tremendous laugh, seemed to talk without moving her mouth, was half my size and was at the epicentre of more love polyhedra than one telephone line and front door could easily accommodate. If your arm was worth having then Angela was on it. She also made a sweet friend.

I became distracted from my own life’s path in the plots of the lives of others. I had no very strong sense, except when I was dressed up, of who to be. When dressed, I often overheard things that I disapproved of or feared. At one dinner party, evidently culled from the tips of various social icebergs, I overheard the unforgettably wrong-headed sentence, ‘That man is a traitor to his adopted class.’ I want one day to write the novel that fits around those self-revealing words.

I was learning the Lily Bart lesson but not taking it in.

Some of my friends were starting to get little dry coughs that wouldn’t go away. One friend I nagged at for a whole evening to go to the doctor. How he must have wished to back me away and how politely he concurred and said he would. They started to die in threes, the more outrageous ones, the ones who had given themselves girls’ names or only wore leather. Surprising people got thinner and thinner and then were dead. It was like a race that you did not want to win whose starting pistol had a silencer.

I received a long letter about the importance of d’Annunzio and about the health of his two Afghan hounds from my schoolfriend Edward Stigant weeks after he died in hospital in Milan. So his mother lost two of her three sons too soon.

Then, at last, I found a proper job rather than a hand-to-mouther. When people asked me the name of where I worked, they said, ‘You’ve made it up!’

Well I hadn’t, and it was a wonderful job, though I was a rotten employee. I was hired to write copy for an advertising agency whose name really was Slade, Bluff and Bigg. It was of small size and, which was startling for an advertising agency in the approach to the nineteen-eighties, radiant with principle. For every flashy account we had, there was a charity, for every glittery client, a quietly decent one. I was happy in my work, though I cannot believe how patient were my employers. Mr Slade, who was very musical, was a dedicated Liberal, the only Liberal indeed on the Greater London Council. His brother Julian wrote Salad Days. Mr Bigg had had a distinguished career in a much larger agency and lent calm authority to every meeting. Mr Bluff was a real sweetie and could handle such tricky clients as Gucci and Kutchinsky with his velvet paws. The agency was in bosky South Kensington. I had a room to myself. I shall never forget the art director because he told me two things: one was to write a book right then and the other that drink was no good for me because my character changed when I drank. And this was someone who had never seen me drunk. He himself never drank. I took neither piece of advice.