My specific aim in writing this novel was to present an anti-heroine in response to all the anti-heroes so popular of the day, beginning with Kingsley Amis’s Jim Dixon in Lucky Jim, John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger, and all the anti-heroes who followed in their wake. Loosely bound together as Angry Young Men, they hit out at everything phony, pompous, priggish, prudish, and pretentious. Their anger was exhilarating. To their delight (and to his later embarrassment), Somerset Maugham called them “scum.” Creating the female counterpart I knew would be tricky, as in those days when relationships between men and women were at an all-time low, females were depicted as passive and put-upon. (Then came the ’70s—Gloria Steinem and her Ms. magazine, Germaine Greer and her Female Eunuch, Carmen Callil and her all-female publishing house Virago. And nothing was ever the same again.) Back in the ’60s I was aware that my anti-heroine might scare people off. But I did it anyway. And it was fun. After all, Cyril Connelly had advised me about my private life: “Make up your mind, you can either be a monster or a doormat.” I opted for the former.

There is a sort of coal hole in the heart of Soho that is open every afternoon: a dark, dank, dead-ended subterranean tunnel. It is a drinking club called the Crypt and the only light to penetrate it is the shaft of golden sunlight slipping through the doorway from time to time glancing off someone’s nose or hair or glass of gin, all the more poignant for its sudden revelations, in an atmosphere almost solid with failure, of pure wind-swept nostalgia, of clean airy summer houses, of the beach, of windy reefs; of the sun radiating through the clouds the instant before the clouds race back over it again—leaving the day as sad and desperate as before.

From my very first glimpse of the battered neon trout sign that hung outside the entrance with its fish-eye winking and sputtering and every now and then slowly dying away, the Truite Bleue impressed me with its air of frank senility. Passing through the shabby entrance hall and coming upon a cubicle in which a few coat-hooks and hat-shelves had been improvised I started to hand my coat over to an old trout-shaped waiter who had been standing there staring into space but at that precise moment another more attractive action presented itself to him and he teetered off out of my reach to grope among the hats for his glass of beer. My coat, suspended in midair, fell to the ground; it was nonetheless three full sips later before he bothered to pick it up. You had to admire that kind of professional slackness.

The waiters looked as if they’d staggered out of an old dark hole. They creaked and wobbled and limped and trembled under their loads, their turkey-gobbler necks rising pink from their stiff wing collars. They rattled and shuffled to and fro groaning, “Y’en a plus!” in hoarse strangled Cockney-French to customers’ requests, laughing toothlessly at the very idea of their clients’ presumption. And yet, looking around, I saw that the restaurant was crowded with contented-looking people. In spite of everything they were eating with gusto. No doubt about it, the place had atmosphere. The genuinely old-fashioned bad service that was being meted out impartially was instantly recognizable as the real thing: a subtle sophisticated Old World incompetence we Americans can never hope to emulate, the best our rustic efforts can produce being a superficial smart-alec surliness not to be spoken of in the same breath as this lofty disdain which was both thoughtful and thorough and would not disintegrate suddenly under a pleading word, a plaintive gesture, or a large tip. These waiters were hand-picked for pleurisy, deafness, and a variety of speech defects. They were flushed of skin, gnarled of hand. The dishes that jumped on to the floor from their palsied hands were never referred to again, as it were, but just lay there for the rest of the evening to be ground under foot by passers-by.

The man looking at me was in his late fifties. Stout and rumpled. Comfortably cushioned. Grey-haired, with a lock that fell across his forehead. A fleshy sensual mouth and a podgy mobile nose. A good coarse face full of robust health and a lustiness one could tell at a glance owed nothing to outdoor life. And those blue eyes—but they were exactly the colour of mine! Not taking his love-glance off me he began talking to his companion. I saw his plump well-padded paws, the fingers lying quietly together like mittens, move forward and sort of hug himself while he sat there still smiling at me as if I were the best thing he’d ever seen in his life. He looked so—what was it that gave him his irresistible charm? He looked so accessible. That was it. A great simple truth struck me with surprise: charm is availability. How had I ever thought otherwise?

Smitty got out the file and I flipped through. C. D. McKee. Cosmo Darwin McKee. Nothing at all about his early life. A few short paragraphs in which he was included in lists of academic honours conferred on him by various foreign universities while at Oxford. The war, his Generalship, meetings with Heads of Staff, etc., etc. Then a sort of social butterfly series—photographs mainly—old Porky leering out from glossy groups at Hunt Balls and deb parties and art exhibitions. I was flipping through faster when suddenly, wedged in between the Hunt Balls and his marriage to the wealthy American widow Mrs. Pauline Saegessor, and on newsprint instead of slick paper—wham—a pile of clips on the Bosworth Clute Securities case. A public scandal; a great big fat juicy business scandal. I caught my breath and studied them closely. What startled me at first was that I knew the name—Bosworth Clute. By, I suppose, a not very wild coincidence, this much married, much divorced English business tycoon was the father of one of the girls I’d been at school with. I ploughed through reams of almost incomprehensible testimony. Something about the firm being hammered on the Stock Exchange. Something about sharepushing. Something about Clute concealing his snowballing losses by using his clients’ securities without their knowledge. Something about gambling on a successful Suez action by Britain that would cause a boom in oil shares. Something about Clute being sentenced to six years in jail having been found guilty on sixteen counts of conspiracy, fraud, and false pretences involving £300,000. But what had all this to do with McKee? Oh—oh. There it was. A little bit tucked away at the end. Clute’s Board of Directors, amongst whom C. D. was singled out for special mention by the Judge. “As to General McKee I have satisfied myself that he was at no time aware of the transactions Clute was conducting though I should like to record my amazement at his lack of interest in the enterprise whether by naïveté or design and the lack of business qualifications which Clute seemed to feel appropriate to the selection of his Board of Directors on the whole and to General McKee in particular.” Hmm. Spot of trouble there.

I ordered a plain old dry martini adding that I wanted it very dry and with a twist of lemon instead of an olive to show that we Americans too can enter the gourmet ring.

C. D. ordered himself a Cinzano and we went ahead and chose our meal. I decided to start with Ogorki Demi-sel and go on to the Filet de Plie Orly while C. D. plumped for the Crème Waldeze followed by a Poulet Braconniers.

The waiter returned with our drinks and began placing them in front of us wrong way round. I’d noticed a kind of mad, satisfied gleam come into C. D.’s eye as he sat silently, watching the mistake to its completion, but nothing to prepare me for the explosion by which he let the waiter—and everyone else in the room—in on his view of the matter. “May I recommend that a little ordinary commonsense brought to your job might help you in overcoming your either real or psychological deafness, young man?” he bellowed. “Who at this table looks young enough to risk a midday martini? Who looks wise enough to choose an aperitif?” It was unexpected to say the least.

“Who is it? The name of your analyst.”

Wonderful how the unexpected always throws us. I was prepared for anything but a simple question like that. I had equipped myself with all possible kinds of false identifications and labels but the name of an analyst wasn’t amongst them. It had never occurred to me that anyone would come out like that and demand the name of an analyst; it was too terribly personal. On top of the confusion I was shocked, really shocked, and I indicated as much.

“I—I don’t think I ought to tell, should I? Isn’t it sort of like breaking the Hipocratic oath? You know, like if it’s all right for me to go around blabbing his name, then it’s all right for him to go around blabbing mine. And everything about me. See what I mean?”

However, as I embarked upon her story the strangest change came over me. I discovered that it was possible to be the sort of liar who comes to believe her lies almost the instant they spring from her lips. For no sooner had I begun to talk about myself as Honey Flood than I felt myself mysteriously osmosing into her: a harrowing experience.

Try telling a story in which you behaved in a somewhat less than exemplary fashion and try telling it from the point of view of the person you behaved that way towards and try laying it on thick for the sympathy of your listener, and see if you don’t find your real self in the disagreeable position of standing by and watching you becoming an absolute fiend.

We greeted each other and he steered me expertly down the ramp alongside the train and into the exact compartment desired, where he skilfully arranged our bags and cosily settled into his seat with an air of putting on his slippers and pulling out his pipe. We were travelling First Class. There was no doubt about that. It said so on the window pane next to me and on the door to the compartment. It said so on the two glass panels on either side of the door and on the window on the other side of our corridor. Altogether it said so not less than five times.