On Thursday evenings, we paced the aisles of clean lit busy Marks & Sparks, loading our trolleys with continental cheeses and smoked meats, Greek olives and designer tortellini. On Saturday afternoons, we played chess (him fierce, one thumb between his lips; me playful, watching him overinterpret my every move). We read D.H. Lawrence's poetry to each other in our nightshirts. We debated discursive subjectivity in the press, the spontaneity of the psychoanalytic encounter, Natticz's transitional perspective of Wagner, the new historicists, Wittgenstein's philosophical problems with the works of Shakespeare, Ian McEwan and his bias against and attraction to Churchillian depression, Koestler's promiscuity as a metaphor for pre-war social fragmentation in Europe, Balthus as a manifestation of Freud's id, the role of the Polaroid camera in Dennis Nilsen's murders, the opposing attitudes of Orientalism and Utilitarianism to British India, Beuys ' use of the blackboard and its repercussions on state education, Bertrand Russell's declining interest in formal logic, the socio-economic history of East Timor, William Blake and the auric colour spectrum, questions of homosexuality in contemporary South American fiction, Bataille's impact on the perception of the omelette and its aphrodisiac potential, the figure of the puer eternus in Mann's work and its formative influence on the ideals of the Weimar Republic, and the psychosexual symbolism of fourteenth-century footwear.

We furiously attended performances of Pirandello's works at the National Theatre and vacationed in the Virgin Islands. He had his hair washed, dried and styled at Sweeney's in Beauchamp Place. I was regularly massaged, steamed, and marinated in grey mud. We did the rounds at the Groucho. I read the Independent, he subscribed to the New York Times Book Review. He belonged to a society dedicated to saving Eastern Bloc novelists from prison. I sent away for periodicals from the American Center for the Advancement of Objectivism. He made certain I was entertained and I patiently groomed his grandiosity. We consulted a marriage guidance counsellor who told us that his sense of inferiority manifested as cruelty and that I had no self-esteem. He sipped Stolichnaya in the 400ft dining room of the Athenaeum. I attended the salons of divorced women desperate for love. We dined with crushingly important cultural figures - anthropologists and actors, balletomanes and bishops, philosophers and billionaire philanthropists - at Scott's in Mayfair, Le Caprice, Le Gavroche, San Lorenzo, and the Ivy.

We were entertained by prominent Democrats at the Jockey Club in Washington DC and frequently dined at the Kennedys ' , where we were seated always by Zuber ' s A Scenic America screen and where we were expected to favourably comment on the Hepplewhite table design and the Seal of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the library. We were guests of Vidal's at La Rondinaia, which overlooks the Gulf of Salerno. There my fiance was propositioned by the world's leading short-story writer. He had been admiring the Morris rocking chair facing the tufa and ceramic tile fireplace in Vidal's bedroom when Charles Chichester-Charterhouse entered and, after running his palm down my fiance's back, said: "I ' ve always rather fancied tiny clever men."

I selected shirts for him to wear on television (no checks or stripes which made him look like bad op-art) and listened to his hysterical accounts of inter-editorial treachery and cultivated a big warm special smile for anyone who had the power to advance his fulminant ambitions. It was a time of freedom conferred by masks.

We met at a soiree held by one of my mother's friends, a big frog in the academe who had written a "ground-breaking" book on the New Physics. The setting was a Chelsea Embankment split level apartment, overlooking that incongruous golden pagoda and the phlegmy Thames. In the corner, a crippled concert pianist was playing Messiaen ' s Oiseaux Exotique . A celebrated Norwegian fauvist wearing a peacock feather in his buttonhole introduced my future partner to me with a smile.

I was still frail from my hospitalization and more than a little disorientated. This daze must have been apparent, for William grasped the opportunity like the sexual imperialist that he had always been: all coos and soothing platitudes, affectionate little pats on the buttocks, much grave assent, select references to Tolstoi and the "coarseness" of the Age of Reason, dark intimations of impending nuclear disaster, his little fingers eloquent through his unfashionably long hair, fetchingly batting his feathery lashes, stroking that absurd goatee and pressing me not to believe anything I may have heard about him. "I have the most regular life of any man I know," he said. While I did not make the common error of assuming that his speech - by dint of its style - had substance, I still listened.