They next set their sights on old Maeterlinck, who however was too preoccupied with expiring (Avant le Grand silence had appeared; La Grande porte was in press; L’Autre monde in manuscript) to be tempted. On holiday in Capri in 1938 they endeavoured shamelessly to introduce me to (read “introduce into me”) Mr Sinclair Lewis, despite his singular uncomeliness and our low opinion of his work after 1930; to this end we ingratiated ourselves with the Americans on the island, and so I first met Jane and Harrison Mack — naive, charming, rich — and Sir Jeffrey William Pitt, Lord Amherst: then 40, recently divorced, making like ourselves a last tour of Italy before Armageddon, and busily flirting with Mrs Mack, who seemed not interested. (Thirty years and several Armageddons later, I realise that Jane would have just then ended her long off-and-on affair with Todd Andrews and was carrying the son named after him — who however too resembles Harrison for any doubts as to his legitimacy.)

But I was interested, despite my parents’ objections that, lord or no lord, Amherst had never published a line in his life: on the train from Naples north, he became my first real lover. The break with my parents, however, came in Zurich the following year, when I rejected Jeffrey’s proposal of marriage: to be his wife rather than his mistress, and therefore a woman with the means and leisure both to write and to “ally herself” with established writers, made eminently good sense to M. and P.; they did not share my “rebellious adolescent enthusiasm” for the author of Ulysses and Work in Progress, to sit at whose feet (but I never got near them, I confess to you now) I went to Paris when Jeffrey and my parents fled the war: they back to Zurich, he to England.

Do I bore you, Mr B.? That cold winter I was nineteen, attractive, virtually francless. I felt handsomely scarred by experience, bursting with talent: I’d had words (three) with young Sam Beckett concerning his aloofness toward James Joyce’s mad, infatuated daughter. I was already contemning Hemingway as a shallow popular novelist; I was skeptical of Eliot’s neo-orthodoxy, distressed by Pound’s anti-Semitism and attachment to Frobenius and Il Duce. And I was befriended by the Misses Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, before whose meagre but welcome fire I met their pet of the moment: a quiet, splendidly handsome 22-year-old French-Canadian avant-gardist named… André Castine.

There, I have set down the name. Thank God Ambrose is not here to mock it: I couldn’t abide that just now, or him — though it was André (I suddenly understand, with a dark frisson, what would have been at once apparent to another: I shall profit, then, perhaps, from this “scriptotherapy”) who made me vulnerable, three decades later, to his pallid echo, Mr Mensch. My André!

We did not need Alice Toklas’s hashish brownies to intoxicate us. Two hardened cynics, we were in love from the first quarter-hour of conversation. Our bringings-up had much in common: André’s parents were obscure figures in the Canadian foreign service, freewheeling and nomadic Bohemians. They never married; André was raised ad libitum all over North America and Europe; he was at ease in half a dozen languages and any social situation; he seemed to have read everything, to be knowledgeable about everything from cricket matches to international finance and organic chemistry. He had been writing poems and stories since he was five, had abandoned both two years younger than Rimbaud, was already bored with the cinema as an alternative to literature, and was provoking Miss Stein (and Miss Necker-Gordon) with the idea of putting these “traditional” genres behind him entirely, in favour of what he called (and this was 1939/40!) “action historiography”: the making of history as if it were an avant-garde species of narrative.

Passionately we differed, passionately concurred, and passionately came together. I had loved dear Jeffrey, my firm and gentle sexual father, an ideal first lover; André and I ravished, consumed each other. We crackled like two charged wires in our freezing flats: love seems too mild a word for such mad voltage! By the spring of 1940 I was pregnant. We moved south to avoid the Nazis; the “script of history” fetched André up and down the country from Vichy to Paris on mysterious errands; I could never tell how much of his high-spirited, always ironic talk was serious. Something went wrong, “a rejection slip from Clio” André called it: in the middle of a night we fled our little villa, where I was battening on Brie and Beaujolais and baby and happily letting life write me instead of vice versa. By lorry and plane and little boat and big we went to Quebec, then to Ontario — antipodal, cool, serene, impossibly far from the world and its cataclysms — to have our baby.

I met André’s parents, Mlle Andrée Castine and M. Henri Burlingame, who but for their mysterious appearances and disappearances recalled my own: devoted and doting, intense and ineffectual. André adored them — and disagreed point for point with their interpretations of history, in particular the history of their own family’s dark activities. But whereas he always spoke jestingly and acted seriously, his parents always spoke unironically and could be taken no more seriously than my own. As best I could gather, they had devoted themselves to the organisation of Communist party cells during the Depression: she in the wheatlands of central Canada, he (I tremble to begin to invoke the web of “coincidence” in which I am still caught, and at whose centre, ever nearer, lies… je ne sais quoi) in the wetlands of tidewater Maryland and Virginia! “As likely as setting fire to Chesapeake Bay,” André would laugh — but his father, with a dark roll of the eyes, would put his forefinger on Washington, D.C., on the hydrographic chart, his thumb on the Dorchester marshes, just that far away. One active cell in that vicinity, he avowed, would be like one free-floating cancer cell in the enemy’s cerebral cortex; it was no defect in the strategy itself that had led to its admittedly total failure, but such accidents of history as Franklin Roosevelt’s election and New Deal, and the busy gearing up of the U.S. defence industry against the threat of war, which were distracting the working class with an adventitious prosperity and killing in the womb (“Forgive me, Germaine!” I hear him breaking off to cry here, aghast at his tactless trope, whilst we rock with mirth) the Second Revolution, whose foundations he’d so painfully begun to lay.

“Poor ground for foundation laying,” André would tease, and declare with a laugh and a kiss that they weren’t fooling him: he knew them both very well to be in the pay of the U.S. F.B.I., to infiltrate and sabotage the very activities they claimed to be organising. And what was this heresy of historical accidents? An affront to the entire line of Burlingames, Castines, and — and so forth!

Into this vertiginous dialogue — on Guy Fawkes Day, 1940, in the snug farmhouse at Castines Hundred where André himself, and any number of Castines before him, had been born — I brought our son. Neither André nor his father was there; something enormous was in the works—“My Zauberberg,” André called it, “my Finnegans Wake.” Postcards came from Washington, Honolulu, Tokyo, Manila. Andrée (a grandmother at 40, and I now virtually childless nearing 50!) was full of candour, love, and a kind of bright opacity: freely as I enquired into the mystery of their lives, and readily as she responded, nothing seemed ever quite to clarify… A postpartum depression seized me, the effect I believe mainly of this ubiquitous uncertainty. I… could not cope, could not deal with things. The baby — I couldn’t name him, even, much less nurse; names had lost their sense. Where was I? What was this Canada, of which I’d seen little beyond Castines Hundred? Where was André? Where were Mama, Papa, dear Jeffrey (how I longed for him now, and wept to learn that he’d been re-wed in London)? André’s letters urged me back to writing, but I couldn’t write, couldn’t even read. Our alphabet looked alien as Arabic; the strings of letters were a code I’d lost the key to; I found more sense in the empty spaces, in the margins, between the lines.