Alcohol utterly transforms my character. Very briefly, it used to give me a window of beauty and connection to that beauty, when I would see nature, people, children, all, as it might be, heightened in their own, as I thought, glow. I suppose it was nothing more aesthetically grand than having a sort of Martini-ad director inside my brain. During the years after I left Fram and was drinking, I must have humiliated Mark countless times and I am dead certain that I scared my children. How can a woman who has found her own mother out cold, actually dead, pass on to her beloved children the same experience in all but actual fact?

You can spot other middle-class alcoholics just as you might spot someone who belonged to the Masons. There are the big signs, such as being there before the Co-op opens, which it does, conveniently for alcoholics, at six in the morning, and the small signs, such as being far too polite and explaining exactly why, as you hand over the precise change in 1ps, you need a ready-made gin and tonic at nine in the morning. You learn to spread your custom thinly, so that the people who run Oddbins, Threshers, etc. won’t know that you are an alcoholic, when your every gesture tells them as clearly as though you were wearing the T-shirt. Alcoholics know a good deal of secret information and will in any town be able to find the corner shop that does sell booze. Under my belt are Aberdeen, Middlesbrough, Wick, Cromarty, many districts of Edinburgh and Glasgow, Inverness, a comprehensive guide to Oxford and absolutely no experience of where to get drink in London at all, although I do buy it online for my friends and my children. That gives me not a pusher’s pleasure, but answers the old need to feel connected to what is normal.

The rules by which alcohol makes you live are the instructions in how to live as though you were dead. Alcohol tells you not to answer the telephone, not to answer the door, not to open the curtains, not to eat, not to wash, not to clean your environment and to cover all mirrors as though after a death. Alcohol tells you to wear black and not to clean your teeth because your toothbrush will make you vomit. Alcohol tells you that you need a drink at four in the morning. It then tells you that you need to sick up that drink to get the way clear for the next drink. You obey it and you sick up blood. In the end your ears, nose, eyes and mouth are streaming blood. You shit blood. You piss blood.

I used to be visited by a bloke called Gary, who represented himself as being an ex-miner. He sold dusters, mops, oven-cleaner and the like, all smelling strongly of cigarettes. Every year of the ten or so I lived in my Oxford house, at the end of the cul-de-sac, Gary visited. In my, perhaps, fourth year of residence, he said, as I passed him a tenner, ‘God, m’lady, you look bad. I’ve never seen you look so rough.’ Oddly, I realised only a month ago that the honorific title was a tic widely used by Gary’s brethren. Sober now, but quite as jumpy about the front-door bell, I picked up the entryphone here in London, at Tite Street, to be greeted by:

‘Hello m’lady, it’s Gary. You know, dusters, ex-miner.’

I don’t think it was the same Gary and I’m not capable of seeing single, let alone double, but I was struck by the usage. The only other place where women are routinely addressed as ‘m’lady’ is, in my experience, Wiltons restaurant in Jermyn Street.

‘Hello, big girl, who are you married to at the moment?’ Peculiarly enough, I have been asked this question twice in my life and I take it ill. I forgive the first enquirer, who was drunk himself, unhappy and shy. He is now dry, handsome as all get out and back to his delightful manner that I’ve known since I was newly wed to Quentin. The other person should have known better. The occasion was a cocktail party for my older not-sister Jane’s fiftieth birthday at Leighton House. Actually I like the man who asked the question; he is interesting and uses his fortune to good ends. Nonetheless, I explained to him why I did not want to be called ‘big girl’, even if I am one, and I could not credit his having reached over fifty without realising that women are unfond of the insult direct, let alone the implication that one shags like a stoat and marries frivolously. Evidently my voice was carrying, which was very lucky as the party was full of family, their voices raised in euphonious competition. One of the many pretty cousins called Kiloran, this one a whip of courage and loyalty, was bouncing up and down. She is tiny, very sexy and has a lisp. ‘Thatth’s it, Claude, thatth’s it. You’ve toughened up at lathst.’ Not in fact.

Speaking of toughening up, there is one, slightly solemn, point that I’d like to make about AA. Of course I love it and owe my sobriety, ergo my life, to it, but it cannot but be observable that as an institution it is, and I’m not complaining, made for men. The systems whereby it strips down the ego and squashes, filtrates and cleanses the superego are all very well for people who think a great deal of themselves in the first place. I know that I drank from fear and shame and I have heard the same from many other women. Fear of what? Of comprehensively everything, mainly of how and who to be. And shame? Well, you are a woman and to be a woman alcoholic is to be born to shame, which makes a fine foundation for the Rapunzel’s tower of shame that will grow up on it as the woman drinker lives her eremitic life, and lets that lovely hair get so filthy she could never plait it to make a rope and escape from her tower of shameful habit. Her habit has become her habitat.

There is a point in alcoholism from which you cannot be brought back. This point is referred to by the nickname ‘wet-brain’. When people have wet-brain they are simply gone and are allowed by the defeated carers, medical and familial, whatever spirit it is they wish to kill themselves with, since the only way is down.

I do not know why it is but the feet, that are so rich in nerve endings, are tremendously vulnerable to alcohol, increasing in size, turning blue, cracking, exuding pus, losing nails, prone to ulceration. At one point, it looked as though my left foot was going to have to come off. I may say that my family spotted my alcoholism long before my GP did and it was Quentin and Annabel and the children, with poor Mark Fisher, who at last confronted me, collected me, cherished me and delivered me to Clouds, a rehabilitation centre near Shaftesbury, about which and whose late inhabitants, I had, long before, written that architectural-cum-social review. Clouds was, with Taplow Court and Wilsford, the lost house that V.S. Naipaul describes so beautifully in The Enigma of Arrival, the residence of a family who were part of that poetic grouping known as the Souls.

Since I had, amateurishly and alone, attempted all the usual separation between myself and alcohol — not drinking at all by using willpower, only drinking one glass and that glass being Champagne/red wine/vodka/alcohol-free lager/White Lightning/Benylin, and so on and so forth ad infinitum or more properly ad nauseam, I knew that I had to ask another person to help me. I was enormously lucky in that, given my incapacity to take initiatives, except disastrous ones, my family, that is Quentin and Annabel and the children, did so. I was literally too drunk to notice that Fram had a hand in it too.

For some reason I had never been to a multiplex cinema and on the fourth or fifth day of being dried out in Hampshire, it was decided that Rose, her friend Viola and their mothers and I would go and watch Shrek at the Basingstoke multiplex. I was, from the first moment, certain that someone would arrest me for being with normal people. Rose then ordered a medium-sized popcorn and I knew that I was very unwell indeed. A thing the size of a filing cabinet was placed in Rose’s slender arms. I asked the person behind the counter what large looked like and there passed across his features the terrible boredom of having to explain things in the real world to leftovers from the dusty old world. We sat in ogre-seats, each the size of a small car. I had Rose next to me who explained to me the quotations from other, classic, movies. Later in the day Rose was kind enough to opine, ‘I think you’re getting better, Claude.’ At that stage in her life her voice was very much like that of the Queen. Her part in my recovery is inexpressible because that child put her trust in me.