As you will imagine, I’m defensive when people ask the sort of questions you can conceive they might. On the whole I do not speak to people about it unless I’m fairly certain that they will understand, and the key to their understanding must be that I wholly accept all of this, since it is the source of Fram’s happiness, and to love someone properly is to wish them that.

When eventually I went stone-blind and I was still too scared of Claudia and of her and Fram’s felicity to go to their house (it made me shake since it was all I had failed to make with my husband), Claudia came round to my house with a bunch of flowers. Her colours are autumnal — warm Victorian reds, blues and browns. She also brought for me Antonia White’s Living with Minka and Curdy. This was a perfect present. Claudia herself is a convent girl like Antonia White and clever and teasing in a similar way. The book was a pretty edition with its decorative dust-wrapper, and Minka and Curdy were, of course, cats. For good measure, Curdy was short for Coeur de Lion.

In February 2007, I received a letter from Claudia. Once we had seen one another plain, I believe we immediately trusted one another, but for ten years before that I feared the Claudia I had invented: ferocious, social, branchée and able to mobilise, I chippily thought, platoons of literati, wits and heart-struck young men bound to her frank beauty and disgusted at my putrid, tarty, fat, pretentious artifice. I used words to describe myself that hurt.

It occurred to Claudia, as I grew blinder, that I should come to live with her and Fram. This was brave. The first time I had visited their house I was wobbly with grief and envy, for what I saw was my own exact life, but relaxed. I felt shredded and like a fat ghost, an undisposed-of Rebecca. I do not think that Claudia has any Mrs de Winter feelings about me, nor need she have. She wrote:

Dear Candia

I felt that I should write to you directly about my reported suggestion that you think of Winchester Road as a base. I wondered if you felt you could not think of leaving Beaumont Buildings for as long as Minoo was Oxford based, and I thought that might seem an age given how unhappy you are and have been there and how impossible it feels to turn things around from there. You know that I have thought often, in the last few months, that it was quite wrong for you to be stumbling around alone and wished that you could see a way of stumbling around Winchester Road until the eyes were brought under some sort of control. But I also saw that Winchester Road seemed no solution to you, and was in fact a sort of torture. ‘I am alone’, you say, ‘that is the truth’. Well you are and you aren’t. If you can bear to take a place in our loose family structure then you would be a strengthening rather than a straining element. I think you know this, perhaps you resent it, why should you prop up our structure? Only because in becoming a prop it would become your structure too. I don’t know any other way, except to prop and be propped. But I also know, in some quarters, that this is regarded as a sick way forward. Still, I reiterate — we haven’t anything cosy and nuclear for you to disrupt — you must see that. Toby and I failed as a partnership — now we are back on course. I have no doubt at all that Fram and I would have failed if we had tried for anything tighter or steppier than we have got. You say the place for you at the table is still an outsider place and that is the story of your life. I say it is as outsiderish as you choose to make it. There are bonds between you and Fram which make me the outsider and bonds between Toby and me which make Fram the outsider and I don’t doubt that we too could grow some bonds of our own that would make outsiders of them both, not to mention all the bonds we have with our own and make with other people’s children to pass the life. I know that Doctor X and Doctor O have both warned against what is on offer here, to which I can only say what do they know and what do I know. Well I know — sort of — what is on offer and why — but of course cannot be the judge of whether it is what you want or need. I have, I suppose because of my mother, a horror of endings. All sorts of mess and experiment seem to me preferable to losing sight of loved ones. But that is my wing, I cannot make it yours.

I have no sense of anything but gratitude for this letter, with its beautiful sense of ‘passing the life’, a phrase she has coined, and its generous reference to her own mother, a Margaret like my own, who died young in a road accident. But I am I think too old and conventional and under-confident to enter such a collegiate way of life. I know myself too well and that I would fit in around the edge of yet another family while significantly being in some sense dead or absent, as I felt it. Am I wrong? I don’t know.

Most psychiatrists I have seen say keep off, keep off, he has two wives, his cake and his eating, and she has two husbands, and you have no one: face it. But how can I when they are my family and I love them? Much of me is from or in or with Fram, for I have known him for so long and am formed by much about him, that I have had to rip out, heal, remould and reform and solidify those traits or excise them, for I am a stand-alone doll now, unattached, what we are told all healthy personalities should be — or un-overattached may be fairer to the psychiatrists.

I feel that it is best to leave bits of myself behind at that house and leave it whole, and over time not to grow scar tissue or to harden, but to try to learn what it is to be a whole person, alone, a colouredin letter ‘O’ rather than an incised and empty zero.

I think maybe it’s anyway time for Claudia and Fram to get a rest from me. I have come to resemble Fram’s mother in a way maddening for and to him. She was inconsolable after the death of his father. Why should he have to console me for my having left him? When first Claudia was with Fram, he was bruised by me, and no doubt talked about me a lot, never guessing that I was thinking about him all the time. Now both Fram and Claudia know that I love them, separately and together, why should they not forget about me?

Then I remember the words of Turner, when asked which was his favourite of his own works, ‘What be the use of them, save all together?’ and I do think again.

Earpiece II

Q: What do you call a no-eyed deer?

A: No idea.

For many years before I began writing this, I was thinking about it. I thought about it in terms of glimpses and of incidents showing the inner life of those who surround me and whom I love; above all I thought of it in terms of scenes depicted, conveying the evolution of this scattered human soul. Whom did I have in mind as a possible reader when writing it? In writing a novel I think it is important to have no one save the ideal reader in mind, as though you are writing a letter to life about life. This isn’t a novel, but it is perhaps a bread-and-butter letter to life from someone who has loved it but not sufficiently belonged to it.

Which almost leads me, but not quite yet, to the subject of religion that has underlain my whole life. But first I must answer the question about who this book is for.

When I was sighted, it would undoubtedly have been for those few readers who are interested in the minds of writers. I have no celebrity and any success I have ever been close to, I have shrunk from, if not sabotaged.

Then there is the question that had already entered my mind a year or two after my stay at Clouds House, of how to write a book that is not merely an episodic story of the dreadful scrapes addiction has got you into (a genre that usually does well at the tills), but a book about addiction that somehow touches the addictive synapses of other addicts, as a novel touches the synapses of those who are addicted to fiction. In other words, I suppose I was keen to try to find the pleasure centres of the brain, those centres that keep people gobbling the sugar, glugging the caffeine, swallowing the delicious fiction. When I was an undergraduate, my friend Anthony Appiah and I used gently to tussle about whether or not it mattered if fiction was untrue. I thought it certainly didn’t matter because, actually, fiction is true. At that time of his life, Anthony was already picked out for stardom in the philosophical world, editing a learned journal called Theoria to Theory with Elizabeth Anscombe and other distinguished philosophers. He is now not only a philosopher at the top of his powers and an expert on African-American studies, he is a poet and an extremely readable novelist, the old fibber. I think he has written more novels than I have, which wouldn’t be hard.