Peter Scudamore used to think the best way to deal with a tricky situation was to panic. Now, he prefers to handle difficulties with prayer and goes to Catholic church most Sundays. ‘I’m not as good a Christian as I should be,’ he says. ‘But everyone has to find a way of coming to terms with things. Racing is a dangerous sport and I face that through religion. I say a prayer.’

This week Scudamore will ride in the Cheltenham Festival and on Thursday he will sit astride Carvill’s Hill, the Arkle of the Nineties and the 5-4 favourite to win the Gold Cup. Probably the world’s best jockey, he recently rode his 1500th winner and has ridden a record-breaking 200 winners in one season. But this week is vital. For Scudamore has never won the Grand National or the Cheltenham Gold Cup. ‘You always think you are going to do better than you actually do.’

He has fallen thousands of times and even cracked his skull. His father, a top jockey, had his racing career cut short when he partially lost the sight of one eye. ‘It’s not something I like to think about. There are some bones I haven’t broken,’ Scudamore almost whispers. ‘Obviously, I’m frightened. I don’t want to hurt myself. The fear of death and permanent injury is always there. But I don’t go into races thinking, ‘I could die’.’ Just over a year ago, he broke his leg – again. Half his shin, he says, was dangling. ‘I lay there thinking, ‘Shit, I’m going to have to have it amputated’ . . . I’m very rude to ambulance men. It’s probably from my childhood, because my mother was so over-protective. She wouldn’t even let me bicycle down the road. If you fell over, she was always there and fussing – so I can’t stand ambulance men clucking over me.’

Scudamore has a starved look and a dry sense of humour. He isn’t weeny like flat race riders but is slight with brown eyes and what looks like a concave tummy. (He sometimes needs to weigh 10 stone, including a saddle.) He is also very softly spoken and often talks in parentheses and sentences that don’t finish.

He is racing’s Mr Nice Guy and considered a pillar of rectitude. He is delightful, sincere, quietly confident and unassuming. He also has a choirboy’s good looks and a famously good and stable marriage. So which deadly sin is he most attracted to? ‘Perhaps greed,’ he says. ‘No, lust.’ Which is surprising, considering his wholesome image.

He has been married to Marilyn for 12 years, since he was 21. He looks foxed when he tries to remember how old she is, eventually deciding she’s about five years older than he. Is he faithful? ‘Yes,’ he says, with a furrowed brow and a wringing of hands.

‘We don’t have the perfect marriage, though. It isn’t like one long honeymoon where I’m in a permanent state of love. Marriage is hard work. We scream at one another and sometimes don’t talk for a week. It’s hard for her with me always being the focus of attention, though it’s slightly easier now she runs her own company promoting jockeys. I’m very ambitious, so I must be very hard to be around. Take holidays, I can’t stand the idea of just lying on a beach. So she went to Barbados with some friend of hers. We try to live an open, mature life.

‘We work things out. If we don’t talk about things, then they brew up. She smokes and that upsets me and is the cause of arguments. We don’t always appreciate what we’ve got. The thing I want out of life is to educate my children. I have two lovely boys (aged nine and eight). It would be wrong of me to want more.’

His childhood has been described as idyllic. He was brought up on a small farm in Herefordshire and retains a slight West Country accent. ‘I was always very proud of my father, because he won the Grand National and the Gold Cup.’ Scudamore wrings his hands again, talking about the two wins that have so far eluded him. ‘He was a brave, honest and good jockey, so I looked up to him. I suppose that gave me my ambition. But I don’t feel I have to live up to him. There hasn’t been any pressure in that way.

‘My parents were so good, a wonderful couple who set the standards of right and wrong for me. I wasn’t spoilt. We didn’t live in luxury or have fast cars, but we had everything we wanted. Looking back, my childhood was very stable.’

Scudamore had an unremarkable academic career at Belmont Abbey, a minor (Catholic) public school. ‘A kindly and cheerful boy with a good sense of humour,’ his housemaster said in 1974 on a report that had a ‘very poor result’ in chemistry and a ‘weak performance’ in maths.

As a child, he used to pretend he was able do things before he had actually mastered them. ‘I always thought from the day that I first rode that I was the best jockey in the world.’ He was three years old. ‘I know it’s stupid, but I’ve always wanted to be the best. If someone criticises me, I find it hard to accept. You always believe you are the best.’ (His father is the only person from whom he accepts criticism and the two are still very close.) ‘I’m still a bad loser. Winning is a great high and losing is a real down. Racing gets me down. I know it shouldn’t. I’m not always happy. Sometimes I get really fed up.’

His mother, fearful lest he get hurt, never wanted him to go into racing. His first job was as an estate agent. But he had his first National Hunt win when he was just 20. ‘Whenever I go home, my mother still asks me when I’m going to get a proper job.’

He feels his upbringing was unfairly privileged. ‘It was very privileged and false. I’m not sure it’s right to be brought up in such a protected way,’ he says now. ‘Most people aren’t bought up like that nor do they go to all-boys schools.’

Because of his elitist background, when Scudamore left school he felt awkward with girls. ‘I left school at 17 without many female friends,’ he says. ‘I was always frightened of rejection.’

He does, however, enjoy meeting the Royals. The Princess Royal used to ride out from his yard. ‘Goodbye Ma’am,’ he said, as she left one day. Then his youngest son, Thomas, then only knee high to a jockey piped up: ‘Goodbye Mum.’ The Princess fixed him with an amused eye. ‘Thomas,’ she said, laughing, ‘I think you have ideas above your station.’

On another occasion, he sat next to the Queen Mother at a dinner of course upon course of a Roux brothers-prepared banquet. Typically, Scudamore was dieting, so he spent the evening picking at quails’ eggs. He doesn’t have a lavish lifestyle. He lives near Cheltenham in a house called Mucky Cottage, which is named after a horse. His trainer Martin Pipe (together they make the most successful team in racing) picks him up by helicopter in the summer. Otherwise he drives himself, around 50,000 miles a year in his Peugeot 605. He races six days a week, often leaving home at four in the morning.

He does a spot of gardening in his spare time. He thinks it would be naff for him to read Dick Francis. ‘I read him when I was a kid. Racing is nothing like Dick’s books.’ And he doesn’t think he looks like a Francis hero.

He admits to a turnover of £80,000. But later in the interview he says that was a ‘porky pie’. Because he doesn’t want a visit from the tax man? ‘Yes,’ he laughs. ‘And because I don’t think it’s good to boast about your earnings. I want to be a millionaire the same as the ordinary arse (his word for a non-rider), but it’s not a lifetime’s ambition.’

People go on about his retiring. He knows his racing years are limited and his nerve will not hold out forever. But he loves his way of life and its risk. ‘If you said to me a few years ago that I would ride 200 winners, I would have said, ‘I’ll then be the most famous jockey, my life will change. That will be it. The kids won’t cry and the missus won’t moan.’ But, in fact, it doesn’t change anything. I might win the Gold Cup on Thursday, but life won’t change. And I don’t want it to change.’

Volatile, fair and loyal personality who organises poetry readings in a Cork Street gallery and is the wife of ad man Maurice Saatchi. Versatile and competitive producer of high-brow plays. Entertaining and high-voltage career woman with supercharged emotions who was formerly on the board of Haymarket Publishing.

Such is the reputation of Josephine Hart, author of Damage, a novel about a middle-aged man’s (requited) erotic obsession with his son’s fiancee. Hart is dressed in black leggings, black Paco Rabanne mid-thigh jacket and flat black shoes, looking expensive, elegant and understated. ‘I break out sometimes and buy red or occasionally green. But I have a strong reaction to colour. If I wear red too much, I get too excitable.’ Black soothes and controls her, making her feel calm. ‘You can fade away in black in a way you can’t with other colours.’

She carries a horse-nosebag handbag, black of course, which contains a thumb-sized book of Shakespeare’s sonnets. ‘Poetry is an absolute necessity in my life. I read it certainly every day,’ she says later, in her very Irish accent. ‘I need it, really need it. I would be bereft without it.’ She’s also wearing a gold ring that looks like the Sydney Opera House, with a diamond in each roof, plus three strands of grey Chanel beads. She has rich brown hair, sharp eyes, thin lips and a strong, determined face. ‘I think I’m fairly fit’ – she swims most days – ‘I move everywhere very fast. If it were possible I’d run, but it looks too embarrassing in the street.’

She wears little make-up save beetroot lipstick. So what of her face? ‘I think it’s a big face (means big features) – but not a pretty face, and not a fashionable one. I think it looks strong and open. But that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m terribly open.’

She feels very Irish. ‘Yeats says, ‘I carry from my mother’s womb a fanatic heart’. There’s tremendous intensity that comes from being Irish and a passion for words.’ She waxes eloquently and lengthily on the subject, very Irishly.

Here is a formidable woman who lingers in the mind long after the meeting, possibly because her words seem so wise. She comes across as persistent, single-minded and with an iron will: a survivor; and an intense, complex and deep character who appears terribly tough on the surface. She also has an elegant mind – is passionately literary, erudite and interesting – and shows her convent education in a high-mindedness, impetus to self-improvement and moral rectitude.

‘It’s terribly difficult to know yourself,’ she says, putting her hand on her chin in a gesture of self-comfort. ‘It’s a very difficult journey between the necessity of finding out who you are because it’s crucial in your relationships with other people, and self-obsession.

‘All my responsibility in life, I believed, was to behave correctly, fulfil my duty and save my soul.’ Has she managed that to date? ‘I think I’m very dutiful.’

She has spent years trying to work herself out, trying to decide when to lay ghosts to rest. ‘I wouldn’t say that finally living in the here and now is something that I have fully managed to do.’

Her 16-year-old brother and nine-year-old sister died within months of each other when she was 17 – one from illness and the other in an accident. She lived in an extremely enclosed world (‘I never went anywhere. For me to go to Dublin was a major thing’) and handled the pain in a very intense way while her parents ‘almost died of grief’. ‘I feel I have lived two such different lives and integrating them both is very difficult.’ Does she feel like two different people? ‘To some extent.’

She once stopped training to be an actress because she felt she had to delve into herself too much. ‘It requires such psychological courage and I definitely wouldn’t have been able to do that. I know I would have cracked up.’ Is she damaged? ‘I am full of sadness, definitely. The life was certainly damaged. But I don’t know whether my soul was damaged beyond repair. I don’t think so because a lot of extraordinary insights came out of it.’

What goes on in her soul? ‘The same as that which should go on in anybody’s soul. The question of how you live a good life.’ She joins her hands together and rests her chin on them, looking as if she is praying. Materially, she lives a good life. Her father ran a garage, while M, as she calls her husband, is not short of a bob or two. ‘That has been the most irrelevant thing in the world to me. It’s hard to describe the emphasis on the spiritual that I grew up with. The things that were interesting were poetry and how well read you were, not whether you had a car.’ In Damage, the narrator is a man. How easy was it for her to be a man? ‘Hideously easy,’ she laughs, an infectious laugh that hits the ceiling. ‘I was so shocked. I felt in total symbiosis with him – and what that says about me as a woman, I really don’t know.’

She views her sexuality – and she’s paraphrasing Tom Stoppard in the Real Thing here – as the great unplayed card. ‘In every other area of your life, people can see how you are, see your clothes, listen to what you say. But a person’s sexual nature, their behaviour in sexual matters, is the great secret of people’s psychology. An extraordinary thing . . . the power of sex . . . it’s majesty . . .’ she says. ‘It has a terrifying ability to throw us out of synch in relation to everything else . . . It is an intense experience . . . I really feel it is an extraordinary, the most extraordinary event in life.’

So how would she describe herself? ‘I have a very disciplined surface and underneath a reasonably cheerful nature. The two are integrating more now.’ She talks in an emphatic way, cutting the air with her voice and speaking aggressively with her hands as if she were chopping meat in the air. ‘I’m emotional, passionate (she gobbles the word as if she doesn’t want to say it out loud). I think I’m fair. When I examine my behaviour every day, I ask myself whether I’ve been fair.

‘It’s terribly easy to be harsh towards others and soft to oneself. And it’s easy for me to be incredibly loving, just as it is easy for me to go pow (she punches her palm with her fist) phew like that when I am angry. My nature is one that would go like that whack (she hits her hand) if I let it.’

It was said that she often bred fear rather than affection in her colleagues. ‘That was a long time ago. I was terribly upset when I read that. But I think it was probably true.’ She thinks perhaps people found her persistence, forthright opinions and intense concentration disturbing. She does come over as very hard. ‘I can accept that. I can completely sympathise with someone who doesn’t know me thinking, ‘God, what’s going to stop this person?’ ‘ she says, her face visibly softening for the first time.

‘I have a determination based on having to decide to survive, not financially but psychologically. But I don’t think I’m hard at all, not at all. I wish I were much tougher. People I love can do absolutely anything with me. My children complain that I’m too soft.’

Jeremy Guscott has a 42in chest, an outside leg of 43 inches and cheveux noirs. It says so on his model’s Z card. On one side of it, there is a photo of the hunk playing rugby; on the other, he sits, legs astride on a chair, while a blonde with a plunging neckline stands behind him with her legs apart.

‘I wouldn’t say I have the typical look of a male model because I’m rather short in the legs and long in the back,’ he says, sitting forward and gazing straight on out of melting eyes. ‘I’ve been told I look like Bruce Oldfield, but often I think I look too serious.’

Such work may seem, traditionally, rather a sissy sideline for England’s rugby union star as the team prepares to take on Wales at Twickenham on Saturday – but he’s happy.

Actually, he can hardly believe his luck. Just over two years ago he was working as a brickie, and a lot of his friends still do. But he is now famous for his graceful and brilliant athleticism, for his surprising attacks and resilient defences.

He presents himself in a calm and confident manner. But as a teenager, he was expelled from Ralph Allen comprehensive in Bath just before taking his CSEs.

‘I can look back on it these days and laugh,’ he says. ‘I also look back with anger. I got suspended for things like answering back to teachers, being obstinate and totally ignoring them, walking out of classrooms or smoking. At other schools, you would’ve just got detention.’ He smiles defiantly.

He is slim and moves in a feline way. The first time I met him informally, he appeared gentle, disarmingly charming. But in interview he is defensive, petulant even. Talking to him on some subjects is like arguing with an errant teenager. You quickly realise that this is a self-protective attitude.

Take the question of mini Guscotts. This week it was revealed that he is going to become a father.

‘You said you were going to get to work on having children straight away after the World Cup,’ I said. He gives a (rare) genuine laugh. ‘There’s no evidence of this, none at all,’ he says, distantly. ‘But my wife and I are both 100 per cent sure that we want children.’

He married Jayne, his sweetheart of five years, 20 months ago. It’s a mixed marriage and he met her after she kicked him at a local disco. (She insists it was her friend.) In similar fashion, his father came from Jamaica and had a mixed marriage to a woman he ran over on his bicycle. ‘I’ve not known anything different from a mixed marriage,’ says Jeremy. His maternal grandfather disapproved so strongly of his parents marrying that he refused to see Jeremy until he was three. ‘I’ve not had any problems with racism,’ says Jeremy, swallowing hard. He did, however, get called Sambo at school. ‘Kids get called Four Eyes and Fatty. You’re not going to get a reaction out of me, Caroline.’

We’re sitting in the tiny, bare sitting-room of his terraced house on the outskirts of Bath with his female manager, who is there to help him feel comfortable. There are some reproduction sepia photographs of Bath on the walls. It is a bland environment, with decor that is devoid of personality. He’s done a little magazine modelling and recently walked his first catwalk as the guest-of-honour model at Oxfam’s 50th birthday celebrations, in front of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent.

‘He felt really uncomfortable in that environment. He was polite but couldn’t wait to go,’ says a friend.

I ask about his modelling career. Is he a sex symbol? A matinee idol? ‘Oh, thanks.’ He gives a weak laugh, but the clothes he wears today could have come straight from one of his mail-order catalogue sessions. M&S camel double-breasted jacket, Blazer shirt and trousers, and camel suede brogues – this is the flash look that has just got him into Esquire magazine’s Best Dressed Men list.

Well, does he think he’s sexy? ‘I don’t think I’m sexy,’ he says, curtly. Or good looking? ‘I’m not being pressed on that.’ Do women chase after him? ‘Not that I’ve noticed. You just get the odd letter through the post that suggests they’d like more than a signed photograph.’

This is just a sideline. He actually works nine to five in the sales department of British Gas. ‘I’m in the housing development department, dealing with getting gas to villages that haven’t already got it.’ Somehow, he manages to make his tone quite menacing. ‘It’s quite wide and varied, and I enjoy going out and talking to people,’ he says, talking like a beauty queen. ‘I wouldn’t pursue another career. My future is with British Gas.’ He has, of course, been offered around £1 million to become a professional rugby league player. But he says he’s not interested in money – his ambition is to be a manager in British Gas marketing. Of course. But the real reason comes out later. With rugby union, he can come and go as he pleases. ‘I don’t think I could cope with the restrictions of being a professional. I didn’t cope very well with being told what to do when I was at school. I’m still not that good with people who order me around and tell me what to do. I wouldn’t be the boss.’

In his early days, his coaches reckoned he had a talent for the game but a suspect temperament. Is he still difficult? ‘Can be.’ And with an attitude problem? ‘I don’t think so.’ Nor does he think he’s too big for his own boots. ‘I still have the same friends I’ve grown up with. When you’re with the squad, you can’t be seen to be big-headed and nobody is.’ He concedes that he is aggressive. ‘I’m not afraid to tell people what I think of them,’ says this 26-year-old. ‘It’s never been a problem.’ His parents live 100 yards away. ‘Family, friends and community are important to Jeremy,’ says a friend. ‘He’s very deep-rooted.’ His father came from Jamaica 30 years ago and worked at the Avon Rubber Company before taking voluntary redundancy and becoming a hospital porter. His mother has been a teacher for 10 years.

Gary, his brother, is two and half years younger. ‘I’m always taking the mickey out of my mother and saying Gary was the favourite child,’ says Jeremy. Their father never used to let them out to play and get mucky. ‘We laugh about it now. But he wouldn’t ever let us go out and play and get dirty.’ Was his father too strict? ‘He was very strict.’

But, he says, with an almost quizzical tone, that it was a happy home. What went on in his childhood that led to him act in such a bolshie fashion at school? ‘I can’t think of anything. I can’t think why I did it.’ He clears his throat defensively.

One thing’s for sure – on Saturday, he’ll be boss. And he’ll be able to go out and play and get dirty.

I had a wonderful childhood and wonderful parents,’ says Sarah Brightman. ‘We lived in a four-bedroom house in Berkhampstead that my father built. I went to a stage boarding school when I was 11 and I was unhappy there. I remember my father saying to me, ‘Make up your own mind. You can either come home and do something else, or if you’re ambitious, you’ll have to stay on at the school’.

‘In the end, I stayed on because there wasn’t a stage school in our area. But to be honest, I would have preferred to have remained at home. I loved my family so much that I didn’t want to be away.’

So Sarah, the eldest of six children, went to private school though, in the early days, her sisters were sent to grammar schools. ‘They went private as my father’s business got better. He started from simple beginnings and did very well for himself and his company. We had a good lifestyle.’ She also says she inherited a disposition to insomnia from her father. ‘I don’t sleep well because I’m always worrying about the next thing.’ (She looks radiantly healthy, bright-eyed and rested.) ‘I think I’m one of those people who can survive on four hours’ sleep a night. My father is like that.’

Only days after Sarah spoke to me, her property developer father, 57 year-old Grenville, was found dead in his fume-filled Golf GTi. His marriage to her mother, Paula, ended five years ago and he is thought to have been having a complicated romance and business losses. It is significant that it is to her mother that she goes to stay in her spare time, on the south coast. It is also significant that she told me how important her ‘wonderful’ family had been to her in the 18 months since she was divorced from her second husband, composer Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Despite her father’s tragic death, she showed up this week to play her part of Rose (a woman who has lost in love) in her ex-husband’s Aspects of Love. Work provides a safe haven for her. ‘I can lose myself completely in my characters,’ she said last week, kicking her leg at an imaginary football, as she did through much of our time together. ‘I love escaping. I’m not saying that one wants to escape from the day, but it’s lovely to be someone else.’

In similar fashion, playing Rose helped her to overcome the break-up of her marriage. ‘It was quite therapeutic. If you work and have something that you can cling onto, that is the best thing you can do. Work is the one thing I know I do excellently. It gives me stability.’ She talks in a guileless fashion and presents herself like a little girl.

She says that since becoming single, she has become stronger. ‘I am opening up and becoming stronger as a person and a performer. I’m becoming stronger because I’ve had a lot of personal things to deal with. I’m not going to go into them, because they’re obvious. But I’ve also had to go through a lot of barriers career-wise.’

Married since the age of 18 (first time to a band manager called Andrew Graham-Stewart), she has coped well. ‘I’ve always been very reliant on a man. But I’ve handled it really well. I’ve not stopped working since I got divorced, I’ve lived in another country (America) and I’ve dealt with things for the first time by myself. I haven’t had anyone to go to and say, ‘I’m scared about making this decision, what do you think?’ ‘

Does she still feel hurt about Lloyd Webber? ‘I never felt hurt.’ Seriously? ‘No, I never felt hurt.’

‘He went off with another woman and you didn’t feel hurt,’ I say. ‘I have never felt hurt and I’m being truthful.’

She says they work together happily today. ‘There aren’t really any negative things to say.’ So why did he leave her? ‘You’ll have to ask him.’ She laughs. ‘He obviously had his reasons and did it.’ She appears incredibly accepting. ‘I don’t think one has any choice in life.’ He settled on her a sum that she won’t disclose, but estimates have been in the region of £6 million. ‘I live off my earnings and I wake up like everybody else, panicking in the night because I have bills to pay.’ Curiouser and curiouser. Why does she feel the need to panic in the night when she has some tidy sum stashed away? ‘Because I like to live in a real situation. I can’t do my job unless I’m in it with everybody else and I know what they’re thinking. How can you go into a meeting and negotiate when your head is in Timbuktu?’

She has left behind a lavish lifestyle. She will tell you how it didn’t change her. (‘I wasn’t any different.) And how she would do things like go to the White House or meet the Prime Minister. But nowadays she lives a quieter life.

One of the things that helped her make this change was her faith. ‘How am I going to say this without sounding cranky?’ She sometimes chooses her words carefully and talks in a circumspect fashion, as if she fears being stitched up. ‘My mother and two sisters are Catholic. Religiously, I haven’t anything very strong in my background. But I feel a very strong force within myself, almost like an instinct which I follow.’ She places her hand on her stomach. ‘It is warm and it is bright. I suppose you could call that God. I know that what keeps me going is this strong, warm force inside me. ‘I think you have to be very humble about what you want to achieve in life, because it’s not our decision,’ she says. ‘I don’t say I’ll leave everything to fate, because I certainly wouldn’t. But there is a fair amount of that. You can plan your life for the next 20 years, but there is no way it is going to go that way.’

When she talks about her split from Lloyd Webber, she talks about such cosmic forces again. ‘There are forces and things that happen that are completely beyond our control. Relationships aren’t like business and you can’t treat them as such. If someone really truly loves you and you’re just yourself with them and not forcing anything and it is right, it will be there forever. But if it’s not right, it’s naturally not going to work.’ She now lives in a two-bedroom rented flat in central London. She has simple tastes. ‘I’ve got the basics. I don’t need anything else. I don’t own a property anywhere in the world.’

She is 31 years old. ‘I don’t mind if I never get married again,’ she says. ‘And that’s not to do with being cross or anything. I don’t have a particular boyfriend. I’m dating lots of men. At first, I was a bit nervous because I didn’t know what to do. But you don’t have to do anything. You just have to be yourself.

‘I badly need people. We all do. I mean ‘no man is an island unto himself’.’ She leans back on the fleur-de-lis cushion in a hospitality room in the bowels of the Prince of Wales Theatre. ‘We all need help and advice. But inside, I am very, very strong and quite tough and I know what I want. I can be very independent, as long as I have my friends and family.’ Ask her about having children and she shrieks with laughter and starts to kick her leg in a very agitated way. ‘I come from a family of six, the youngest of whom is only 13. So I don’t particularly have any great maternal instincts. I’ve seen it’s jolly hard. I’ve seen my mother bring up all those children without any help. It’s tough.

‘In a way, they do drain your emotions and I feel that I wouldn’t be able to do my work as well if I had babies. If I had children, I’d probably give up all my time and stop work.’

It is unlikely she will stop work soon. She is driven. If she has two hours when the phone isn’t ringing, she starts to pace the flat. ‘Even if I switch on the television and watch a film, my mind’s grinding about why something is such and such a way at work and which camera shot would be good.’

She says she feels like the lion in The Wizard of Oz. ‘The one who has no courage. I’ve always felt like that since I was small. I’ve always felt like I’ve got a hurdle to overcome and often I don’t know whether I’m going to make it. There are all sorts of little things in life that I am scared of. And I am fearful of people.

‘But I’m also very happy within myself and feel quite strongly within myself at the moment.’ She does a double take on the last few words. ‘I’m healthy. I have a lovely family. And I have been given a talent that I feel grateful for.’

So why did she flinch on the last few words? Is it because she always thinks there’s something nasty around the corner? ‘I don’t know.’ She shrugs her shoulders, little girl like. ‘Maybe.’

Pat Booth was once extremely promiscuous and slept with men because she thought it old-fashioned not to. ‘I think I have a very healthy sexual appetite. I’ve seldom met a man who hasn’t appealed to me.’ This East End girl turned model, owner of boutiques in the Sixties, photographer, journalist and now steamy best-selling novelist thinks of herself as having a man’s mind in a female body. ‘I often see men as sexual objects.’ The place she really likes to be more than anywhere else in the entire world is in bed. ‘If someone said, ‘What would you like to do for the rest of your life?’ I’d say, ‘Stay in bed – alone’.’ She laughs. And what would she do? ‘I’d read.’

She has that look that models had in the late Sixties. She is beautiful, with big eyes and perfect teeth. Her reading tastes are eclectic and run from Russian classics to pop US religious leader Marianne Williamson, but she wouldn’t be at all averse to reading her own work in bed. ‘I’m always surprised that I’m so good,’ says the woman who once said that it never occurred to her that she wouldn’t become extremely successful and believes defiantly in her own artistic merit.

She has just published Miami, an airport novel about the super-rich, sex, models, glamour and power. The book opens with sex: ‘Christa was an animal.’ The book ends with sex: ‘His hands cupped her tensed buttocks. He drew her into him, plastering her soft wetness against his face.’ Such heavings might appear to sit oddly with Booth’s Catholicism. But her priest, who reads her avidly, once told her that it was all right for her to write thus since nobody in her books actually enjoyed sex. ‘I thought they were enjoying it when I wrote the scenes,’ says Booth, in the voice of a strong, confident woman. ‘It never occurred to me that the woman wasn’t enjoying it.’ Like the women in her books, she takes control of her life. She has been married to her psychiatrist husband, Garth, since 1976, when she was 19. They took time off for ‘bad behaviour’ for three years in her late twenties. ‘We decided to split up and ended up fooling around. He didn’t want me to work. I was Left-wing and he was Right. We used to row about Vietnam and the Israeli war, which is so meaningful when you are young.’

She has been faithful to him since. ‘But that is not particularly important to me,’ says this youthful 45-year-old, wearing a jacket painted with the names of her husband and children. ‘I certainly wouldn’t break up a marriage because of it. If I found my husband was being unfaithful, that wouldn’t concern me.’

She has two children, Orlando and Camellia. She waited until she was 34 to have Orlando, and her daughter is adopted. ‘Why? Because I er, er, well, er, my Catholicism. I, I, (she stumbles) had had an abortion when I was younger and came to the stage of thinking that was deeply immoral. So I adopted for that reason.’ To compensate? ‘Yeah.’

Booth says she had been financially supporting several girls who had no alternative but to abort. ‘I didn’t want any more children. I would never have adopted. But one of the girls was 12 and her mother wouldn’t take her back into the house with the baby.’ So she adopted Camellia. ‘To cut a long story short, it has worked out really well.’ She appears unfazed by nearly everything else I ask her, answering without pause.

She takes her religion very seriously. ‘I go to church three or four times a week. I’m very comfortable in church. I feel most at home there.’ She is seeking peace. ‘It’s the only time I am in tune with my core’ – she gestures as if holding her essence in a tennis ball against her chest – ‘with my inner voice and moral imperatives. I very much believe in one’s spirituality.’

She hates confession. ‘I’m just so fearful of it. So fearful of that box. I can’t forgive my own sin – and the confessional is somewhere you are given dispensation.’ It is sinful not to accept dispensation. ‘I am basically a complete and utter sinner, but I don’t think we are put here to be perfect.’ The words seem odd issuing from the former model with the sun-bleached hair.

Booth was bought up in the East End. Her mother ran a jellied-eel shop and her father was a professional boxer. ‘It was a matriarchal environment.’ It was also an impoverished upbringing. ‘There was no comfort or home cooking. I used to be very fearful of poverty. Frightened of being cold again and repeating the misery of my childhood. For the first time in my life I now feel so divorced from such circumstances that I no longer feel frightened of poverty.’ She has homes in London, Palm Beach and New York, but the legacy of her childhood, she says, is seen in the monastic, austere interiors she creates.

The early years were solitary, with her only sister 15 years older. A background that she says made her self-sufficient and single-minded. She left school at 16, refused to serve again in the eel shop, did a secretarial course, and then got her break as a model by working for Norman Parkinson on Queen Magazine. A toughie and a survivor, she didn’t have time to wonder whether she was going to fail. ‘I know what I want all the time. All I want is my own way.’

She is married to a psychiatrist, but would never consider seeing an analyst. ‘That would be complete self-indulgence. I am totally and utterly against it. Psychiatrists deal with those who are mentally sick with one of the five major illnesses treatable with drugs. There are some seriously ill people, I mean sick people,’ she says, a tone almost of dislike in her voice. ‘There are tragically sick people, of whom my sister is one, funnily enough.’ Her sister developed schizophrenia 12 years ago. ‘It has had no effect on my life. She was diagnosed when my father died.’

The only thing that makes her fearful, she says, is weakness. ‘I’m not vulnerable at all. I don’t feel at all vulnerable.’ If she does feel a hint of the v word coming on, she attributes it to chemical imbalances. ‘I think my adrenaline is not pumping properly. I don’t believe in vulnerability. I don’t indulge it. If I feel it for a second, I do something about it. I work out (which she does every day). I get rid of it very fast.’

The writer Margaret Drabble lives in a Hampstead house and Michael Holroyd, the husband to whom she is devoted, lives in Ladbroke Grove. It is an arrangement that London’s top-drawer literary couple have maintained since their secret wedding in 1982. But now she wants to move in with him. When they entertain, they sleep at her house; when they go to the airport, they spend the night at his. ‘We speak every day,’ says Drabble of Holroyd, the enigmatic man of letters who received a record advance of £625,000 for his biography of George Bernard Shaw. ‘He’s coming to dinner tonight, tomorrow I’ll spend alone…’

Drabble, 53, is an intriguing woman. ‘Occasionally I dream about being naked in the front row of the stalls. Sometimes I’m falling off a cliff or missing an aeroplane,’ she says, cupping her face in her hand. ‘I have a recurrent dream of standing up to give a lecture and I don’t know what I’m talking about.’

She also has a famously frosty relationship with her elder sister, AS Byatt, the Booker prize-winning novelist and critic. There have been periods of potent rivalry when they haven’t spoken, and they refuse to read each other’s books. ‘I was,’ says Drabble, ‘terribly upset when she became very difficult about me.’ Normally exceedingly reluctant to discuss their relationship, she talks later at length about one of the literary world’s most famous tiffs.

Drabble became famous 30 years ago, aged just 23, with A Summer Bird Cage. Once compared to George Eliot, she is currently writing a biography of Angus Wilson, has written novels, screenplays, biographies and edited The Oxford Companion to English Literature. She created a new kind of domestic novel but now writes with ‘black humour about post-industrial society’. Her recent work had critical drubbings. ‘I’ve been around too long and was doing too nicely and they don’t like that.’

She is wearing a sensible black suit, brown shoes and greyish tights and has large penetrating blue eyes, a clear and unmade-up face and brown bob. She is equanimous with an outer confidence, a face that expresses little emotion and a plummy middle-class accent with no trace of her Sheffield roots. We are talking in her Edwardian redbrick house, in a sitting room with one white wall and the rest in 20-year-old William Morris wallpaper, with books everywhere.

We return to the subject of marriage. Drabble and Holroyd spent most of their courtship behind the wheel of a car – Holroyd allegedly teaching her to drive. Why do they have such an unconventional relationship? ‘Both of us absolutely love being alone and we enjoy one another’s company enormously. So we’ve struck up a way of life which allows us to do both. ‘I didn’t want a relationship that was threatening or confining. He didn’t expect me to change or alter my work pattern. So many relationships have a bad effect on both parties. You see them getting nastier or cosier – cosiness is bad, too. For us, every week is different. This week we’re apart two nights. But we can always ring and say, ‘I want to be alone tonight,’ or, ‘Why don’t you come to supper?”

The last of her three children (she has two sons and a daughter) left home last year, so she feels there is no further need for her house. She wants to finish off Angus Wilson and then move into Holroyd’s place next year.

‘We’ll carry on just the same. I absolutely have to have my own space. We’d have to have separate bits of the house. I’ll say things like, ‘I’d like to spend this evening on my own with a whisky and an omelette.’ ‘I think marriage is a dangerous, dangerous relationship, full of potential destruction of personality. People aren’t meant to be together 24 hours a day. The form of relationship we have seems much more natural.’ Are they faithful to each other? ‘It’s not a question that I would talk about,’ she says, sounding strained.

Sex is something that she regards as destructive as well as agreeable. ‘It can be consuming and obsessional and make you very unhappy. I think it’s an extremely important part of life that can cause a great deal of misery. Sexual jealousy is a terrifying feeling. Sex has caused me misery at certain times in my life. I was unnaturally nervous about it when I was young, and then terribly keen to get on with it when I was 18.’

Drabble’s father was a circuit judge who was frequently away and remote, and her mother an English teacher who was aggressive and difficult. The second child of four, she went to a Quaker school in York, read English at Cambridge and got a double first, acted with the RSC for two seasons and then started writing. Marriage to actor Clive Swift lasted 15 years. ‘I was quite fiery and would lose my temper as a child. My mother and father were depressives and we all got depressed. I had quite serious bouts of depression. I used to cry a lot. My mother had a really foul temper and was always telling me off. You just weren’t allowed to make mistakes. She was from a working-class background, so you had to get on in life. ‘I had a most terrible stammer as a child. I could hardly speak. It comes back when I’m tired or cross.’ It also seems to happen when conversation hits an emotional nerve.

So what of her relationship with her sister? ‘She’s written about how she hated me, and I’ve written about how I admired her,’ replies Drabble, her voice rising. ‘When we were little, we had just an ordinary sibling irritation. But things got worse when we became published writers. ‘I used to tag around after Sue (as she calls her) when we were children. I wanted to do everything she wanted to do, which must have been maddening. I published first, when I was very young – which must have been terribly annoying for her.

‘We both became wary of reading one another’s work, worried that we were using the same kind of material. I forced myself to read one volume of her short stories which, unbeknown to me, came up for an award. I found it an unpleasant and disturbing experience reading about my own father.’ How did she feel when AS Byatt won the Booker Prize? ‘I was delighted for her – I don’t let my books go in for it, but of course I felt a twinge of envy…

‘We get on much better now than we did. She had this tragic period in her life after her son was killed. But now for the first time in many years she’s actually enjoying life.’

What about the time when they refused to speak? ‘It wasn’t as obvious as that,’ she stammers. ‘We just didn’t go out of our way to see each other.’ Does she feel animosity towards her? ‘No. I feel flattered and honoured if she calls me. I’m still the little sister. I feel it is wrong to bother her. I’m actually quite frightened of her because she is older and cleverer than me.’

As Byatt is certainly older; but Drabble is extremely clever. She also appears dour, but laughs. And wise, enquiring, sometimes priggish but likable. ‘I suffer from doubt most of the time. Doubt of myself as a writer, cook, housewife and human being,’ she says, steadily. ‘I feel flawed and faulty as a human being.’

Perky, impish and nutty Academy award-winning actress and sister of Warren Beatty. Self-centred, single-minded and charming author of Dance While You Can who talks about her past lives and is into the occult. Whither the real Shirley MacLaine?

On the cover of her book, with black boots and lots of black leg, she looks like a happy hooker. But today she’s wearing violet sweater, jeans and cowboy-style shoes. She appears youthful and casual and gives me a force 10 handshake. ‘I like to wear loose, comfortable things,’ she says in an accent that is mid-Atlantic, nasal and with a twinge of southern. ‘I don’t like my legs to get cold, so I always cover them.’

She doesn’t think her legs as pretty as people say. ‘They look much better in black stockings with heels. I look much better nude than I do dressed.’ In the best of all possible worlds, would she go around naked? ‘Yeah. Nude with heels and a nice pair of earrings,’ she laughs. She says her garb gives the impression that she doesn’t care about what she wears, ‘and that if I do care, I’m not that good at it.’

She has red hair, slightly wispy at the back, eyes that were made in heaven, and fuchsia lips that have been very painted on. Close up, her cheeks show their crinkles. But she looks damn good and has had only two hours sleep.

‘Physically I’m heavier than I’d like to be. By 75 pounds.’ (Huge cackle.) ‘My ideal body was the way Twiggy used to look. I’d love to have a size 4 figure.’ She doesn’t like the loose flesh on her tummy or the ‘lovehandles’ on her back. ‘I don’t like to look at myself in the mirror backwards.’

She dyes her hair because it’s salt and pepper grey. ‘I don’t like that.’ But she’s happy with her looks. ‘Yeah. But I’ve never thought of myself as particularly pretty. I guess I’m kinda easy on the eyes.’ Her own eyes look both lively and sad.

She has decorated herself with a necklace on which hangs an ancient Buddhist symbol of a spiritual performer, and she has four earrings in each ear. ‘I’d have 12 if I had enough room. I’d put one in my nose, and one in my teeth if I could.’ She’s hindered only by the thought of the pain. A forceful personality, she has a very strong presence, and a humour in which, surprisingly, she sends herself up. She is hugely absorbed by her own character. The things she says often look cooky in print, but she doesn’t feel that way in real life. She’s also very earthy and friendly to the hotel staff. I liked her.

‘Jesus, how would I describe myself? I’ve written seven books, it’s taken 15 years and you want a nickel of crack? (A thumbnail sketch.)’ She then describes herself seamlessly. ‘I’m curious, impatient, focused, wilful, vulnerable, don’t like people to be afraid of me – some people are, but that’s their problem. Sometimes I can be detached, I don’t suffer fools gladly at all, don’t like small talk – sometimes my big mouth is too much for other people – very open-minded, judgmental, like to laugh, love slapstick humour, not very acquisitive.’ Phew.

Although she seems to convey the opposite in the interview, she says she cares deeply about what people think of her and that she tailors herself to elicit a pleasing response. What doesn’t she like about herself? ‘My impatience and judgmental-ness.’

She has written about her inner balance, peace and harmony in cosmic terms. (A quick read of Dance While You Can, reveals much psychobabble and pretentious tosh.) Where does she want to end up with all her personal growth? ‘I want to be able to meditate in peace at the drop of an eyelid.’ Her face looks stern, as it does mostly, but that’s because she’s concentrating.

She reckons her voice is getting lower as she becomes wiser. ‘I think a high voice is probably a sign of tension.’ She’s had a long time to get it right. In her previous lives, she has been a model for Toulouse-Lautrec and a maidservant for Nefertiti. ‘A really important one was on the Steppes in Mongolia. How do I know? I just feel it.’ Is she coming back again? ‘Yeah, maybe I’ll try Venus next time.’

This time round she’s 57 years old. ‘I’m glad that I never have to be young and insecure and conflicted again because I get happier as I get older. But I think something new and big and transformational and transcendental is about to happen to me. I don’t know what it is. Crewwwfff, crewwfff,’ she says, not for the first time making a strange noise through her nose in the style of someone who has just snorted cocaine. Does she do drugs? ‘I had one joint once and I stared at the test pattern on the TV for 15 hours.’ She hates anyone taking anything personality-altering and attributes her sinus problems to the hotel’s air conditioning.

In the book, she has put sex behind her. But now she has changed her mind. Where exactly does she now stand on sex? ‘Very rarely do I stand. (Laughs). It’s not as fulfilling!’ Professionally, she says, women in their 50s are no longer perceived as sexual beings. And personally? ‘I just had two years of . . . well, I wasn’t purposefully abstaining, sex just gave me up and it gave me an opportunity to have relationships with people without that sexual pressure.’

Does she think she’s sexy? ‘Yeah. I’m not as promiscuous as I used to be. It was fun, and I wasn’t as promiscuous as the word would imply. I was just promiscuous in relation to my upbringing. I’ve had a lot of lovers, but I’ve only had one at a time – it was serial monogamy.’

How many lovers? ‘I dunno. I wouldn’t even like to get into the counting of it.’ How would she define her sex appeal? ‘I’m spontaneous and childlike.’ She has piled her plate high with food and tucks in unselfconsciously, even eating a crumb off her jumper.

Is she eccentric? ‘Yeah’ – enthusiastic – ‘not because of my beliefs, but because of my lifestyle.’ I say she’s seen as cranky because of her mysticism. ‘People don’t see me as loopy here. Or, that’s not what comes out in the Press.’

Does she always need to be the centre of attention? ‘No. In fact most of the people I am with are much more theatrical’ – she is talking through a mouth full of food – ‘I like to be the woodwork. I’m shy – that’s my natural personality. I’m afraid of being judged, that’s why I don’t like to be the centre of attention.’

And is she self-absorbed? ‘Umm,’ she pauses, for the first time, ‘not really. I like to be centred in myself, some people would call that ‘self-centred’ or ‘self-absorbed’, and I’d say ‘fair enough’. If I’m not centred in myself, I’m not happy.’

And an egomaniac? ‘No,’ she says, with certainty. ‘I don’t have much of an ego. I’m always concerned, overly concerned, about the other person’s point of view. I’m basically a dancer and dancers don’t have ego.’ Dancers, she says, have will. ‘I am ruthlessly wilful. I won’t hurt anybody if I can avoid it, but I will certainly fix things so that what I want happens. But I’m not egomaniacal.’

Perhaps the accusation is levelled at her because much of her work is a tribute to herself. She has written seven volumes of autobiography and starred in a television drama about herself, written, of course, by herself. ‘That’s a search. It’s like I’m looking for who I am. Someone egomaniacal is already damned sure.’ Has she found out who she is? ‘No, only in parts.’

Amusing and nervous impresario who once forgot about a booking in Northampton, leaving the audience staring at an empty stage. Gimmicky and stocky promoter who once did the Spycatcher Pops – passages from the banned Spycatcher book set to music at the Barbican and with free seats offered to MI5 and MI6 members on proof of identity.

Charming and diffident man who throws Teddy Bear concerts to which adults get reduced tickets if they come accompanied by a teddy bear (booking form requires the name of the bear and his paw mark too). And man who worked for Victor Hauchhauser for 10 months, 28 days and 12 hours.

Enter the so-called Grand Old Enfant Terrible of the Concert Scene, the chap who promoted the recent Turandot at Wembley, the Arthur Daley of the music world and Britain’s most successful classical music promoter, Raymond Gubbay.

The potentially ghastly little philistine is wearing a safe and sober suit, stripy shirt and paisley tie – free of the flashy or spivvy traits one might expect from a big-time concert promoter. ‘I like to merge into the background and listen to what people are saying.’ He speaks in north London accent.

Before we met he was dressed in T-shirt and casual trousers. ‘Now I’m wearing the sort of clothes I’d wander out to a concert in.’ He fiddles with his hands, does a shoulder-heaving laugh and leans forward over the table. He is thick-set and balding with wonderful soulful brown eyes. ‘I eat too much and I sit down too much. What else? Oooh God! This is difficult. Go on, give us a clue, ho ho.’ Is he good-looking? ‘Oooh no, ho ho ho I just think I am pretty ordinary. Even when I was younger I never thought of myself as particularly good-looking. I’m just me.’

He says he’s happy with his bald patch. He started to lose his hair when he was 18. ‘I wondered whether I should wear a wig. But I’m happy with what I have – or haven’t – got. It’s just like a wide parting, isn’t it?’ He points to his hairline. He is 45 years old. ‘It never worried me. I’ve never been conscious of age.’

He is seen as the Placido Domingo type, clean-shaven, whimsical, resolute when roused, and clashing with the Pavarotti-style figure of the other impresario, Harvey Goldsmith. What does Gubbay think his image is? ‘I suppose people see me as being at the popular end of the market, as something of a wide boy – which I would deny.’

He is shy and very nervous, and gulps down his food and drink and wiggles around a lot while he’s talking, visibly displaying signs of tension. He’s also making great efforts to be honest, despite finding the questions so tough. He doesn’t seem the type who would set the world alight. But he comes over as a kindly, warm and generous man. One also senses that this is a man with regrets.

‘I’m impulsive. I like to get immediate results and I have a low boredom threshold. I like to see ideas come to fruition as soon as possible. What else?’ he says. ‘I can be very rash and not very responsible with money – spend first and regret later, you know.

‘I’m also a bit antisocial. When I’m not working, I have to be kicked to get out and join in. I really like just putting my feet up and relaxing. I’m probably a bit shy – people may find that strange, but I have always been a bit diffident and hanging back. That and being self-conscious is something I have had to get over.

‘Sometimes I have incredible bursts of energy followed by great periods of lethargy. I’m very unpredictable in that sense. But when I get the bit between my teeth, I really push on and achieve things. Other times I can really lack inspiration and get depressed and into second gear. I’m either firing on all cylinders or in a stalled position.’ Thus he describes the petrol in his tank.

What changes would he make if he could have a car mechanic work on his parts? ‘I suppose I would try to lead a less pressured life. I think the stress can sometimes be too intense – one doesn’t realise just how much it is until one stops.’

How does this stress manifest itself in him? ‘Irritability, short temper, sometimes lack of enough consideration for what people are telling me. I don’t lose my temper that often. When I do, I always regret it afterwards. You have to let off steam sometimes.’

He is a mixture of Russian, Baltic, Prussian and Spanish Sephardic Jew. He clears his throat and coughs. ‘Being Jewish isn’t important to me in a religious sense. But being part of an old grouping influences you in a historical sense. It is there subconsciously and comes out in the Jewish character of liking culture, music and painting. One also feels slightly vulnerable when looking back in history and seeing what has happened to the Jewish people.’ Everyone who is Jewish, he says, knows someone close to them who has been ‘hideously scarred’ by events in the past 60 years. Is he successful? ‘I suppose on the whole I have been. If the test is measured by enjoyment – and I don’t suppose it can be – I very much enjoy what I do. In the eyes of other people, I suppose I am successful.’ Is he rich? ‘No,’ he says, surprised. ‘I care about material things inasmuch as I like to have a comfortable lifestyle. But I’m not particularly aware of wanting to have lots of money.’

And what of love? ‘I’m not very lucky in love,’ says the man who once fell foul of the GLC Women’s Committee harridans by handing out roses to the girls in the concert audience on Valentine’s Day.

Married for 15 years, he is now divorced and lives with his children, for whom he cooks. ‘The downside of my work is that it makes relationships difficult because of the unsocial hours. My work had a damaging effect on my married life, which I regret.’

Ask him what makes him attractive to women and he laughs like a motor starting up. (He also wiggles his wheels, doing a version of a long-distance runner with his feet.) ‘I’ve certainly never felt that women were attracted to me because of my looks, huh huh huh. People have been drawn to me because of a common liking of music.’ He smiles and winks. ‘I’ve never felt I was a particularly good catch for anyone.’

Fay Weldon is drinking a cup of instant hot chocolate and talking about marriage, divorce and reconciliation. Just last month, her husband claimed she had fled their home to get away from a noisy neighbour. Then the author of Life and Loves of a She-Devil, Puffball and The Cloning of Joanna May (on ITV later this month), and Growing Rich (a TV series next month) announced that she had actually filed for divorce from her husband of 30 years, Ron Weldon.

‘After many years of harmonious marriage . . . he to pursue his painting, me to pursue my writing,’ she said at the time.

Now, four weeks later and speaking extensively for the first time of the breakup of her marriage, she says: ‘I very much hope that we haven’t permanently split up. It seems to me unlikely that anything that drastic will, in fact, occur.’

She spent Christmas Eve dinner and Christmas Day in Ron’s company. ‘We are getting on, increasingly, rather well, so we will just have to see what happens next.’ She gives an end of subject look.

She relents, with gales of defensive giggles and genuine amusement, and says that she left the matrimonial home because it’s easier to move a pad and pencil than an easel and paintbrush. (Former antiques dealer Ron metamorphosed only five years ago into a painter and jazz trumpeter.) ‘He needs light and all I need is a patch of floor. Anyway, I have a nicer nature because I’m more flexible and, you could add, ‘impetuous’. ‘I have too much respect for him to say a word against him. Let’s just say differences in perception of politics, of what morality consists of and of aesthetic sensibility made it difficult for us to function under the same roof. We used to have incredible arguments on the stairs about the nature of creation.’

The 60-year-old author who is currently working on a BBC bible (series blueprint) looks tremendous. She has been dieting and doing Calanetics from videos in the sitting-room and taking hormone replacement therapy. ‘I can’t understand why everyone doesn’t have HRT.’

The feeling that whatever is natural is somehow good and you shouldn’t interfere, perhaps? ‘Nature’s only interest is in having you procreate, then it throws you away. But I do not wish to be thrown away. I don’t even want to die.’

But she puts on weight and takes it off repeatedly. ‘I never thought I was obsessed with my size,’ she says, indignantly. ‘It’s not something that rules one’s life.’

She returns to the subject of Ron. ‘I could say, I suppose’ – cavernous pause – ‘that I cannot live any more with three dogs, 16 hens and 18 sheep, and a hen in the dog food.’ She laughs, ironically.

But these are merely symptoms of an underlying problem. ‘Yes, the problem of what you spend your energies on. I have a gregarious nature and like talking to people and listening. I am a very sociable person. I like to expend my energies on the outside world and he likes to spend his on an interior world.

‘It becomes difficult for me to put up with him. It is also very difficult for me to put up with not being with him and very hard for him to put up with not being with me.’

They always had their fairly basic differences in attitude. ‘But we managed, somehow, to overcome them.’ The divergence, however, became exacerbated with Weldon’s growing celebrity. ‘The differences do get more acute as my public face becomes better known. It becomes more difficult to live in a world which is cut off, because the outside world intrudes. You also become answerable for your actions.’

She doesn’t think the relationship had become destructive for her. ‘But I think it may have become destructive for him. We have been married for a long time and it is extremely difficult to separate yourself from another person, to know to what extent his views are mine and mine are his. ‘If things go wrong, what should be working constructively begins to work destructively and it is important to have a high opinion of the other person, or a good opinion. And if that isn’t available for both partners, you begin to see yourself out of the other person’s eyes and you may not like what you see.

‘The other person may be completely right. But you would very much hope you could get them to turn around.’

The woman who once said she’d rather be in prison than trapped inside an unhappy marriage regards marriage as a very serious affair, not undertaken lightly, and unhinged with great difficulty.

Her peace negotiations with Ron are at that delicate stage when they could break down. ‘It might,’ says Weldon, scratching her head and looking to the side, ‘even be a little like the Arab-Israeli peace conference.’ She feels she is sitting there while the Israelis stalk up and down making wild gestures. Ron lives up the road (the occupied territories) in the ivy-clad house she moved out of.

She’s living in the neighbouring Somerset village of Pilton in a dear cottage (‘rented accommodation,’ as she says crossly) with a river at the end of the garden, his paintings on the walls, unmade beds and a sloppy mess in the kitchen. (She spends half her time in Somerset and the rest in a terrace house in Kentish Town. Curiously, she says she is going to move back to London at Easter.) So what is going to make it possible to go back and function under one Somerset roof? ‘One of us has got to bend.’ And will it be her? ‘Well, you sincerely hope . . . you don’t know . . . it depends.’

Throughout her talking about her marriage, one gets the feeling she doesn’t know whether she is coming or going. She takes a sip of instant chocolate, enjoying the chemicals. (You feel she’d rather that than Go to Work on an Egg, the slogan she created when she was a copywriter. ‘When I get to Paddington and take a deep breath of London air, I think it’s wonderful.’ Ron, by the way, liked lentils and home-baked bread.) Weldon is wearing a dusty pink jacket, with shoulder pads that hunch up around her face. She is on the short side, fleshy, with a huge bust, and blue, blue eyes that are upward tilting and set in an open face. Her face is pretty and expressive, but she is not photogenic. Her eyes can look sad, but her face has the expressions of someone who thinks life is a big joke. She spent her early years in New Zealand. Her father was a doctor and her parents divorced when she was five years old, thereafter living in different parts of the country. Weldon lived in an all-female household with her mother, older sister and grandmother.

‘Life was very hard and we had to survive. My mother had to support two children, which wasn’t easy.’ (Her mother, a romantic novelist, ended up running an advertising agency.) Aged 14, Weldon came to England and felt ‘in exile’.

When she was 17, her father died. She hadn’t seen him since she was 14. What was that like for her? ‘It was dreadful, dreadful. I mean shattering to the extent that you don’t quite recover from it properly.’ She is touched, caught unawares by the question, without defences or automatic answer. ‘When there’s been that gap, it’s very hard to come to terms with the loss of somebody you never really knew, because you only knew them when you were a child. It’s very difficult to come to terms with that.’ She sounds enormously sad. She has tears in her eyes.

‘It was a major loss. But my mother is still alive.’ She lives near by and they see one another frequently.

We discuss Weldon’s health. Her heart sometimes beats at twice the normal rate beneath her generally unflappable and serene exterior. ‘I just go into hyperdrive if anybody upsets me.’ (She has plasters on her wrist today because it happened the previous night. As usual, she had to drive herself to hospital where she was wired up, given a cardiogram and an injection to slow her heart.) It wasn’t a call from the Annex (as she dubs her real home) that caused it, but rather matters literary. ‘Someone upset me on the phone about Angel Clare and Alec d’Urberville.’ She screams with laughter.

Hers is a condition that affects people who talk a lot and have loads of adrenaline and are constantly getting more done in a day than can reasonably be asked. She claims to like this stress. ‘Oddly enough most people who get it feel absolutely terrified, but I don’t.’ (She is a great coper.) It happens about three times a year, but more if she is going through patches of tension. ‘Yes,’ she looks reluctant, ‘it has been happening quite a lot recently. Christmas Eve was the last time I was in hospital. Ha-ha.’ She’s a Leftish, humanist, feminist and omnivorous reader – cheerful, buoyant and immensely likeable. Not the dark and miserable woman full of rancour and savagery that one might expect from her books. She also has extended senses – they might be called psychic by someone with a less scientific mind.

She has been a breeding machine (she laughs at the words) and has begat a Nicholas, Daniel, Tom and Sam. The first from a short-lived marriage to Ron ‘Number One’ Bateman (whose name she normally claims to have forgotten). ‘I just like children. I think it’s extraordinary to see what comes out.’ The youngest lives with her and she drives him daily to school at Millfield. To her surprise, she works with the others sometimes.

‘I do say to people that if you are going to be a writer, you’ve got to be a bad mother. But I think I’m a bad housewife and a kind mother.’ She used to feel great anxiety as a mother, and would weep from self pity and rage, feeling trapped by other people’s needs. ‘As you earn more, you’re not nearly so angry because you can always call a taxi and go to Harrods.’ On Weldon’s birth certificate, she is recorded as ‘Franklin Birkinshaw, boy’, and ‘boy’ is crossed out and ‘girl’ added. ‘Naturally, anyone would have thought I was a boy. Then my parents just called me Fay, having realised they were in error calling me Franklin.’

She smiles mischievously and suggests we go up to the Annex and pretend we want to buy a painting.