WHEN Deborah Moggach’s partner of 10 years died in February, they stopped the film at the Empire Cinema. The paramedics leapt on him like athletes, attempted resuscitation, the theatre emptied in a flash, and the police cleared Leicester Square. He was the cartoonist Mel Calman and he had a fatal heart attack as somebody’s throat was being cut on screen. His death was no more extraordinary than the life of Deborah, 45, the popular novelist.

In 1981, Deborah agreed to have a baby for her infertile sister Alex, offering to borrow her man, Brian, for a few nights. Deborah said she didn’t fancy Brian and was doing it out of noblesse: this was reproduction not adultery. She thought artificial insemination too cold and official. But would Tony (now Deborah’s ex husband) be upset? Or Alex jealous? Or one of the lovers fall for the other? Deborah never found out because Alex and Brian separated; but she put her experiences into a novel, To Have And To Hold.

Or go back another decade. Then Debraless, as she was known, was at Bristol University: a middle-class gel living with a bus conductor, trying LSD and pot and visiting a shrink to talk about her rebellious penchant for rough trade. She’s always had a predilection for butchers’ boys, men covered in plaster and is, she says, the sort of woman who hyperventilates when she sees a skip.

We meet in her Camden Town home (colourful, surreal and messy) with Jocasta Innes splodge painted walls, a dinosaur skull in the sitting room (it turns out to be a hippo’s; she bought it for £4 when she was six) Penguin books and Ella Fitzgerald to Brahms tapes. Two characters converse in a Calman cartoon: “Do you realise we’re stuck in a frame we can’t sell.” Deborah offers wine and freshly ground coffee – her voice rich but tremulous – then poses revealingly for the photos in her shredded Indian chiffon skirt. She has forcible features, tumbling hair, ink writing on her wrists and smokes roll-ups. She laughs to hide her pain and is witty, observant and shrewd. Lovely.

And she understands the game. Next week The Ex-Wives – about a boozy, sweaty, superannuated actor and his exes – appears in paperback and features Penny, a journalist: ‘From strangers she had extracted humiliating personal confessions…’ it reads.

Deborah writes lying on her bed, Pentel spilling on the counterpane, doodling naked women when it’s going badly. She’s adapting Moll Flanders for TV and writing a kidnap novel. But she’s found it hard to work since Mel died.

She fell in love with Mel when she walked into his larder and discovered he’d pencilled a face around every wall tack. They never married or lived together; she says she didn’t want to inflict her adolescent children on him, and loved the schizophrenic life of visiting him in Soho. ‘I’d come back in the morning wearing my high red heels and everybody would think I was a hooker. Then I’d change into my horrible baggy working trousers.’ Mel died when he was writing a radio play about a man who has a heart attack. Deborah’s only previous experience of death was years ago when she watched her grandmother die in bed. That didn’t really bother her. But Mel’s death was traumatic. His funeral was grim and freezing. Grief was a foreign country. ‘I couldn’t cope. I was always putting things in the wrong place, like keys in the washing machine. You’re not yourself. You’re ill. I felt raw and only wanted to eat nursery food, undemanding things like mashed potato and leek soup. I became terribly working class and wanted lots of roll-ups and sweet tea, which I hate. I was pole-axed by the loss. ‘I went through my answerphone tape hoping to hear him talking about normal things. But he wasn’t on it.’ She looks forlorn. ‘I miss the long conversation we had which lasted 10 years and was just interrupted from time to time.’

People, says Deborah, don’t realise it’s necessary to be much alone in grief, to think about the deceased. ‘The nearest equivalent is having a baby. When you give birth, you need to concentrate on the pain to get through it. With death, you need to be undistracted. You don’t want to go anywhere. Even crossing the street you feel vulnerable and naked.’ SHE says she didn’t turn to drink or tranquillisers. ‘I love drink but I’m not a great drunk.’ And she managed to write a poignant account of Mel’s death just days later. She feared it a terrible invasion, a cathartic plundering of his death. ‘But I’m glad I did it. I wanted to record this terrible moment from the front line.’

She feels ‘normal’ now. ‘The recovery process was revved up because we didn’t have any unfinished business. We didn’t have anything left which we hadn’t said,’ she says, shaking slightly. She can conceive of a relationship with another man. ‘I won’t find anybody like Mel. But I can imagine a future with somebody else.’

But she doesn’t see herself as sexually attractive. ‘I do if I’m tarted up. But underneath I’m a mess,’ she says, bringing her knees up foetally under her chin. ‘Often I feel that I’m a pretend woman and underneath I don’t really know how to do it, sex or being a woman, and that I’m going to get found out.’ She recognises that such self deprecation requires some self confidence and may simply be an elaborate self deception.

We talk then about her ex-husband, Tony, a publisher whom she left in 1985 for Mel. The divorce was traumatic and she lost weight badly. Now relations are friendly and he lives in the next street for the children’s sake. (Tom, 18, and Lottie, 17.) ‘You are parents until you die,’ she says. Deborah, third of four daughters of writer parents, is laissez faire with her offspring. How would she react if they took drugs? ‘I only took acid because it was the Sixties and to give myself street cred with my children,’ she says, unconvincingly. ‘I wouldn’t like them to, but everyone smokes pot. I don’t have strong feelings about that.’

Had Deborah had that surrogate baby, it might now be friends with her children. ‘I’ve never talked to them about it. But I’m terribly glad I didn’t do it,’ she says. ‘It would have opened a can of worms. One jumps into things in a flood of emotional warm feelings, generosity, sexual desire or whatever. But it would be fantastically difficult to see your child being brought up by somebody else.’

And what would it have been like to have slept with her sister’s boyfriend? ‘Technically it would have been adultery. But it’s when it gets to be adultery emotionally that it becomes interesting.’ Was it not a taboo? Something perilously close to incest? Perhaps an extreme manifestation of sibling rivalry? She replies with waffle. Deborah is normally searingly honest.

Her frankness, she admits, is a strategy to distract people from asking her things she doesn’t want to talk about…