‘CHESS’ proclaims the huge banner outside the drab one-time cinema that is now the Playhouse theatre in Edinburgh. Scarcely noticeable beneath it, a small strip reads ‘Rudolph Nureyev’.

The audience file in, looking as if they were going to the local bistro, no one particularly glammed up for the occasion.

Inside, an usher gives me-and every other woman in the front stalls-a pink rose, to throw on stage at the end of the performance. An adolescent girl in jeans and T-shirt (no pearls and fur coats here) asks her companion: ‘Where’s the orchestra?’ There isn’t one. For the £30.75 ticket and £6 programme you get pre-recorded music, on a diabolical system. The performance is billed as part of the 16-stop Nureyev Farewell Tour, the road show which reaches Wembley Conference Centre on Friday. But what we are witnessing tonight is the pathos of The Long Goodbye, the tragedy of a legend who cannot let the final curtain fall.

Has it really come to this? Inexorably, the man who enthralled millions around the world is joining the ranks of those who destroy their own mystique. The Maria Callas, Sarah Bernhardt, Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald Club.

The first time I ever saw Nureyev, he was in the Russian Orthodox Church in Kensington. The incense burned, people chanted gloriously and he paraded in an ankle-grazing sable coat. He had that distinctive haughty tread and trademark cap pulled over his thick brows and dark eyes.

This was the international superstar incarnate; defiant, handsome, magisterial, proud, temperamental. And now here he was playing in a provincial theatre in Edinburgh. It was a bleak, undecorative and charmless affair.

In Sunderland, on the opening of the tour five days ago, 50 fans demanded their money back. His performance at Liverpool was described by critics as lacklustre. ‘Nureyev leaves them shouting for less,’ said the headlines. Here in Edinburgh, there were 700 tickets still on sale the night before. During the performance, there are rows of empty seats at the front. But where is Nureyev? Ah, yes. He comes on just before the interval. He does no solos and after a little exertion in The Lesson, the fiery Tartar sits breathless. Sweat pours off him. He is in constant pain and virtually disabled by a calcium spur on his heel. He’s 53 years old and for more than 20 years has performed a near-masochistic 250 performances a year. His body has grown weary, his stamina nigh gone.

Tonight he is no longer playing virtuoso roles, but ones which depend on dramatic presence. Imperiously, he milks the audience for applause and to be fair he still has a fading sexual charisma and compelling stage presence, but it is based on an association with the glorious past, not the now. What he is now doing is really low grade theatre. The soundtrack crackles dismally out of the PA, ugly great speakers set to the fore of a space that has no stage set and no design to relieve it. It is as alluring as a school hall on a Sunday night at midnight. The whole evening grows artistically like . . . like . . . well, like something thrown together by the promoters for the sole purpose of spinning a fast buck.

So there we sit with our pink roses. If they are meant to be thrown to the maestro, nobody does.

So why does he do it? Not for money, ambition or fame. ‘I am a dancer. I am a dancer. Maybe I am the dancer,’ he once said. There is a demon inside him. He is simply a man obsessed; one consumed by a passion; one for whom dancing is the focus of life.

He is also a man who has always fought against critics, competitors, his own muscles and even gravity. He is a warrior who has the will to fight-even when he is losing. He won’t give in to loneliness, old age or infirmity. At the end of the evening, the audience dutifully claps. But there is none of the foot-stamping or whistling that denotes serious approval. A girl in the stalls calls ‘Bravo!’ Nureyev’s eyes light up as he hears it, the single voice in the dark. A lone cheer that is of little cheer. Where is the retinue of yesteryear? The fans straining at the police cordons? The autograph hunters? Gone are the nights of 89 curtain calls. As the performance ends, those watching file out. Many leave before the applause is through.

The dancers’ hero bids farewell DANCERS lost their most formidable champion last night when Wayne Eagling gave his final performance for the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden. Flowers cascaded from the balcony, and bouquets materialised from both sides of the stage, as he blew a departing kiss to the cheering audience and turned to snap the assembled company behind him for his family album. His talents as dancer, choreographer and fighter for dancers’ rights were generously acknowledged by Mr Jeremy Isaacs, the general director of the Royal Opera House, who found him a testing adversary during the dancers’ strike in 1989.

‘He steadfastly championed the cause of dancers in debate and dispute with management,’ said Mr Isaacs.

‘He has fought hard for them and in spite of the spats and recriminations, he is widely respected for his experience, flair and powers of leadership.’

As a dancer, Mr Isaacs continued, Eagling ‘had a formidable technique, a handsome presence, and masculine vitality. He played every prince that ever was’.

For Eagling, who moves to Amsterdam in August to take up directorship of the Dutch National Ballet, his farewell was not an occasion to rake over old coals. ‘I told my mother that I would not say anything controversial,’ he joked.

He said: ‘I have a very warm place in my heart for this building and this House. I hope it remains one of the best in the world-along with the Dutch National.

‘After 25 years with the Royal Ballet-22 with the company and three in the school, which I hated-I’ve a lot of memories. I will miss everyone that’s around.’

He paid tribute to a long list of inspirational dancers-Rudolf Nureyev and Royal Ballet Director Anthony Dowell among them-and to choreographers like Kenneth MacMillan and Frederick Ashton.

* THE BBC is joining with the Royal Opera House, the Kirov Theatre, the Opera de Bastille and other organisations to show a new production of Prokofiev’s War and Peace by British producer Graham Vick at the Kirov this summer. Viewers will be able to see the production, which marks the centenary of the composer’s birth, relayed live from Leningrad on 14 July.

Sandie Shaw is wriggling and giggling. Now she’s sitting cross-legged. Now there’s the laugh that hits the ceiling. And more wriggles. And lots of funny voices. If you didn’t know she hated the song, you might say she was acting like a bit of a Puppet on a String. But she’s just recorded an interview with Jonathan Ross, and she seems to be quite high. Grace, her lovely-looking and, at 20, her eldest child, has just left us. (‘Yummy Mummy’ is what her children call her.) ‘Grace is really beautiful, not just physically but mentally and spiritually. We relate very much to the child in each other as well as the woman.’

Sandie Shaw came back after an absence of more than 15 years-‘my black hole, I call it. I don’t know the exact dates’. She ‘retired’ at 24, pregnant and with 17 hits behind her. Always Something There to Remind Me… This is the girl who came from Dagenham and whose first job was with the Ford motor company, training to be a computer operator. She who finished her marriage to dress designer and television presenter Jeff Banks in poverty and went to work in a restaurant in Soho where, once Warhol’s guest, she found herself waiting on him. ‘I didn’t feel ashamed. I loved it. It was such fun.’

Sandie Shaw is clear-complexioned and bright-eyed (penetrating blue and ‘blind as a bat’), with curly lashes, rich brown hair, little-girl dimples, architectural cheekbones, and what is probably a willowy figure beneath the billowing pink T-shirt. Grace’s mum, in other words. She’s wearing lurid-fluorescent, even-green Ozbek leggings and the trademark bare feet are shod with lime running shoes. ‘I might be sophisticated from the neck up, but from the neck down . . .’

The eternally youthful 44-year-old (on being asked, she says she’s about my age; I’m 31) who has just published The World at My Feet takes a sip of her white-wine spritzer.

She left singing so prematurely ‘because I’d buggered up my career’. She was, she reckons, slipping artistically and soaring commercially. ‘I’d done some really great stuff-and then I was talked into doing this crappy song Puppet on a String and entering the Eurovision Song Contest. I didn’t know what a feminist was then because they didn’t exist. But instinctively I knew it offended my sensibilities.’

She walked off live German TV when they played it. (‘I don’t want to wallow in nostalgia, it’s so negative. It’s valuable to look in your wing mirrors from time to time, just to know where you’ve come from. But you shouldn’t drive like that, without consulting the road ahead.’) ‘There were hits after that, but nothing I enjoyed.’ The turning point, she says, was this bloody song where they kept changing the lyrics and it was in Italian. ‘I went and hid in the gazebo in the garden and covered myself in hay and waited till everyone went away.’

Any fool, she reckoned, could get up and sing. But the book reveals she was looking for an inner conviction, having spent years ‘winning publicly and losing privately’. Her self-confidence is fragile. She’s known what it is like to ‘descend into the pit, to live in the dark, airless basement, to be traumatised by pain, to be paralysed by fear . . . sometimes life kept hitting me so hard that I would crawl around on all fours unable to stand up. For days I hid under the smoked-glass table top, curled up foetus-like’. Grace-who held her mother’s hand at the births of her next two children-would pass her her meals, sometimes forcing her to chant. Did these Dark Ages continue throughout her ‘retirement’? All through her marriage to Jeff Banks? ‘Oh no. That sounds awful. But that whole time (10, 15, 20 years, she doesn’t know which) I lost my direction, my self-esteem, my money and I lost a baby. I’d lost just about everything you can lose. And look at me now.’ (Giggle giggle and she’s putting on silly voices again.) ‘I needed to get away from everything. I had no respect for myself as a woman, artist, human being, person of talent . . .’

So why did she write the book? ‘Cos I was in kind of a unique situation. I realised I was getting these kind of parallels of everything I had lived in the past and not done quite right. So I thought I’d resolve it in this new situation. Every day seemed like a second chance-every relationship I had, my re-emergence. It was all a kind of reliving of something.’ Meet Sixties Person. Mrs Time Warp herself. She who used to ride a tricycle and, it is said, breast-feed in interviews. She who, along with Jean Shrimpton, Mary Quant and Twiggy, was the inspiration for a generation; a household name in Europe and the pin-up of every mod astride a Lambretta. ‘I think I’m a very Nineties person. I really do. The things I carry from the Sixties are really right on. Things like being spontaneous, really connecting with the whole, the universal-consciousness thing, the peace initiative. But I think I’m always in the eye of the hurricane. I’m always in the middle of what’s happening.’

But don’t ask who it is inside the hurricane. We’re not allowed to grasp her essence. You see, we can fuse (her words) at a particular time, but we can’t capture her. She changes from moment to moment, and it’s like we can’t read her personality-just pick up (still her words) certain nuances and atmospheres. ‘It’s just like I’m so multi-textured. I mean that’s what’s so great about people.’

Her mother, in The Sunday Times in 1965, described her as ‘quiet, reticent . . . she was quite a lonely child. She used to like her own company . . . I’ve tried to teach her to be good and believe in God’. Which brings us onto her Buddhism. Sandie Shaw is another singer-Cat Stevens, Cliff Richard, Aretha Franklin-with the religious impulse. A dedicated Buddhist who works as a district leader for central London for the Nichiren Shoshu brand of Buddhism-Tina Turner, Lynn Franks, Herbie Hancock-she chants daily. (Nam nyoho renge dyo . . .) It improves the tonal quality of her voice as well as giving her an inner calm, balance and happiness. ‘It makes the quality of my life fantastic.’ She started in 1977 and has gone on record as saying she has been able to change everything she doesn’t like about herself. But as to what she didn’t like . . . well, that sort of thing changes from moment to moment.

But why? ‘I’m quite prone to lose my confidence. And I understand now more what triggers it. No, I won’t tell you. That’s between me and me. But I think people are unique and each person’s karma is so theirs.’ What sort of childhood did she have? ‘Some of it was happy, some of it wasn’t. You can’t grasp someone’s personality in a moment . . .’

Why did her first marriage go wrong? (She is now married to Palace Pictures film millionaire Nik Powell who proposed on their first date and married her in the Buddhist Centre.) ‘I don’t think that particularly matters. I think what is important is why my second marriage is succeeding.’

So why did she re-emerge into the public eye? (‘Did I let Nik know I was going out?’ she writes about her thoughts on her first tour. ‘Have I left the kids something to eat? Did I leave the washing on?’) ‘I was dragged out of my shell by lots of people who said I was wonderful. And they said it often enough for me to start believing it a bit.’ Right at this moment, perhaps she is.

Then I was talked into doing the Eurovision Song Contest… it offended my sensibilities

‘How did you get on with the Queen, Mr President, and what did you think of Windsor Palace?’ Lech Walesa thought for a moment and replied: ‘Windsor is very nice. But I’d move a few things round a bit if I lived there. The light was too far away from the bed and the bed was so big I could hardly find my wife in it.’

A few days before Walesa lost his wife in a Windsor bed, Neil Kinnock had Glenys to dine with the Queen, a meeting which prompted a much-quoted exchange between him and John Major across the Commons debating chamber. What actually goes on at Windsor Castle? The mix of guests is intriguing (the Kinnocks dined with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Home Secretary and Sir Paul and Lady Fox) and the etiquette virtually unknown outside the walls. Such little jaunts are known in The Household (when it comes to the Castle nearly every other word has a capital letter) as a ‘dine and sleep’. If this sounds like ‘wash and go’ or ‘bed and breakfast’, it is not intentional.

WC is the plum invite, the thing to go to. Obviously better than a lunch at Buckingham Palace, it is also rated by those who have been there much better than Balmoral which is a glorified camping holiday (hamburgers on spits and so on). But very few people are getting invited at the moment because of the rewiring at WC. Even One’s Family Christmas for 30 has had to decamp. It is, however, during April, Ascot in June or the Windsor Horse Show that invitations get extended. Gatherings at WC are the most formal and the Queen tends to be at her most relaxed during Ascot when she knows everyone who’s staying there.

Instructions on how to get to WC, what time to arrive and the code of dress are furnished. And a lady-in-waiting will answer questions about tips (yes, do) clothes (black tie; but ankle-grazing Scotch House rather than Thierry Mugler. HM is not a wild dresser) etc etc. What do I say to the Queen? is the one that can make the most hardened socialite go weak at the knees. Apparently anything goes-as long as it’s not in any way contentious or controversial. Something like ‘How are your horses?’ will usually do. The way to behave when receiving royal hospitality is subtle and arcane. Call her Mam (like ‘mum’) and curtsy or bow on first clapping eyes on Her. Thereafter the scraping and bowing ceremony is repeated only before going to bed and on first seeing the Royals in the morning.

One notable recalls how, years ago, Prime Minister Harold Wilson kept all the other guests up half the night drinking balloons of brandy. HM had retired to bed hours ago. The poor Canadian Ambassador was dead on his feet, but stayed up into the early hours. It wouldn’t, you see, have been etiquette to leave before the British Prime Minister. Generally, however, one doesn’t get drunk with the Queen.

Lady Longford remembers a friend having her plunge bra removed from her room at WC, rendering her earth-bound in her glamorous gown until she tore her other bra into a new model. The Countess says that sort of thing happens all the time in houses where there are servants. The brisk ladies of The Household are not famed for having their fingers on the pulse of fashion. They do understand, however, that during Ascot week, ladies wear a bowl of fruit and veg on their heads.

WC is just up the M4 and within spitting distance of Heathrow Airport, from whence the roar of over-flying jumbos can be heard every three minutes during the day. (After the nervous exhaustion of the shindig, a ghost is likely the only thing to awaken the overnight guest who will probably not notice any shift in the medieval foundations either.) A place of muscular towers and serried battlements, going through the gate to WC is a bit like entering an up-market housing estate-on which Liz, there since the age of 26, is the oldest resident. The place is full of tenants like military knights, the dean and cannon and lots of chaps in funny outfits. In addition, the shrubs tend to reveal assorted cranks, Fleet Street types-and former members of the Thames Valley police force keeping a close eye on the sleeping arrangements. The Queen has her own self-contained apartment where she can rustle up bacon and eggs or try on a tiara and sash with a tracksuit in peace.

There’s a swimming pool too. One of the guests found the Queen’s bikini top-yes, she wears one in private-and light-heartedly tried it on. A man, he was. HM caught him cavorting. She definitely saw the funny side of the proceedings. But the offending article was rapidly removed and replaced in the Royal Ladies Changing Room.

The main guest gets a suite in, say, The Lancaster Tower. WC notepaper-and loo paper-is provided, but there are no bath robes or giveaway shower caps. While Countess Spencer whacks stamps on the envelopes in her guest rooms, our dear Queen is known to make a little saving in this department. State rooms are hangar-sized and of concussing splendour-mostly the handiwork of George IV and his chappies-in various forms of neo-Gothic, souped-up and florid. And the Grand Reception Room is dazzling. George IV and the Duke of Wellington types glower from the walls, and the place is awash with Van Dycks, Canalettos, Stubbs’, Holbeins and old-master drawings.

Bedrooms are pretty standard decor-tapestries, glowing wood, richly wrought ceilings and suchlike. The Woman of the Bedchamber, it must be understood, is a lady-in-waiting. A quick peek round the door will reveal endless pages and footmen wandering around wearing livery. Like all old-fashioned bedrooms, bathrooms are rarely en suite and they skimp on the heating and have endless huge chests of drawers. Bedrooms also tend to be a good 15 minutes from where the food is served. And if one brings a nanny or lady’s maid (these days few do), she’ll be another 20-minute walk away. It’s well known that Princess Michael wasn’t impressed with the nursery arrangements for the dreadful Freddie. And the maids’ rooms are primitive and spartan.

Queen Victoria used to forbid people to smoke. One Archbishop of Canterbury was caught puffing up his chimney. Things these days are much more relaxed. There’s a story that the whole Royal Family drank from finger bowls on observing some African dignitary doing so. But this is probably not true. It is, however, all right to eat one’s salad with fingers, as Mrs Tebbit found.

You are led to dinner by HM, and the seating arrangement very properly goes boy-girl-boy-girl. All this takes place on a great long table in somewhere like the Waterloo Chamber which is not where the battle was fought, although it has a size that suggests it could have been.

The Queen and Prince Philip will often sit in the centre of the table, opposite one another. Forests of flowers preclude having to make eye contact or conversation with the person opposite. These marvellous huge bowls of flora have been home grown and arranged by people who have had to clamber onto the-at that stage felt-covered-tables to do so. This is not generally done during dinner.

Food tends towards the Dover sole and peas variety. Simple and good is the way it is described by those who have savoured it. Fruit and veg come from the Home Farm. The wines are all served by white-gloved men. Mam talks to the person on her left during one course and the person on her right during another. It is advisable to follow suit, otherwise you end up nattering to the Countess of Hoo Ha’s hairdo during the sorbet.

After dinner, the Queen does a guided tour around the State Apartments, ending up in the Royal Library. Like the head girl of a boarding school, she expects people to pay attention. And the Royal Library goes to a lot of trouble to find out what the guests are interested in.

Michael Foot, something of a bibliophile, was amazed to see The Household didn’t just read Dick Francis. And the Library doesn’t just keep books. They have all sorts of curiosities like Henry VIII’s cricket bat, the flying gloves that Prince Andrew used during the Falklands and the diary that Elizabeth kept of the Coronation. Depending on your interest, you’ll arrive in the Library and find a cricket bat or an illuminated manuscript in the display cabinet.

HM loves to hear jokes, (maybe something to do with being partly Scottish). ‘What do you get when Batman and Robin are run over? Answer: Flatman and Ribbon.’ That was the one that made Her Majesty roar with laughter.

She likes to provide some entertainment-and even during the house parties of Ascot week there will be some kind of drawing-room reading or string quartet on offer. The Queen also sometimes shows films. But probably not King Ralph.

Cool, self-assured, forthright former waitress, clerk and receptionist who was born in New Zealand. Devout, unimaginative housewife who was convicted in 1981 of murdering her nine-week-old baby Azaria by cutting her throat with a pair of nail scissors at Ayers Rock. Hard, unsympathetic, little bitty lady who was sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labour. Unflinching author of Through My Eyes, a direct and detailed account of her conviction and subsequent exoneration, phenomenally recalled in 768 pages. This is the image of the lady who went from housewife to household word. Enter Lindy Chamberlain, 42: Logical Lindy as she was known in prison, or Lindy Gulla (which means ‘good one’) to the Aboriginal girls. ‘It meant that I was all right and wasn’t going to put them down because of their colour or because they couldn’t read or talk properly.’

Former prisoner 2958 looks like a smart secretary in her neat make-up, patent shoes, sheer tights, black skirt and striped shirt.

‘I’d wear shoestring straps, bare shoulders, very light clothes-Stubbies (shorts), thongs (flip-flops), boob tubes. I wore a sun frock for the first inquest.’ She speaks in a light and clipped antipodean accent, very Neighbours-ish, emphatic, high, but full of apparent self-assurance. She steamrollers interruptions-and my attempts to tell her she’s going off the point-pressing on determinedly with what she is saying, even when the questions are about something else, although the interview can only be short owing to her schedule.

She’s insistent on giving a history of her wardrobe, relating it mostly to her various court appearances. She is very much the one in control. Her look turns out, curiously, to have been moulded by the Press-after constant criticism, comments, admonishments ‘not to wear anything too busy or provocative’, photographers saying wear this or that. She’s very professional and has packaged herself nicely into a very saleable commodity.

‘I have a designer friend, Jean Bas, who dresses me for my interviews.’ She borrows the clothes and gives them back afterwards. ‘So it gives the impression you’re rich when you’re not.’

She charges for interviews, apart from when she’s launching a book. Exonerated but not compensated, she needs money. ‘All that publicity has meant I can’t get a job.’ It is the newspapers and television stations who have made money out of her plight.

She has been described as tough, unsympathetic and not showing enough emotion for a mother who had lost a child to a dingo.

‘I suppose my face in repose is fairly straight. It’s fairly severe when I’m not smiling. When you have 1500 cameras around you, jurors and hostile people looking at you, your face goes stiff. I tried to keep as neutral a face as possible. And then it looked severe.’ And now? ‘Well, yeah, this is it.’ (She’s smiling.) One of the things that went against her was her apparent passive acceptance of her loss. ‘An English response, misunderstood by the emotional Greeks and Italians in Australia . . . and when you believe in something after death, it doesn’t affect you so much. You don’t have a cold, hard feeling of nothing being left.’

People just saw a hard-nosed murdering bitch (her words) when they saw her. But she is a private person, guarded even, who doesn’t show her true feelings to strangers.

She has brown hair, brown eyes and has put on two stone while writing the book-which weighs almost as much. She laughs at the latter notion. She laughs easily and also has a sense of the ridiculous, which comes out in her book.

So how would she describe herself? ‘I’m normally about seven stone. I’m only five feet one inch and people think because I’m on TV that I’m taller. They always go, ‘Ooh, you’re tiny’.’

Does that make her strive more? ‘Oh no, I think nice things come in small parcels-otherwise, diamonds would come the size of Ayers Rock.’ She comes over as cool, very self-composed with a perkiness.

She has sad eyes that have seen a lot. Meryl Streep went further and said she had eyes like the survivor of a Nazi concentration camp. ‘I don’t know.’ (Laughs.) ‘I’ve never been in one of those.’

While she was in the prison next to an abattoir, kept awake at night by the sound of pigs being slaughtered, she worked on the drains and did cementing without gloves. How resilient! ‘With my bare hands. It’s really good hand cream.’

Suffering from flu, your interviewer repeats a question. ‘I told you that in my last answer,’ she says sharply. She knows how to keep a person on her toes. So how would she describe herself in terms of character? ‘Now in what way is that question different from the last one?’ she retorts in a chilly tone. What a hard time she gives! (Too intimidating to dare ask her about her sexuality. On simply enquiring about her relationship with her husband, one gets a frosty: ‘No comment.’) ‘Well, you have to be specific. I have a very accurate attention to detail. I’m fairly tidy, fastidious, too meticulous. I’ve always relied on memory-my book is from memory-and in court they’d say you can’t possibly have that good a memory.

‘I used to be shy in public, but not any more. That’s the greatest change . . . I don’t let people walk over me. If I get the wrong change in a shop, I say so instead of walking away disgruntled. I don’t suffer fools any more, though I’ll still be polite to stupid people.

‘I don’t think there’s any call to be rude to people. And I think you should remember to treat people the way you want to be treated.’ And what sort of mother is she? ‘A fairly reasonable one. I think I’m pretty laid back. If the kids fall over, I don’t scream and panic. But I do see if they are really hurt . . . I like to keep them fairly tidy and neat. My kids and I have a lot of fun . . .’

She continues: ‘I’ve always been a very positive person. I like to get all the information in before making a decision and then I’ll stick to it’-she’s rather boring in her delivery-‘I’ve got the reputation of being fairly stubborn. But if I hadn’t been, I would never have got out of jail. ‘I didn’t see why I should admit to something I hadn’t done just for an extra bit of physical comfort-I would have had to live with my conscience.’ Certainly, she has endurance and spirit.

‘If I make a promise I keep it. I’ll do anything humanly possible to do it.’ She’s leaning forward, fiddling with her leg, cradling herself in her arms; it’s the only time in the meeting that there’s any flexibility in her body, though she becomes progressively softer as the interview proceeds. ‘I guess that’s another reason I got labelled as being hard. I’d do things that went against the tide, even things that got me into trouble with the screws. But I believe in honesty.’

So what does she think got her through all this? ‘Faith,’ she says, her eyes lighting up. (She is a Seventh-day Adventist.) And how does the image of a formerly convicted murderess sit with her now? ‘Well, it never really worried me because I knew I was innocent.’ Does she think she’s a bitter person? ‘No.’

She’s been described as strange, difficult, sneering, callous, mysterious . . . ‘Well, am I?’ (Laughs.) ‘The papers got sick having to come up with something new over 10 years and just put down whatever came into their heads.’

She presents herself as amazingly self-possessed and calm. Image or reality? ‘I think that’s my nature. If there’s a road crash, I’ll pull over, act quite calmly-then feel sick afterwards.’

And is she formidable? ‘No.’ (Laughs.) A friend who hadn’t seen her for 12 years recently came over. ‘After 10 minutes, she said, ‘Gee, you haven’t changed at all’.’

I’ve got the reputation of being fairly stubborn. But if I hadn’t been, I would never have got out of jail.

Until 18 months ago, Dorothy Berwin and Seth Stein lived in his little-larger-than-a-doormat bachelor flat. Very high-tech, it had aluminium floors, aircraft chairs from a jumbo jet and the most minimal minimalism. Dorothy kept most of her clothes in a mobile wardrobe unit-her car. ‘It was like being on a constant camping holiday.’

Now Dorothy and Seth have made a few changes. They have got married. They have moved into what was a former Notting Hill Gate nurses’ hostel-and they have developed agoraphobia. Their old flat would fit into their current kitchen, and you could land a microlight in the new sitting-room. ‘We used to lie in bed, stare at the ceiling and wonder how long it would take to walk there,’ says Dorothy, 30, grilled-vegetable enthusiast, red Comme des Garcons skirt lady and head of business affairs for Zenith Productions, a leading independent film and TV production company. Seth, 31, in Ralph Lauren shirt and Levis, laughs.

She’s impish and clever; and he-with a dry wit and gentle disposition-is New York gone Barcelona: the former by birth, the latter in looks. When they first saw the conversion, Dorothy’s mother-a lady of some taste-said: ‘Isn’t it wonderful? You can move straight in.’ And then Seth ripped it apart and demolished it.

Built in 1850, the building-of which they bought the ground floor-had previously been full of nurses’ bedsits in decline. Their current 50-foot sitting-room was four bedsits. This hostel had been connected by a passageway to the block behind, a hospital.

But the flat on which they exchanged was a luxurious new development. ‘It had serious gold handles and lots of twiddly bits everywhere,’ explains Dorothy. For ‘twiddly bits’ read chair rails, decorative tiles, frilly knicker Osborne and Little curtains and trellis-work motif on the best quality handmade Colefax and Fowler carpet.

And so they set about tearing down the brand new curtains, stripping the flat, ripping up carpets untouched by human foot, bartering a marble fireplace for a generous Thirties sink from the Dorchester, getting rid of all ornamentation and knocking down walls. All achieved with some pocket money and what they dub low-budget expensive taste.

The thing you need to know about Seth is that he’s a talented architect who worked for Richard Rogers and then Norman Foster, whom he left 15 months ago to set up on his own-in other words a baby of the high-tech generation who has discarded his aluminium nappies for modern clothes sewn with much care and attention to detail.

His work-relished from Islington to Italy-is about modernism that is not alienating, stark or cold.

Take their sitting-room. You burst into it through a Tutankhamen passage. Asymmetrical, with tapering walls of natural pigmented plaster, it gives a feeling of length and perspective.

Inside, there are soft white walls, motorways of white silk curtains, a chandelier of white Christmas fairy lights with clothes hanger wire, a fire with a concrete hearth set with Seth’s collection of pebbles picked up on beaches, a Sarah Charlesworth diptych-half of which is all black-called Fear of Nothing, and an acre of vegetarian carpet (Seth’s name for seagrass). ‘When it’s damp, you can throw alfalfa seeds on it and they sprout. Come the siege, we’ll be able to live on it for a month.’

Then there’s the furniture-or rather, there isn’t. ‘The typical situation is to go either to Conran or IKEA.’ Seen It Before, in other words. The little but great furniture there is was designed by Seth, apart from the Bonnetti and Garouse-they did the Christian Lacroix showroom in Paris-rope-coloured curvy-backed sofa and an Eileen Gray chair. There’s a dining table made of salvaged yet still distressed Victorian floorboards on a modern steel frame. A fire-engine-red table, a graphic solid square which tapers to a rectangular base off-centre, irregular and appearing to float. And not much more.

It was here that they recently held a party for 200 friends: a flat-warming-cum-engagement do, with Sixties moving blob oil projections on the walls, dry ice and funky music-all because Seth always wanted to be on Top of the Pops.

Next door is the study, nocturnal and introspective with its big white door with a single steel handle, grey varnished plaster and high-tech bookshelves that aren’t bookshelves-they’re floor decking for warehouses-clutter and Fornasetti classical motif Fifties-shaped chairs. The kitchen-with natural materials, handmade terracotta tiles, timber cabinets, stainless steel with linen finish, fig trees and Dorothy’s mother’s 30-year-old cooker-is not just modern, it’s ergonomic. The inspiration for the flat came from a Manhattan loft space. ‘As London gets more like New York City in terms of pace and grottiness,’ says Seth, ‘you need your home to be more of a simple haven away from the stress. We fantasised about having a large, white, simple space.’ Simplicity. Ah, simplicity.

BARBARA Chandler’s Supersaver is a Fagor white or brown built-under electric oven with hob controls, plus gas hob and electric hood for £375 (usual price £500). From Buyers and Sellers, 120-122 Ladbroke Grove, W10 (071 229 1947/8468), while stocks last. Credit card orders accepted. Please show or refer to this edition of the Evening Standard to qualify.