HOWZAT

“I think now that anyone who really wants more than anything else in the world to get married and have a family, can do it. I know I could have done . . . but anyone who asked me to marry him always seemed to me to be too boring for words.”

Instead she was drawn to excitement: her work at André Deutsch brought her into contact with black radicalism and in the 1960s she became involved with Hakim Jamal, a handsome convert to the teachings of Malcolm X. Jamal, Athill’s author, was a highly persuasive madman: he believed himself to be God and he spent hours trying to convince her of this. When he wasn’t stealing from her, sleeping with her or hypnotising her into acknowledging his divinity, he was apparently excellent company.

Jamal eventually took off to Trinidad with his English girlfriend, who was hacked to death by some of his associates. He fled and was later murdered himself. Athill largely exculpates him from responsibility, laying the blame on his rotten childhood.

Tellingly, she is far less forgiving towards the other killer among her acquaintances, Myra Hindley, with whom she discussed a book proposal. The project foundered on Athill’s dearest belief: “The whole point of writing about yourself if you are going to do it at all is to get to the bottom of what your experience has been. You can’t do that unless you say what it really was like.”

On talking to Hindley, Athill decided it would do her no good to face up to what she had done because, if she truly did, there could be no way out but suicide. “I don’t think Myra was mad . . . She was very intelligent. When she reached the point of seeing what Ian Brady was doing and going on with it, then I think she did something so wrong that it was unforgivable.”

Why is she so much tougher on Hindley than Jamal? “I understand the way Hakim was what he was in a way that makes me feel sorry for him. I couldn’t do that with Myra. I don’t think there was any excuse, any damage there, not that I could see.”

Given her passion for truth-telling, is there anything she feels she cannot write about? She hesitates. Somewhere Towards the End, she thinks, will be read by old people and so she softened what she wanted to say “because I didn’t want to shock them too much”. She wrote of her last lover Sam that he found her attractive because she was “white and well bred”, but she does not go deep into this in the book. “When I wrote that, I was aware of saying something that not many people would have said. It’s rather rude to black men, for one thing . . . And it could be seen as racist. But it’s a fact of life.”

In conversation she ventures further: “I don’t suppose that many white men of Sam’s age would have wanted to have an affair with me. There is in sex relationships, very often, an element of trophy with men. And by the time you are a woman in your fifties and not particularly beautiful . . . My looks, such as I had, were gone but they were replaced by the fact that I was white. I was desirable because of my colour. Of course, it was nice for me.”

It hasn’t taken us long to come back to sex – it crops up whenever she talks about truth, how people really are as opposed to how they like to seem. She feels that her parents’ generation and class lived their lives in “a conspiracy of silence”: one which she had to escape to survive. Crucially, escape came not through sex alone, but through the decision to be utterly candid in print.

Does she feel saddened, now she’s 90, to be freed from sexual desire, to have achieved the state George Melly once called being “unchained from a lunatic”.

“Oh! It’s a liberation. Women do feel that, you know, much more than men. I’ve known so many old men who hang on to the idea that they are still sexual beings. Heavens, to have to take a pill to help you get it up? If it doesn’t want to get up, then it doesn’t want to get up, surely!”

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