This isn't going to be easy. Not least since I've just swallowed a shard from a duck bone. Interviewing people in restaurants is always a mistake - they're just about to admit to killing their father or doing something unspeakable to their mother when the meringue arrives - and the Chuen Cheng Ku Chinese restaurant on the edge of London's Soho may be a bigger mistake than most as the waitress speaks hardly any English and I have only the haziest idea what I am eating.
But the food writer Elisabeth Luard was keen to get some lunch, so here we are, talking about her new memoir, My Life as a Wife, which scampers through 40 years of marriage to the racy Nicholas Luard, proprietor and saviour of Private Eye in its infancy, co-founder with Peter Cook of the pioneering early 1960s Establishment comedy club, travel writer, novelist, co-founder of the London marathon, conservationist, anti-apartheid campaigner, alcoholic, philanderer and all-round impossible husband.
Luard died of cancer in 2004. The book is a portrait of a marriage, and its opening nicely captures the ambiguity of the relationship. "This is the story of my life as a wife. Or how to stay married for 40 years without actually murdering your husband. A love story." The verdict, Luard tells me when I've extracted the duck bone from my throat, could have gone either way.
"It started as the story of a marriage," she says, "and I didn't think it was going to end up like that [as a love letter]. It was basically how to stay married for 40 years without actually murdering the bastard. That was the core of what I embarked on, but writing it was like the truth and reconciliation commission. It really did change. I could suddenly
understand why people need to speak about things, because if you speak about them they lose their sharpness."
Luard was alcohol dependent all his life; extramarital affair dependent, too, if the stories in the book are to be believed. Such as the time, when they were living in Spain, that he managed to give a sexually transmitted disease to both his wife and the au pair. Wasn't she mad to stay with him - except for a year-long separation in the early 1970s when her patience finally ran out - through thick and thin?
We never quite get to the heart of this central question. First, she offers negative reasons for sticking around. "I wanted to say this is how a marriage happens. It's self-evidently not all plain sailing. There's a lot of encouragement now to run for the hills, but there are other considerations. It's a different decision when you have children - and a different decision, too, even when your children are adult, because if you have someone in the kind of physical condition Nicholas was in, your children, if they're well brought up, would pick up the pieces when you walk away."
When I protest that this sounds more like force of circumstance than grand passion, she changes tack. "You can sound a bit elitist if you say, 'I loved living with this man who was so literate, so interesting.' I liked the fact that he had a very fine, very educated mind, and after 40 years of marriage we could sit across the table from each other and discuss whatever we wanted. That was great, and that's what I miss with Nicholas. His political ideas were so interesting. You can see that with his career, his conservation work. That ability to see the way we should go, and then get up and do it."
The truth may be that Luard herself doesn't know what kept them together. "When a love affair is over," she says in the book, "whatever the reason, the heart and mind keep the print.
I can draw no conclusions from the life that we shared. All I can say is that this is what happened at that particular moment, this is how it was, this is how it seemed to me. Some things are left unsaid. We are free to choose what we remember and what we forget." There are no definitive portraits of a marriage.
The book's title seems self-deprecating for someone who has built a successful career in her own right as an illustrator, food writer and author. Why put herself down in that way?
"I called it that because it's the truth," she says. "My life was completely dictated by the fact that I was a wife, and it's written for all those people who are wives. I used to get asked when I was knee-deep in four children: 'Do you work?'"
Her background was privileged - wealthy mother, airman father killed in the war, diplomat stepfather with whom she didn't get on - but peculiar. She was a debutante in 1959, but quickly saw through the charade. "I was outraged by the whole business," she says, "which wasn't bad for a 17-year-old. It was like a cattle market. I remember thinking this is not that much different from what goes on in Soho, for heaven's sake. We've both got a price - ours just happens to be higher."
She was smart but uneducated - this was a time when posh women were meant to be good at entertaining and motherhood, and not much else. Her mother, who was living in Mexico with her diplomat husband, paid Luard's rent, but she had to earn her keep, which is how she came to be working in Private Eye's cramped office above the Establishment club in Greek Street, where she fell in love - more or less at first sight - with her husband-to-be.
They married in 1963, had four children in quick succession, and decamped to Spain when the satire bubble burst and Luard's business enterprises foundered. He turned to writing instead, starting with a highly regarded book on Andalucia, but money thereafter was tight and, once her children were bigger, Elisabeth had of necessity to embark on her own career.
"I needed to earn a living," she says, "and I was never not busy."
She wrote European Peasant Cookery, The Princess and the Pheasant, The Barricaded Larder and The Flavours of Andalucia, and even tried her hand at a novel. Then in 1996, she produced Family Life, a happy book about bringing up her peripatetic family (conceived, she says, as a "My Family and Other Animals-type memoir, with recipes and drawings") that ends with a tragedy that played out as she was writing the book - the death from Aids of her eldest daughter Francesca in 1994.
Francesca's death is detailed in a moving coda, told from the perspective of both mother and daughter. "Knowing the inevitable," writes Luard, "she made certain that everyone who knew and loved her understood perfectly what had happened to her - and then she set the matter aside and went about reorganising her life." Francesca gave up her job as a journalist on the Daily Mail, where she covered lifestyle subjects, and took up painting instead. "Life's too short for shopping," she told her mother.
"I think she knew who she got it [HIV] from," Luard tells me. "She very bravely rang up the list of exes and said, 'Oi, you'd better go and get yourself tested.' She knew about five, and the sixth said he hadn't picked up the result ... But she had no rancour about it. She was much more worried about who she had passed it on to. She was really remarkable."
That coda in Family Life also hints at the accommodation she and her husband reached in the painfully bright days they spent nursing their daughter, and afterwards, when they returned to the remote farmhouse in Wales that Nicholas had inherited from his godmother.
"We find," she writes - just a few years before Luard was himself diagnosed with cancer - "that the division of our labours means that we have neither grown apart nor together, but in parallel. Perhaps because of this we still find each other surprising and interesting. Unexpectedly, after three decades of independent living, we can still learn from each other. We know one another's weaknesses and strengths - and, after all these years, take care not to tap too hard on the cracks."
After lunch, Luard has her photograph taken - a neat touch, this - in the nightclub that now occupies the old Establishment club premises in Greek Street. With a nod to its heritage, it is called Zebrano at the Establishment. Luard, preening for the camera, looks pleased to be back. Then she heads off, ploughing her way through the traffic in Piccadilly Circus and shouting after me: "The one thing that what you called my privileged upbringing gave me was a belief that everything would be all right. I don't fear anything." As if I needed telling. How else could she have survived the successive losses of devoted daughter and errant husband, and still be in love with the world?
My Life as a Wife is published by Timewell Press (£16.99). To order a copy for £15.99 with free UK p&p go to theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875.
