Novelist Marika Cobbold, whose fourth novel, Frozen Music, has just been published, lives in an imposing Victorian Terrace house a stone's throw from Sloane Square. Petite, and attractive, with a ready smile, Marika is enormously likeable, bubbly and open. Her accent swings from English to Swedish, and our conversation is punctuated by shrieks of laughter.
However, she glances warily at my tape recorder, having been caught in the glare of publicity when the papers learnt that she had left her husband for her publisher, Patrick Jansen-Smith of Transworld, four years ago. The Evening Standard published a piece, calling the story, A real life twist to an Aga saga, and it was picked up by the Daily Mail, and the Express.
"It was ridiculous," says Marika. "Quite absurd. It was six months after the event. It wasn't that hostile. It was more stupid. I thought, who would bloody care? I'm not well known, and Patrick's name wouldn't mean anything outside the small world of publishing." However she did worry that the publicity might hurt others; particularly her children, Jeremy and Harriet, then 18 and 15, who were at boarding school.
"Luckily they are very level headed," she says. "They were pretty clued up. Harriet's house mistress was an excellent support. She said, `oh my dear, don't worry. We had Lord Lucan's daughter here!' "
Marika declined interviews to promote her third novel, A Purveyor of Enchantment, and she left Transworld to save embarrassment and charges of nepotism; and signed a two book deal with Orion. But promoting Frozen Music, has, inevitably reawakened press interest in her private life. She was annoyed that a recent interview in the Daily Telegraph, focused on her guilt that her happiness has hurt so many people.
"I should have known; I'm a journalist's daughter!" she says ruefully.
Worse, another paper published an interview with Janson-Smith's ex-wife which included a vicious attack on Marika.
"I just wish it hadn't happened," she says, too upset to comment further.
Marika was born and brought up in Sweden; the daughter of not one, but two journalists.
"Looking back, I was an embryo writer as a child," she says. "I did nothing but reading, and I was communicating from the outside in rather than the inside out. But it never occurred to me that I would write as a profession. Writing always seemed so commonplace."
At 19, Marika married Richard Cobbold, a Royal Naval commander, and moved to Hampshire. When her children were tiny, she joined a creative writing class, and wrote a novel.
"It was a secret," she says, with a giggle. "I spent all my spare time writing. But when people said, can't you do this or that, I didn't like to say I'm busy because I'm writing a novel. I suppose because if you don't succeed, which is highly likely, you would seem so silly and pathetic."
Cobbold's first novel wasn't published. "Thank God!" she says now, but her next, Guppies for Tea, which dealt with the problems of old age, became a surprise best-seller, having been featured in the WH Smith Fresh Talent promotion.
"I had been involved with an old mother-in-law, and had seen my grandparents go through that stage, and I was, and am very passionate about the way we handle old age." Her editor, Di Pearson, felt that the novel was too stark, and asked her to take some of the more depressing scenes away.
"I stood my ground. I didn't want to cosy my way out of it." She compromised by adding to the love story, to attain a better balance.
Oddly, getting published didn't make Marika happy.
"I think most writers feel almost embarrassed about being read, but the novel doesn't exist unless it's published. It matters so wholeheartedly, but I got depressed. It's like when you're a child and you long for that red bike, but when you get it, nine months later at Christmas, you don't really like it at all."
A second book, A Rival Creation, followed, and it was when Marika was writing her third, that she and Patrick fell in love, and left their marriages to set up home together. Twice married, Patrick has four children; two of them young. Finishing the book was very difficult.
"It's very hard when the drama in your own life is twice as dramatic as anything you are trying to do in the novel," says Marika. "It was not good. It was moving house; everything that came with it." She felt manipulated by the press too . . .
"They have to have a story! When Guppies was short listed for the Sunday Express Book of the Year, (alongside Roddy Doyle, Barbara Vine, and William Boyd,) I was the housewife who was writing. I remember thinking am I not a writer now? I'd been writing for four years! And then it was suddenly, the housewife who had led this very dull life in Hampshire being catapulted into the bright lights!" In fact, Marika explained, her social life in Hampshire had been perfectly stimulating, with many London friends, and there were glitzy parties to attend in Sweden.
"Contrary to what the press thinks I don't go to a lot of publishing parties. I have a lot of writer friends, and friends in publishing, and I will see them, the way you do." Frozen Music, set in London and Sweden, is a bigger, more complex read than her first three novels. It centres round Esther, a journalist whose actions create mayhem, and Linus, a successful architect, whose personal life is in tatters. Both misfits, they meet when Esther is trying to stop Linus's dream opera house being built. "I really enjoyed writing Frozen Music. I had fun!" says Marika, whose initial idea was to find out what happens when you act in good faith, but something goes wrong. "Like how does it feel to be a defence lawyer when you let somebody off who then goes on to re-offend. Or a wretched psychiatrist who gets pilloried in the press because they've let someone out who does something dreadful. In both cases good people doing their best under difficult circumstances."
Throughout the book, the death of Linus's mother remains a mystery, until her diary is discovered, and it turns out she had left her husband for her lover, thereby losing her son.
"I don't think I could have left if my children had been small, or had not been given to me, but in the old days, the option for a woman would probably be to lose her children or stay caught in that marriage.
"It's not my story!" she says, getting shrill and giggling, "It's nothing to do with me, but I wanted to show the absolute cruelty of a world of certainties, that even I yearned for. Although I have broken the rules of the old-fashioned society by divorcing my husband, at the same time I long for those days."
Has the trauma improved her writing? She nods, talking slowly as she thinks it through.
"Before, I was perfectly happy. There were no traumas, nothing strange going on. I think in a way, all the upheaval, good and bad does actually mature you. I would hate to say suffering, because you're always aware that if you instigate these kind of things your suffering is incidental compared to the people who have had it instigated against them. "I don't want to give a plea for `poor little me,' because I started it, but at the same time, it is there. And although you never get through, you get throughish, and hopefully, a more sensitive, mature person alights at the other end."
Frozen Music, published by Orion Press, retails at £9.99.