In Elizabeth Taylor’s novel The Wedding Group (1968), Cressy is a girl in her late teens who is a member of Quayne, a Catholic artistic community presided over by her maternal grandfather, Harry Bretton. She is beginning to find the life stiflingly restrictive, and dreams of ‘Wimpy Bars and a young man with a sports car, of cheap and fashionable clothes that would fall apart before she tired of them’. The daily rallying point of the community is the eight o’clock supper. Nourishing soups are ladled out by Cressy’s mother and, over coffee, Harry ‘who, even more than most people, loved the sound of his own voice’ reads out a passage from Thomas Aquinas. On another occasion he says to his wife: “Rachel, where are my old letters to you? I feel like sitting here by the fire and reading them to you.”

It is generally accepted that Quayne is based on the artistic community led by Eric Gill that he moved from Ditchling, first to Wales and then to Pigotts, near High Wycombe. Living nearby was the young Elizabeth Coles, later Taylor. She embarked upon a love affair with Donald Potter, one of Gill’s apprentices. In her 2004 obituary of Potter, Fiona MacCarthy mentions that the relationship was ‘discouraged by Gill’. It was MacCarthy’s 1989 biography of Eric Gill, with its revelations of his relationships with his young daughters, that provoked what Thomas B Macaulay calls the ‘ridiculous spectacle’ of ‘the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality’. There have, as a consequence, been token efforts to cancel Gill, but it’s still, thankfully, possible to see his Stations of the Cross at Westminster Cathedral.

In November 1992 Andrew Billen interviewed one of Gill’s daughters, Petra Tegetmeier, in The Observer. Her line on MacCarthy’s book and the extracts from Gill’s diaries contained therein, was as follows: “I don’t think it harmed me at all. I don’t know what went on with my sisters. I really don’t, but I had a very happy childhood. We were all very fond of my father. I think he was probably very attracted to my older sister, but, after all, she went on to get married and live a happy life with her husband. We were all old enough to say if we didn’t want to go along with him. And all this thing about girls and models: I sort of think it was up to them. They could look after themselves. My father would never force them. Honestly, I don’t think it did anybody any harm. Honestly, in those days, I think a lot of people were improved by it.” Perhaps surprisingly, Fiona MacCarthy, in the same Andrew Billen article, concurs: “It just wasn’t a Childline thing. They were kept away from the rest of the world in a very closed community in which incest was almost natural. Gill and his sister were also on incestuous terms and they went on right up to the 1930s when they were both quite old. There was no sense of sin attached, and therefore for the daughters there was no guilt either.”

I really don’t know what to make of all this and I wonder whether such an interview would be published now. But to those who don’t know her work I would heartily recommend Elizabeth Taylor’s writing. Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont is, perhaps, her finest novel. The short stories are, to my mind, even better.