Donkey’s years ago Michael Frayn wrote a comic masterpiece called Towards the End of the Morning. The novel was about the newspaper men of old Fleet Street, but its subtext was the approach of middle age, a problem particularly for Bob, its protagonist, who until then “had been young all his life”. More than half a century on from its publication, Frayn, 90, is heading toward the end of the evening.
It is not long after the end of lunch, however, that I meet him at his home outside Richmond, southwest London. As he makes us coffee, his wife, the outstanding literary biographer Claire Tomalin — like him, a former journalist — gives me a tour of the house they have lived in for 20 years: their bedroom overlooking a magnolia tree; the neat spare room (“should you ever come to stay”); their busy his-and-hers studies; and another room lined with methodically ordered box files.
