It was a dreadfully difficult book to write she says because

“It was a dreadfully difficult book to write,” she says, “because they are three women who should never have met and who, at first glance, do not seem to have a great deal in common. I’ve written before, 20 years ago in A Woman’s Age, about three generations of women, but this time I was not very interested in that generational thing, because England has become a narrower place and almost everybody now has experience of other countries or other nationalities.”The finished version, she admits, is less than half her first draft. “When you write across such a period in time, you inevitably look at the world outside your characters and have things to say about it. I’ve tried to piece the outside events together, like a patchwork But really the book is about friendship, though not… as something sentimental and reassuring, but friendship that includes disapproval and differences, yet that lasts and has a real value.”The three central characters – Fay, an American Jewish doctor living in New York, Connie, an extravert Irishwoman from a farm in Mayo, and Nina, an English painter struggling unsuccessfully to avoid becoming a middle-class wife and mother – meet in a psychiatric hospital and forge a quasi-mystical bond when they dance around a sacred yew tree.

All three were born in 1940, two years before Billington, so there is a hint of autobiography, a taking-stock as she approaches 60 and the imminent arrival of her first grandchild.She acknowledges that some references are drawn from her own experiences. She lived in Fay’s New York as a young woman, while Connie marries an Anglo-Irish aristocrat whose seat has echoes of the Longford home in Co Westmeath Yet she pleads not guilty to any greater overlap. “I feel in my novels that my imagination has become much stronger than my grip on reality. Perhaps I’ve entered my dotage already, but my characters now are hardly ever based on people I know.”The novel takes as one of its overarching themes the fight facing women of that generation if they wanted a career. Connie briefly flowers as a journalist and feminist campaigner, but later is always subservient to her husband’s needs. Nina finds herself allowing her choices to be dictated by the men around her.

Only Fay single-mindedly pursues professional success but, having got it, doesn’t want it. None seems contented with her “work–life balance”.”I think I was unusual,” Billington reflects, “because I’ve always worked. It certainly wasn’t normal among my generation for middle-class women to have a career. Yet now, every single one of my daughters’ friends takes for granted that they will have one. I feel that there was a real fast-forward in women’s career expectations in the Eighties.” She adds: “I was fortunate in what I do. I had always been obsessed with writing since I was a child, with words, ideas, characters.