Even though Elisabeth Luard’s new memoir — My Life as a Wife — presents her husband as a liar, a cheat, a philanderer, an alcoholic, an absent dad and an awful husband — you won’t hear from her a bad word about this monstrous man. “He was so good-looking! So witty and charming,” she says.

There was the time when Elisabeth found the family’s young, blonde and very pretty Spanish au pair crying. “What’s wrong?” asked a concerned Elisabeth. “I’m in love with a married man and he with me,” said the au pair. A short time later Elisabeth found that her unfaithful husband Nicholas — one of the owners of the satirical magazine Private Eye — had given her a sexually transmitted disease. While seeking treatment at a London medical clinic, guess who she ran into? The Spanish au pair.

But if their 40-year marriage has left Elisabeth with a bruised ego and a battered heart, she remains that rare kind of female memoirist — a woman who has been wronged, yet has no time for regrets and no taste for revenge. “I’ve had a wonderful life,” she says.

The marriage began as a swinging sixties fairytale. Elisabeth was a rich, beautiful debutante who broke free from that stuffy world to go off to Paris to listen to Simone de Beauvoir (“I’ve always been a rebel,” she says). Nicholas was a handsome, athletic, clever Cambridge graduate and former guards officer who’d boxed for his university and regiment.

He was also the business partner of the comedian Peter Cook, rising star of the emerging satire movement. Nicholas took care of the business; Cook created the comedy. They had met as undergraduates at Cambridge and in 1961 set up a new cabaret/satire club called The Establishment in London’s Soho. The Establishment featured the likes of the outrageous American comic Lenny Bruce and such future stars as John Bird, John Fortune, Barry Humphries and Dudley Moore. A year later the two partners bought Private Eye.

For the Luards — who had met when Elisabeth was working as a secretary on the magazine — this provided an entrée into the glittering world of the great and the groovy. “It was very glamorous,” she says, “but at the time we didn’t really know it, we didn’t think we were at the centre of anything.”

Their flat in Hyde Park often provided sanctuary for the bad boys and lovable rascals of British Bohemia. “I remember Jeffrey Bernard trying to commit suicide by putting his head in the gas oven — but the phone rang and he couldn’t resist answering it,” Elisabeth says with a giggle.

There was also a grungy side to the glamour. Her home housed the comedian and heroin addict Lenny Bruce during his 1962 engagement at The Establishment. The iconoclastic comedian was not exactly the tidiest of houseguests.

“I remember,” says Elisabeth, “coming home and finding one of his old syringes lying around and a lot of broken doors.”

The fun of the glamorous life the Luards shared in the early 1960s stopped as soon as Elisabeth got pregnant. She ended up home alone with their four children, while party-loving Nicholas disappeared into the night to pursue other women.

“Most of the time I didn’t really know what Nicholas was up to until it was too late,” she says. “I was very naive. Even when I saw the Spanish au pair at the clinic, I didn’t put two and two together.”

In the 1960s it was sex that threatened their marriage. Later on it would be drink: legend has it that Nicholas was given his first drink at the age of 14 by the poet Dylan Thomas. Even after a liver transplant Nicholas carried on drinking and died of cancer four years ago.

Looking back, she has no regrets. “There were moments of great despair,” she says, “but overall we had a happy marriage.”

Elisabeth Luard’s My Life as a Wife is published by Timewell Press on September 11, £16.99

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