The name Yvette Cloetta will not convey much to the general reader. She led an interesting enough life, but it was always veiled in discretion. There is a glimpse of her in Greene on Capri, the pleasant memoir by Shirley Hazzard which was published a few years ago. In that book she appears as ‘a pretty woman who loved – one might say idolised – Graham Greene’. Although Hazzard’s own liking for the novelist was not uncritical, her description of Mme Cloetta’s regard for her famous lover was clearly accurate. In Search of a Beginning is perhaps the final testimony to that ‘idolising’ devotion, which continued for more than thirty years.

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