As soon as I begin, I automatically go into character." She is contrasting her style of writing with that of the more autobiographically inclined Kaylie Jones, author of A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries, which Jhabvala adapted for the screen and which will open on 9 October in London with Kris Kristofferson and Barbara Hershey in the leading roles. (Did she wish that he had? "No.") And in all the years they knew each other, he never saw her without her make-up on. Such facts, printed baldly, may sound a little strange, but at the end of her 200-page book they make perfect sense.It's clear that Kenny has been a hard act to follow. At 32 Cleo lives with her mum, although she would love babies. Her career, not surprisingly, has never hit the same heights, although she has remained steadily in work, and is shortly to film a series of (almost certainly bizarre) reports for the ITV travel show Wish You Were Here.

But then, as she has known all her life, long before she met Kenny, she is a misfit, and misfits have to wait for the world to fit in with them. Perhaps Bananas Forever will show a few people what they are missing.! 'Bananas Forever' by Cleo Rocos is published by Virgin Books (pounds 14.99). "I tell nothing but lies," says Ruth Prawer Jhabvala This is not quite the candid admission it sounds. It signifies her reluctance to give away anything, in print, of her personal history. Even that he timed perfectly."Do you think he might have driven round and round in circles beforehand? "Now you come to mention it ..." she laughs. "But we'd always be chortling like loons anyway so I would never have noticed."In the book they come over, finally, as two reticent, rather formal people who loved to play and perform but valued their privacy above all else Even at his most poorly, Kenny never cried in front of her. He never lost appreciation of, particularly, anything to do with nature.

One thing he would always do was carpet the atmosphere with the most perfect fumes. When we were driving to a friend's house in the country he would put on a cassette, and he would time it so that as we drove up the driveway the last chord of the last bit of Brahms would resound, and I never knew how he did it. So at the very peak of her fame, when she and Kenny partied as if there were no tomorrow (probably a wise move), she was still only in her teens Everett was 22 years older. "Kenny and I used to sit and talk and because we never talked about age, we used to talk as though we were the same age.

And we'd talk about the one thing that really was paramount, and what everyone sadly underrates, and that is humour above all else. Before he was ill he said to me, 'Clee, when we are both 99 and we are sitting in our bathchairs and we are all gnarled up and we haven't got the energy for anything else, we'll still be able to laugh.' Laughter is beyond any embrace, it's like wrapping your spirits around each other, and nobody can interfere with that."He always looked at everything as if it was the first time he'd seen it. "I suggest that Everett must have become very bored in the last days of his career, at the strictly programmed London oldies station, Capital Gold "He did. He became bored with the ways things were changing, inevitably as business takes over things, and it was harder and harder to find that buzz within the building It was the same with the TV show Everyone became used to it He didn't want that He had done his job. They wanted us to do a series in America, they wanted 75 episodes, and that terrified him He said, 'How can we possibly come up with ... ?' If he didn't love it he didn't want to do it."Possibly the strangest revelation in the book is that Cleo was only 15 when she auditioned for the television shows, although she pretended to be 18. And I remember him playing this record and he said, 'We like this record, Clee,' and I said, 'Yes it's really nice,' and he said, 'I'm going to play it loads and loads, but don't tell anyone.' And then he played it six times in an hour! Those days are gone now, because everything's computerised, and you go to jail if you play anything more than once ...

everything, so it's very very hard, and I wept like a loon, and I'm not a big crier But it does do that to you, I think. Unless it hurt, it wouldn't be different from any other book."Meeting her in the flesh, you can see why photographs never quite capture the best of Cleo Rocos. She is a ball of fire, who probably generates enough nervous energy to power a small town. Although she clearly takes care of herself physically, I suspect she is one of those people who could eat three pizzas every day for breakfast and never put on a pound. If she talks too quickly - and she does - it's because she thinks too quickly: there are always seven new ideas queuing up to displace the previous six.