BOOK REVIEW / Alone of all her set: 'Good Company: Diaries 1967-1970' - Frances Partridge: HarperCollins, 18 pounds

FOR the Bloomsbury group, conversation was more than a pastime: it was meat and drink to the hungry mind, adventure for the curious and lively. As entertainment, it appears to have been closely followed by sex and love, for the group were all

connected with one another via a highly complicated system of marital and extra-marital links. This made for some enduring relationships, but was more often a breeding ground for seething rivalry, with sex and ideas - mainly sex - tugging at the foundations of fragile friendships and rocky marriages.

Does anyone outside literary London care about the Bloomsbury set any more? Good Company, the fifth volume of diaries by Frances Partridge, the oldest surviving member of the group, at once raises the question and renders it irrelevant, because although these diaries contain much about Bloomsbury, Good Company is essentially a personal odyssey through Partridge's private grief. As she describes her attempts to readjust to life following the death of not only her husband Ralph, but also of their son Burgo, who died of a heart attack aged 28, it is difficult not to be melted, stimulated, moved - and ultimately uplifted - by such a clear account of the bleak years between the shock of bereavement and the long, slow ache of recovery.

'Oh my aloneness,' she writes. 'I see it now as a horrible, long streak, like the trajectory of a bullet or rocket, leaving behind everything most valuable . . . Much as I love being with friends . . . there's an effort in trying to fit in, understand, not grate on other people's nerves, which gives me a desire for the only form of true relaxation that now remains - being alone. And this, when it happens, is often a bitter disappointment. My life has dwindled to a skeleton leaf.'

Good Company may be built upon Partridge's painful internal journey, but its bricks and mortar consist largely of accounts of her friends which are so vivid, so witty and compassionate that after a while you begin to care almost as much about them as about Partridge herself. Not all of them, however. Julia Gowing and Rosamond Lehmann, whom Partridge loves, sound perfectly dreadful. Gowing is self-centred and neurotic; Lehmann vain beyond belief. Partridge's description of a trip to Spain with Lehmann, and her friend's nutty ideas about spiritualism, is one of the most hilarious passages in the book:

'She told me as a great confidence how when she was in Egypt she noticed that an Egyptian guide who was showing her round a museum suddenly began to tremble and shake as he stood beside her, until at last he said: 'Forgive me, but I've known you before. This is terribly agitating. I can't go on being your guide. Perhaps you were formerly some Egyptian queen.' ' Lehmann, despite her pink-rinsed hair, becomes so boringly obsessed with the idea of herself as a reincarnated eastern royal beauty that she finally provokes the dry aside from Partridge: 'I must try and keep her to more mundane subjects.'

Throughout the endless house parties, holidays, weekends, walking, talking and dining, Partridge returns over and over to the subject of her grief for Ralph, though not Burgo. Her dead son's name appears only three times in the book. Given her willingness to trawl the depths of her misery in search of some comprehension, this seems like an astonishing omission; astonishing, that is, until one stumbles across a brief entry nearly halfway through the diaries:

'Returning from errands today, not for the first time I met a young man whose dark burning eyes brought me an agonizing memory of Burgo. I feel unarmed against stray impressions and unequal to pursuing such thoughts very far.' As always with Partridge the tone is calm and unfussy, but the message crystal clear. There are some things that the writer cannot write, that the reader will never read, that are too painful even for this, the truest and bravest of women to contemplate.