Michael Frayn and Claire Tomalin: A marriage between the sheets

Why the Whitbread judges should change the rules for Britain's first literary couple

Michael Frayn's 1973 novel Sweet Dreams is a vision of a bourgeois English Heaven. Following his untimely death in a traffic accident, Howard Baker finds himself in a world where everything is just as you would want it: schools with a good social mix and high academic standards, bittersweet romantic entanglements, and perpetual professional promotion. And at the end, Howard dies and it can start all over again. Taken purely as a swipe at English notions of happiness, it is very funny; but the comedy is also concerned, more profoundly, with the broader nature of happiness: if people are naturally discontented, is the only way to stay happy to keep on the up escalator for eternity?

The difficulty of being happy was underlined last week when Frayn and his wife, Claire Tomalin, were both nominated for the Whitbread Prize – the first married couple to achieve a double. Frayn is up for Novel of the Year for Spies, a story of adult intrigue and childish incomprehension set in suburban London during the Second World War; Tomalin is shortlisted for the Biography prize for the doorstopping Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self. The winners of the various categories of the Whitbread go on to compete for the title of Book of the Year. Frayn has listed the possibilities: he and his wife could both win their categories, and then become rivals; or one of them could get through and the other not; or they could both fail. It was hard, he said, to decide which was worse.

A less determinedly pessimistic view might be that this unique feat is a fitting climax to a pair of amazing careers. Indeed, from the outside their cvs read rather like alternative drafts for Sweet Dreams. In Tomalin's book Several Strangers (1999), a selection of her literary criticism from the last 40 years, she offers some tantalisingly brief sketches of her life and career: right at the beginning, she recalls how in 1954, just down from Cambridge, 21 years old, beautiful and already recognised as a promising poet, she lived in the painter Roger Hilton's basement, while her charismatic and stunningly gifted boyfriend and husband-to-be, Nick Tomalin, lodged round the corner with Patrick Heron. In the holidays, the couple rode to the south of France on a motorbike. Jeunesse doesn't come much more dorée.

While Nick went on to celebrity as a reporter – one of the only British entrants in Tom Wolfe's anthology of the New Journalism – she became a successful literary journalist: in the 1970s, she was literary editor of the New Statesman during its glory days (Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Timothy Mo were her deputies), then the Sunday Times. Meanwhile, the books started coming: her life of Mary Wollstonecraftwon the Whitbread First Book Award for 1974; The Invisible Woman (1990), about Dickens's mistress, Nelly Ternan, scooped the pool with the NCR Book Award, the Hawthornden Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. There was also a much-praised life of Jane Austen (1997). Frayn, too, has led a life that has the rest of us pressing our noses up against the glass. No other British writer has matched his achievements in a multiplicity of fields: novelist, dramatist, translator and journalist. There were his brilliantly funny columns for the Guardian and Observer in the Fifties and Sixties. The early, satirical novels – Towards the End of the Morning (1967) is by common consent the best novel about Fleet Street – were succeeded, by more complex and less schematic fictions, culminating in the shortlisting of Headlong (1999) for the Booker. On stage, he had massive hits on both sides of the Atlantic with the manic farce of Noises Off (1982) and the lecture-theatre dazzle of Copenhagen (1998). And having learnt Russian on National Service, he knocks off a Chekhov translation with regularity.

The cvs, then, are extraordinary. But cvs miss out the bad stuff. In Several Strangers, Tomalin talks of "disaster and sorrow" as the agents of change in her life: marriage confined her to domesticity for several years – she had had four children by the time she was 28. The third died within a month of his birth; later a daughter also died. A fifth child, Tom, had spina bifida and needed constant care. Nick, meanwhile, turned out to be "a bolter", though the marriage survived his behaviour. He was killed in 1973 by a Syrian missile while reporting on the Yom Kippur war from the Golan Heights.

TheNew Statesman job came soon after: as she tells it, Anthony Howard offered it to her partly to rescue her from grief. Her daughter Jo has said that this is when Tomalin became the confident figure she is today – confidence boosted, perhaps, by her notorious affair with her much younger deputy, Martin Amis.

She met Frayn around 1980 at the Society for the Discouragement of Public Relations, a lunch-club that Nick Tomalin had established. Frayn had been married to Gillian Palmer since 1960, and they had three daughters; but the marriage was under strain – partly because of the goldfish-bowl life they led in a group of glass-sided houses in Blackheath (an experience which contributed to his 1984 play Benefactors). Shortly after meeting Tomalin, Frayn left his wife for her. The break-up was not amicable – his daughter Rebecca, now a documentary maker, has talked about turning to truancy and drugs in the aftermath; but his relationship with his children has apparently weathered the storm. He and Tomalin and their children and grandchildren now take family holidays – up to 24 of them in a hotel.

Tomalin and Frayn have lived together for more than 20 years now, though they married only in 1993, when both were 60. They turn 70 next year, and have announced that they are leaving Camden – where their neighbours include Alan Bennett – for the relatively pastoral peace of Petersham, down by the Thames; Frayn has suggested that they might stop writing, though his ferocious work-rate makes retirement faintly implausible. And they do not give the impression of being people who long for seclusion – they like to go to literary parties, get out and meet people: they have the clubbability of old journalists, rather than the reclusive inclinations of the novelist. One friend says, "What they have in common is charm and playfulness and style; but also, both of them have enormous depth of intellectual field – whole acres and corridors of learning."

The affection in which they are held means that right now they can probably claim to be Britain's premiere literary couple. Interestingly, the other contenders for that title – Harold Pinter and Antonia Fraser, Margaret Drabble and Michael Holroyd, and Richard Holmes and Rose Tremain – all consist of one biographer and one novelist or playwright. (By contrast, the marriages of Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard, both novelists, and Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, a pair of poets, ended in disaster.) Do biographers, accustomed to submitting to someone else's ego, make ideal partners for more egotistical creative types? Interviewed last week, Tomalin seemed to hint at something of the sort, complaining slyly about Frayn's supposedly more competitive nature. But the impression was of affectionate sparring, like Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man.

Meanwhile, the only decent thing the Whitbread panel can do is to change the rules, cut out the intervening stages and give them a joint Book of the Year award. That way, everyone will be happy.