Smash hit

She had met her future husband at an A. D. Peters office party in 1978 and they married 18 months later, in the year of Barnes’s debut as a bestselling novelist with Metroland. Barnes had proposed marriage during a trip to Romania, in “a village with an unprintably rude name”. Her reaction to his proposal was: “That’s brave.”

The wedding, on the 40th anniversary of Hitler’s annexing of Poland (“I hope this annexation will be more peaceful,” wrote the poet John Fuller) startled the London literary world, but at its soirées they were a handsome adornment, with their aura of glamour and success. Robert Harris described Kavanagh as “the most exotic of creatures, like a plumed bird of paradise in the grey scene”. Barnes introduced her to France; she introduced him to the work of Edith Wharton, Penelope Fitzgerald and Howard Hodgkin.

It was to prove a loyal union even in the face of the tremors they later underwent, about which both were steadfastly discreet. Barnes would allow that as a writer he had to submit to the vulgarities of answering questions for publicity, but Kavanagh remained unflinchingly private. These upheavals flung them unwillingly into the gossip pages. During the 1980s Kavanagh temporarily left the marital home to live with the author Jeanette Winterson, and in 1995 came the cataclysm when Martin Amis, Kavanagh’s most famous client and Barnes’s closest friend and tennis partner, left her in search of richer rewards elsewhere.

The hiatus in a lifelong friendship (Kavanagh was agent to Kingsley Amis as well as his son) left deep and lasting wounds, but the only comment she would make on the subject was: “The ironies inherent in this outcome will not be lost on any of the participants.”

Their house in Dartmouth Park, North London, a fine detached Victorian villa with broad landscaped garden, became from 1983 a statement of resolute good taste of the kind that only a couple without children or pets can achieve. Dining table and piano on the open-plan ground floor (plus kitchen where both exercised culinary skills); Barnes’s study and snooker room on the first floor, well-stocked library upstairs, and a vast cellar for his splendid wine collection. Guests (invariably including client writers) would greatly appreciate the wine, observing a small card in Kavanagh’s place where Barnes had written: “Pas si vite” to discourage her from emptying her glass too fast.

Kavanagh never overcame her conviction that she was not educated enough — “her many lovers always had brilliant minds,” as one friend said. “They were people who knew stuff, and she always wanted to learn things. She was a brain groupie.”

As a jazz fanatic who took New Orleans blues piano lessons for years, she got her client Russell Davies to send her his vast collection of versions of St Louis Blues, and played them until she knew each one. She went on bird-watching holidays. Latterly she had been learning Italian — which she spoke well — and flirted with dancing the tango.

Untrammelled by family, she travelled widely with her husband, latterly on walking holidays where all cares dropped away. Her brain tumour was detected just over five weeks ago; when she died her husband’s hand was in hers.

Pat Kavanagh, literary agent, was born on January 31, 1940. She died on October 20, 2008, aged 68