Pat Booth was once extremely promiscuous and slept with men because she thought it old-fashioned not to. ‘I think I have a very healthy sexual appetite. I’ve seldom met a man who hasn’t appealed to me.’ This East End girl turned model, owner of boutiques in the Sixties, photographer, journalist and now steamy best-selling novelist thinks of herself as having a man’s mind in a female body. ‘I often see men as sexual objects.’ The place she really likes to be more than anywhere else in the entire world is in bed. ‘If someone said, ‘What would you like to do for the rest of your life?’ I’d say, ‘Stay in bed – alone’.’ She laughs. And what would she do? ‘I’d read.’

She has that look that models had in the late Sixties. She is beautiful, with big eyes and perfect teeth. Her reading tastes are eclectic and run from Russian classics to pop US religious leader Marianne Williamson, but she wouldn’t be at all averse to reading her own work in bed. ‘I’m always surprised that I’m so good,’ says the woman who once said that it never occurred to her that she wouldn’t become extremely successful and believes defiantly in her own artistic merit.

She has just published Miami, an airport novel about the super-rich, sex, models, glamour and power. The book opens with sex: ‘Christa was an animal.’ The book ends with sex: ‘His hands cupped her tensed buttocks. He drew her into him, plastering her soft wetness against his face.’ Such heavings might appear to sit oddly with Booth’s Catholicism. But her priest, who reads her avidly, once told her that it was all right for her to write thus since nobody in her books actually enjoyed sex. ‘I thought they were enjoying it when I wrote the scenes,’ says Booth, in the voice of a strong, confident woman. ‘It never occurred to me that the woman wasn’t enjoying it.’ Like the women in her books, she takes control of her life. She has been married to her psychiatrist husband, Garth, since 1976, when she was 19. They took time off for ‘bad behaviour’ for three years in her late twenties. ‘We decided to split up and ended up fooling around. He didn’t want me to work. I was Left-wing and he was Right. We used to row about Vietnam and the Israeli war, which is so meaningful when you are young.’

She has been faithful to him since. ‘But that is not particularly important to me,’ says this youthful 45-year-old, wearing a jacket painted with the names of her husband and children. ‘I certainly wouldn’t break up a marriage because of it. If I found my husband was being unfaithful, that wouldn’t concern me.’

She has two children, Orlando and Camellia. She waited until she was 34 to have Orlando, and her daughter is adopted. ‘Why? Because I er, er, well, er, my Catholicism. I, I, (she stumbles) had had an abortion when I was younger and came to the stage of thinking that was deeply immoral. So I adopted for that reason.’ To compensate? ‘Yeah.’

Booth says she had been financially supporting several girls who had no alternative but to abort. ‘I didn’t want any more children. I would never have adopted. But one of the girls was 12 and her mother wouldn’t take her back into the house with the baby.’ So she adopted Camellia. ‘To cut a long story short, it has worked out really well.’ She appears unfazed by nearly everything else I ask her, answering without pause.

She takes her religion very seriously. ‘I go to church three or four times a week. I’m very comfortable in church. I feel most at home there.’ She is seeking peace. ‘It’s the only time I am in tune with my core’ – she gestures as if holding her essence in a tennis ball against her chest – ‘with my inner voice and moral imperatives. I very much believe in one’s spirituality.’

She hates confession. ‘I’m just so fearful of it. So fearful of that box. I can’t forgive my own sin – and the confessional is somewhere you are given dispensation.’ It is sinful not to accept dispensation. ‘I am basically a complete and utter sinner, but I don’t think we are put here to be perfect.’ The words seem odd issuing from the former model with the sun-bleached hair.

Booth was bought up in the East End. Her mother ran a jellied-eel shop and her father was a professional boxer. ‘It was a matriarchal environment.’ It was also an impoverished upbringing. ‘There was no comfort or home cooking. I used to be very fearful of poverty. Frightened of being cold again and repeating the misery of my childhood. For the first time in my life I now feel so divorced from such circumstances that I no longer feel frightened of poverty.’ She has homes in London, Palm Beach and New York, but the legacy of her childhood, she says, is seen in the monastic, austere interiors she creates.

The early years were solitary, with her only sister 15 years older. A background that she says made her self-sufficient and single-minded. She left school at 16, refused to serve again in the eel shop, did a secretarial course, and then got her break as a model by working for Norman Parkinson on Queen Magazine. A toughie and a survivor, she didn’t have time to wonder whether she was going to fail. ‘I know what I want all the time. All I want is my own way.’

She is married to a psychiatrist, but would never consider seeing an analyst. ‘That would be complete self-indulgence. I am totally and utterly against it. Psychiatrists deal with those who are mentally sick with one of the five major illnesses treatable with drugs. There are some seriously ill people, I mean sick people,’ she says, a tone almost of dislike in her voice. ‘There are tragically sick people, of whom my sister is one, funnily enough.’ Her sister developed schizophrenia 12 years ago. ‘It has had no effect on my life. She was diagnosed when my father died.’

The only thing that makes her fearful, she says, is weakness. ‘I’m not vulnerable at all. I don’t feel at all vulnerable.’ If she does feel a hint of the v word coming on, she attributes it to chemical imbalances. ‘I think my adrenaline is not pumping properly. I don’t believe in vulnerability. I don’t indulge it. If I feel it for a second, I do something about it. I work out (which she does every day). I get rid of it very fast.’