I was with Rosa when she was told that the cancer that had been in her breast was now in her brain. We were in the old Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford. Her husband Robin, who had already lost one wife to cancer, had rung me up and told me to go to Rosa right then. I got to her in time to hear a smartly dressed Australian lady doctor saying to Rosa, a young-looking woman with long silver hair, terrific curves and a moonstone on her hand,

‘You’re bright, so you must know it’s curtains.’

Rosa sent me out for two bottles of red and two packs of Dunhill. She lifted her booted legs on to the narrow hospital bed, crossed them at the elegant ankle, and lit up.

For the rest of her life, Rosa railed against the fact that because she had ‘Doctor’ before her name, other doctors presumed that she had no feelings. Not that she was railing on her own behalf, but on that of patients who weren’t even doctors; how did the doctors treat them?

In her dying months Rosa made a freehand and exact botanical tapestry that would cover a good-sized double bed. Every stitch was an act of will. Its ground is black, the most difficult of all colours in which to sew large areas. Yet not the tapestry but Rosa was being nightly unmade. She did tell me she was well in her dream-life but at the end she fought angrily with some apparition that made itself felt at her deathbed, perhaps her father, turning up at the last.

Rosa made a surprising schoolgirl because of her poise, deep voice, and innate aversion to wasting time. It’s pointless to speculate whether she knew she had to cram more into less time. She was a superb drinker. Hard spirits had no perceptible effect upon her; they certainly reinforced her already devastating effect on any man in her vicinity. She was drawn to much older men of powerful intellect. She is the only woman I know to whom a man has sent an entire antique ruby parure after only one meeting. Years later he shot himself, on Valentine’s Day. Rosa was fundamentally, and realistically, sad, which lent her a gunpowdery vivacity. Rosa also became attached to the Howards; large families have this fuzzy magnetic edge that pulls in others. The Howards deeply loved her. Her gap is shaped like that of a sibling in many lives. To and in her profession her gap is incalculable.

Rosa’s personality was in torsion, her character silver threaded with steel. Its quality was recognisable in her person, in her writing, in her work, and in the calibre of the men who loved her. Her widower, Robin Denniston, is more than twenty-five years her senior; it is cruel. Still he writes and still he reads and still he lacks her company.

At her end, it was not Katie or me whom Rosa and her body’s dying animal needed, but our other close schoolfriend, Emma, who has inherited from her own mother the gift of healing hands. She helped Rosa to peace and comfort by her presence and her touch as Rosa neared her death.

Emma’s mother wears a lipstick called Unshy Violet and is named Kiloran after a bay on the island of Colonsay. Emma is called Emma Kiloran. The name of the Laird who gets the girl in the Powell and Pressburger film I Know Where I’m Going is also Kiloran. In the film he is considerably less glamorous than Papa, who is first cousin to Emma’s mother. Emma’s mother remembers children’s parties given by Nancy Astor at Cliveden, where the children had a little parade of shops and went ‘shopping’ with their own paper bags. Over eighty, she can still touch her toes, is a corking dancer, and mother of six. My first term at Girton, Emma’s mother took me out to lunch with her own godmother, who was Kipling’s daughter, Elsie Bainbridge. She was wandering in her mind and I was no help, very likely wandering in my own. Kiloran held things together. It is what she does.

She has never married again since the children’s father shot himself late one summer. Lucy, the youngest child, was still tiny.

That day, we were all, Rosa, Katie and I, going to Emma’s home on the farm in Dorset for lunch, a swim, a glimpse at the news papers and to visit the local steam fair, which had become an annual treat. Emma’s mother was the first person I knew who peeled cooked broad beans so that the little vegetable was bright green and digestible. She served them with thick home-made mayonnaise. On that day, we did still go to the farm for lunch.

Emma’s mother fed us, sat with us, looked after her still young children. A widow for under a day, she gave time to all these things.

Where does pain go?

Emma’s father was a joy to get a laugh out of. His was a languid slim English beauty. He loved jazz and secret jokes. I only once really got a laugh from him and it was when he came down to the disintegrating tennis court on Colonsay and saw something he thought he would never see in his life, which was me playing tennis. His daughter, my friend Emma, who is half my size and vitally bossy, had the same reaction when she saw me driving. We were going along a perfectly ordinary road and over a perfectly ordinary bridge.

‘Claude, darling, can you get out now and let me take over?’ she said, and completed the movement, exactly in the manner of her elegant father relieving me of the implausible tennis racquet when I was thirteen on the tennis court by the lupin field, where the tall pink and lilac flowers grew like a crop. Made into patties with water and cooked on hot stones, the flour made from ground lupin-seeds may have composed part of the diet of ancient man. Just think of the labour in collecting the stripped piplings, like lentils, their silky podlets discarded into frilly heaps.

As the slaps of my own familial tide broke repeatedly upon me, it seemed that the choice was to stay and be damaging or to slip away.

I did not run away from home. I took a boat.

I don’t know whether it was natural buoyant pessimism, self-paining good manners, a slight aversion to his oldest child, or simple exhaustion that led my father to take my disaffection with such quietness. He was a man not without anger, but the complications that came with keeping me at the heart of the home were painful and distasteful. Since his consciousness was of a piece with his tentative but utterly confident draughtsmanship, it is perfectly possible that he decided without even consulting himself to leave the area in his life that was concerned with me with rather more outline than shading. Unlike me, my father was absolutely not a monster of self-control. His life made intolerable demands upon him and he bore them apparently easily as though born to the task. I wish we had spoken more together. At the time, if we chatted, so attuned was our language that it seemed somehow discourteous to my stepmother whose English is perfect, but not highly nuanced. The responsibility for the jagged edge left by my departure was all mine and I only hope it healed as swiftly as it seemed to. Both my father and I had been so trained to be retiring that I have no idea whether he was as I felt myself to be, when I dared to think about it, haemorrhaging in my own nature internally, having somehow betrayed both parents, a stepmother and her children, by the time I was fifteen.

The internal valve used to decompress such feelings is commonly some means of escape or oblivion; I took one and was to take the other.

Today, in blind-time, it is the Wednesday of the Chelsea Flower Show. Staying in the flat last night was my landlord’s mother, a gardener by profession. Since she was coming to her own son’s house she need have brought no gift, but she had chosen for me Ted Hughes’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I hadn’t read it since 1997, and was at once excited to see the russet cover. But that was all I could see. Somehow it seemed a perfect present and I remembered how struck I had been by Hughes’s translation of the story of Daphne; in my recall, the bloody words sprang leaved with green.