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Published: 28 July 2011

I FIRST saw Lucian, or Lux as I knew him, in the French pub in Dean Street with his friend, the artist Francis Bacon.

I was in awe. I was a young art student of 18 in 1961 and I was up from Corsham, Wiltshire, and in town to meet my lover, the painter William Crozier. We met and hurriedly left. It was only years later I learned that he was afraid that Lucian – who was 20 years older than me – might see me and take me from him, such was Lucian’s reputation. We went on to the Colony Room in Soho where we drank with Bill’s friend, the Irish painter and writer Patrick Swift, who was also a friend of Lucian’s. Seeing Lucian left a strong impression.

I loved the Colony Room with its dark green mirrored walls (known as the Colony School because so many artists drank there) and I saw the influence on Bacon’s painted interiors; but I was scared of Muriel Belcher who ruled over the place – who swore like a trooper, and treated all the men like her children.

It was not until 1964 when painter Tim Behrens took me to Wheeler’s restaurant that I met Lucian again and that was it. We met and re-met over the years. After an encounter in the Fitzroy Tavern in the 1970s with him, and his closest friend, the painter Frank Auerbach, I enjoyed my first oysters with Lucian at Wheeler’s. He loved food and was a good cook. St John’s in Smithfield was one of our favourites… and the Wolseley. We also went to Elena’s Etoile in Charlotte Street. He liked Elena Salvoni.

Lucian and I had both been to Dartington School in Devon, and had both felt outsiders. He because he loved horses more than people, and often slept in the stables, making him smell so much that others shunned him. In fact, he was proud of having this effect.

He had flats dotted across London. Once, in 1975, at his flat in Camden Road – now demolished – we had to get up in the middle of the night and leave because he said someone was looking for him. I imagined it was a possessive lover, but never found out. Lucian was marvellous company, as sensitive as his whippet Eli, and full of sweet attentiveness but this could quickly change. He was horrified I was thinking of training as a psychotherapist: “Too many of them already,” he said, swearing under his breath. In 1988, when I told him I was seeing Masud Khan, the analyst, for supervision, he said he had met Khan shortly after Khan’s marriage to prima ballerina Svetlana Beriosova and the two men got into an argument during which Lucian said: “You may be married to her, but I’m f***ing her.”

Entering his flat in Holland Park was like entering the Bank of England: two huge security doors with multiple locks led into a sparsely furnished flat with bare boards. A bed, a bath, a kitchen table with a couple of chairs; in another room a small table with a tiny Rodin maquette and a Bacon on the wall. Functional. He would get a bottle of champagne from under a pile of papers and in the morning make delicious breakfast, while pouring derision on the biggest gallery in New York for sending him the visitors’ book following a retrospective of his work: “What can I possibly want with this?” he said contemptuously.

While painting he would swear a lot, his quick eyes darting intensely back and forth – art was his passion. He worked relentlessly day and night, stopping only to go out for a meal or to gamble, or even to visit the National Gallery at night, when no one was there except the security guards, to look at his favourite paintings undisturbed.

He told me that one time –in spite of the tight security – a jealous lover had slashed one of his pictures in a crazy fit.

We had friends in common too, until he fell out with them. The photographer Harry Diamond was one and Bruce Bernard the artist was another. Harry took the loss of this friendship very badly, but never ever showed it. Yet I found inscribed books from Lucian in Harry’s flat years later, showing Lucian did keep in touch, albeit from a distance.

Bruce did a marvellous series of photographs of Lucian, one of which is very playfully based on André Kertész’s 1926 Danseuse Burlesque. Both a tribute to the great photographer and an in-joke between the two of them, it has Lucian balan­ced in an uncomfortable pose on the floor among his painter’s rags.

Lucian had painted the artists’ model and social­ite Henrietta Moraes in the 1950s. She had been engaged to Martin Green, the man I later I married, and who looked for all the world like Lucian’s twin brother.

Henrietta and Martin had gone off to Dublin together on a sort of engagement, generously paid for by Francis Bacon, but Martin had a change of heart, and I met and married him shortly afterwards. Martin would stay in the pubs, so I got lonely…

Lucian and I became very close around the time of his mother’s death in the 1980s. He had spent an incredibly long time on her portrait and adored her. I think no woman could ever really come between them.

He was a marvellous lover, but always maintained an emotional distance. In fact, he was the perfect companion for me in some ways: witty, very funny, generous and sexually athletic. Paradoxically, I don’t think he liked many women very much, and for me the proof of this lay in his abandonment of his many children when they were young.

Although I loved to wake up with his huge Van Gogh boots beside my bed, I am very clear that I would have never been able to bear him leaving me with a child of ours.

I will miss him hugely.