It was the act of imagining herself as she had once been that enriched her syntax and extended not only her images but the coherent flow of association that led directly into the task at hand.

The better the speaker imagined herself, the more vividly she brought the dead doctor to life. It was, after all, a baptism by fire that was being described. To see her ambitious young self burning to know what her mentor knew, we had to see the mentor as well: an agent of threat and promise: a figure of equal complexity.

That year he [Oscar Wilde] met Alfred Douglas and fell desperately in love. The affair was obsessive, and it was nasty: public scenes, low-life amusements, voyeuristic sex. The two were mismatched in every way except the only one that mattered: each one touched in the other the secret sense of unworthiness to which both were devoted. Each became the instrument of downfall the other craved. Nothing but scandal and prison could separate them. And, as it turned out, not even that.

I remember a woman caught not in a triangle, but in a pen-tangle of new lover, old husband, children, her parents, and herself. They were all implicated in her love life, and each of them added pressure to the muddle. After a few years of struggle, she resolved the emotional geometry by discovering that she hadn’t been giving enough love to her own interests and abilities. Once her career blossomed, the other loves all took their highly original, unconventional places. It was a resolution she never could have imagined in the early days of her despair.

When my father died she [Lucie] tried to kill herself. She had given up. I actually felt I could finally be with her because she lost interest in me,’ Lucian said. ‘I tried to be unavailable to her when I was young. She was very intelligent and highly observant. I felt oppressed by her because she was very instinctive and I’ve always been very secretive. It was hard to keep things from her. The idea of her knowing what I was doing or thinking bothered me a great deal. So it was a strained relationship.

D’Offay’s relationship with Freud had started in the 1960s through an introduction by a bright young art expert called James Kirkman, the son of a general, who worked for Marlborough Fine Art and looked after Lucian there. Marlborough, part-owned by the Duke of Beaufort, was the most prestigious British contemporary gallery, representing Francis Bacon, Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland, as well as Lucian. But Lucian felt ignored and sidelined compared to his friend Bacon, who in 1962 had a show at the Tate Gallery and was rapidly gaining a global reputation. ‘Lucian was by no means a star then. He was actually thought to be something of a has-been,’ said Kirkman. ‘No one was really interested in figurative art, especially what he did. Pop art and kinetic art was what modern art collectors desired. All that passed Lucian by, making him seem traditional, even old-fashioned, but still with an ability to shock with his raw nudes. He was doing pictures that were considered less attractive, that were not really appealing to anyone. It sounds strange now but that was the reality and how he was received and perceived.