Julian Barnes remembers his friend Anita Brookner: ‘There was no one remotely like her’

Anita Brookner was too easily mistaken for her unhappy spinster heroines, but the Booker winner was a novelist of peerless wit and insight, and one of the most distinguished art historians of recent times

Anita leaning across the lunch table to examine what was on my plate: “How is that?” she asks, and then, with one of her broader, more expectant smiles: “Disappointing?” Anita telling me that she had just completed a novel, dropping her voice to add, in a low, confidential tone, “It’s about … a lonely woman.” Anita, who was always in situ, however early I arrived, greeting me with her usual unsettling opener: “So, what have you got for me?” Lunch never took longer than 75 minutes; she usually ordered fish, then black coffee, with which she would smoke two cigarettes. (For quite a while these were Sovereign, a sort of low-rent Benson & Hedges: it was the only less than stylish accoutrement I ever noted about her.) Anita telling me that she had just completed a further novel, and with that off her desk she was now free to do whatever she wanted. “Well, in your case,” I said, with joke-jocularity, “That probably means rereading Proust.” There was a slightly alarmed silence: “How did you guess?” At fairly regular intervals, she would ask me how old I was. I would tell her, and she would respond, with a kind of enthusiastic melancholy, “Another 10 good years.” Over the next couple of decades, the same question was repeated, and exactly the same response to my reply; though as time passed, I couldn’t help noticing that the enthusiasm diminished into a kind of sympathetic hopefulness.

No one else had the same effect. I found myself punctuating my own conversation – putting in semicolons, for God’s sake

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