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17 A Short Anatomy of Friendship Peter Adam Prunella was the image of English eccentricity. She looked like a schoolmistress, was not easily thrown and had a wry smile. She lived in a small house in Fulham, before it became fashionable. One ate in the kitchen on a scrubbed pine table. Everything was slightly disorganised – the food was overcooked, the yoghurts in the fridge grew beards and nothing matched anything else. Prunella had paintings on her wall, but never her own. It might be a Lowry or a Patrick Heron, a Chinese print, the work of a student or a Wyndham Lewis. Around her table gathered her friends: Keith Vaughan, Bridget Riley, Robert Medley, Paul Huxley, Patrick Heron, Bryan Robertson and John Berger. Prunella was open to the world of artists and attended exhibitions of the work of colleagues, friends and pupils. She followed all forms of modern art, observing the changing art scene and defending everything new and worthwhile. Prunella was largely self-taught. She had been a commercial artist and a fine teacher who enjoyed contact with students. She was reserved about her work and, except on rare occasions, reticent to talk about it. She was constantly in doubt about her painting. 'I am a very English painter, we do certain things very well, but we lack the soaring strength or the scale of the American artists', she told me. Prunella once wrote to me from Rome: 'Soon I will be home'. Back in the only two spaces in which I feel totally at ease: my studio and my kitchen – where I can have a meal alone with a book, or entertain my friends.' Prunella became my closest and most enduring friend. Keith Vaughan once remarked: 'Your relationship is like a marriage without the inconveniences of it'. There was much gaiety in her and she had acquired a seriousness and a calm which gave her an infinite compassion. She possessed a rare quality – an original mind in which imagination and intellect, in even flow, enhanced each other. In revolt against her aristocratic background she had a determination to be free; any manifestation of wealth or status was an anathema to her. Strong natured, but also vulnerable, she was marked by sadness but without a hint of sentimentality. Of great generosity to others, she had hardly any material needs; her desire was for space in which to work and space between her and others. She was the freest person I have known – free of worldly want, free of conventions. She would come round, from time to time, with little watercolours she had made, from memory, of objects in my house and give them to me as gi s. On 26 December 1999, at the Chelsea Hospital, whose walls were hung with many of her paintings, Prunella passed away in my arms. My life took on a shadow that would never go away. I arranged her funeral at St. James's Piccadilly. Bryan Robertson spoke of friendship, Bridgit Riley read Emily Dickinson's poem 'Because I Could Not Stop for Death' and I read some of her letters. Hans Werner Henze wrote a trumpet solo for her. Her simple coffin, covered in leaves, was carried through a church that could hardly contain the artists, curators, museum directors, collectors, pupils and friends. She had enhanced the lives of many, this woman of complete integrity and total incorruptibility. 'Make sure there will be drinks. They all like that', she had said to me. 'And no Schubert 'Trout Quintet', which seems to be customary at funerals nowadays!'