My parents received the news while I was at work. I was in a bad mood by the time I had got home: I had not been able to get on with the work that I had planned to do today – other people had been urgently requesting my time – and to further aggravate my displeasure I had found that one of my co-workers had blocked my car in the parking compound; it had taken me ten minutes of nudging backwards and forwards before I was able to drive away.

I sloped into the house. My father asked me how my day had been. "I’m knackered," I said grumpily, "and I’ve got a headache."

"Your mother is on the phone… Gillian has died."

I suddenly felt very ashamed that I had had the audacity to be in a bad mood because of a few piddling little problems at the office. Just then the family dog came bounding up to me cheerfully, oblivious to what had happened.

My mother was talking on the phone very slowly. For some thirty years Gillian lived in France and the person to whom my mother was talking, a friend of my aunt’s, did not speak English very well. Mum was talking slowly, carefully enunciating every word. Dad was hovering, desperate to be of some help but not knowing quite how. I knelt down next to the sofa upon which the dog was now huddled. I absently tickled her under the chin.

Gillian had been very ill for some time. About a year ago she had told us that the doctor had given her three to six months to live. I spent the early part of this year expecting her to go at any moment. She didn’t and I gradually stopped thinking about it and began to believe that the doctors had made a mistake or that Gillian had been exaggerating.

The last time I saw Gillian was just over two years ago. She had looked decrepit, shrivelled and older than her own mother who is thirty five years her senior. A lifetime of drinking, smoking, rich food and hedonism had finally called round to repossess her body. She cannot have much longer, I had thought even then. So when the doctor had given her three to six months it had not come as any great surprise. Six months after that diagnosis she was still hanging on and I was beginning to think that it had been a mistake, that Gillian still had a few years left, that despite her ailing body she would stubbornly refuse to die.

But at nine o’clock this morning, she did.

Janet and Gillian were the two daughters of Drew and Kathleen Stoba. Drew died many years ago when the girls were barely in their teens. Janet, my mother, was the sensible one, the plain one. She was well behaved and mature. Gillian, on the other hand, was the rebellious one, the passionate one, the one who answered back, the one who would not be told what to do. As my mother settled down and married Keith, my father, and worked briefly as a civil servant and a dentist’s nurse before starting a family, Gillian took off for France for adventure, to escape the routine and because it was not the kind of thing that a young woman in those days was expected to do.

Over the years she made a career for herself, eventually becoming an editor for the World Health Organisation in Geneva. She edited speeches for former US presidents, interviewed Mikael Gorbachev on French television (subsequently the Gorbachev’s always made time to have lunch or dinner with Gillian whenever they visited Switzerland) and met Nelson Mandela. She was married twice: she left her first husband when he began to hit her and divorced her second after he had descended into alcoholism. She finally found a good, stable man called Dominique with whom she spent the final decade of her life.

She was outspoken, opinionated, intelligent, generous, funny, pig-headed, stubborn and passionate; and for all of those reasons I thought that I should have been so close to her, that she should have been one of my best friends. She was the outgoing, confident and slightly intimidating person that I would love to be. She was, in real life, the person that I can only manage to be when I write. She would speak her mind in a way that I can only do when I sit at a keyboard. She had the kind of swagger in her step that I only have in my fingertips. She was perhaps the only person in my family, with the exception of my sister, who would have understood what goes on in my head. We should have had some wonderful conversations.

But we did not.

It just never seemed to work out that way. She did not suffer fools gladly and I did not want to become one of those fools. I would often start to write her letters in which I would give free reign to the thoughts and ideas that buzzed around in my head, but I never finished writing them. Some doubt always held me back. Kurt Vonnegut said that all artists create with an audience of one in mind: Maybe I wanted her to be my audience but deep down knew that she was not. As she lived in France, I rarely saw her. Maybe the rarity of our encounters created in me a romanticised vision of who she was. Maybe I was scared that if I did open up to her I would be disappointed. Maybe I was scared that she would not get me after all. Maybe I was scared that she was not as cool as I thought she was. Maybe I was scared that I loved my idea of her more than I loved the reality of her.

But it does not matter now. Whether I loved her or just my idea of her, she is dead, and I am going to miss her.