ROSE TREMAIN: The friendships that shaped my life... and how 'love's poor relation' can show us truths we're unable to see for ourselves

• Though a story of romantic longing, Tremain's new novel is also about friendship
• READ MORE:  Spending just nine minutes together per day can stop friendships wasting away, says Oxford professor

The other week I published my 16th novel, Absolutely and Forever. Primarily it explores one of the most popular subjects in the history of human life: young romantic love and heartbreak. 

In 1950s England, my heroine Marianne Clifford is only 15 when she falls for 18-year-old Simon Hurst, ‘the cleverest boy in Berkshire’. 

When fate tears the lovers apart, Marianne understands that the future she’d imagined for them was as flimsy as her torn party frock, but her yearning for Simon is like a disease she’s unable to shake off. 

She goes forward into a different life, but like a sleepwalker, fumbling in emotional darkness, tripping and falling. Only one person is able to save her: her school friend Petronella, known as Pet.

It is Pet who sees to the heart of things and guides Marianne towards truths about her life she is unable to perceive. 

This novel, then, though a story of romantic longing, is also about friendship – love’s poor relation, if you like – and writing it helped to crystallise how central to my life, and writing, friendships have been.

Through the joys and pains of making and losing friends we learn so much about ourselves. 

When we age, the friendship mix is stirred by mortality 

Are we by nature loyal or are we rivalrous? Are we kind at heart? Do we make people laugh? Are we good listeners? Can we empathise with our friends’ successes as well as with their troubles? Do our contemporaries gravitate towards us or shun us? If they shun us, is it time to examine the ways in which we alienate those whose affection we crave?

I learned very early that making friends was important. I made my first friend, Jane McKenzie, when I was three years old and we were put into the same little dancing class in Chelsea. I was dark and Jane was fair.

I was boisterous and she was shy. But we formed such a passionate friendship that later, at school, we would dissolve into tears if we weren’t put on the same team in a netball game. 

We continued together to boarding school where, in our first term, we clung together like little drowning mermaids.

As a child I thought that Jane McKenzie would be my beloved friend for life, the steady ‘Pet’ who would help to keep me from harm. 

But, aged 22, Jane got engaged to a man who thought I was too ‘arty’ an influence on his wife-to-be. He asked her not to see me any more and, to my incredulity, she agreed. 

Feeling sick and shocked, I got out of her car at traffic lights on Rosebery Avenue in Clerkenwell and didn’t see her again for many years. 

Later, when we both had children, we attempted some kind of patching up and I went to stay with her in Jersey, but somehow, my heart wasn’t in the friendship. I still felt betrayed.

When Jane got married, I was an undergraduate at the University of East Anglia, then a brand new establishment, which had welcomed the writer Angus Wilson on to its teaching staff. 

In defiance of my upper-middle-class upbringing, I sought out witty, radical friends in this new life under Angus’s tutelage, the most significant of whom was a fellow student. 

Jon Tremain was clever and difficult, tied to the political Left. We were unlikely fellow-travellers, but we found important common ground through the founding of a student magazine and our drama work. 

When my tempestuous love affair with a Corsican artist broke up, Jon fulfilled the ‘Pet’ role, helping to console and guide me through the heartbreak. 

What neither of us had foreseen was that our friendship – the hours of conversation, fuelled by Nescafé, Gauloises and nameless yearning – had laid the foundations for romantic attachment. Jon split from his girlfriend and two years later we got married.

In the end, it didn’t work out, but we share a beautiful daughter, Eleanor, and retain strong affection and respect for each other.

When we start to age, the friendship mix is stirred and changed by mortality. In my writing life, I’ve been lucky enough to enjoy close friendships with my agents and publishers. 

Chief among these was Penny Hoare, who published my first novel in 1976 and remained my editor for 41 years. Her guidance was so important to me that when she died in 2017, I couldn’t see how I could manage to do good work without her. 

But my daughter Eleanor said to me, ‘Mum, Penny wouldn’t want you to give up. Listen to your “inner Penny” and hear what she has to say, then you’ll find a way forward.’

And she was right. This is how I’ve kept going as a writer, helped hugely by my beloved partner Richard Holmes, but most of all by a vibrant memory of Penny, sitting in an armchair in my sitting room, scattering manuscript pages around her as she cut and pasted my work into shape. 

She could be severe at times, and when she saw that I felt like weeping she would glare at me over her glasses and say, ‘Rose, don’t be a baby!’ 

And we’d laugh because we knew she was saving me from myself. She was Pet again, helping Marianne towards her future.

• Absolutely and Forever by Rose Tremain is published by Chatto & Windus, £16.99*