He called her Lucia after Joyce's mad daughter, or sometimes he said she was Santa Lucia, singing her song at the top of his voice whenever she stepped into the studio He never had problems telling them apart - Sophia, Maude, Cassandra, Sinbad, Costello, Tatiana, Hamlet, Icarus, Jezebel or the dozen or so children by the secondary mothers. 'Lucrezia!' he'd call out, without turning his head. 'O mercy to myself I cried, if Lucy should be dead!'

There he'd be at his easel, dressed in a spattered blue shirt like the one Kirk Douglas wore in Lust for Life, surrounded by the paintings that he turned out so effortlessly. Portraits mostly - not just of women, though these were his most famous. The faces of madmen and vagrants from his Dublin sketchbooks, and of his own children when they were young.

Sometimes he even said she was named after Lucian Freud, that cold fish, just to tease her. Lucian Freud! The London establishment. To Ridley, painting was just a fragment of what he was about. His great enterprise was the gathering of hidden knowledge, and for him the true meaning of art transcended craftsmanship.

All of his offspring were talented. Costello was playing Horatio at the Old Vic. Tatiana's first novel was on the Booker shortlist, while Cassandra was a furniture designer and Icarus a potter. Only Lucia had chosen a more conventional career. She taught at a school in a small town far away. She loved the bright eyes and the squirrelling bodies of the little children. Many of them arrived at reception class barely able to talk or answer to their own names. Most of them had never sat down at a table to eat. Yet she could get the whole lot of them hushed and attentive, just for that one pure moment when she held the whole room in the palm of her hand. She considered herself a fortunate person.

In public, Ridley disavowed parental ties. 'What concern is it of mine, what my spunk goes to make when I've shot it?' In private he was more indulgent, writing out and illustrating his own version of Alice's Adventures Under Ground specially for Lucia, which he read aloud to her when she came to visit. Lucia's mother, Muffin, was legally his wife, though they'd never shared a roof together in the forty years since they met at art school. Ridley never spent the night with any of his lovers. He considered the process unnatural and vampiric. Muffin was his wife because she was hard-headed and sensible and could manage his business affairs. Ridley had a premonition that he would meet a violent death, and throughout his career was concerned that posterity would find everything in order.