I can't remember when I first met Martin Amis, and I can't remember if I ever met Anna Ford, though I do recall the initial furore surrounding the relationship between her and Mark Boxer and the way they would enter a room, like a royal couple.

But, peripherally, at any rate, Mark was part of my group, my gang, the people whom I hung out with.

This was principally because I was then great friends with Christopher Hitchens. All the clever New Statesman boys - Martin, Christopher, James Fenton, Julian Barnes - were the ones I wanted to know.

Anthony Howard was then the New Statesman's editor - his nickname was Foetus Features; Julian's was Farouche Features; Martin's nickname was Little Keith, after his protagonist in Dead Babies, and Christopher's was The Hitch.

Along with Clive James and Mark Boxer, maybe Craig Raine and Ian McEwan, they would meet for regular weekly lunches, on a Friday, I seem to recall, at restaurants such as the old Bertorelli's in Frith Street. Women were rarely invited or indeed welcome.

I had met Christopher one evening at dinner at the home of the late David Leitch and his then wife, Jill Neville. David was a brilliant journalist and a drunk; Jill was a novelist, critic and sister of Richard Neville of Oz fame.

I think Jill had hoped to fix me up with Christopher, but it didn't take, though we became, over the years, great friends, and through him I met the others. Mark, Martin and Christopher became briefly my lovers but, more importantly, they were my friends.

Certainly for Mark and Martin, womanising was a way of life. It was compulsive. Though Mark was married at the time to his first wife, Lady Arabella, and the father of two children, it didn't seem to slow him down. He had had a number of love affairs of varying degrees of drama, one with a woman whose name I could never remember.

When it broke up, Mark was devastated and would declaim tragically, "When I killed myself over X." He didn't much like it when I pointed out that here he was, alive and well and onto the next one. At the time I met him, he was involved with Jane Bonham Carter, who was only 17, blonde and very pretty.

But, when Jane went to America for a year, Mark continued his womanising. There was a famous story of him going to bed with a new woman and saying to her after it was over: "Will you tell all your girlfriends how good I am in bed?" It was too good a story for her to keep to herself.

Mark was extremely handsome with dark curly hair, regular features and brown eyes. His were the sort of classic good looks set off by cricketing whites, which he often donned as he loved the game.

He was vain, insecure, a man-about-town and rather a dandy; he had a low-key, camp manner and he always noticed and loved social nuances, as his cartoons, just like those of Osbert Lancaster before him, showed.

He was, I suppose, a bit of a snob (but I remember that he always used to laugh about the very snobbish mother of a woman we knew who, observing that he was left-handed, commented, "Oh, I see you write with your left hand. Just like girls in banks").

When I knew him he was drawing the covers for a new edition of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time and I almost think of him as a character from those novels. Once Mark and Martin were making up the guest list for a party. "After the first 75, it's on looks alone," said Mark.

Martin, though famously short, was also very good-looking, more in a brooding, Mick Jagger-ish way. If he was a character from a novel, it was one of his own. And he was so funny and clever and knew everything, or seemed to (not foreign languages, of course, but he didn't want to know foreign languages).

He didn't need to pursue girls because they ran after him. He had a flat/love nest in Bays-water, known, as everyone is now aware, as the Sock (nothing to do with society but because it was always full of dirty socks). Martin rarely pushed his admirers away while often treating them very badly. But the memories were always pretty good.

Then along came Anna Ford.

There's no way she could have been part of the gang, nor, I suspect, did she ever want to be. Emma Soames came nearest to it - as an honorary chap.

Anna, by contrast, was a feminist, for God's sake, and though Martin isn't as anti-feminist as some people make out, it's not really his thing, nor is it a guy thing, whatever they say (the boys used to make jokes about Ian McEwan being such a feminist that soon he would start suffering from PMT).

When Martin's memoir, Experience, was published in 2000, I asked why he had referred to Emma Soames as his "companion" in the book, a very uncharacteristically politically correct term. He told me that his brother always used to refer to his current girlfriend/companion as his "f**k" and maybe that would have been better. Then he laughed. That was the real Martin speaking.

But what did Mark see in Anna?

Well, she was beautiful - or many people thought she was; and she was famous because she was on television. I now live in Greece where all the female newsreaders look like old-fashioned hookers with waist-length dyed blonde tresses and massive cleavages (the weather girls do the forecasts in sexy, not to say kinky, underwear), so I find it hard to believe that anyone takes them seriously.

In England, at the time, there was Angela Rippon, Moira Stuart and Jan Leeming. Suddenly there was Anna Ford. Was Anna Ford the first glamorous newsreader? The phrase "thinking man's crumpet" was used about Joan Bakewell, but you get the idea. Robin Day claimed all men wanted to sleep with Anna - she pushed him into a bush for this compliment/harassment; Auberon Waugh apparently used to kiss the television screen when she was appearing.

But for dandy dilettante Mark Boxer, who could have and had had his pick of many women, to fall for her? It always seemed a bit unlikely.

In the early days of her romance with Mark, they were punting on the Cam one day with a group of friends including, I believe, Martin Amis and Clive James. It was a beautiful summer's day; delicious, cool white wine was being drunk; everyone was relaxed, snoozing and enjoying themselves. Suddenly Anna sat bolt upright in the punt, causing it no doubt to rock alarmingly from side to side. "Mark," she said, "what is the history of punting?"

In a way this story says it all. They were so different. He was a flibbertigibbet, a lightweight, albeit a talented and charming one. He once said, "When you get a really good piece of gossip, don't you want to bring it to somebody you love, like a dog with a bone?" I knew just what he meant. I'm a lightweight too. He was frightfully indiscreet, couldn't keep a secret for a second, and great fun. Anna was (and probably still is) very serious.

It is always easy to rush to judgment, to say that you know or knew what was going on, but I think that this recent, ridiculous spat (to which Martin wrote a dignified response) is because of a tug-of-war over Mark. And I don't think Martin was doing that much tugging. I have read the piece that he wrote after Mark's death and it was very moving. He had loved Mark. Very much. And Mark's premature demise was a great loss to him.

But, before that, Anna had taken him away. It was a loss that had begun when Mark married Anna and moved to Brentford, a place that before then might only have existed in Mark's cartoons and might have been designed to get Mark away from all he had known and loved before.

Lucretia Stewart is writing a book about Naxos.