I could have met Hilary Mantel. I am the chair of the judges for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, a prize she had just won; she was invited to receive her award and had accepted. True, Covid disruptions meant the prize-giving now clashed with work commitments. I could have moved my commitments. I didn’t.

‘I could have met Hilary Mantel,’ I say sometimes to particular people in particular contexts, ‘but I chose not to.’ People shake their heads. ‘Then she died,’ they say, as though my choice and her death were somehow connected. Really, they mean ‘you could have met her; you didn’t; now you can’t’. In other words, ‘you blew it’. But did I?

I once met Nicola Benedetti in the green room of some radio programme. I think it was part of the Edinburgh Festival, which the virtuoso violinist now directs. She had her violin, her dedication, her hours of hard practice, her talent, her technique, her intellectual acumen, her musical understanding, all deepening daily. Having nothing comparable, and also because since childhood I’ve had a perhaps exaggerated respect for musicians, I stuttered some inanity. She smiled politely. It was a relief to us both when she was called away.

With Hilary Mantel it would have been even more awkward. We ply the same trade, but that only helps between equals. Hilary Mantel – I never met her, so never earned ‘Hilary’ – were – are – not equals. As a historical novelist Hilary Mantel has few equals. She had ‘second sight’, defined at her memorial service by Bill Hamilton, her agent and friend, as seeing and feeling things ‘us ordinary mortals missed’. It might also be defined as a kind of truthfulness, a seeing once on the surface and again under the surface, the place, often best unseen, where our real selves lurk. I suppose I was frightened of what she might see in me. She would never have let on, of course.

I could have met Hilary Mantel in the same way that I could have met Harold Shipman, the mass-murdering GP from Greater Manchester. I was visiting Frankland Prison, not an inmate but the prison itself, for a piece I thought I might write. The warders were escorting me down a rabbit-run between buildings, wire on each side and overhead to prevent airborne ingress or egress. Ahead, through a wire gate, emerged a bearded figure. ‘That’s Harold Shipman,’ said the warder with the pride of a zookeeper showing off a new acquisition. ‘Learned braille quicker than anybody else.’  I increased my pace. I could already hear myself saying, with all the vainglorious relish that attaches to even the remotest connection with a notorious villain, ‘I’ve met Harold Shipman’ and my audience saying ‘Really? My goodness!’. But I couldn’t hear any words of greeting between myself and the murderous doctor. ‘Hello’ seemed off. ‘How do you do?’ seemed worse. And what would come next, me with nothing to say to him and him with nothing to say to me? Deathly silence? I slowed. He reached another wire gate. Somebody opened it and he disappeared.

I could have managed ‘hello’ with Hilary Mantel and I can pretty accurately guess her response. She’d have thanked me for my small part in delivering the prize money into her bank account. I didn’t want to hear those thanks and hear my stuttering self-deprecation – ‘oh we should be thanking YOU.’ I didn’t want to be anywhere near what we might call the ‘gratitude platitudes’ that splash about like verbal hyperbolic book blurbs at festivals and award ceremonies. But attempting a different conversation seemed impossible, not through being tongue-tied – if only! – rather, through the nervous gush-rush that, in the presence of greatness, tends to seize hold. Words pour out. I can hear them alright. They’re not words to be proud of. They’re sludge, silt, the rubbish eventually swept away by clear water, except with Hilary Mantel the clear water might not have arrived, either at all or in time, and her abiding memory of me would have been silt. ‘What was her name, you know, the woman who spoke like an avalanche of saccharine mud?’ she’d ask her husband. It wouldn’t have been a question worth answering so, small mercy, he probably wouldn’t have bothered.

It’s strange that, like the sentence you can’t get right, there are those people who, fatally, you want to impress, yet everything comes out wrong. Is there some kind of neural condition that reduces the normally articulate to blithering idiots? For some people, the condition is induced by royalty, but the only time I met the Queen I remained quite composed. It was a garden party and my father had three, possibly four daughters on parade. ‘Good Lord, Simon,’ remarked the queen, ‘are these all yours?’ ‘More at home,’ I said. The queen appeared faintly startled; occasionally the bald truth carries more punch than the clever retort.  As we left, royally sandwiched and sunned, anxious now to peel off tights – the best thing the old Princess of Wales did for women was eventually to ditch tights for formal summer occasions – I could already imagine the regal drinks-time conversation. ‘Do you know,’ the queen would say to Prince Philip, shoes off, corgis on, ‘there are perfectly respectable families with more children than we’ve got.’ ‘Bloody fools,’ Prince Philip would snap back. ‘Probably Catholic.’ In our case, bang to rights. It was a happy imagining.

Lots of people didn’t need to resort to happy imaginings with Hilary Mantel. In a piece for the Literary Hub, the writer Miranda Miller quotes from conversations and email exchanges, and you can tell from the easy tone that she and Hilary Mantel were easy friends. That example notwithstanding, it still seems valid to ask whether, as a writer, it’s actually possible to converse in a normal way with other writers you admire. Is there not always the slightly edgy fear that for them it’s like playing tennis with somebody worse than yourself? All the time you’re speaking, are they worried about being contaminated by the banal?

Things progress much better if the revered goes unrecognised. My mother once sat next to Omar Sharif and asked him what he did. ‘I play bridge,’ he said, and throughout lunch she remained blissfully unaware that she was sitting next to Dr Zhivago. At the time, how I envied her his proximity. The man who drove the sleigh with Lara. But since he would have ranked highly on my list of those to whom I can’t address a normal word, a list that, now I come to think of it, alongside Hilary Mantel includes the vet to whom I always say too much, the breeder of our whippet to whom I always over-enthuse and, as already revealed, all musicians, I must be glad Mr Sharif was spared my inevitable blabbering.

So there it is. I could have met Hilary Mantel. I didn’t. That danger has now passed and I thank God every day that I’m also in no danger of bumping into Martin Amis.