Of all the stories about adulterous rock stars, it must rank as one of the worst. When Franka Wright heard her husband, Pink Floyd keyboard player Rick, had returned to Athens, she rushed to see him on board his boat – only to find him entertaining a young blonde.

‘She was wearing his shirt,’ Franka recalls. ‘I asked her how long their affair had been going on for and she stared at me, then slowly unbuttoned the shirt to show me her slightly rounded stomach. She was clearly pregnant. I was devastated.’In the past Franka had forgiven Rick’s affairs. It was, she says, one of the hazards of being married to a member of the world’s greatest rock band. But fathering another woman’s baby was the final straw.

Rick's letter of wishes – signed three years before their divorce – stated Franka (left) should be paid a pension ‘whether or not she is my wife at the date of my death’

During the ten years I was with Rick, I had four miscarriages and almost died during one of them. Rick cheated on me constantly and although we loved each other, I had to leave after I found him in bed with the pregnant groupie.’

It was scant reward, she says, for having worked so hard to reunite Rick with the band as famous for their bitter divisions as their ground-breaking music. Torn apart by drug-fuelled rows and mired in mutual loathing, they had split and vowed never to reunite by the time Franka met Rick in 1981. Using her negotiating skills, she brokered peace between Rick, guitarist David Gilmour and drummer Nick Mason. When Pink Floyd embarked on their historic world tour in 1987, she says Gilmour told her: ‘Thank you for making this happen.’

Franka says Gilmour’s words at a rehearsal were the only acknowledgement that she had saved the band from bitterness and rancour.Franka  complains that she was left virtually penniless after her divorce from Wright in 1994, having received just £150,000 in her settlement. Wright claimed at the time that he was worth only £200,000, yet left a £24 million fortune when he died from cancer in 2008.

He did, however, write a letter of wishes – which is not legally binding – to the executors of his will, in which he asked that Franka enjoy a lifelong pension from his estate. This, she says, has never been honoured.

Indeed, her circumstances are a world away from the lifestyle she once enjoyed with Wright. ‘People think I walked away with millions,’ she says. ‘They don’t believe that I have no money and that my life is a big struggle. I had to borrow €1,000 to pay the doctors when I had severe bronchitis last year.’

It is one of the reasons she is writing a warts-and-all book about life with the band. She admits to ‘crying every day’ thinking of all she has lost.

She runs a worldwide Pink Floyd fan club and declares openly that she still loves Wright, who she refers to as ‘my darling’, even though he indulged in every conceivable rock cliché throughout their relationship, from taking industrial quantities of drugs to sleeping with endless groupies. She has never remarried.

She first met Rick in 1981, after he had been forced from the band by Roger Waters, Pink Floyd’s co-founder, for not contributing enough to The Wall album.

He was, however, hired as a session musician for the album tour and was the only one to make any money – the others had invested in the loss-making venture. The band’s 1983 album The Final Cut is the only one without Rick.

He was by then living in self-imposed exile in Rhodes, where he spent his days drinking in the Qupi bar in Lindos, a popular celebrity hangout owned by Franka and her then husband.

‘I was not interested in him but I could feel his blue eyes on me all the time,’ she recalls. After a car accident put her in hospital for two months, she received pink roses every day. ‘I didn’t know who sent them,’ she adds. ‘He only told me after I returned to the bar. He eventually broke up my marriage by telling my already suspicious husband that he was madly in love with me.’

Despite his wealth, Rick told her he had very little money. ‘He was really mean,’ she says. ‘I had to hide shopping bags to stop him blowing up about my spending. When we met, he had only one pair of jeans, his personal hygiene was questionable, and his house in Knightsbridge was shambolic. He needed to be cared for and that’s what I did.

‘I took his daughter Gala to Carnaby Street and wanted to buy her a £50 shirt on the credit card Rick gave me, but she said it would make him upset if we spent so much.’

Franka blames Rick’s drug-taking and drinking for his death at the relatively young age of 65. ‘I begged him not to take drugs when we were in Greece and was furious when I saw him doing cocaine in the bathroom in our Athens flat,’ she says.

‘After every concert the table in Rick’s rooms would be laden with drugs and alcohol – and he was not the only one. You didn’t have to ask for anything. I took a line once, to keep up with him, but I didn’t like it.’

She says Wright regularly had sex with groupies or backing singers, which is why she flew all over the world to be by his side – even while pregnant. ‘If I wasn’t there when he wanted me, then he would find another woman to put in his bed.’