WEEKEND COLUMNISTS Driving south from Lisbon a few days ago to stay with friends and passing Setúbal, we stopped for coffee and I darted into a minute haberdashery and bought, for €6 ($8.58), seven smallish lengths of 1970s polka-dotted linen: red on white, navy on sky blue, white on green, blue on red, red and navy on sky blue (like airmail stationery), and black on cream. This will ensure our dolls and bears look jaunty in the park this autumn.
Afterwards, in the hire car, as some parched hills went by, I rummaged in the glove compartment for a map and found instead a lone CD, gleaming and unlabelled. I pressed it into the slot and was a little surprised, as we zoomed through brilliant Portuguese suburbs, to hear Topol singing, “If I were a rich man”.
It was only a couple of weeks ago that I had seen him in person, daringly upholstered in lilac, crooning “Thank Heaven For Little Girls” at the Open Air Theatre in London. He lent a slightly anxious sensibility to Chevalier’s world-weary Parisian creation that made the part his own.
When rain stopped the show after 20 minutes, I was quite dismayed. I had been humming “If I Were a Rich Man” almost continuously the week before, as a friend who works at Christie’s in London had sent me a jpeg of “Susie II”, a painting that my father [Lucian Freud] did of me in 1989-90, which is being sold by a private collector at auction in October. The estimate is £2m ($3.5m)-£3m.
I had felt a familiar electric uneasiness – a bit like food poisoning – as the image very slowly unrolled on my screen. First I saw my stripy hair and the curve of an eyebrow, then one eye alert and painted quite thickly and the other more delicate and sadder and half drifting off to sleep; then a patch of skin at the back of my neck, then my now-derelict favourite blue-black shirt. I looked at the picture very carefully for a long time and it was a guilty pleasure, for it felt like the pinnacle of self-regard.
I don’t appear beautiful or anything in that way, but as I gazed at the picture of the picture I had such an enormous sense of fellow-feeling, a powerful recollection of what I was trying to do at that time, what I was clinging to, how hard things felt, every day a struggle, and then my pride at not seeking help – deranged pride I can see now, but pride I feel quite proud of nonetheless.
The picture was painted when I was very unhappy, the pain of sudden bereavement having taken the colour and meaning out of everything that wasn’t connected to loss. The prospects just weren’t good.
Yet, as I stared at my younger self I almost felt nostalgic for that ruinous time, for the strength of my feelings, and for the relative calm that the hundreds of sittings offered me, the sense of refuge, a sort of life outside my life that would claim me unfailingly two or three mornings a week for a year.
It was an environment in which I could, with no special effort, shine, and these things mean a great deal when everything is going wrong.
My reverie stopped when I heard a small noise on the stair, a creak or a clunk of pipes, and I sprang to my feet suddenly, although I knew I was the only soul in the house. I did not want to be caught.
The next day I had gone to visit the painting, which was on an upper floor behind a library of books relating to Old Masters. I looked at it for about 10 minutes with my friend, the contemporary art specialist.
“If I asked you how I was feeling in that picture, what would you say?” I inquired.
“You look calm and peaceful,” my friend answered thoughtfully.
“Can you tell that I was very, very sad? That it was the worst year of my life?”
“I don’t see that,” she said. “It just looks very tender to me.”
“I was worried when I came that I wouldn’t be able to bear not being able to take it away with me. I thought I might even resort to theft. But I don’t feel that now. Not at all. I just feel ... I don’t know, happy I suppose.” She smiled.
We made our way down the stairs and I felt oddly festive. A sort of huge excited relief rose in me that had its roots in strong attachment.
I never had a little sister, but the girl in the picture felt like the next best thing.
More columns at www.ft.com/boyt
