Visiting the Lucian Freud collection at the Irish Museum of Modern Art recently, I half-hoped I might catch sight of a long-gone friend. I knew her portrait was in the gallery’s possession, but, wandering through the current display, there was no sign of her until, just as I was about to make my way out, I finally found her, looking sombrely preoccupied on a first-floor wall.
Katie, the subject of the painting, was the girl I had my most serious fling with as a teenager, at a time when she was also seeing Freud himself, to whom she once introduced me.
That encounter took place on an intensely sunny day during the prolonged, raucous heatwave that was the summer of 1976, when I was 19, Katie a year younger, and Freud in his 50s.
Katie and I were drinking tea in the dilapidated kitchen of her top-floor flat in a house in Maida Vale, west London. In the bathroom off the landing below us, a conger eel named Deadly, a gift to Katie from Freud, was in occupation of the bath. And downstairs, Freud was at the front door, ringing the bell.
Katie and I had just spent only our second night together and, at daybreak, had walked back to her flat from my place near Ladbroke Grove, along the canal and past the shattered glass and wrecked cars left over from rioting at the Notting Hill Carnival the night before, which started when the police turned up in unprecedented numbers, linked arms and tried to wade into the crowds to arrest alleged pickpockets and dealers.
The bell sounded again. Katie, who had been involved with Freud for some time, had already warned me that he might turn up unexpectedly.
After a brief hesitation, she went down to open the front door.
Standing in the kitchen, I heard the two of them come back up the flights, talking, it seemed to me, a little edgily. His voice, even from a distance, was singular and unforgettable, a mixture of upper-class English preciousness and clipped middle-European precision.
They went into the bathroom and I then heard a burst of laughter, followed by Katie calling me to come down and see what was happening.
Both Freud and Katie are dead now (and Deadly too, presumably), so it is only I who am left to remember the three of us that day, looking on at the scene of whipped carnage in the bath as the conger eel got to grips with the treat Freud had brought over for it — a selection of small fry from a polythene bag, if my unreliable memory serves me right.
Mesmerised by the sight of this feasting, we were all quiet for a moment, until Freud asked me what I thought of Deadly.
“What do I think of him?” I said, disconcerted, and then, struggling, remarked that he didn’t seem the friendliest, a comment which made Freud grimace mockingly.
He then asked how I was coping with the heat, and said I looked thirsty. He took a brown paper bag of peaches from his jacket pocket, followed by a small flick-knife, which he opened in a swift, practised movement, observing me closely. He cut the peach into neat segments, spearing them and offering them to Katie and I.
For a while, the two of them talked about animals. The first time I’d met Katie, in her family’s big house in the Scottish Borders, she’d had a black rat running around in her clothes and hands as we talked, and we were then interrupted by the kestrel she cared for, which floated down from a perch near the ceiling to have a closer look at us. And then later, Freud gave Katie a monkey, which lived with her in a squat in Cambridge Circus in Soho and which greeted me, on our first (and only) encounter, by jumping on my shoulder and pissing down my shirt.
Freud said he had his car and that he wanted to take Katie to the races. Although I perhaps had no right to be jealous, I was, instantly. I also knew that nobody would be impressed by any signs of possessiveness from me. Katie asked whether I minded if she went, but there was no doubt what my answer should be, so I claimed indifference.
And then suddenly Freud was all impatience, hurrying her up as she went to get her stuff, moving us all on to the landing and down the stairs again.
Outside, they climbed into his tight little car, waved in unison and drove off together, leaving me stranded outside the front door.
I never met him again, though one evening soon afterwards he followed Katie and I along the street in that same car, watching us, before speeding up and driving off.
Things didn’t last between Katie and me that year. Later, though, some time after she and Freud had broken up, our attachment was rekindled for a longer while, and when it ended we remained friends until, in her mid-20s, she died, shockingly, in a drowning accident off the coast of Kenya. She had just finished her degree at art school and, had she lived, would certainly have been a painter herself, as well as, hopefully, remaining the fearless, curious and unusually uncompromising person she was.
In the Imma catalogue, Head of a Girl (1975-76) is described as a "rather despairing yet tender" picture, and the artist is quoted as describing 1976 as a time when he was "feeling sadder than I ever have before or since".
The subdued tones of the painting do indeed suggest a prophetic melancholy in the artist’s view of his teenage subject, though, for me, they also offer something different and opposite, a path straight back to the dazzling, disorientating light and heat of that untypical youthful summer.