A FAMILY AFFAIR
While researching her new novel, Esther Freud reimagined the love and the little-known relationship between Lucian Freud and her mother Bernardine Coverley – and explored a world where women were defined by men
The author Esther Freud reveals how the romance between her mother Bernardine and her artist father Lucian inspired her latest novel
For someone with such a renowned surname, Esther Freud knew remarkably little about her heritage. While she was familiar with the biographies of her father Lucian, and her great-grandfather Sigmund, the true nature of her parents’ relationship – and the texture of their lives together – remained elusive. ‘My parents didn’t talk much about the past,’ Esther tells me on a sun-soaked afternoon from her study in Hampstead. In a stylish green and black top, her dark brown hair framing her slim face, she is sitting in front of bookshelves studded with wedding and baby pictures. ‘Hardly at all, so nothing much was in the folklore.
‘Every generation rebels,’ continues the novelist, in a husky voice that compels attention. ‘My parents were very rebellious, utterly unsentimental; they weren’t family-minded, they forged their own path. I rebelled by being totally sentimental, fascinated by my family, trying to crawl back right into the heart of it.’
Indeed, this is exactly what Esther does in I Couldn’t Love You
More, her ninth novel. It interweaves the stories of three generations of women: Aoife, an Irish Catholic housewife, her daughter Rosaleen and granddaughter Kate. Their personalities and experiences are drawn from the maternal side of Esther’s family, in particular, her mother Bernardine Coverley. The book centres on Rosaleen, who falls in love with a famous sculptor, Felix Lichtman – a thinly veiled portrait of Lucian Freud. Like Bernardine, the teenage Rosaleen finds herself unmarried and pregnant in a society and a time – the 1960s – when her condition was seen as morally reprehensible.
Investigating the circumstances of her mother’s youth was not something that Esther could have attempted while she was alive. ‘My mother was very private. She didn’t welcome direct questions about the past.’ What known about Bernardine has always been defined by Lucian’s life and work. She met the married 36-year-old artist in a Soho pub and was subsequently immortalised in his expressive painting Pregnant Girl (1960– 1961) that sold at Sotheby’s for £16.1 million in 2016. She had two children by Lucian by the time she was 20 – Bella, the fashion designer, and Esther, who is two years younger. The couple separated not long after Esther’s birth, although they remained on friendly terms. Bernardine’s unconventional, freewheeling approach to motherhood was beautifully evoked in Hideous Kinky, Esther’s bestselling 1992 autobiographical novel recalling her mother’s decision to decamp to Morocco for 18 months with her two daughters – Esther was then aged just four – which was made into a film in 1998 with Kate Winslet.
Bernardine died of cancer in 2011 – four days after Lucian’s demise – but it took Esther five years to start writing
I Couldn’t Love You More. ‘Maybe that was enough time to stop being in the grief of it,’ she says. ‘She died very suddenly. She was only 68 and she drove herself to hospital, and within 10 days, she was dead. It was very shocking. I started to think so deeply about her after that time.’
Esther’s first thought had been to write a book about love. ‘I’ve never focused on it as a main subject. But of course it goes sideways, because what is love without the relationships and the people who you happen to be loved by or be in love with?’ Researching an area of her life that had previously been closed to her also coincided with her separation from her husband, the actor David Morrissey, with whom she has three children. ‘Maybe the book was a sort of opening up…’ she muses, ‘thinking about the love I have for my daughter, who hadn’t been very well. My marriage was falling apart. I’d been caught up in things that were difficult and I wanted to add back the wonder of love.’ There’s a scene in the book in which the unhappily married Kate, Rosaleen’s daughter, tries to remember all the boyfriends she’s ever had. ‘Certainly, I remember doing that during a dark night,’ says Esther. ‘I was thinking, “How did I end up in this situation right now?”’
‘My parents were very rebellious, they were utterly unsentimental. They forged their own path’
As a character, Rosaleen is vividly and affectionately drawn, especially in those vital years with Felix. Though the novel is a fiction, Esther chose to link it to real events and places: Rosaleen grows up in the Black Horse pub in Brixton, is evacuated during the war and sent to a convent boarding-school. When the family moves back to Ireland, she runs away to London, and Esther fictionalises the meeting of her mother and father in that pub in Soho and their short but transformative relationship.
For the writer, it was a way of spending time with both her parents: ‘I loved it, I really did,’ she says. These imagined glimpses of their years together, from the feverish obsession with which Felix sculpts Rosaleen, to their dayto-day conversations, explore the intimacy her parents may have had. ‘I wondered what was so marvellous that someone would hold onto this great love, when there were a lot of painful things around it?’
At one point, Felix whisks Rosaleen to Marseille; she is bikini-clad and carefree, drinking champagne and dining on lobster, far from the stifling judgement of her parents in Ireland, or the transient nature of her life in London. The tender vignette was inspired by a photograph Esther found of her parents on holiday together. ‘It looked as if it was taken by someone who asks tourists if they can take a photo and have some money. It’s got that kind of feeling. They’re sitting at a table with a lobster and glasses of wine. If I’m lucky enough to find a photograph, that’s what really helps me, because I have very few from my early life and of my parents.’
She also reread letters from her ‘Nana’, Bernardine’s mother, to better comprehend the kindly woman who loved her daughter but nevertheless adhered to the repressive conventions of Irish Catholic society. ‘I would go several times a year and spend lovely holidays on the farm,’ she remembers. ‘I was very close to my grandmother and we wrote to each other until the end of her life. Reading her letters was a way of creating the character of Aoife. She took such care and precision over the way she spoke, the way she ran her life and the work that she did.’
The novel takes an ominous turn halfway through, when Rosaleen’s story diverges from Bernardine’s. Rosaleen is taken into a mother-and-baby home run by nuns, and her baby Kate is adopted. ‘My mother used to occasionally say that the reason why she kept Bella and me secret, and didn’t tell her parents that she had children for quite a few years, was that she thought they might take us away and have her incarcerated in a home,’ says Esther. ‘And I thought – surely you’re being a bit dramatic? Nana and Grandpa? But as I researched, and discovered the full horror of how many girls and young women found themselves in such brutal institutions, I started to see that my mother’s fears were utterly valid and that they were a sort of bedrock of who she really was. I saw how much shame there was in the way women felt about their “misdemeanours”.
‘It’s as though these women were being set up to be punished,’ Esther goes on. ‘Because they weren’t told what happens if you have sex, they didn’t know how you got pregnant. I remember my mother saying she wasn’t allowed to see her naked body when she was young and had to wear a liberty bodice, that you shouldn’t even see yourself in the bath.’
It was only when a family friend spotted Bernardine standing at a bus stop in London with two small girls and sent a letter to her parents saying: ‘I didn’t know your daughter was married’ that Bella and Esther became known to their grandparents. ‘My novel was written in response to the idea: what would have happened if she’d been found out,’ Esther writes in the acknowledgements. ‘Would her story have followed the path of so many thousands of other girls, and would anyone have intervened?’
It’s not a coincidence that the home Rosaleen is taken away to is Bessborough in County Cork, which was recently exposed in the news for the appalling cruelties inflicted on unmarried mothers and their children. Pregnant women were stripped of their identities and forced into unpaid
‘She kept Bella and me secret, because she thought they might take us away’
labour; they gave birth without proper care and there were many fatalities, of both mothers and babies. In some cases, women were tricked into signing adoption permissions by being told they were forms to receive pain relief. About 56,000 Irish women were placed in such homes over a period of more than 75 years until 1998, when the last one was closed down.
Esther realised that in writing this story, she was not only giving a voice to her mother, but also to a section of society that had been silenced. ‘I started to feel very passionate about Rosaleen and the other women in the book, who find their lives derailed in the way that so many were,’ she says. ‘The men went totally unpunished, unblamed, or often didn’t know what happened to their girlfriends or the girl at the dance.’ How does she feel about the choices Bernardine made about herself and Bella early in their lives? ‘I know, having had children, how much you need the support of friends and family. I was very affected by thinking how alone my mother was. I felt quite low for the year I was writing the traumatic unfolding of Rosaleen’s story.’
Since finishing the book last year, during lockdown Esther has turned her hand to writing short stories, glad ‘not to be in an overwhelmingly absorbing place’. ‘I’ve been quite obedient and surprised by how much lockdown has suited me,’ she says. ‘London became peaceful. There’s no noise of traffic, no planes. I’ve been doing a lot of cycling and investigating all sort of streets and places that I’ve never noticed even though I’ve lived here for 40 years. It’s glorious.’ And perhaps that’s what Esther Freud does best; she notices and imagines, blending truth and fiction to allow us to reappraise, and see with an exquisite clarity, the very world before us.
‘I Couldn’t Love You More’ by Esther Freud (£11.89, Bloomsbury) is published on 27 May.