Rose Boyt and the legacy of Lucian Freud

But there are paintings too not by him; one a gorgeous small oil of a piano against a background of canary yellow, which Boyt will tell me is by her 17-year-old daughter, Stella, who wants to go to art school (her son, Vincent, is 15); and another, a still life of flowers, by Boyt’s mother, Suzy, which hangs in pride of place in her study. Freud met Suzy when she was a student and heiress; he was a young married man teaching part-time at the Slade School of Fine Art. “Nobody ever asks me about my mother,” Boyt says as she shows me her picture, “but she is an extremely good artist too. When she got pregnant by my father, she was the one who had to leave the Slade. Can you believe that?”

Now, Boyt says, is “my time”. Two events have occurred that have brought her name back into the press since her first book, Sexual Intercourse, was published 25 years ago (she is now 55). The first is a new novel, Hows Your Father [sic], out this month, inspired by her itinerant life as a young adult living hand-to-mouth in hostels, squats and bedsits in east London. The second event, paradoxically, is the announcement, following Lucian Freud’s death three years ago, that she was the child – out of the many – whom he chose to be co-executor with a lawyer of his £96 million (pre-tax) estate.

Boyt’s whole life is a story of rags to riches, back to rags and then after a spell of normality, now, it seems, back to riches again. “My mum used to call us downwardly mobile,” she says about the relative poverty, bar a short period living on her mother’s family inheritance, of her own childhood.

Once all the various complications of Freud’s estate are sorted out, Boyt, like the other undisclosed beneficiaries, will inherit, although she certainly will not articulate or even admit to its likelihood or its sum. “I will cross that bridge when I come to it,” she says, looking pained at even having to say anything at all, “and I don’t believe for a minute that I am ever going to inherit any money, so if I do, I will see what that feels like.

“I can’t really imagine it and I’ve never really had any [money] before, never thought I was going to get any, don’t see myself in that role. I will obviously do the things that people would do who have got money; my children will be able to go to university; we are able to support my mum. If I do get it, there are a lot of people for it to be shared between.”

Lucian Freud’s dynasty is a complicated one. There are 14 children acknowledged as his – including the sisters Esther and Bella Freud, writer and fashion designer, with whom Rose is close – from six partners. As they have all moved into middle age, with children of their own, all attending each other’s birthday parties, that aspect of being a Freud has been entirely positive.

“I feel that my family invented a community that we decided that we would have because of, or in spite of, my father. We all look after each other and we all have an amazing level of respect, love and protection in our family, and everyone’s back is being watched. And if you think that, between the people I am talking about, we probably have about five different mums or something … We disregard that. They might all be howling with laughter reading this. But we all feel that we love each other.”

All 14 were at his funeral at Highgate cemetery in July 2011. Rather cleverly, as much as possible, Freud’s bequeaths have remained private. Death duties were settled by donating works Freud owned, including Corot and Degas, to the nation; and his assistant, David Dawson, was given £2.5 million and his home in North Kensington. The rest of the money, some £42 million after tax, passed into the trust overseen by Boyt and Freud’s lawyer, Diana Rawstron. They had been instructed by Freud to keep the money in trust for others, whose identities have not been revealed. Boyt is not going to be drawn into who or how much.

“How much power do I have?” Boyt repeats my question when I try to pin her down on how it all works. “I talked about it with him when he was alive and we worked out what to do and I am trying to do it …

“The others [her siblings] have given me the most extreme sensation of allowing themselves to be looked after through this by me, while supporting me while I’ve been doing it,” she says. “I cannot imagine any other scenario where the person who is the executor feels so utterly blessed by how the beneficiaries have received all the edicts and the decisions and everything. Not only having things doled out to them and having to be grateful, but also [they] have all been wholesome in their praise of how I’ve done it and expressed gratitude. It has been an extremely heart-rendingly warm and wonderful experience, which is hard to believe.

“I couldn’t really have done it unless I felt that everyone was behind me and everyone has been behind me all the way through this.”

Still, there have been problems too, pounced upon by journalists. Earlier this year, a disgruntled half-sibling of Boyt’s went to the High Court to claim a share. Straying into this area makes Boyt look pained and at this point I feel like the grubby hack for making her feel so. Unfortunately for her, the awful truth is that it is compelling.

When I ask her why her father chose her for the role of executor, Boyt says, “I really don’t want my siblings to read that I think I’m the ‘chosen one’. I was a tried and tested sensible person, and I have quite a strong sense of what is right and wrong and I am fair, and care about everybody … Yeah, that sort of thing. He chose me and I was happy with that decision.”

Getting her even to talk about the estate is hard won. Sometimes it feels like we are in hand-to-hand combat, but we push on through, she and I, each representing our opposing interests. Harmony is restored when she says, “I’m not stupid enough to think that people will only want to know about my book.”

For the past 20 years, Boyt has been happily living a normal life below the Freud public radar: bringing up her two adored children by her husband, Mark Pearce, to whom she has been married for almost two decades; writing her novels and running her father’s estate, which she started doing around the age of 30. She goes by the name of Rose Pearce at the school gate and did so in court: “When a dinner lady saw some picture of me and my children in Hello! magazine, everybody said, ‘Why didn’t you say who you were?’ But you don’t just go around saying that.”

Although Boyt has never stopped writing while her children have been growing up, the books have remained unpublished. The new novel, which she handed over to a friend and publisher on the school run, is only “new” in so much as she has re-edited it.

It is written entirely in cockney dialect, tracking four women in the same family, which has been broken over generations by poverty, drug abuse, domestic violence, sex abuse and lack of education. Its inspiration came from those early years in squat, hostel and bedsit – “just along this same street. Who’d have thought I’d be sitting here now as lady of the manor?” – and later when Boyt used to trundle down the nearby roads with her young children in a double buggy.

At its centre is Maureen, who is saved by the love she feels for her children and her eventual escape from her violent husband with a loving, gentle childhood sweetheart. Boyt says 50 per cent of Maureen is her; the love she feels for her children is especially strong. The dying father in the book is a grotesquely damaged figure, whose alcoholism and violence wreak havoc on his wife (who befriends a paedophile who abuses her children and the generations to follow). “And [the father] is not my father!” says Boyt emphatically. “There is no way anybody could read my father into him.

“It’s a difficult book in some ways because there is this feeling people will say it’s inauthentic because I’m not actually Maureen, that it’s like a Black and White Minstrel Show and that I’ve blacked up, but to me it feels convincing. It is incredibly disinhibiting being able to write in the voices of the four women in the book, because in spite of going to university, I don’t feel like I’m highly educated. I went to state school and it was all a bit crap and I didn’t really learn any grammar or anything useful, so the luxury of not having to worry about my sentences was extremely liberating.”

The title – on which her father helped her settle – refers to sex. Hows Your Father is as dark and brutal in its themes as were her first book, Sexual Intercourse, and her second, Rose. But despite how she lived until falling in love with her husband in 1993, Boyt does not like “the dark” in her life: “Don’t like it, not attracted to it, don’t want it. I could easily give it a massive body swerve.” Perhaps it is more that what she calls her “psychopathology” comes out in her fiction, rather as it does in the work of her half-sister, the writer Esther Freud.

Lucian Freud, who is the dedicatee, read the book before he died. “I think it’s marvellous; I think it’s brilliant. But I might be the only person who is going to like it,” he told her. “So let’s hope he was wrong about that,” says Boyt, laughing. She does not think the book is bleak, but confesses that when she re-read it after Freud’s death, she surprised herself by crying. “I must admit I wrote it before my dad died and I read it through afterwards and I did cry. It was very strange. It was properly sad.”

Despite her mother’s inheritance and the prospect of her own, Boyt has lived much of her life hand-to-mouth. There was a brief period during her childhood when her mother inherited her fortune and with the money bought a cargo ship, complete with crew, called Inge. Boyt spent her early life with her mother and siblings, taking cargoes around Scandinavia, Finland and Poland and then Trinidad, from where the family was repatriated when the ship sank. The Boyts returned home to live in one room for a while and often ran out of money to feed the electricity meter. Suzy Boyt went on to have a fourth child – Susie – by Freud, during this time. He was not around much and, as it turns out, had simultaneous families on the go.

The Boyts once again settled in Islington where, broadly, they all still are today. Rose felt always the outsider, always different (a common theme among the Freud children: Esther Freud wrote Hideous Kinky based on her version of it). She went to school dressed in red velvet miniskirts made by her mother and knitted Tyrolean jackets when everybody else was in grey skirts and white polo shirts. She left home at 15, then a squat in Hoxton and the hostel. When I ask if her mother, who has been suffering from cancer, ever found someone else, she looks icy and says, “Not that I would have ever wanted.”

Was there someone then? Given that she left home at the age of her own son today, I feel the curiosity is justified (and she does have a half brother, Kai, not fathered by Freud). Actually, I had been hoping for a fairy-tale ending; that Boyt would say, “Yes! Mum found a sweet, boring accountant who loved her dearly and never let her down.” Instead, she says: “God, you don’t give up, do you?”

If Rose Boyt’s cool thoughtfulness is a little unsettling when she is at ease, it tips over to being scary when she’s rattled. But the moment passes like a dark cloud clearing.

She did her A levels at City and East London College and decided, after a period doing a foundation art course at Central Saint Martins, to drop out and read English literature instead. It was around this time, when she was 19, there was much comment over a picture that Freud painted, titled Rose, in which she was naked with her legs open. There were many other paintings, too. In the sittings she’d often talk about literature with her father and he would recite poetry to her. But she says, “I wasn’t endlessly painted. I was trying to do my own things and I didn’t want to be in that [muse] relationship, so there were times in my life when I wasn’t being painted. And that was good, that I could say, ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ or ‘When I’m a bit older,’ or ‘When I’m not so busy.’ And that was good for my relationship with my father; that I would still have the closeness of our relationship but that it didn’t have to be that relationship. That was quite brave of me, looking back, but it didn’t feel like that at the time. It just felt that this was an absolute necessity for me, because I wanted to be my own person.”

After reading English at UCL (AS Byatt, who taught her, told her when she left: “Of course you are going to be a writer”) came the edgy life of deejaying and running clubs in King’s Cross, working on the door of Café de Paris and carrying around adidas bags crammed with banknotes. At times, she had her own bouncer. But it also involved looking after the babies of her single mother friends while they were working their shift at the clubs.

“I had a lot of mouths to feed,” she says, an echo of the phrase she uses about her inheritance. “I wasn’t interested in money. Just paying my rent and surviving.”

Boyt’s external toughness hides a deep maternal instinct to look after people – “She always wants to make sure everyone’s OK,” a friend of hers told me – which started when she was seven years old, on the ship, when she’d look after the infant Kai. During the trip, he once fell overboard. “I didn’t feel safe as a child,” she says. Later, she unexpectedly begins to cry when she remembers babysitting her friend’s child when she was at UCL, and the baby almost dying. She sucked the vomit from its nostrils. Her recall and distress as we sit in her sitting room are as if it happened last week, not more than 30 years ago. She feels the importance of protecting children viscerally, a theme that emerges strongly in the novel.

Boyt finally found the love of her life when she met Pearce, who had lost his wife to cancer. He had an eight-year-old son, Alex, whom she took on as her own. (He is now 30 and married.) She waited two years before marrying Pearce. “I didn’t want to jump into anything too quickly. I wanted to make sure I knew how to be a good stepmum … I don’t come from a long line of people who are good at making long-lasting commitments to relationships.

“But I really wanted to get married and have children. From my experience I didn’t feel that men were necessarily to be trusted on any level.” She laughs.

Because of your father? “Yes. Not that I didn’t trust him myself, but that obviously it seems that people look for somebody like their father to replicate those familiar feelings … if they have them. Or they look for someone the complete and utter opposite of their father. And I suppose as I was growing up I had the time while I was writing to work out what I did and didn’t want, and I got to the stage when I realised I wanted someone who was strong and stable and sensible and faithful … Those seemed to me to be the ideal qualities.

“Before I got married, or leading up to it, my husband gave me a Peter Jones account card and I just thought, ‘Finally, I’m bourgeois. Hurray!’ I loved it. One of my friends said on our wedding night, ‘You do realise you will never be able to have sex with anybody apart from Mark ever again?’ and I said, ‘Thank God for that.’ I just wanted to be a mum.”

The experience of motherhood was transforming and intense, much as it has been for her other novelist sisters – Susie and Esther – who also relished normality after chaotic, rootless childhoods. Boyt placed her children at the centre of her life. “I wanted my children to feel 100 per cent safe. I didn’t feel safe as a child, and I wanted that for them, and they do. I feel I have the blessings and the riches of the universe poured on my head, that I have two children who feel safe and can handle themselves. I had an absolute sense of focus; that ‘I am going to do this. Properly! Properly!’ I am going to give it my all.”

When the children were tiny, she and Pearce pushed two double beds together so that the whole family could sleep with one another. “I remember my friend’s nanny arrived and said, ‘Rose, your parenting is outlandish!’ I had no idea what she meant.”

It has been three years since Rose Boyt lost her father. She cared for him a lot as he became ill. He only stopped painting at the very end. Her mother is also battling cancer and all five Boyt children are doing the same for her.

Boyt’s bereavement is still close to the surface, and her children were devastated to lose their grandfather. “It doesn’t matter if your father is famous or not. It is exactly the same, except when you get home it is on News at 10. It’s as strange as that. You lose your beloved dad. It’s no different. Everybody makes the assumption that it’s a whole different thing because it’s public, and that if your dad is a sort of national treasure/national devil … You still have the same family. You come home; your children are there; their grandfather is dead; you have the funeral; you’ve got the body; you put it in a box; you bury it. It’s the same thing. It’s just as bad, just as painful.”

It’s the dilemma of being a Freud in a nutshell: a heritage that makes the world interested in you from the start – not to be sniffed at if you are a writer, artist or anybody creative – but carrying with it the risk that that is all the world is interested in, no matter how hard you try to be your own person, no matter how hard you try to be “normal”.

Oh, how I wish we could just sit down and have a nice cup of tea and a natter about where she got her skirt and bond over the joys of motherhood. Being a Freud – however much money and sense of belonging it brings – is also something of a burden too. The “too different from me” reaction of the dinner lady when she eventually found out Rose Pearce was actually a Freud sums it up in a nutshell.

After three hours, Rose Boyt realises that neither of us has eaten or drunk anything. She is mortified. “I’m known for my hospitality,” she says. She is eager to look after me. Lunch? A cup of tea? But I do my own kind thing: I give Rose Boyt a break and I leave. I think I’ve got to know her enough to understand that she’ll be breathing a sigh of relief.

BOOK EXTRACT
Rose Boyt’s Hows Your Father

My mum got three months because some c*** left a pound weight of drugs on top of her kitchen cabinet. Everyone knew the drugs was nothing to do with her otherwise they would of thrown away the key but the judge reckoned she needed to be taught a little lesson. In other words that will learn you, you silly old cow.

– Take her down, he said, flap flapping his white hands like he was shooing her away.

She bowed her head in silence, waiting for someone to come for her. A court official touched her gently on the arm. The judge was shuffling his papers without even looking up as my mother was led towards the cells.

I couldn’t see her face but from where they stuck me up in the public gallery I could see scalp through the sparse hair on top of her head. Her thin shoulders shook inside the brown coat she borrowed off of our Linda for her big day. The coat was too big and she was shaking with the effort not to show herself up in the court. She raised a hand to pat the hair at the back of her head. The ends of her fingers was stained orange brown and you could see a red tide-mark round the back of her neck where she put a rinse through her hair the night before her court case, to cover the grey.

Where was the c*** what hid the drugs when the old woman needed help? Nowhere. I thought my brother Alan might pop up at the back of the court like in church when the bride and groom are just about to tie the knot and the vicar goes like just impediment or whatever and someone at the back shouts IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN ME.

Afterwards I popped in the Macbeth to pick up my fags from the fag man. My sister Linda was playing darts with Shirley Irons and Julie and Julie’s mum and who do you think was celebrating at the bar only our Alan with Alan’s Sandra and that ex-copper what used to go with Sandra’s sister and a couple of Alan’s mates and his mate’s cousin what was friendly with one of them from the social club over Green Lanes where they get the stuff off of lorries bringing boxes of tomatoes and coriander and those long hot green pickle peppers they put in kebabs.

Sandra was smiling up at Alan like he was god. Alan popped the cork on a bottle of fizzy wine and sprayed foam over Sandra. Sandra screamed and wiped her eyes.

Alan’s mates was back-slapping and hugging all over the shop and Alan started to sway with his arms in the air like we are the champions and the new landlord what’s his name Ronnie something put in by the brewery after Mick and Maggie flitted back to Ireland wasn’t he smiling and smiling behind the bar with his arms folded across his chest where he was waiting for it all to go off.

The fag man dipped in his bag for my change. Alan waved the empty wine bottle at Ronnie and was like same again my good man and make sure it’s very and then he saw me.

– What you celebrating, Alan? I went.

– Maureeeen! he goes, opening his arms wide. – Another glass for our Maureen.

I put my fags in my bag. I slung my bag over my shoulder.

– I don’t wanna celebrate with you, I said.

Alan moved towards me across the pub. He punched me in the upper arm. I rubbed my arm. He laughed.

– Have a drink, he shouted. – Relax. She’ll only do six weeks.

– Only six weeks? Is that all? Oh that’s all right then, I said.

– Don’t be like that, Reen, he said. – Do her good to put her feet up I reckon. You can keep an eye on the old man for her. Reckon I done her a favour. The poor cow could use a break.

– I knew it was your gear, I said.

– You only just worked that out?

His mates was laughing. He dug me in the arm again.

– Gotta laugh, he said.

I was like ha ha and poked him back, not as hard as all that but hard enough.

– That f***ing hurt, he said.

– Good.

– Don’t start, Reen, said Linda.

I looked at Linda.

– It’s your f***ing funeral, she went.

I turned back to my brother.

– C***, I said.

– You what? he said.

– I said YOU C***, I roared.

His mates stopped laughing. I thought he was going to nut me but he was like think about it Maureen, better for us all she spends a few weeks in Holloway than I do the best part of a ten stretch for possession with intent. Think all the mouths I got to feed. Think how she’d worry. The worry’d be a sentence for her in itself. She’d make herself ill over it. You know what she’s like Maureen. She’s better off inside.

– Better off? I said. – In Holloway? You sure?

– Whatever, he went, turning away from me.

I got my hands round his throat. His skin smelt bad.

– F*** sake, Maureen, said Linda.

I let go and tried to shake his smell off of my hands. I tried to swallow my tears squeezing out before I mean I f***ing hate myself sometimes I always let myself down like crying when I want to kill somebody I stop myself but I can’t stop myself crying.

– Maureen? he said, in a different voice.

I looked up at him. I wiped my hands on my trousers. I thought he was going to say sorry but I was wrong wasn’t I? I looked up and he nutted me. I leant against the bar and Linda fetched some bog roll and helped me to clean up the mess. The landlord was whistling, polishing glasses.

Alan sipped his drink and lit up and blew smoke-rings at me.

– Nice one, Alan, I said, dabbing at myself.

– You want some more? he said.

– Alan, said Sandra, pulling at him.

– F*** off, you. You want some more, Maureen?

– No.

– Well then don’t start.

I swallowed blood and tears. Alan’s Sandra tried to give me a sovereign pendant but I told her to sod off. I bowed my head and pressed the sides of my nose between my index and middle fingers to straighten it. The bone crunched, then clicked. My fingers smelt of Alan, of his skin problem and the skin cream like bad eggs he dabbed on to hide it and heal it. The front of my white top was splattered. I went in the bog to have a wash. When I lifted my head up to check myself in the mirror our Linda was standing behind me. She started to sing.

– Two lovely black eyes, ooh what a surprise…

© Rose Boyt 2014. Extracted from Hows Your Father by Rose Boyt, which is out now (Short Books). It is available from the Times bookshop for £11.69 (RRP £12.99), free p&p, on 0845 2712134; timesbooks.co.uk