This summer, while I take a bit of a long-overdue break, I’m sharing pieces from the savour archive paywall free. In a couple of days I’ll return to Charleston House in the Sussex Downs for The Festival of the Garden, something I’ve had the privilege of speaking at for the past few years. I wrote this about a few minutes snatched during a busy day there last year. Even then, among wild sleep deprivation and a tidal wave of other things, I managed to find a moment of pause in the library. I’m looking forward to going back.

The painting hangs in the library, against a black wall with red edges, in the corner next to the bookshelves. It means you don’t spot it when you first walk in; perhaps you’re taken by the bookshelves, or the view from the windows into the trees outside. Instead, you have to turn around. I’d forgotten it was there. Seeing it was like seeing an old friend, from a different city, on the street while you’re out running some errand.

Artist Duncan Grant painted three portraits of Vanessa Bell - also an artist, quite an important one in fact - in the same red dress, as 1915 shuffled into 1916. As they shuffled from friends into lovers, from London to Charleston, from two lives apart to one lived together. It’s a good dress, the kind of thing that would always win compliments. Daringly spaghetti-strapped, louche around the neck, Empire line beneath it and then, whoosh, down to the floor. I imagine the paisley-printed fabric to be soft and light, for it to have the heft of a lining. I wonder if she was cold when she wore it. I wonder if she made it; she writes in her letters to him about making her dresses.

The painting - ‘Portrait of Vanessa Bell’ - hasn’t always hung in the library, which was Bell’s bedroom until her husband Clive moved into Charleston House, nestled in the Sussex Downs, before the Second World War. It became part of Charleston’s collection in 2020. But I’ve been taken with it, and its sister paintings, for 20 years. First clocked one of them in the National Portrait Gallery as a teenager and became quite obsessed. I liked Grant’s use of colour - the stripes of green to mark a cheekbone, or a groove beneath an eye - and the lazy decadence of them. There was a bohemianism to them that was wildly alluring. I turned the paintings into talismans and made my own in their image. I asked my friends dress up - 1950s ballgowns in stripes of pink and green, corsets shiny like beetle-backs - and sat them in floral chairs. Grant made his paintings large, and on table-tops and the backs of doors. I chose big canvases and smothered them in fine layers of cheap oil paint.

And so there it was, waiting. We were alone in the library - M had C in his arms, was looking through the spines of the books. I took in the thick jade line that runs beneath Bell’s raised arm, the necklace of the same colour resting against her clavicle, the flashes of pink and yellow on her chest and arms. She looks faintly weary in these portraits, as if she has been sitting too long. There is so much desire in these images but its not in her face. But was a hasty look, in all honesty. Someone called to the baby from the corridor and suddenly there was Jamaica Kincaid, and so we were having a nervous (on my part) little meeting in a tight hallway and cooing over C. I had been yanked from one part of my life - my adolescence, a time when I painted every day - to another - the right now, when sleep is so scarce it feels like the world is wrapped in cling film. How strange this all was. The wind was blowing at 40 miles per hour outside and it felt like I was caught up in it, thrown between two places with everything moving too quickly.

When I first fell for that painting I was waiting for life to happen to me. I was living in my parents’ house, in a village, thinking about which city I would move to next - the first city I’d ever lived in. Now I am an adult fortunate to be invited to sit in the kitchen at Charleston during festivals and see my friends walk through the door, hug them tightly while eating Tunnocks teacakes. To sit on a stage built in a barn there and talk about the books I’ve written. I’m not sure I could have imagined this life, but I know that it probably would have sounded quite good to the teenager who made her friends pose as bohemians.

Back then the days felt long; they were things to be ticked off as university loomed. Now my days are apportioned into little chunks when the baby is asleep and the baby is awake. When I have time to write (7am, when he is with his father. Noon until 2pm, when he is asleep) but only, really, if I ignore the mess in the kitchen and the laundry and remove the email app from my phone. I sit and I type and the baby is asleep on a little screen next to me. Vanessa Bell was my age in those portraits. She had two little boys. She had her art, and a house to transform, and a husband, and a lover. Hers was a world away from mine.

I threw most of the paintings away in the end. My parents left the house they raised us in and we were encouraged to clear out what we didn’t need. I remember driving to the tip with my dad and throwing my sketchbooks into the huge metal trough signposted for paper. In went the canvases. I knew I should have had feelings about it, but I didn’t. Perhaps there was something very faint, like a soft breeze, that felt a little like freedom.

The others I gave away, mostly to the mothers of the girls I had painted, and forgot about them. But one, the one most inspired by that portrait of Bell, was rescued from the house by the friend who sat for it. A few weeks ago, I went to her house for the first time and was surprised to see it hanging in the living room. Here was a funhouse mirror, a guttural tug to the past. We were just playing dress up. Perhaps Bell was doing the same.

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