Night at the Freud Museum

A night at the Freud Museum! The idea appeals. I always think twelve hours the perfect length for any holiday. Philip Larkin at his most likable said, “I wouldn’t mind seeing China if I could come back the same day,” and I agree. Packing my case, though, my intent feels heavy. There isn’t the sense of a spree. I think of the bags I took with me when I went to the hospital to have my daughters: bags of hope, bags of fear. I am braced after a month when, deliberately, there hasn’t been a second to think about a thing. I sense the facts vying for position, sour and exacting, after stretches of neglect. Scrutiny beckons, mercilessly. Such a stagey approach to feeling can’t be good, but my mood is odd. I’ve been asking others how I seem, looking in the mirror to try to gauge my state of mind. My dreams have been especially sarcastic.

The museum is situated in the house where Sigmund Freud lived for the last year of his life, with his wife, Martha, and daughter Anna, and their maid Paula Fichtl, after the Nazis drove them out of Vienna on June 4, 1938. The house at 20 Maresfield Gardens is a wide, three-story, red-brick villa. It sits in a prosperous and leafy broad North London thoroughfare, its size and bearing in 2023 rendering it, and the neighboring dwellings, a mini-embassy, a mansionette. It’s the kind of address at which fifteen years ago a drawing room owned by internationally acclaimed musicians might boast two grand pianos, primed for duets. It would be too expensive for them now. The road still throbs with high IQs, but it isn’t glamorous, or if it is, it possesses a drab sort of glamour, tweedy and sedate, like Celia Johnson’s character in Brief Encounter, possibly, with an injection of new tech cash.

I am to spend a few hours alone in Freud’s study when the museum is closed and then sleep in Anna Freud’s bedroom. I’ve brought sheets and blankets and a pillow. I have use of Anna Freud’s bathroom and the kitchen next