Young love for Lucian Freud

Last year, the journalist Emily Bearn began behaving very strangely indeed. Colleagues at the Sunday Telegraph, where she works, were baffled. "She started going very, very weird," recalls one, who prefers not to be named. "She said she couldn't talk about it, but she simply couldn't be in the office any more." The obvious explanation seemed to be an office romance gone sour. Her employers gave the ravenhaired 27-year-old a new weekly column. And Bearn suddenly found herself with time on her hands, time to spend with her new lover, the artist Lucian Freud - at 79, a man old enough to be her grandfather.

"You arrive at the studio and get plied with champagne," one of Freud's female sitters has commented about visits to the artist's Holland Park eyrie. "He's a great cook and he usually prepares something lovely to eat in the break, like lobster or game." Into this heady atmosphere of popping corks and well-hung pheasant stepped Bearn at some point last year, after she and Freud had been introduced by mutual friends. The result of these sittings, a near-lifesize portrait, will shortly be seen as part of Tate Britain's Freud exhibition, which opens on 20 June.

Yet Bearn is no stranger to relationships that are not so much May-September as January-December; a 52-year age gap was never likely to trouble her. Before shacking up with Freud, she had excited more column inches than she might have wished as a result of her two-year relationship with another oldie, the explorer and Colditz survivor Michael Alexander, a relatively youthful 74 at the time. And, if rumours are to be believed, Bearn rebounded from this liaison into the arms of an ageing Fleet Street columnist who is, by chance, an acquaintance of Freud's. Like Sarah Alexander with Gerald Harper, Sarah Forbes with John Standing, and Heather Mills with Sir Paul McCartney, Bearn's predilections gave hope to bus-pass lotharios everywhere.

"She's ageless and otherworldly," says someone who used to work with Bearn. At that time, she was still living with Alexander, having left Cambridge early because of "ill-health" and moved into his Belgravia flat. "She once went to Ibiza to do a story and sat on the beach in the blazing sun wearing a tweed skirt and a petticoat. And then she marched up to a drug dealer and said, 'Are you a drug dealer?' in her plummy public school voice."

When news of her affair with Freud first broke, nobody was better for a quote than Bearn's mother, a person who maintained the tradition of voluble loose cannons never quite saying the right thing. "Emily is a terribly fragile and vulnerable young woman," said Anne Westwood, who is divorced from Bearn's doctor father, but still lives next door to him in Chelsea.

An equally loaded comment came from Alexander, who expressed concern that his former lover had "jumped from the frying pan into the fire".

Dr Bearn himself, who was born a year after Freud, seems vague to the point of forgetfulness. "I know the situation so incompletely," he says, fighting to be heard over the lunch he is eating and the World Cup game that is on the television in the background. "I think if I brought it up with Emma I would just get a rude answer. She never talks about it."

He's met his daughter's lover just once, for half an hour, but says that he hopes to be invited to the Tate opening and would be happy to meet Freud again. "I believe he's a pretty tough person. But certainly, if I were to be invited to have a meal with him, I would say yes."

With the names of two ex-wives and an unquantifiable number of mistresses notched on his easel, the twinkly-eyed and whippet-thin Lucian Freud is no slouch when it comes to seduction. Admitting to seven children, he is reported to have sired anything up to 30 more. His portraits can take as long as six months to produce: a long time for a snake-hipped young woman to be lounging around suggestively in the buff, full to the gills with bubbly and woodcock. Small wonder, then, that Bearn should find Freud irresistible (and he her) - though others find her choice less understandable.

"She's so lovely and pretty," says a former colleague a touch enviously, "and men just make a beeline for her." Another former workmate is fainter with her praise: "She appeals to the kind of men who go home after a long, liquid lunch at the Garrick and order something from the Erotic Print Society." Asked if she can recall seeing Bearn with a man her own age, the colleague is emphatic. "Oh no," she says, as if the mere idea were too absurd for words. "Never."

Alexander once likened her to Flora, muse to the Victorian artist JW Waterhouse - an appropriately idealised analogy, and one steeped in the myth of the femme fatale. Yet, for someone so apparently fragile, Bearn strikes many acquaintances as anything but. "She's polite and thoroughly genuine," insists one."Horrifically bright," is another's description of a woman who got straight As when she took her A-levels at Westminster, and stirred things up at the school's debating society, where she is remembered for her caustic tongue. She was apparently bored to tears at Cambridge, finding her studies - which she described dismissively as "researching agricultural records" - and the male undergrads far from stimulating. Bored enough to run off with Alexander, who hinted at Bearn's complicated personality when he described her as "a bit frail, a bit fragile, someone who needed to be protected from the world". Others have described her as highly strung and in need of a father figure. "I have heard this over the years," says another colleague. "And people always talk in hushed voices when her name is mentioned, as if she were a very delicate little flower. I think she's just deeply eccentric and rather shy."

Shyness can, of course, be very attention-seeking, and this, combined with Bearn's dress-down wardrobe of long skirts and other exclusion-zone apparel, only increases her appeal in the eyes of those with active imaginations. She's capable of disingenuousness, as when she mocked the Press for wanting revelations about a "teenage gerontophile" and a "veteran bonker" at the time of her relationship with Alexander. Or, more recently, when she mused on the state of her bank balance and the shopping sprees that had caused this: one assumes the Le Creuset pans she confessed to splashing out on were for the kitchen of the £500,000 terraced house in west London that Freud is alleged to have bought her, allowing her to move out of her Shepherd's Bush flat.

And the fragility? It is tempting to conclude that, like a volcanic temper or a thermonuclear device, the mere threat of it is enough to keep everyone on their toes. Careful with Emily today, you imagine friends saying, she's looking a bit fragile. And for God's sake don't breathe a word about her moving in with a near-octogenarian painter with a fruity reputation in the trouser department. You'll never hear the end of it.