Must You Go?

by Antonia Fraser

  1979

  New Year resolutions: 1) Be calm, have a calm centre, turn towards the calm centre and inspect it, contemplate my soul, if any. 2) Take joy in what Wordsworth called ‘the meanest flower that blows’; especially the mean flowers of Campden Hill Square (whose refurbished garden was once more my delight).

  Despite these good resolutions, the spring of 1979 was not particularly calm. The strike situation at the National Theatre rumbled on, and bedevilled a production once again; this time Simon Gray’s Close of Play which Harold directed. ‘Union selfishness and violent behaviour at the National’ was what convinced Harold to vote Tory in May. I too voted Tory but that was quite unashamedly in order to see a woman walk into No. 10. Neither of us knew much about Mrs Thatcher’s politics: on a trip to the Booksellers’ Conference in Guernsey, I took the trouble to break away and watch the new Prime Minister making this historic entry. Mrs Thatcher, a small, broad, light blue figure, paused and read aloud from St Francis. A journalist got bored and indicated she should now stop. Mrs T. put up her hand and stayed him. Implacably she read on. So they were warned.

  Subsequently Harold, by his own account, regretted his vote. I didn’t: it was just this kind of defiance of what had hitherto been the masculine establishment which appealed to me (although I never voted for her again). My mother hated Mrs Thatcher and told me she hit my father – an unprecedented event – when he said something nice about her reading of St Francis. Mummy, gloomily: ‘Of course taxation will change and we’ll all be much better off.’ Me, to tease: ‘But, Mummy, won’t you give it all to charity?’ Mummy: ‘Yes, a charity called the Bernhurst carpet.’

  Although the children flourished, one of my cats – Rocky the rover – disappeared at the age of eighteen months. I thought of what it must be like for the parents of ‘disappeared’ children, as I listened for the sound of the cat-flap which did not come, and glimpsed the wrong cat at street corners. (His brother Rowley, after King Charles II’s popular nickname, clung close to me and lived for another sixteen years.)

  4 April

  Excitement! Harold will buy the little house in Aubrey Road! I wanted to buy it myself in September in Monopoly fashion, since it abutted my garden, but my bank politely suggested that since I could not afford the house I was in, it was not on. Harold desperately needs something for his books. Also as he says about Campden Hill Square, which was becoming a cheerful maelstrom of activity: ‘Although I adore all your children and their numerous friends …’ Me: ‘I know. They’re not exactly shrinking, are they?’ Harold talks about the ‘reclusive’ side of his nature. I say that my idea of happiness is to be alone in a room in a house full of people.

  So Harold’s wonderful Super-Study, as it was called (actually his study and his secretary’s office) was born, joined to the big house by the garden, with a new door. Harold walked to work, as he put it. Before he could change his mind, I hastily moved into his previous study and for the first time in my life did not work in a little hole off my bedroom.

  9 April

  Harold has signed the deed of separation with Vivien.

  14 May

  Evening with Beckett and Pinter. Beckett is exhausted from directing Billie Whitelaw in Happy Days at the Royal Court. ‘We are discovering a woman, whereas I believe Peggy Ashcroft arrived with a preconception.’ (But he also heard she was very good.) Harold is moved to enact most of Close of Play for him, as Beckett seems never to go to the theatre and was quite alarmed at the notion that he should actually visit this. His eyes shine at Harold’s depiction. Barbara Bray behaves quite well until the end when she starts declaiming that everything in art is political: she is rehearsing for doing The Critics on radio and I suspect that Close of Play will not fare well. Harold, vehemently: ‘Nothing I have written, Barbara, nothing ever, is political.’ Sam: ‘This very absence of politics is in itself a political statement.’ But Barbara couldn’t leave it at that. She went on and on. Finally, Beckett, lighting one of his little black cheroots: ‘Oh, why do you talk so much … ?’ After that, we all got on better. Barbara still talked but she stopped lecturing Harold on his own work.

  3 June

  Went on Read All About It, now chaired by Ronnie Harwood. We interviewed Vidia Naipaul in connection with India – A Wounded Civilization. I asked him about writing fiction and non-fiction. ‘I know it’s a corny question,’ I said, ‘but you are famously tolerant.’ Afterwards one of the people on the programme said she was glad to hear this because she had thought him ‘a wee bit intolerant’ (!) Vidia reveals that he writes fiction and non-fiction quite differently – typewriter v. hand-writing. I love hearing details of writers’ craft, as cannibals eat the brains of clever men to get cleverer.

  6 June

  Visit to Venice. We have to visit Torcello because of the mention of Robert’s visit in Betrayal. We also do a spirited rendering of the play itself, the two of us. I am a particularly fine Jerry, the lover, I feel, and Harold a feisty Emma as well as the husband Robert. The latter is actually his favourite part in the play – he says it’s the best part. (He subsequently acted it on radio.)

  We have a long conversation about occupation beginning with what would have happened if England had been occupied by the Germans. Harold: ‘I would have taken to the Welsh Hills and joined the resistance.’ Me: ‘No, you would have been killed before you got there, as a prominent Jewish intellectual, but would have taken one or two Germans with you.’ We then turn to the agonizing subject of the ‘occupation’ by Israel of Arab lands v. the Jewish right to a national home. I remind him of the disquiet of our friends in Israel that Jews should in any way be an occupying power. In this endless discussion, we tend to reverse positions according to what the other person says, I notice.

  More happily, Harold works hard on the screenplay of The French Lieutenant’s Woman. A sinister experience crossing back to the Cipriani in the hotel motorboat with other revellers, staid but elegant couples, mainly American. Suddenly Harold gives a shout. The lights of the island have all vanished. I look up and see a small strongboat with lights on the mast fore and aft which has just passed us. But right on top of us, totally black and enormous, is a vast menacing ocean liner which is in fact being towed out to sea by the little boat. Like a monster, rearing up out of the deep, quite silently, it has blocked out all the light.

  At lunch on Torcello, the gatti prowl about, one all too like poor vanished Rocky, the rest like Rowley, but their eyes are fierce and pessimistic as they prowl among the tables, not like the confident, more innocent eyes of English cats. I buy a tablecloth from the traders outside, in imitation of Emma in Betrayal. I get a call from London saying that income tax is being cut drastically. All round us, wealthy English guests are rejoicing and of course it’s wonderful for us, most welcome at just this juncture, to put it mildly. But, I think: who gets poorer? As usual with my Diary cogitations, there is no answer.

  3 July

  We stayed with Clarissa Avon at Alfrediston. This is a perfect country house arranged with all the harmony I remember. I passionately appreciate Clarissa’s sense of order, huge pots of regale lilies, a jardinière of pink and white geraniums; two pots of fuchsia – Ballerina? Harold says in awe of his own dressing room: ‘My old black jersey has been neatly folded.’ David and Rachel Cecil come to dinner, bringing Iris Murdoch and John Bayley. David rings up to say they won’t be changing, ‘since the Bayleys don’t seem to have brought any luggage’. Later, when they’ve gone, Clarissa asks: ‘How can you bear to hear about it, Harold’s old girlfriends, Isobel, Dilys and the rest?’ (Harold had been talking about his past). Me: ‘It’s the memorable path which led to wonderful me!’ Clarissa comments that she hates competition (she is so beautiful, so well-read, that I don’t think she can face much of it). ‘The only sport I like is swimming, which is not competitive.’ Cecil Beaton came to lunch, every conceivable inch of him immaculate in white tussore. He is an advertisement for the stroke from which he has recovered, full of chat and malice.


  14 July

  John Fowles has written Harold a charming letter approving the screenplay: ‘I had doubts about the interweaving of past and present (the present was all invented by Harold, at Karel Reisz’s suggestion) but found myself really looking forward to your bits, the bits typed in red.’

  52 Campden Hill Square – that Haven – was becoming more and more of a tip, with the influx of quantities of teenage children and their friends who never got up and if they did get up, never washed up. Harold, an only child, a fastidious only child, was in despair with which I totally sympathized.

  23 July

  The Reign of Terror has started. Decide to wake both Benjie and Damian, my elder sons. ‘You can’t talk to him. He’s still asleep,’ says an unwise voice from upstairs. ‘GET HIM UP! IT’S HIS MOTHER SPEAKING!’ ‘Why?’ said the unwise voice still more unwisely. ‘BECAUSE I SAY SO.’ Stormed about the house ranting and shrieking, having read a learned medical article in the Guardian that morning saying that people who suppress their anger fall dangerously ill. An hour later I shout: ‘Damian!’ ‘Jawohl, Stalin,’ he replies. ‘It’s the Cheka come to get us,’ wail the unhappy teenagers. Soon the house is clean and tidy. Victory.

  27 August

  My forty-seventh birthday. Day haunted by Mountbatten murders. Later I continue to be haunted by the subject, not the death of the grand old boy, dying a hero’s death full of years and honours, to merit a Ceremonial Funeral, but those children, those bright young faces on TV including an Irish boat-boy.

  8 September

  Frances Pinter is reading Charles II with evident enjoyment. She has also written one of the most charming letters I have ever received in my life, saying in effect, how happy I have made Harold. It’s odd. Laura Lady Lovat didn’t want me to marry Hugh, wearing black at our wedding which shocked my mother (I still have the black hat labelled ‘the hat I wore at poor Hugh’s wedding’ which I found after her death), yet I was young, Catholic and willing. My crime was that I had no money, as she made clear from time to time. Harold’s parents might justifiably shrink from the Catholic, divorced mother of six, yet they are displaying great warmth now they have got over the shock.

  18 September

  We revisit the Hotel Lancaster in Paris for the French production of No Man’s Land. I recall to Harold his remark four years ago that he might find it difficult to live with children. Me: ‘You were quite right. Who can?’ (It has become one of our jokes.) Harold to me, last thing: ‘You may not agree but I am actually very calm these days.’ In the meantime I have floated the idea of writing a study of women in the seventeenth century: both George Weidenfeld and Bob Gottlieb seem keen.

  This became The Weaker Vessel: enormously successful in the US in 1984, largely due to the energetic promotion of Bob Gottlieb who made it into a bestseller; in the UK in contrast it was perhaps ahead of its time as women’s history – America much more advanced in that respect – although it did win a Wolfson History Award, to my eternal joy. It remains the book of which I am proudest, because it was so difficult to write: ‘Fifty-one per cent of the population for a hundred years, no narrative structure, no nice neat birth, life and death,’ as I groaned to Harold on the first day I sat down to write.

  29 September

  Poets at the Purcell Room for a TV programme directed by Harold. (It never came to anything but a good time was had by all, since the poets included those famous bon viveurs George Barker and W.S. Graham.) The most touching moment came when Judy Gascoyne, wife of David Gascoyne, got up and recited her life story as if it was a poem. Which it was really, and I laid it out as such in my Diary.

  I was married to a vet

  For thirty years

  He left me for another woman

  But it’s essential, isn’t it?

  To keep cheerful

  Anyway, that is what I did

  I went to the asylum

  I read to the insane

  For them I read poetry

  My favourite poetry

  So one day in an asylum

  I said: ‘This is a poem

  A poem by David Gascoyne’

  And one of the inmates

  The sad and desperate inmates

  Said: ‘I am David Gascoyne’

  8 October

  Flew to Dublin for the production of Close of Play which has been a bone of contention with the actors of the National Theatre (an official British institution), because of the security risk following the Mountbatten death and surrounding carnage. Despite heroic work by the Pope recently touring round Phoenix Park in his popemobile, urging ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ One of the actors discovered that there was no legal necessity to tour in a foreign country – Ireland – as not contracted to do so. Some of the stauncher actors, including Michael Gambon, metaphorically shrugged their shoulders like troops going over the top and said: ‘Oh well, count me in, I suppose.’ Other parts had to be re-recruited. We stayed at the brand-new Bloom’s Hotel, every modern luxury, the smart European Ireland that is evolving, Anna Livia Plurabelle Restaurant, Boylan’s Brasserie, etc. Harold: ‘What would Joyce have thought of all this? Blind and poor.’ Me, reminding him: ‘But when I cried on Bloomsday, finishing Ellmann’s life, you said, “He knew he was a great artist and nothing else matters.” ’

  In fact security at the Olympia Theatre is negligible, and no one is searched, although my brother Thomas is carrying an enormous, obviously weighty bag. In Close of Play Dubliners love the readily identifiable character of Benedict – an alcoholic but a witty one, played by the superb, urbane John Standing.

  10 October

  Dublin. Harold’s forty-ninth birthday. I brought over an edition of East Coker specially designed by Julian Rothenstein. Harold loved it.

  15 November

  In New York for rehearsals of Betrayal, once again directed by Peter Hall, this time with Blythe Danner, Roy Scheider and Raul Julia, who tells me he has been over to London and patrolled Westminster Abbey to acquire the correct English accent. Don’t dare tell him that he is more likely to have acquired an Australian or even a Japanese accent in the Abbey … Harold tells me afterwards that at dinner with Peter Hall he looked across to me and thought: ‘You have given me a sense of the present, the happiness of the present. I’ve never had that before.’

  I give an interview focused on the re-named Royal Charles to the Washington Post. Man, hopefully, at the end: ‘Just one more question, what is Harold Pinter like about the house, all those pauses and enigmatic statements, I’ve always wondered.’ Me, briskly: ‘Keep wondering.’

  17 November

  Harold outraged about the Anthony Blunt affair. (Blunt, despite his background as a spy for Russia, had been deliberately left in position as Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures.) I think he has the sense of a cover-up by the Establishment, which is the more acute because he has never remotely belonged to it – or wished to. I am fascinated by other things such as how did the poor Queen conduct her conversations with Blunt?

  1 December

  Back in London. Day of winter gardening (planting bulbs, my favourite activity). Diana Phipps has created a fantastic world for Harold in his new Super-Study out of the really poor material of the original house. I love the way there is now a great deal of purposeful movement between the two houses, all of it through my garden.

  2 December

  Society of West End Theatre Managers’ Awards (later the Oliviers). Had to arrive by 6 p.m. Interminable. Harold mellow however and got mellower as the drink flowed down the hours. There was really nothing else to do until 1 a.m. when ‘Carriages’ were to be called. He was stunned when Sir Ralph Richardson went on to the platform, waved the envelope and said, sonorously: ‘A prize for an old friend of mine!’ It was for Betrayal as Best New Play. Harold wove his way with difficulty to the platform and said: ‘I’m very surprised, but not as surprised, I’m sure, as Michael Billington.’ (Evidently not forgiven for his stinking review of Betrayal.) Nobody could understand what he meant. Bill
ington looked completely bewildered. ‘Why me? What did I do?’ Harold meanwhile, minus specs and beaming is making another speech to anybody who will listen. ‘I love women. I’m resolutely heterosexual. Listen, a woman’s waist is the most beautiful thing in the world.’ He puts his arm round the nearest waist which happens by pure coincidence to be that of a woman, and by a further happy coincidence, mine.

  Chapter Eight

  IT IS HERE

  1980

  1 January

  I know the eighties are going to be good in so many ways. The seventies were violent, as the newspapers were saying; it spread everywhere. I decide to ‘know thyself’ as the Bible tells us to do. I know that I am hard-working, affectionate and kind. I also know that I am lazy, nagging and neurotic. God – if She exists – knows how that works out.

  5 January

  First night of Betrayal in New York. Bar full of rich Philistines. It was thus amusing when I heard one say to the other in the interval: ‘Yeah, I like it, but it won’t have broad appeal. You see, we’re a very special audience.’ One turns to me and says kindly: ‘This will interest you. We’re going to play squash.’ (A subject Robert and Jerry discuss aggressively in the play.)

  6 January: Twelfth Night

  And the three kings did come bearing gifts – or two of them. There was a rumour via somebody’s children’s nanny (New York!) that Mrs Kerr, wife of the great Walter Kerr of the New York Times, on whose word we depend for the survival of Betrayal, rather thought that Walter … And it was true. Harold, putting down the paper. ‘Well, I can only call this a rave.’ I have never heard him use such language before. The telephone rings off the hook and so we shall go back to England in a haze and a blaze of glory. Before we went home, Harold proposed to Sam Spiegel that he should make a film of Betrayal.