Must You Go?: My Life With Harold Pinter

by Antonia Fraser

  Ten years later I still think this is the best verdict on Celebration, which turned out to be Harold’s last play. It includes the shiver brought about by the Waiter’s last speech after all this raucous materialistic jollification: ‘My grandfather introduced me to the mystery of life and I’m still in the middle of it. I can’t find the door to get out. My grandfather got out of it. He got right out of it. He left it behind him and he didn’t look back. He got that absolutely right. And I’d like to make one further interjection …’ The stage directions read: ‘He stands still. Slow fade.’

  27 November 1980. The Pinters: leaving Kensington Registry Office.

  At 52 Campden Hill Square celebrating the wedding which actually took place six weeks later.

  In my white Jean Muir ‘Titania’ dress.

  The Pinters meet the Longfords: Bernhurst, East Sussex, 1980. Jack Pinter, Elizabeth Longford, Frances Pinter, Antonia, Frank Longford, Harold.

  At 52 Campden Hill Square. © Ivan Kyncl

  John Fowles and Harold during the filming of The French Lieutenant’s Woman.

  Harold and Karel Reisz, the director.

  With Oliver Sacks, City Island, NY, after Harold was inspired by his Awakenings to write A Kind of Alaska.

  Harold showing me Caerhays Castle, Cornwall, where he was evacuated at the beginning of World War II.

  Harold at the grave of Tennessee Williams, St Louis, having directed Sweet Bird of Youth with Lauren Bacall.

  Roger Lloyd Pack, Alan Bates and Harold: cast party at Campden Hill Square after the first production of One for the Road which Harold directed at the Lyric Studio, Hammersmith.

  The Playwrights’ Express comes to Paxos: Simon Gray, Harold, Ronnie Harwood.

  Doing ‘optical research’ for my book The Warrior Queens: Boadicea’s Chariot; Grime’s Graves near Ixworth.

  Harold in the ‘cow shed’ in Corfu, painted by Elizabeth Longford as he wrote the screenplay for Kafka’s The Trial.

  East Coker church containing the memorial to T.S. Eliot where Harold recited ‘Little Gidding’ by mistake.

  Listening to Eliot.

  As Goldberg in a TV production of The Birthday Party including Julie Walters, Ken Cranham and Joan Plowright. Harold inscribed the photograph himself: ‘Uncle Cuddles … love H’.

  Harold, Liv Ullmann and Nicola Pagett, Old Times, Los Angeles, 1985.

  Antonia, George Galloway and Harold releasing ‘the Black Balloon’ and carrying crosses symbolising the Nicaraguan war dead outside the US Embassy, Grosvenor Square, 1987.

  Harold and Václav Havel, 1989.

  Havel interviews Harold about the theatre.

  Olga and Václav Havel, Rita Klimova and Diana Phipps welcome us with a Union Jack outside Havel’s house, Hradecek, Czechoslovakia, 1989.

  Harold greets Daniel Ortega, President of Nicaragua, on his arrival at Campden Hill Square, 1989.

  Listening to Daniel Ortega.

  At Cibo’s restaurant for Harold’s sixtieth birthday party, 10 October 1990.

  Venice in January: sunshine and Corvo Bianco.

  I bring down the Berlin Wall. Photographed by Harold, February 1990.

  Harold at James Joyce’s grave, Zurich.

  Salman Rushdie, the West Indian fast bowler Ossie Gooding and Harold, before the Guardian match.

  At the Comédie Française for Le Retour.

  Harold and the grandchildren. Harold and Blanche, Dorset, 1998.

  Ruby is not impressed by the ‘revolutionary rattle’, 2007.

  In front of Harold’s 1992 portrait by Justin Mortimer at the National Portrait Gallery.

  The two ‘Haikus’ we wrote in Chez Moi restaurant when Harold was about to have an operation for oesophageal cancer.

  Tom Sternberg, producer, Harold and Jude Law, during the planning of the film Sleuth, Dorset, 2003.

  Edna O’Brien and Jude Law, Dorset, 2003.

  Dominique de Villepin, Prime Minister of France, presents Harold with the Légion d’Honneur at the French Embassy, London, 2007.

  The last photograph of us taken together. Lord’s, July 2008. © Lucy Fraser

  Simon and Victoria Gray.

  Harold’s seventieth birthday, 10 October 2000. © Susan Greenhill

  PART THREE

  Chapter Sixteen

  THE STEPS DOWNWARD

  Harold was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus on 13 December 2001, and died almost exactly seven years later. Before that date, which changed our lives forever, we had a prelapsarian summer in New York at the Pinter Festival which came originally from the Gate Theatre, Dublin. I call it prelapsarian, because all our lives were in a different state after 11 September 2001: the Fall.

  Harold acted in his own play One for the Road with Indira Varma as the poignant, tragic Gila. There were plays galore, interviews, talks, even films connected to him. We stayed in a high-tech hotel called Parker Meridien which had a glassed-in swimming pool on the roof – the forty-second floor. As I travelled up early each morning from our thirty-fourth-floor suite, looking way over the tops of the trees of Central Park, I meditated that anywhere else, in the present state of the world, there would be colossal security risks; but this was the United States, so we were safe. Thus I swam confidently, soaring above the towers of Manhattan.

  It was a time before the Fall, also a time of epiphany. Immediately on arrival, we found ourselves resuming the New York life we had always liked so much: dinner with Bob Silvers, Barbara Epstein, James Fenton and his partner Darryl Pinckney. Very jolly. On the way home Darryl said: ‘For scary people, you’re really a lot of fun.’ Me: ‘Oh, but underneath we are really much scarier than you think.’ Harold: ‘Nonsense, I intend to be a pussycat, Uncle Cuddles.’ And so he proceeded to be.

  I was too busy to write more than impressions in my Diary. First of all, there was the success of the festival, in honour of a living playwright who has himself acted in one play, directed another (Landscape with Penelope Wilton) as well as writing the whole shooting match, to say nothing of three symposia about Harold and one interview conducted by Mel Gussow. There were fabulous reviews for The Homecoming, with Lia Williams as Ruth, in the New York Times, the best review I have ever seen for anything anywhere. There was Harold’s personal success with the dreaded Nicolas in One for the Road. I was touched when Harold revealed to Rosa Porraz del Amo, Paloma’s charming and cultivated mother, that it was painful to enact him; at least he knew what we, the audience, suffered. I had sometimes wondered.

  One man said to his wife on leaving the press night: ‘To think that a guy could write a play like that and then to think that he would want to act in it!’ It was not intended as a favourable comment in either case.

  There was a lot of late-night carousing with the actors, night after night, in the Parker Meridien bar, which is partly outside, virtually on the pavement. In the heat and semi-darkness of a New York July we congregated with a changing cast of actors and their families: Lia and Guy Hibbert, with Josh aged eleven and Guy’s mother. In the pool on the forty-second floor I used to meet Anastasia Hille who was playing in Ashes to Ashes, a tall streak of pale blue, with a round little baby, and the director Katie Mitchell, sleek and wiry in a black athlete’s suit. I even managed to have tea with Sofia Coppola when we discussed Marie Antoinette’s female relationships: how these relationships were all-important to her due to her upbringing among a gaggle of sisters, but she was not a lesbian.

  The first Fall was in fact that of an oak tree – my father – who died at the age of ninety-five, five days after our return from New York. Having arrived overnight, I had hesitated to go round to the nursing home where both my parents were installed, on Sunday morning. The heat was intense and I told myself: ‘tomorrow’. Luckily my conscience would not let me stay lounging in the garden, so I went round to the nursing home just in time to comfort my mother, left behind as she watched my father vanishing. It was an inspiring death, serene and befitting a great man, not forgetting the fact that he had made a speech
about prison reform in the House of Lords only a couple of weeks before.

  During the autumn, Harold’s health was, presumably, declining but any check-up was delayed until after he had opened No Man’s Land, which he directed at the National Theatre with Corin Redgrave as Hirst and Andy de la Tour as Briggs. I made one or two dabs at persuading him to go to the doctor about his indigestion, without success. ‘I’ll wait till the play has opened.’

  But this was a horrible time for the whole world.

  11 September

  We were at Florence Airport: Harold having received an honorary degree at the university and made a speech in which he denounced American foreign policy, when I idly noticed rows of people staring glazedly at the TV in the Exit Lounge. Two English lawyers, father and son, recognized us and told us the unbelievable story. Images sprang up: Independence Day, Towering Inferno. Thereafter we sat more or less in silence on the plane for two and a half hours, the memory of Harold’s recent speech with us both. In addition I realized that my son Damian was almost certainly in New York where he worked half the month in the financial sector. This was no doubt a common thought to all the people on the plane: Who is in New York? And where? It’s the first primitive thought of human beings.

  When we reached home, Harold rang up his Italian translator, a close friend: ‘I want to withdraw my speech from any of the websites who asked for it.’ Damian had left me a message: ‘Like a war. People weeping in the streets.’ I managed to reach him on the telephone and he told me that in his mid-town office, ‘I look out on the Twin Towers and now they are not there.’ Then he told me the sort of personal details about people in his office and their losses which stab you. After that we just sat watching the TV screen. Harold’s speech lay heavy upon us because although there are rational arguments to be marshalled against US foreign policy, to say nothing of Iraqi casualties, nothing, but nothing, could alleviate the sheer horror of what had happened, the unalterable tragedy for those left behind.

  Later Harold made a press statement pointing out with regard to his speech: ‘I use words not bombs.’ Then he maintained silence out of respect for the bereaved. My own private reaction was to cancel my projected book tour of the US to promote Marie Antoinette. ‘She had her sorrows too’ – perfectly true, but I couldn’t and shouldn’t say things like that at such a time.

  15 November

  Harold has not felt well since he returned from Canada, a month ago, absolutely exhausted, no energy. Both of us, in it together, feel a kind of despair which luckily we can discuss. Naturally I get nightmare scenarios in my head in the night hours. I don’t know how to combat them.

  25 November

  Harold feeling better. It’s just indigestion. We discuss Harold’s idea years ago for a play as a sequel to One for the Road, in which the wrecked parents Gila and Victor, together at liberty but of course without Nicky, meet the torturer Nicolas at a party. He had even started to write it, when I reached Chez Moi restaurant at 10 p.m. after a film. He has not written for over two years. It makes the whole difference to his spirits as ever. Harold on the problem: ‘There will be no confrontation. At least I don’t think there will …’ Later: ‘No explicit allusions.’ It takes place in an embassy, possibly in America – the UN? – and the characters are, as before, called Nicolas, Victor and Gila.

  27 November

  Our wedding anniversary – twenty-first. The hopeful entry above about a sequel to One for the Road has to be completely contradicted. Harold found ‘nothing’ in the ten or so pages he had written, had violent indigestion at Sunday lunch and felt incredible lassitude on Monday.

  12 December

  No Man’s Land having opened, Harold is off for an endoscopy. He feels generally better.

  13 December

  Oh, the optimistic tone of that entry yesterday morning. Everything has changed. Harold came back from his endoscopy and buzzed me in my Eyrie. I found him in the drawing room looking rather white. And I knew. What Dr Westaby said was: ‘There is something there and I don’t like the look of it. I suspect cancer.’ Later on I looked up oesophageal cancer on the internet on Flora’s computer. I weep a bit in the car outside her house where I’m going to tea with the Soros boys, Simon and Tommy, to play Scrabble, my weekly pleasure. Flora very supportive: ‘It’s only what someone has put on the net,’ she tells me when I found out that the mortality rate was 92 per cent.

  14 December

  Today Harold goes for a scan to see it ‘from another angle’. And then to an oncologist. Wish it wasn’t the eclipse tonight. And I thought it would be poor Mummy … (My mother had been very ill with a series of strokes but had recovered.)

  Harold tremendously calm. Asked what could be done. The answer: ‘An operation or chemotherapy or a combination of the two.’ Late, late last night, Harold: ‘I just can’t get used to the notion of death in my early seventies.’

  In the event the decision was chemotherapy followed by an operation if the tumour was shrunk or at any rate not increased. So months of chemo followed.

  14 December cont.

  Harold had the scans, saw the consultant and was then given his programme. He’s also given a printed list of possible side-effects: ‘You won’t necessarily need a wig.’ Suggest that Harold has a trendy short haircut, like David Beckham, before the chemo kicks in.

  Everything is cancelled, Ireland, Paris, Barbados. Harold very sweetly keeps apologizing. As if I cared a hoot about any of that! The sheer shock of the verdict, though. I fear my lip trembled. I realized that a small part of me, I suppose it’s only human, had hoped that the consultant would spread his arms and say: ‘It was all a mistake.’

  On the whole I haven’t cried very much, only on the telephone breaking the news to very sympathetic people like my children.

  19 December

  Odd thoughts. I gave Harold my usual early-morning kiss, and then wondered: ‘Is this the spot where the tumour is?’

  22 December

  Harold, although feeling very weak after a procedure under anaesthetic (thank God no spread!), persisted in his plan to go and buy me a Christmas present at McCarthy’s jewellers in Artillery Row. We found a jade bangle, thick, bright spring green, full of light. I am giving Harold a DVD of the work of Frank Auerbach that he likes so much.

  25 December

  All in all, despite dreads (like: I won’t have the energy to carry this through) it was a lovely Christmas Day. Harold made a touching speech about the power of human support, especially the children. I drank a toast to Dada and the past, but the star was Thomas Fraser who had written both an earnest and considered speech and a Viking poem. Also Phoebe Fraser who recited ‘Away in a Manger’ in a strong voice, aged three, word perfect. A tiny star.

  27 December

  Harold’s first go of chemo. Tests, tests, tests. I visited Harold at 8 p.m. The hospital at night quite sinister, the smell of chloroform. Told myself: ‘It’s the smell of cure.’ Harold very positive: ‘I only have four goes and this is number one.’

  30 December

  Took Harold up to the Serpentine as we had had a terrible night of worries, both of us, which we could not somehow seem to control, and I thought air would be beneficial. We sat in the bright winter sun, huge ducks and geese being fed, light on the water. I went for a brief walk while Harold reflected. Alternative was going to Mass, but good deeds preferable.

  2002

  1 January

  Palindrome year as Simon Gray points out last night. I shall be seventy in August, I said. Simon: ‘What’s a girl like you doing being seventy?’ Gallant. I feel a hundred and seventy.

  Lack of courage this morning and a few tears of which I feel ashamed. No way to start the New Year. Not fair to Harold, to put it mildly, and to have provoked the sleepy words ‘I am so sorry’ made me even more ashamed.

  4 January

  Harold read me ‘a sketch’ – former Minister of Police becomes Minister of Culture. He said: ‘It’s very crude.’ It was. I got upset: the death
of a child being described as ‘educational’. I realize that it’s the relic of the play he began once as a sequel to One for the Road. Still, the energy is good.

  5 January

  Harold announced he was going to perform his sketch, now called Press Conference, twice at the National and within days of the third bout of chemo. ‘I know you don’t like it.’ We didn’t pursue that point: it wasn’t to do with liking, more with my generally fragile state. But I did question his decision to take this on. I was thinking of all the instructions we’ve read about leading a very easy life while you’re having chemo. Is performing a new sketch on stage at the National an easy life?? Harold: ‘I’m not just sitting here waiting to die.’

  8 January

  Twenty-seventh anniversary of our first meeting. Surgeon has outlined the procedure for the operation. He has also okayed Harold’s two performances, delaying chemo a little to accommodate them.