Must You Go?

by Antonia Fraser

  17–22 August

  On Sunday I flew down from Inverness to live with Harold here, at 33 Launceston Place, off the Gloucester Road. He met me at the airport. Then we entered Launceston Place. The first thing I saw was a mass of white flowers in the hall. I had time to think, ‘Harold probably forgot to move them’, then he took my hand and led me into the drawing room. Lo! A vast arrangement of flowers including foxy lilies and other glories in the window, and another on the mantelpiece, and in the back room, all luxuriant, then on up the stairs. A huge arrangement this time of yellow flowers in the pink boudoir, more, pink, on my dressing-table, and pink also in the bathroom. At the time I wanted to photograph them. But having lived with them for a week, there is no need. They are in my ‘inner eye which is the bliss of solitude’. I shall never forget them. Or Harold’s expression. A mixture of excitement, triumph and laughter. It transpired he asked the flower lady from Grosvenor House (whom he knew from his time with Sam Spiegel when he sent me daily flowers) and commissioned them. ‘Is it for a party?’ she asked. ‘No, it’s for Sunday night.’

  Chapter Three

  READER, WE LIVED TOGETHER …

  So we settled into our new lives. It was not all flowers and romance – probably the least romantic time of our lives, in retrospect.

  I would like to be able to say in the immortal words of Jane Eyre: ‘Reader, I Married Him …’ Actually, it was a case of ‘Reader, We Lived Together’. I counted Anthony Powell as my uncle (the writer I admired so much was married to my father’s sister Violet). A stickler for these things, Tony asked me in advance of our arrival at his Somerset house, The Chantry, how I described my relationship with Harold officially. He was interested in the modern etiquette, he said. ‘Companion,’ I said, to tease. Tony pondered this. ‘Like an old lady?’ ‘Exactly like an old lady.’ Tony, who told me he had much admired the TV film of Harold’s play The Lover, looked puzzled. On that subject, Harold insisted on describing our relationship in the next CV in a National Theatre programme. ‘Harold Pinter has lived with Antonia Fraser since 1975.’ He told me that he heard on the grapevine that this was considered ‘unusual’ and somebody asked: ‘Don’t people generally try to cover up such things?’

  19 August

  Lunch with my father at l’Epicure which began well but got progressively worse as he tucked down his lips in a familiar grimace, following a perfectly satisfactory talk about Christopher Sykes’ biography of Evelyn Waugh, and started on at me.

  Me: ‘I don’t ask you to approve, but to try to understand.’ But it’s no good and I see that Dada basically feels crossed at not having his own way. He never likes that.

  21 August

  Harold’s oldest friend Henry Woolf came to supper. Afterwards he performed Harold’s play Monologue. I thought it was brilliant. The night before Harold had read me his revue sketches and I fell asleep!! This time I did not fall asleep.

  22 August

  New TV show at the BBC, hosted by Melvyn Bragg, about paperback books. Original and admirable idea. Since we are dogged by the tabloids, including outside Launceston Place, Melvyn was gallant and arranged for me to be spirited away afterwards by a back door. There is an adrenalin rush in the getaway as I watched from my taxi a reporter sitting on the front steps of the BBC waiting for me in vain.

  24 August

  Strange and pleasing day at Iver with the Johnsons. Harold dropped me there on his way to cricket. I thought Paul might be very disapproving. He was on the contrary extremely warm to me, as one who had had a hard time. Marigold and I went to watch Harold at his cricket, first time for me, seeing Harold play. Luckily for me, my father was a cricket enthusiast, one who knew Wisden by heart as a boy, so I knew the rules. We minced towards the field, fearing to be discovered watching the wrong match. Harold came towards us, looking very dashing and jolly. Then we watched resolutely. One run and not out! Well, it could be a lot worse.

  27 August

  My forty-third birthday. I’m in the aeroplane returning from Scotland where I went on a freezing sea picnic at Rosemarkie with the children, and afterwards hosted some agreeable charades. Hugh and I talked about money – frankly, we’re both broke.

  28 August

  The birthday ended arriving at Launceston Place and finding the flashes of press photographers. Harold drew me in and gave me a wonderful necklace of coloured stones. He hovered nervously as I opened it: ‘You can change it.’ We went defiantly out to dinner. Harold suddenly very angry to photographers: ‘Why don’t you fuck off?’ I bowed my head and recited my mantra in such circumstances: ‘Oh God our help in ages past/Our hope for years to come.’ The next day the photographs were on the front page of a tabloid. The necklace looked pretty. But – when people are being maimed by bombs in pubs and the world teeters economically – does a dinner date really rate such a billing?

  29 August

  Went to No Man’s Land … Supper with the two knights (Gielgud and Richardson). Both very courtly towards me. Richardson discussed Pepys and Gielgud discussed Shaw’s Good King Charles’s Golden Day, both with regard to my future biography of Charles II. Harold’s son Daniel, who has chosen to live with us, is silent but pleasant company.

  6 September

  Maurice Jarre, composer for The Last Tycoon, came round and played a haunting tune to Harold’s lyric. Even I could pick it up! Must be a hit. (To think he composed Lara’s Song for Dr Zhivago.) Dinner at Donald Pleasence’s. Last time I went to that house what tensions were in our lives. Sense of calm is overcoming us both. Looked at Harold in the garden and he did indeed look very calm. Then some American children started shrieking next door, closely followed by an electric saw the other side … Things changed.

  8 September

  Heinemann’s lunch for Tony Powell’s twelfth volume of A Dance to the Music of Time. Sat next to Tony who had Jilly Cooper, blonde and lissom, on his other side. As the star guest (Tony adored her), she had begun on his right, but he had switched us over. ‘When the Revolution comes, let it come. But at my lunch things will be done properly.’ Being an earl’s daughter, like Violet, I had to be on the right. Tony made a brilliant short speech in honour of his editor Roland Gant, perfectly worked out and ending: ‘how they brought the good news from Aix to GANT’. Harold couldn’t come but I wondered what his placement would have been. Although Tony had this historian’s love of social hierarchy, his real respect, I noted, was always reserved for artists.

  15 September

  Grace Dudley came to Launceston Place for tea. Made me laugh with a touch of her endearing grandeur: ‘And of course we do over the house at once.’ ‘But, Grace, we have only rented it for six months.’ She loved Harold, who is of course very much the same type as Bob Silvers.

  Things got a little better with Hugh going away for several days on political business, so that life was able to continue more or less serenely on the domestic front.

  19 September

  Our dog Figaro arrived: he actually woke Harold with his friendly damp nose but Harold took it well. Joan Bakewell (with whom, Harold told me, he had had an affair some years before) came to dinner with her new long-haired, much younger husband Jack Emery: all very jolly.

  23 September

  Felt a little impatient with Pat Naipaul at lunch although I hope I didn’t show it. Not quite strong enough for lame ducks at present. I suppose it’s because I’m a bit of a lame duck. Then I felt ashamed of myself.

  26 September

  Lunch with Antonia Byatt. We discussed The White Devil, God and The Good. That’s what she’s like. I love her company. In the evening Harold and his son read Hemingway: the half of Harold which is not Beckett is Hemingway.

  29 September

  A most unpleasant experience. A flurry of calls to me at Launceston Place about a flat which was apparently for rent by one Mrs A. Fraser. Details were correct. Thought it must be a misprint and got on to Classified. But it wasn’t. An enemy hath done this. The Editor Charles Wintour, sweet and sympathetic, h
ad it taken out at once. But such Malice from Unknown Persons is upsetting.

  30 September

  Dinner with A.J.P. Taylor who had sent me a sweet letter congratulating me on ‘capturing the foremost playwright of the age’. This was both funny and welcome at a time when nobody much was congratulating me on anything (I knew him originally from my childhood in Oxford where he was a don: he had always been kind about my historical efforts). The hostess turned out to be his first wife – he has gone back to her having been abandoned by his second. Filthy North Oxford food: Dutch gin to drink. Harold quite amazed by it all.

  5 October

  Visit to Natasha at my old school, St Mary’s Ascot. Sister Bridget (my old teacher) hugs me. ‘Don’t do anything desperate. Remember everything passes away.’ I’ve got the most ghastly cold: so I say, ‘Actually I feel I shall pass away at this moment.’ I should say that the reaction of the Catholic Church has been markedly charitable and concerned for the children in the right kind of way.

  10 October

  Harold’s birthday: I gave him Imperial Cricket bound in white vellum for which I had advertised. ‘£95,’ said Harold, looking inside. ‘I hope it doesn’t cost that nowadays.’ Silence. It had actually.

  11 October

  Stayed in Brighton. Harold went over to Hove to see his parents. I fell asleep. He came back with charming photographs of his parents in youth, his mother with the same dark sloe-eyes and his father looking quite a card.

  14 October

  John and Miriam Gross came to dinner to watch a Simon Gray play on TV. They make a most agreeable pair: you can’t actually say ‘with his brains and her beauty’ because Miriam is also very clever.

  18–21 October

  In Paris to discuss possible Proust film with the director Joseph Losey. Joe: heavy, silvered, ageing but still handsome. He had drunk a good deal of vodka, and addressed me in the light of his Communist past: ‘I don’t generally like your sort, but I like you.’ He said it several times and was prone to repeat it whenever we met. In spite of – or perhaps because of – this, I felt enduring affection for him. Patricia, small-faced and very pretty in a little green hat, a very sympathetic character. A strike prevented us leaving. We couldn’t get a further night in L’Hotel where we had been staying. We sat hopelessly like refugees while fashion figures and their vast dogs gambolled about the red velvet lounge. In the end we were put up in the private apartment of the owner of L’Hotel whose name we never knew. A young man in a white suit accompanied by a white Alsatian, also anonymous, took us there. Harold sat up talking, I went to sleep. Bizarre but friendly episode, including strangers and territory, rather Pinteresque.

  23 October

  I didn’t sleep, very rare, and took a Mogadon. Made coffee at about 8.40 a.m., very late for me. At 9 a.m. the telephone rang. Jean, our au pair, who had dropped my youngest son Orlando at school, was crying: ‘There’s been a bomb at Campden Hill Square’ (where she had gone to collect post). Celia Goodhart, our neighbour there, took over the telephone. ‘Jean is all right. Terribly shaken, of course. She saw the bomber place the bomb under the car.’ Harold rings Campden Hill Square on his line. He gets Caroline Kennedy (her mother Jackie being an old friend of Hugh’s, she was staying in the house for a course at Sotheby’s). She’s clipped, admirable – the poor girl must have thought it was aimed at her: ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’

  I am desperate to track poor Jean who must be in need of succour. I finally find her at Kensington police station. With great gallantry considering her ordeal, she is describing the death of the bomber to the police so there is an air of discreet satisfaction. Not from me. With rising horror I realize from the description that it is in fact our neighbour Gordon Hamilton-Fairley, the cancer specialist, who, alerted by his white poodle, had been poking under the car. To compound things, the press have by now surrounded Launceston Place (as well as more legitimately Campden Hill Square).

  Hugh is grey in the face with shock at what has happened; he was blown backwards in his chair while drinking coffee by the blast and has just heard of our neighbour’s death. Later he makes a statement of great dignity about Hamilton-Fairley in the House of Commons, ashen but splendidly upright, chest flung out. I collected Orlando from school. All the other children were told by telephone. Flora, with her extraordinary intuition, rang up out of the blue from Florence where she was studying (she never rang up) and thus heard the news. Seeing Campden Hill Square on TV that night – it was the most beautiful autumn day – now looking wrecked and shattered, I felt the most terrible guilt for everything in the world.

  There was nothing rational about the guilt. The IRA bomber was part of the so-called Balcombe Street gang who were subsequently convicted and imprisoned. The bomber had gone for Hugh, it was said later, as a hard-line Tory over Northern Ireland – which wasn’t even true: as a Catholic himself, Hugh had a lot of sympathy for the plight of the Catholics over there. Hugh however was not a member of the government and his conspicuous car in an outlying area was unprotected. As a result a noble man had died. But when is guilt ever rational?

  24 October

  We visited Campden Hill Square. Small, deep, round, black hole outside. Also a policeman. All the windows boarded or cellophaned. Stepped in, went upstairs, collected some of my work (I used to go there most days and stored all my work there).

  30 October

  The hundredth performance of Otherwise Engaged. Party on a boat given by the producer Michael Codron, who wore boating costume himself. It is a beautiful starry night. We crowd into the open poop of the boat as it slides through the canal. The star Alan Bates looks ragged but very glamorous. I was hardly in a party mood but tried to disguise it.

  3 November

  Harold agrees to go to an Andy Warhol party at Emma Tennant’s. Harold: ‘I’m ready for anything.’ Emma: ‘And anything is just what he will get.’ The party was fine – except we didn’t get to meet Andy Warhol.

  The autumn proceeded with a lot of turbulence, including threats of further press revelations from Vivien – Me: ‘What is there left to tell?’ – plus private happiness.

  18 November

  Lunch with my aunt Violet Powell. She told me of the early days of Tony Powell’s reviews, especially A Buyer’s Market when they were so terrible that a lesser man might have abandoned the project (the sequence A Dance to the Music of Time). Herself at Chester Gate, up early to go to church, looking at the papers first and finding the reviews ghastly. She thought: a more religious person would have gone to church first and read the reviews afterwards. Me: ‘But at least that way you could pray for endurance.’ (Which is what I pray for these days.)

  A bomb at the Walton Street restaurant. Thought of all our friends who might be there and try in vain to get news on the radio.

  21 November

  My father gave me lunch at Beotys, where all went well till the fatal 3 p.m. when I know he felt we had got on too well, on topics like the Irish bombers. So he insisted on trying to give me a lecture. Heated. Depressing. Pointless. Furious with Dada’s morality. All right to be unfaithful to my ‘saintly’ husband. Not all right to be faithful to Harold. I thought of trying to explain to him about passion, but what’s the point? He only likes people like the convicted Moors murderess Myra Hindley who are apparently repenting of passion.

  23 November

  I went for a walk in the bright park. On my return I heard a whistle in Victoria Grove. It was Harold in a black leather jacket. He kissed me passionately in Hollywood style. At that moment a passer-by stopped and engaged me in trivialities on some neighbourhood issue, regardless. She paid no attention to Harold. We agreed that our mood was restored from the torturing troubles of previous days. Told me he had been going to rip open dramatically the invitations to our Xmas party and show me the wording: Harold and Antonia invite you … ‘That’s our declaration to the world,’ he said.

  Throughout all this time Vivien’s divorce action was pending; we warned the teachers at the various
schools. At the last minute she withdrew it, being too ill to appear in court. The press ran a story saying that Hugh and I were reconciled which would have been grimly funny – it was so very far from being true – if it hadn’t been so painful for all concerned.

  5 December

  Dada’s seventieth birthday party. Since Harold was specifically not invited, and we had been officially living together for nearly five months, I decided to send a present – a thriller which Dada likes – but not attend. Harold persuaded me that I would regret not attending. Actually he was wrong. I deeply regretted going because there was the most boring family row (nothing to do with me) at dinner with a glass of champagne being thrown by A over B. Longed to be back in Launceston Place with Harold. I did choose to wear a red dress for fun. Laurence Kelly got the point: ‘Here comes the scarlet woman,’ he said, boomingly.

  9 December

  Harold and I went to Nottingham to see Gemma Jones in A Streetcar Named Desire: Harold had booked the Byron suite at the Albany Hotel. Told Harold Byron’s story, my version, including Augusta. Harold thought I would have liked Byron: and so I would, but not for the reason he thought: rather for his essential wildness. Inspired to go to Newstead Abbey. When we reached Byron’s own room, the caretaker coughed and proceeded to quote from Don Juan: ‘the lucid lake’. By the time we walked out, the lake was grey and misty with birds rising off it as we passed.

  12 December