Must You Go?: My Life With Harold Pinter

by Antonia Fraser

  27 January

  The week after this chemo was horrendous; I suppose it was only to be expected. Harold feels cautiously more human this morning. The hair, the blackness of it, characteristic of his appearance, has gone. Everyone says it will grow again but perhaps the blackness, phenomenal at seventy-one, will change, and he will be a Godfather silvered like Al Pacino in Godfather III. In which case I’m glad I did a Delilah seventeen days ago and cut off a black lock. (I still have it today.) Harold, who has no personal vanity, doesn’t care a bit. He minds, sensibly, about other things such as the sickness, which is getting worse. Baked potatoes, soup and ice cream: the valiant trio will be familiar to all those who have been through this. I comfort myself by reflecting that the Irish nation survived for hundreds of years, strongest of the strong, on potatoes.

  28 January

  Someone told poor Mummy in her nursing home about Harold despite my explicit instructions to the contrary. (At the time I sought to comfort and sustain her so far as I could, following my father’s death in August; I didn’t see that knowing about Harold’s cancer would help her – or me.) I was extremely upset by this. It got worse when Mummy was then helpfully told it was only a rumour, Harold was all right. I couldn’t bear this travesty of the truth, given Harold’s current ordeal. Went round after Mass and told her it all. She wasn’t as devastated as I expected, given her affection for Harold: of course she lives in a world of the dying, and the person she loves most in the world is dead. She was very sweet and murmured: ‘Is there anything I can do?’ Me: ‘Pray. But you do that anyway.’ Stumped away home in the wind and the rain. Benjie and his children to lunch. Eliza got Harold a plate of ice cream: a first for him at a family lunch and the children were duly impressed. Thomas aged nine then asked Harold what sort of plays he wrote, which Harold found unanswerable but amused him, both at the time and in recollection.

  1 February

  Front-page news this morning: both The Times and the Daily Telegraph (I believe) saying: ‘Harold Pinter has throat cancer.’ Well, it took six weeks to reach the press. Not pleasant to read it but let’s face it, press attention is not the problem. Harold, I note, is wonderfully open about the whole thing: ‘Yes, it’s true,’ he says instead of denying it; which rather destroys the story. I worry that Harold will do Press Conference twice out of bravado and then collapse. But I don’t voice this. I’ve been reading about the last months of the great Duke of Ormonde (I was contemplating a book on the Battle of the Boyne), who said that for him the time for field sports was past: ‘The steps downwards are very natural from a field to a garden, from a garden to a window, from thence to a bed, and so to a grave.’ Actually this is true about Mummy, if you leave out field sports. But it is also a powerful image in Harold’s situation, he who has been an athlete all his life, his buoyant, dashing if unorthodox tennis style being the wonder of all players at the Vanderbilt Club.

  5 February

  New endoscopy. I collected Harold at 10 a.m. after his early start. The news was good. No spreading. The pain probably caused by necrotic shards of the tumour being sloughed off. So IT is responding. Quel relief.

  Later we visited Dr Westaby. I spied photos upside down. Insisted on looking and after a bit Harold did too. IT looked ‘like something on a rock,’ says Harold. ‘An evil oyster,’ say I.

  8 February

  After some rough days and tests, Harold is feeling better. Saw the oncologist in the morning, who confirmed things are moving in the right direction. In the evening to a packed house (nine hundred people) he gave a magnificent performance in Press Conference. He looked elegant in grey shirt, black tie, formal black jacket and the new trousers from M&S: he’s lost so much weight that we had to make a rapid expedition there, despite his sickness. (Harold kept trying to pay more money at the till as he couldn’t believe how cheap everything was compared to the trendy Italian shops he patronizes.) His splendid newly revealed skull most impressive, highly suitable for this horrible governmental character, and so was his voice – which grew – and his ferocious glee. It was a triumph for a man undergoing chemo or indeed any man. I was quite wrong to try and persuade him not to do it because it has boosted his morale enormously. I’m learning as I go: the demands of the body, the needs of the mind … trying to balance them.

  9 February

  Harold totally exhausted and the bloody indigestion acute.

  11 February

  Another triumph for Sketches II. Harold possibly even better – less nervous. And I adored Doug Hodge and the lovely Catherine MacCormack in Night: I used to think that it was the only happy thing Harold had written when I first met him. Harold’s skull beneath the skin, as Webster would put it, even more noble.

  Some terrible days followed of sickness, the problem of eating and so on. It was the most brilliant weather, crisp, blue skies. Camellias started to flower in the garden, and I was able to bring in my favourite Amaryllis Appleblossom from the greenhouse. Otherwise I just read and read and listened to opera on Radio 3 wishing I could do something, bear something for him. Harold has been told he will probably need more chemo after the operation: not good news and I know his morale is low though he is staunch in not talking about it. The arrival of food supplements, little infant-looking packs with plastic straws and flavours like ‘Peach’ and ‘Cherry’ give a nursery air to the dining room.

  20 February

  Harold’s supper was two scoops of ice cream and three grapes. A friend, whose husband has recently died of cancer, says: ‘I hope Harold is not very cross with you.’ (I imagine her husband was.) Me: ‘No, Harold is saintly.’ True enough. Keeps worrying sweetly about me: ‘I want you to have a nice time.’ As if I could!

  2 March

  Harold a little better on the potatoes and ice cream diet, awaiting the fourth chemo session. We went to the Olympia Fine Art Fair on Tuesday to see the Keith Vaughan exhibition, an artist we both admire: I have a small, multi-coloured male figure bought in the fifties. Left Harold at the champagne bar and went a-wandering. Vaguely I was looking for my jewellery (I had been robbed in April 1999 and the police had advised me to ‘keep an eye out’). Rounded a corner on the ground floor – and there was a large stone font full of primroses. Knew I had to buy it, it was waiting there for me, and I would put it in the middle of our rather scrawny lawn as a visual attraction. ‘From an East Suffolk Church 1781’: where the Pakenhams came from before they set off for Ireland with someone called Oliver Cromwell. 1781: a date when Marie Antoinette still held sway at Versailles. Harold slightly surprised to hear we had acquired a font but readily agreed to pay half when I explained that it was an ‘affirmation thing, an affirmation of life’. After all, life begins with a font – well, some lives anyway.

  11 March

  Bad day after the night-long chemo session. I dashed to No. 10 Downing Street to a Prisoner of Conscience Appeal party held by Cherie Blair, out of guilt as I’m a patron but a useless one. Cherie much prettier than her pictures, most beautiful creamy complexion, and very warm and friendly. The photos of prime ministers all down the stairs all gazing at one with earnest solicitude: ‘I’ve mucked up the world to the best of my ability, but you do admire me, don’t you?’

  14 March

  Harold’s poem, inspired by a remark of ‘a senior nurse called Sue’ to him at the Royal Marsden, ‘Cancer Cells’, appeared in the Guardian and it was subsequently printed by Bob Silvers in the New York Review of Books, to his great pleasure.

  CANCER CELLS

  ‘Cancer cells are those which have forgotten how to die’–

  Nurse, Royal Marsden Hospital

  They have forgotten how to die

  And so extend their killing life.

  I and my tumour dearly fight.

  Let’s hope a double death is out.

  I need to see my tumour dead

  A tumour which forgets to die

  But plans to murder me instead.

  But I remember how to die

  Though all my wi
tnesses are dead.

  But I remember what they said

  Of tumours which would render them

  As blind and dumb as they had been

  Before the birth of that disease

  Which brought the tumour into play.

  The black cells will dry up and die

  Or sing with joy and have their way.

  They breed so quietly night and day,

  You never know, they never say.

  Harold is I think fortunate to have been able to write two great poems at critical moments in his life – ‘Death’ when Jack died being the other. Come to think of it, what about ‘Paris’ in May 1975: ‘She dances in my life’? He had worked on this poem since his return from the hospital which has brought him much pleasure.

  17 March

  Innumerable children racing round and round the new font (thirty-five apparently). Like the tigers in Little Black Sambo I thought they would turn into ghee. The occasion was the christening party of Natasha and Jean-Pierre’s twin daughters Cecilia Antonia and Allegra Giovanna. Harold managed to make a well-turned speech at the godparents’ lunch beforehand: he invented the Twinnies’ conversation with one another, half in English and half in French. It came to an end at the age of eighteen when one says to the other, ‘It’s a funny old life,’ the reply being ‘C’est une drôle de vie.’

  22 March

  Went with Harold for a ‘family conference’ to the Royal Marsden to see the oncologist following the endoscopy which had showed a ‘reduction’. Dr Cunningham was extremely cheerful: it was good news and they were recommending an operation. Harold remarkably calm at the description of the operation and its results in full detail including the comment: ‘You’ll never be fat again.’ But as to the next batch of chemo, post-operation, he says he will make up his own mind about that.

  25 March

  Saw the surgeon Jeremy Thompson. He drew maps for us of what he was going to lop off from the stomach(!) He called it high-risk surgery and referred to 5 per cent mortality, as he was bound to do. I think we were both quite shocked by the reality of all this. As Harold said later: ‘I’ve been pretty broody ever since.’ Harold: ‘I never asked what would happen if I didn’t have it,’ so he rang up and asked. The answer was that the tumour would regroup and spread … Anyway, on a lighter note, Jeremy Thompson had on his desk a copy of Harold’s poem ‘Cancer Cells’ which he had sent him. We’d both been eyeing it and in unspoken accord longed to know what he thought of it. ‘I got your poem,’ he said at last. ‘Very enjoyable,’ he said with a humorous, almost indulgent smile. It was the most wonderfully inappropriate word, surely, for such a poem. That at least cheered Harold up.

  7 April

  Dedication of the plaque to my father in the local Hurst Green church. Harold gallantly elected to come despite a bad attack when he tried to eat, failed, took refuge in the kitchen and was fed ice cream by the aged Bernhurst staff Gwen and Ellen. But he did manage to have some words with Mummy, not seen since 3 November. They discussed Peter Stanford’s book on Heaven and Mummy told Harold that she thought he would be a very exciting presence in Heaven. Later Harold wondered aloud in the Chez Moi restaurant in Holland Park Avenue what would happen if there was no death, no one ever died. So perhaps there had to be death to prevent the planet overcrowding. I composed a haiku and wrote it on my napkin:

  If there was no death

  How in all the crowds

  Would I have met you?

  Harold answered it initially but being a real poet was dissatisfied and corrected it in the middle of the night.

  You’d find me turning from the long bar

  Glasses raised,

  One for you, one for me.

  11 April

  The destruction of the lofty – twenty-five foot – olive tree in the garden is the worst thing that is happening to me emotionally apart from THE thing. The evil, indifferent squirrel bites off vast silver branches evening after evening in front of our appalled eyes, and stripped of leaves or not, they lie pathetically abandoned on the terrace. It stands for absolute helplessness. The tree, the myrtle bush from my wedding bouquet (also stripped), me, we’re all helpless. And the squirrel is energetic, playful and a killer.

  16 April

  We took a break in Torquay for Harold to try and get some strength back before the op. At lunch in a country pub (Harold’s favourite thing – not that he was able to eat) we argued about a line in W.S. Graham: was it the ‘shining’ sea as I thought, or the ‘silent’ sea as in Harold’s version? Harold is always right about these things which doesn’t stop me gamely arguing. So when at dinner he pronounced, ‘It’s actually the speaking sea,’ it was a touching demonstration of his weakness, that he had forgotten one of his favourite lines.

  23 April – St George’s Day

  To my amazement Harold had agreed to my idle suggestion as to how to spend the last night before his enormous operation to remove the tumour: ‘Let’s have a party.’ Suddenly it was boiling hot, unbelievably so, and under a convenient full moon, lighting by Mick Hughes as it were, we held the entire party in the garden. The whole wonderful evening was a tribute of affection to Harold. Even Peter Hall and Trevor Nunn came, the busiest people we know, and at prime theatrical time. All the children of course and afterwards Peter Soros, ever practically generous, took us for dinner.

  It’s odd how anxiety blinds you to some things, while exposing you to others. It never occurred to me that the reason why all these busy people took the trouble to come was that they feared the end was coming and wanted to say goodbye. I only understood this when Edward blurted it out to me, following the happy outcome: ‘I never thought I would see Harold again.’ I also took a lot of photographs of the scene in the moonlit garden. Much later Harold looked at them and said curiously: ‘Who is that?’ He did not recognize himself with his mysterious Jacobean skull.

  25 April

  Harold rang me at 7 a.m. before the operation as promised. I had told him, ‘On no account do a Louis XVI on the eve of his execution,’ i.e. fail to call in order to spare me, as Louis XVI, sweet but insensitive to the last, did to poor Marie Antoinette and the children. They just sat there waiting for the promised summons until the roll of the drums from afar told them that the King was dead.

  Continued. Well, it’s over and Harold has survived. No roll of drums. This morning (26th) is better than yesterday when I sat all morning trying to read a book about Danish Regiments at the Battle of the Boyne. Then Rebecca thoughtfully offered to come and sit with me. On the dot of three, I rang the Clinical Nurse and she said Harold was OK. Went there at five o’clock. He was still unconscious. I was handed over to Staff Nurse Steve: a very nice man. Sat in the Relatives’ Room, a small octagon. Later I was allowed to give a reverential kiss to this Pietà figure and so some squeezing of the hand; Harold’s eyes opened and he definitely knew me.

  Days followed in intensive care with me visiting Harold three times daily. He wanted, he said, the pleasure of looking forward to my arrival. Which he couldn’t do if I just stayed there. As I shuttled to and fro from Campden Hill Square to Chelsea, I took to speculating what happened to people who had no one to visit them: because surely cancer doesn’t spare the lonely. There was a strange period when Harold started to hallucinate, a temporary consequence of the anaesthetic. It began with ‘awake dreaming’ as he put it: he had a lovely dream that we were both in California and there was sunlight and leaves and I looked very beautiful. I think I had been swimming and my hair was shining. Then it got more serious and turned to bugs, Harold’s bane, infesting the (immaculate) telephone. This was fearful – literally so – for him but I was able to remain optimistic in what might otherwise have been a desperately worrying situation because by an extraordinary coincidence this had happened to another member of the family after a major operation a year or two back. So I knew Harold would recover his wits. In the meantime, the fears included a gentle black man with a crown – a king as in the Three Kings of the Orient – re
siding in the television so his face had to be extinguished with a towel, although unlike some of the visions, he was not menacing.

  This led to a hilarious situation as Harold began to recuperate and the hallucinations at last faded. I arrived for my morning visit quite late on in his stay and Harold said: ‘I must warn you there is a very tall black man in the bathroom.’ Oh God, I thought, here we go again: my heart sank. And lo and behold at that moment the door opened and out came the cleaner, an Ethiopian perhaps, of about 6′8″ …

  7 May

  I can’t believe it, I took Harold out to lunch at Le Colombier! (the restaurant next door to the Marsden Hospital). Gaunt, fragile, all in black, he then proceeded to eat liver and bacon, the first real food since forever.

  8 May

  He’s coming out at noon. I am to spring the prisoner. I can’t believe that either.

  I did spring him. On return home Harold behaved like Hector, Damian and Paloma’s golden labrador in Mexico who was kidnapped for a week; when recovered, he just rushed up to their bedroom, went under the bed and stayed there for forty-eight hours. Except that Harold got into the bed, he behaved exactly the same. I stayed downstairs and answered the doorbell to flowers. Finally I opened the door to Mr Nader, of Savile’s Cars, who had been so tremendously staunch in times of need, driving both of us to and from hospital endlessly; he had a huge bouquet ‘from all the drivers’. At long, long last I burst into tears which I didn’t try to stop.

  Chapter Seventeen

  THE NEW DEAD

  In the course of the summer Harold cautiously began to say that he felt better.

  15 May

  Alexandra Shulman’s tenth anniversary party as editor of Vogue. A touching occasion, full of Alex’s old friends, most of whom I have known throughout their lives. Nigella Lawson was tenderly sympathetic about intensive care at the Royal Marsden where John Diamond had died, and the holy character of Steve the male nurse. At this point the photographers descended on her in droves as if she were Princess Diana and perforce snapped us together – if only they knew what her perfect lips were discussing.