Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [100]
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