Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [103]
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.
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