Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [108]
9 June
Over five hours in a car – to Ilminster and back where I spoke about Marie Antoinette – led me to say to Harold on return: ‘I’m going to Bin the Boyne.’ I told him: ‘It was learning the Irish that did it. I thought – why am I doing this? To give depth to something which is fascinating in itself but doesn’t have depth in me. Never mind the Irish books, the Irish lessons, the prints. Away with them! Versailles here I come (back).’ And furthermore Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette project does not seem quite dead.
10 June
Sofia Coppola came to tea. Tiny, lithe, very well-proportioned in her black leggings and little black jersey, shivering in the cold June rain. ‘Flaming June,’ as Harold said, leading her to the French windows where rain was sploshing down into the garden. Sofia and I have an interesting discussion about playboys and the attraction they have for women who know they are destined to be unfaithful, yet can’t help believing ‘I am the one’; this is in relation to Marie Antoinette and Count Fersen.
15 June
Harold delighted with the reactions to his award of the CH. The Times runs a leader which mentions Gaieties CC and states: ‘No one who loves cricket can not be a gentleman.’ Splendid old-fashioned stuff. About six years previously, he had rejected a knighthood: ‘I can’t make the sort of speeches I do and be introduced as “Sir Harold”,’ he told me, but he felt the CH was different. I am certain that, whether consciously or not, Eric Hobsbawm’s acceptance in 1997 had influenced him. His only regret about the knighthood had been that it would have pleased his father – then in the last year of his life.
19 June
Determined to give Harold treats insofar as he is up to them. I decided that the Lucian Freud exhibition opening at the Tate would be a treat – it might not be everybody’s idea of a treat but it is certainly Harold’s: we have been to at least two previous Freud exhibitions. Harold havered more about the need for a wheelchair than about the treat. It was odd pushing him, I must say, as in spite of Harold’s colossal weight loss, he’s still an adult compared to tiny Mummy. Also it was a reversal of our roles; I felt rather uncomfortable being the director of our progress. But it grew on me, I found. I was soon whisking Harold past huge pictures of full-frontal naked Leigh Bowery in favour of a tender, even beautiful one of Bindy Lambton in a butterfly-strewn jersey.
28 June
Visit to Professor Cunningham. Harold is cured of cancer, it was all got out. Cunningham looked at Harold’s body, the war wounds and said: ‘Yes, I can see Mr Thompson has been here.’ He then told Harold he had benign leukaemia of the mildest sort, but people often lived for ten years … This struck a chord with me although I did not say so. I had been saying to myself, ‘Give us ten years, when Harold is eighty-one and I am nearly eighty …’ and copying the message to God.
4 July
End of a Diary. I am resolved that the next one will record happier times. Harold and I love each other more than ever, now and forever. That’s the Royalist slogan of the Battle of the Boyne: ‘Now or never. Now and forever’. The Protestant one was: ‘No surrender’. Both seem appropriate.
5 July
Harold read my Diaries having gone over to the Super-Study for the first time for months (always a sign of his mental as well as physical health to take the short walk down the garden). He has never read them in depth before, made the occasional jocular interjection when in the mood. But if you live with someone, you keep a diary at your own risk – see Count and Countess Tolstoy who left messages for each other diary-wise. I told him that the Diaries did provide a day-to-day picture of his illness. But of course reading them meant that Harold lived through the whole thing again, all he suffered, all I suffered, which he says he knew but we didn’t discuss. Harold very, very moved, and still in quite an emotional state, which having written the things, left