Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [11]
Vivien continued to alternate between rage and despair but Hugh, admirable as ever, said that he was becoming philosophical. Apparently Harold’s son may come and live with us. More the merrier, says I. In the evening, Harold says: ‘In spite of all the grievousness, and it may sound like a woman’s magazine, but with you I have found happiness.’ It is a lovely note to end the week on in spite of everything.
29 June
Worked a little on Charles II: therapy! Told Hugh about Harold’s early life and he seemed rather interested in his detached way.
30 June
Took Harold to dinner with Peter Eyre. Peter said afterwards: ‘He’s very deep – but then I thought, that’s not surprising, considering all the plays.’
3–6 July
Harold’s son Daniel joined his father at Grosvenor House. I met him for the first time: slender, gangly, gym shoes and denim jacket brigade. But he courteously lent that jacket to me to protect me against the night air outside Morton’s. Face dreamily handsome inside its curly hair. Very clever.
Harold and I sit in two deckchairs in Green Park. Later in the bar at the Washington, we found that Arthur Ashe had won Wimbledon: well, that was good news, and Harold told me that the smile had come back to my face.
Dinner with Penelope, Jonathan Aitken’s ever-glamorous mother. Jonathan to me: ‘Why are you here alone? Oh, I’ve worked it out. Sunday night. Cricket night.’ He was of course quite right.
7–12 July
In Oxford at the Randolph Hotel, in a large Gothic room over the front porch. I pattered about various rooms in the dark small hours. Harold went to the theatre to see Otherwise Engaged in its pre-West End run and had supper with the cast. I felt very content after the alarums of the week before except one night when I waited for him until three, reading Anna Karenina and got in a stew – not perhaps the best choice of reading in my situation. I liked Simon Gray particularly and thought I would like to know him better, if it came about. Harold pleased me by saying he was looking forward to living with a writer, not an actress, because first nights had been such a strain, the play and the leading lady competing for attention. I had previously felt that by not being an actress, particularly not a famous one like Vivien, I was lacking something. I had not seen the other side of the coin. There was a party on the last night and I was proud to be on Harold’s arm.
22 July
Harold is now living in Donald Pleasence’s house in Strand-on-the-Green and we have rented a house in Launceston Place for the future.
26 & 27 July
These dog days, the dog days of the end of my marriage, are a most strange experience of heat and night and telephone calls and frenzy – and also words of love.
I didn’t write my diary again (unusually) until 5 August when I arrived in Scotland to be with the children. Otherwise Engaged was now in preview in the West End. In the meantime Vivien filed her petition.
28 July
I returned home from a drink with Harold to find some young men in shirts fooling about, vaguely in front of Campden Hill Square. It was an incredibly hot night. Paid the taxi inside the cab, for some prescient reason. Noticed drawing-room curtains drawn. Odd. Got out. Young man turned revealing camera on his hip. Back into the taxi fast and away. Where? They banged on the back of the taxi, shouting to get me to look up. Got back into Campden Hill Square by the back way. Went for the night to Diana Phipps, a true friend, in Elgin Crescent. Harold joined me. It turned out that Vivien had talked