Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [115]
3 November
Too depressed to write.
The results of the American election when Bush was re-elected was the reason for my depression.
15 November
Depression continued. Didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, on the whole I laughed when a huge parcel of my own books arrived from the US. No message. I assumed they were for signing but sent a message to enquire: ‘To whom should they be dedicated?’ Answer came back: ‘They are not for signing. I have sent them out of disgust at Antonia Fraser’s anti-Bush letter in the Guardian. I no longer want to possess them.’ Had to repress an instinct to respond: ‘Why don’t you give the huge postage money to the Children of Iraq? And bin the books.’ Resisted the temptation. Nevertheless I decided that I don’t mind being attacked in a good cause; I don’t positively enjoy it as Harold does, but after all my piece did contain the words: ‘I am Philamerican since WWII when we children knew the American soldiers had come to save us.’ Before denouncing Bush.
25 November
Feast of St Catherine. Decided the date was propitious to start writing Love and Louis XIV. I’m full of anxiety however. Can I bring it off? Wrote three pages of which only the first sentence pleased me. Harold suffering from diminished energies as he admits. He spends a lot of the day just sitting, not even reading. Worrying.
2 December
Everything is better. Michael Caine sends a message that he loves the Sleuth script. And I get positive messages from Sofia Coppola. She’s still on track to make Marie Antoinette.
24 December
Met Harold at Le Colombier. He’s clear of cancer and the leukaemia hasn’t moved. It’s wondrous.
Christmas Day
The youngest guest was Honor Fitzgerald aged nine and a half. As we were without babies, I seized the opportunity to have a proper poetry reading at lunch and No Speeches! Edward, who is a famous orator, did not like the ban. He said mutinously: ‘I can start my poem with a long dedication, you can’t stop me.’ Harold read from his favourite Gilgamesh as the theme was feasting. I read the passage from ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ when Porphyro pops out of the closet and lays out a feast for the sleeping Madeline.
26 December
The 9 a.m. news tells of a vast underwater earthquake, the fifth biggest since 1900, killing thousands with tidal waves all round the rim of Asia and the Far East. Apparently it’s called a tsunami. As I sometimes observe to Harold, even man cannot match God in destruction when he sees fit.
Chapter Eighteen
WORST OF TIMES, BEST OF TIMES
The dawn of 2005 found Harold in rather frail health for no particular reason since he had been found free of cancer comparatively recently and the leukaemia was quiescent. The Great Fear was therefore more like a figure at a carnival, masked and in the doorway; you’re not quite sure who it is. Death, no, it can’t be … but it’s definitely something menacing. But it all got much worse. Altogether 2005 was the most extraordinary year of our lives together, leaving aside our meeting and all that followed, thirty years earlier. I might quote Dickens at the opening of A Tale of Two Cities by the time we reached the end of it: ‘The best of times, the worst of times’. Except that I think I would phrase the same words rather differently. Thus: it was the worst of times – and also by the way the best of times.
10 January
Barbados. Torrential rain. (This would turn out to be our last visit and it was, alas, dismal.) Harold developed a painful chest and heavy cough: he was tested for lung cancer on return which required hospitalization; mercifully that was one thing he did not have. My knee, following an operation the previous year, was extremely painful so I could not swim in my beloved sea, and hardly exercise