Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [116]
11 January
It is depressing, no doubt about it, when unordained rain comes to an ordained sunshine paradise. Pools everywhere, apart from cascading and dripping water. People who should be on the beach congregate inside and play noisy card games. Me, dourly to Harold: ‘I am reminded of rainy Cornish holidays in my youth and the card games we played indoors, wet sand, our school macs over school shorts, all we had to wear.’ Only a visit to St Francis where I heard Father Michael Campbell Johnston preach an excellent practical sermon, made a difference. ‘The money collected today,’ he said, ‘will go directly to the Jesuits of Sri Lanka with whom we are already in touch: they plan to go where the political spotlight is not.’ I had just found an unexpected hoard of US dollars in an old wallet and gave them freely, guiltily, instead of buying fripperies in the hotel shop. Father Michael also talked of orphans just gazing helplessly out to sea where their parents had vanished.
I am reading Margaret Macmillan’s excellent book Peacemakers interleaved with Alice Munro’s latest – she’s the best! And Harold is reading Chekhov interleaved with Anthony Sampson on the oil companies of South Africa. Judy Daish (my dramatic agent as well as Harold’s agent and our close friend) tells me from London that Sofia Coppola intends to start shooting Marie Antoinette the movie on 7 March. In my present mood, I feel there’s many a hitch … (four years since she signed the first option). Except that I have just seen a rainbow. And I love rainbows.
All my gloomy predictions about Sofia – whom I liked and admired so much, and so did Harold whenever they met – were freely recorded in my Diary: they were wrong. She did start to shoot on 7 March, having always carried out everything that she said she would do, surely a record in the exciting, roller-coaster world of film, which normally I only knew about second-hand from Harold.
9 February
Sofia’s final script arrived. Harold read it first and pronounced it ‘brilliant, so economical’. I read it on return and thought: where people like me depend on the final gruelling scenes for evoking sympathy, she has the simple image of the sound of a guillotine falling. (Harold didn’t tell me how it ended and let it be a surprise – an extremely effective one.)
10 February
The Daily Express rings me with the news that Prince Charles and Camilla will wed. ‘Good luck to them! And the nation will heave a sigh of relief,’ I say and ring off as fast as possible. After that I don’t answer the telephone. I like my royals dead, I once flippantly said, referring to my historical works, in answer to those eternal demands for comments on this that and the other in the present royal family; then poor Princess Diana was dead and I couldn’t use it any more. Just as the telephone stopped ringing for me, it began again for Harold, more significantly for the death of Arthur Miller. Harold was extremely sad. Me: ‘You didn’t lament for Beckett though you loved him too.’ Harold: ‘Beckett wanted to move forward towards death but Arthur was full of life and wanted to stay alive.’
2 March
Ran into Ian McEwan at a party for Ishiguro’s superb, sad new novel about clones. Told him that Saturday had been a great solace to me, reading it when waiting for an operation because it’s compulsive reading and you don’t notice the hours passing. Ian’s huge owl-eyes gleam behind his glasses: ‘Was it a brain operation?’ he asks hopefully. ‘Was the surgeon drunk?’ He is referring to the climax of his book. He is definitely disappointed when the answer is a modest knee operation and a stone-cold sober surgeon.
4–6 March
We both went to the Aldeburgh Book Festival, run by an enterprising and civilized couple, Johnnie and Mary James, who own a bookshop there. There was a blizzard on the way up, but once in the hotel