Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [120]
Harold remained extremely frail and extremely tense. My Diary is one long record of his inability to eat, general suffering. But there was talk of a wonder drug. He took for the first time to using a stick (one of mine left over from my knee operations, thus decorated with perky green hearts – which he removed). Also got Carter’s the builders to make a wooden banister outside our front steps. Harold’s feet began to swell, thanks to the steroids, and his voice became extremely croaky.
1 October
Harold managed to come and join Sofia Coppola and me at dinner at Le Caprice (to his annoyance she managed to pay the bill, which he was determined to do, by slipping deftly away and doing it unannounced). Harold feels the great charm she radiates too: ‘a really nice person’. Partly it’s the gentleness, the good manners with which she arms herself, perhaps, as the daughter of a genius. The editing of Marie Antoinette is going well. Sofia loves the ‘Must you go?’ story of when we first met, which Harold told her. Wishes she could get it into Marie Antoinette. Me: ‘Maybe you can use it in your new vampire movie?’
Despite the swollen feet of a mummy (oh my God! the shoe problem), Harold gallantly said he would ‘somehow’ get to Dublin for a Pinter Festival to celebrate his seventy-fifth birthday. ‘Somehow’ turned out to be a private plane, since by now he could scarcely walk and had many medical problems arising from his many medicines. He arrived totally exhausted but ‘I made it’ as we used to say about our various holiday travels in the past. He was rewarded by a production of Old Times at the Gate Theatre, as good as this great play gets, with the utter truthfulness of Janie Dee to commend it, last seen in Betrayal. Then there was Penelope Wilton and Derek Jacobi in Family Voices.
Lastly there was an extraordinary triumph of affection – no other word will do–when Celebration was performed by actors who had flown in, literally, from all over the world including Jeremy Irons and Michael Gambon (from Europe and LA respectively) and Stephen Rea (from New York). But tears rushed into my eyes when Harold actually managed to get on stage for the second act, all in black, looking very noble with his stick. He seemed suddenly so frail, by which I really mean old, I suppose, albeit very, very distinguished. I thought of the dynamo, the energetic man in his forties of 1975. Then in a strong voice, miked but very clear, stronger than it has been for months, he referred to 1975, our thirty years together, and read ‘Paris’, the first poem he ever wrote to me. Then the tears really did flow and I had to jump up and stand by the side and applaud strongly to still my palpitations of pride and pleasure. Later, at the party, lots of wives told me they wished that poem had been written to them. All referred to the line: ‘She dances in my life.’
10 October
Harold’s seventy-fifth birthday. Fêted day, then fated. As Harold was walking up the steps to the VIP lounge at Dublin Airport, plus stick, he slipped. I heard a scream behind me. Harold’s whole face dripping blood, down to his shoes. It was a huge gash which ultimately needed nine stitches. So it was off to Casualty in an ambulance. As I filled in the forms, about fifty times, each official said: ‘But it’s his birthday today!’ Desperately, I thought of giving a false date of birth but realized that the whole system would then grind to a halt.
12 October
Back in London, Harold recovered very slowly and I was punch-drunk with the shock of seeing it all. To calm my nerves, in the evening I tried out Harold’s denim umpire’s cap on him, to distract from the enormous white patch; having originally constructed a black patch out of the tail of a black silk shirt, which looked even worse. In the meantime I hastily reread my book The Gunpowder Plot in order to do a dialogue with Jim Naughtie