Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [121]
Thus dawned the most exciting day of my life: with Harold, scarcely able to walk, heavily dependent on a stick, with a white patch over one eye and a sailor’s cap lying on the hall table.
13 October
What happened was this: we both felt awful at breakfast, Harold from coughing without intermission all night, me from listening to him. I went up to the Eyrie and assembled notes re the Gunpowder Plot. Then I chatted to a friend about Dublin. About eleven thirty, Linda came in and said the odd words: ‘Could you clear the line? Harold has something urgent he wants to tell you.’ Somewhat crustily I did so. Now it was Harold who was engaged: I thought he might clear his line. Finally he buzzed me: ‘I seem to have won the Nobel Prize.’
I think I cried out: ‘I don’t believe it!’ Anyway, that was what we kept saying the whole day and night thereafter: ‘I can’t believe it!’ ‘I don’t believe it!’ ‘I can’t take it in!’ So many tears recently, of joy (Gate Theatre), fear (Dublin Casualty) and now joy again. Suggested some champagne – it was 11.50 a.m., very early, but why not? – while we watched TV. Idiotically, I added: ‘To see if it’s true.’ Actually the noon news was a long story about sick poultry and it wasn’t until one o’clock that I actually saw Harold on TV.
In the meantime our two telephone lines became like mad hissing snakes. The world started to ring and bang on our door. Actual banging. Harold went out on the steps at 1.30 p.m., with his stick and wearing the cap: thank heaven for the cap, nautical in aspect, which looked great and made Harold have the air of a cheerful old salt, despite the white bandage. What a fortunate prophetic search that was! Sitting in the drawing room I heard some chuckles, so evidently Harold on the steps was in good if somewhat dazed form. Then the US woke up and Damian (in Mexico) said that while he was talking to me, he had twenty-seven messages on his BlackBerry; Natasha said she had thirty in Paris. The senior grandchild, Stella, at Yale, telephoned later to say that she had just gone walking round the University with a smile on her face, letting everyone congratulate her. I even managed to get to Bush House to talk about the Gunpowder Plot although I have absolutely no memory of what I said, I suspect I just babbled on about Harold.
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It may sound odd in retrospect but it is true that neither of us had ever remotely thought that Harold would win the Nobel Prize. Occasionally people had politely suggested it, and I had always given Harold’s politics as the reason why he would never win. And I meant it. That very morning we had casually hoped that our friend Orhan Pamuk, he who had escorted Harold and Arthur all those years ago, would win, to help him in his current troubles with the Turkish authorities. Harold now learned that a Nobel Prize transforms your life forever: in his opinion entirely for the better. His plays entered the stratosphere of productions. Equally dear to his heart was the fact that he would now have a political forum in his Nobel Speech.
14 October
We are living in a house full of flowers. Harold’s pronouncement on the subject of his speech: ‘It will be wise, lucid, sane and tolerant.’ He reported that he then immediately lost his rag with a foreign TV interviewer who asked him why he wrote in dialogue, also why he thinks human rights are important.
16 October
The whole Nobel experience has sapped Harold’s physical strength and he has only a month to write his speech. Me: ‘Please don’t forget dear old literature altogether.’ Harold: ‘No, I am thinking of the double theme of literature and then politics in literature.’ I was even congratulated at the communion rails by Father Isidore at Mass on Sunday. I muttered ‘Amen’ automatically. Among messages of congratulations was one from my brother Thomas: ‘Ten thousand feet up