Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [122]
17 October
Harold is inviting the whole family to Stockholm. He offers me a dress or rather dresses in which to beguile the King of Sweden and any other passing king. I haven’t had a ball dress for years. Kenneth Rose told me that Lady Gwendolen Cecil, biographer of her father Lord Salisbury, used up her old evening dresses by gardening in them. I may do the same.
While the excitement grew, so did the weakness. There were terrifying falls including one when Harold lay for two hours outside the door of his Super-Study and I watched television in the drawing room (I did not hear his cries and thought he was having a meeting). I shuddered. Yet he still managed on occasion to make my breakfast on Sunday morning with the mantra: ‘I am the luckiest man in the world.’ And he did a dialogue at the Royal Court with Ian Rickson in which his love of the English language and the English countryside got stressed. The shoes were a terrible problem, his poor swollen feet, until an angel in the shape of our next-door neighbour Paul Smith came to his rescue, searching London for an adequate pair and finally offering his own shoes.
28 October
Read Harold’s speech: the first draft. The beginning (Art) is brilliant, Harold at his best, writing like quicksilver. The middle is the usual stuff, all perfectly legitimate but familiar, and then it becomes Harold again. Very funny, offering to be President Bush’s speech-writer. When asked, my main comment was that the synthesis was a bit spare. Harold rushed away and was last seen scribbling furiously, whether he accepted my suggestions or not.
Harold had numerous tests with a view to being helped by the wonder drug so as not to depend on steroids for too long. Damian arrived in London from Mexico and I asked him to be candid as to how he found Harold. Damian: ‘If I hadn’t been prepared by seeing the Nobel pictures when he was so terribly frail, I would have been shocked.’
7 November
The day I delivered Love and Louis XIV (after five years’ work) was carefully chosen to be A Great Day. I am some rotten picker of Great Days. When Judy Daish rang me about six with regard to Louis, to say: ‘How exciting …’ I didn’t even know what she was talking about. For at noon Harold had said: ‘They are taking me into hospital. Now.’ A test taken on Friday had come through ‘bad’; I still don’t know what that meant. Harold told me later that he had postponed leaving for half an hour in order to finish the second draft of his Nobel Speech. We went to Chelsea & Westminster. The Great Fear was well and truly back when I thought of the poor skeleton with its hacking cough I had held in my arms that morning. And when I returned in the afternoon, Harold was palpably worse, in a state of great distress.
A number of doctors gathered round. His throat was swelling and he couldn’t breathe: there was talk of an emergency tracheotomy. The dreadful rasping breathing, the convulsions, no other word will do. Two nurses, one middle-aged white, one young black woman, were bending over Harold. Older woman as Harold rattled: ‘You hear that sound? That’s called Strydel and when you hear it, you send for everyone in the hospital.’ Much later I learned that Strydel is the Death Rattle to you and me. Dr Bunker asked me gently what I knew about Pemphigus and gave me a lot of statistics which seemed to indicate that Harold at seventy-five had a one in two chance of survival. I looked at the book on my lap which happened to be called The Terror (about the French Revolution; I’d just instinctively grabbed it when I left the house).
A terrible period for Harold ensued: he was transferred to intensive care at the Royal Marsden and by degrees the immediate danger had passed far enough away for him to be able to leave the hospital. I transformed the house into an abode for a person whose legs were too weak to do anything with them. Then at the end of November he had a bad fall in the night and I couldn’t get him up (later we learned this art from a South African