Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [123]
9 November
Harold was declared ‘out of danger’ and sent for a yellow pad. Harold: ‘Those are good words to hear about oneself, “out of danger”.’ I wondered to myself: will Harold ever be out of danger?
25 November
Harold has a very painful infection in his poor swollen leg. Just when you think things can get no worse, at 2 a.m. I was aware that Harold was falling. Then he cried out. The next half-hour passed with two adults, seventy plus, struggling with numerous bits of equally unfit bedroom furniture to raise one of them back up. Judy Daish and Gordon, the blessed pair, came round instantly when summoned at 3 a.m. and even Big Gordon had a problem getting Harold up. So Harold went back to the Marsden in a wheelchair.
Sleepless and exhausted, I had to go and see a rough cut of Marie Antoinette which Sofia had brought from California, on her way to Paris to show me. Oh my God, I thought, I shall fall fast asleep in a warm dark private cinema and there is no way I can ever, ever explain that. So I rushed into the Covent Garden Hotel and drank two of the strongest coffees I could find: I was buzzing.
Then came the rock music. I had written in my Diary on this subject when I visited the set at Versailles, recording my puzzling conversation with Richard Beggs, the Sound Designer.
17 May
Richard wonders whether the sound of an aeroplane which drove the sound men mad might not be incorporated into the film as a token. Token of what? I don’t get this at all. But not at all. Even odder is his reference to Rock’n’Roll when I ask him about the music. I had expected him to say Gluck, Mozart, that sort of thing – the music to which I used to listen when I researched and wrote the book. He obviously can’t literally mean Rock’n’Roll. I expect the phrase has another meaning which I am not cool enough to know. I must ask Natasha.
Now I realized that Rock’n’Roll was no code … the first blast of it nearly made me jump out of my comfortable chair in the viewing theatre at the chic Covent Garden Hotel. Although I got to love it in the wild party scene. (In the end the music was Rameau’n’Rock’n’Roll, leading to some highly original music credits.) In March, in another chic viewing theatre at the Charlotte Street Hotel, Harold also nearly jumped out of his chair at the first blast before settling down to enjoy it.
And I adored it, the whole concept, Sofia’s notion of the young girl at a loss in an alien world of hostile grandeur.
27 November
Just spoke to Harold. I am in bed and so for that matter is he. Although not beside me. It is our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. There is no doubt at all that our marriage is very, very, very … to the infinite degree happy beyond all possible expectations. It takes something like these last months to realize the depth of love (on both sides).
Chapter Nineteen
FORTITUDE
3 December 2005
Harold said: ‘I could as easily get to Stockholm as I could climb the Andes.’ He talked to Michael Kustow about going in a private ambulance to a studio and recording his speech here. Both Mike and David Hare – who will introduce it on television – think the speech is wonderful.
4 December
Harold was so amazing yesterday. In an ambulance – which took one hour from SW3 to SW1 but luckily he did not notice – we went to the Channel 4 studios. Harold had one foot in a surgical sandal (ulcer is terribly painful) and one in a cut-down shoe. He refused to wear a tie and was right about that. In the studio, he was placed in a chair in the centre, a rug of checked pale reds over his knees. He looked frail and isolated, like Methuselah’s older brother. Yet on