Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [125]
This was a plan for Harold to play in Beckett’s masterpiece of a monologue at the Royal Court, directed by Ian Rickson. Over the next six months, it became, for me, a touchstone for Harold’s health, his real survival. When he felt up for it, I was encouraged, when not, cast down. And so it went on.
9 April
Harold spoke to me very tenderly and sweetly last thing at night (recently he’s been going to sleep so early that we haven’t talked). He thanked me as though he had thought the words out very carefully, for all the devotion, practical and otherwise, I had shown to him. Me: ‘You would have done exactly the same for me.’ Which is absolutely true. All this in view of the coming visit to hospital in order to deal with the ulcer on his leg, the latest extremely painful ordeal.
14 April
Good Friday. And a fine penitential day. I walked into Harold’s room at the Cromwell Hospital, ready to collect him and take him home after a five-day stay. I saw the dark head in bed with the sheet more or less over it. Luckily it wasn’t Harold dead: I had simply got the wrong room.
5 May
Harold’s pain is worse. Nice doctor with an Indian name admits that it is rare for an ulcer to last five months. You can see the pain breaking over him in waves and he gives an involuntary groan. I can hardly bear to write about this latest martyrdom, for that is what it is, which has lasted nearly a year, since last July.
However Harold did come with me to Paris in late May where the French translation of Marie Antoinette was launched to coincide with Sofia Coppola’s film. He spent most of his time holed up in our suite at the Hotel Meurice while I raced round Paris giving live interviews in French, of which I hope never to see a recording. But he came: and that was wonderfully loyal after the virtual twelve months of illness. Heroically he even made the lunch given for me at the British Embassy, to honour Marie Antoinette the book. Harold put on a tie and suit for the first time for – I don’t know how long. The Embassy chef produced a magnificent cake, of the sort she never told the people to eat, in the shape of the Queen herself. Big pink skirts, high powdered coiffure, which I did not dare put a spoon into. Lots of ambassadorial jokes: ‘Go on, lift the skirt of Marie Antoinette.’ Later, in the Dark Bar, we had our now familiar argument about History. Harold’s position: ‘Things are getting worse and worse all the time’ versus mine: ‘Some things are getting better for some people some of the time.’ Gut feeling versus the study of history. Jewish despair versus Catholic – what?
While he was in Paris, and in the Dark Bar, Harold wrote a little piece called Apart from That. It was triggered by his dislike of listening to inanities as people gossiped into their mobiles in restaurants. He decided to read it at a poetry reading held to raise money for the Patrick Pakenham Scholarships for young ex-offenders (my brother, a barrister, had recently died of leukaemia), part of the Longford Trust in memory of my father, which had also funded an annual lecture. It was a two-hander: Harold was looking for a partner and I put myself forward.
9 May
Rehearsed Apart from That with Harold, and contested one of his comments. Harold: ‘I am the Director here.’ Me: ‘I am the Assistant Director.’ Still, I think I won’t give up the Day Job. My new project – Queen Elizabeth I – is beginning to obsess me because if you don’t have another book on the go whenever a new book comes out, criticism can be awfully painful and stultifying. But a new book, especially with all the crises of Harold’s health, gives one a separate dimension of hope.
11 May
The poetry reading. Harold, Benjie and Grey Gowrie: ‘Three strong voices,’ said Harold later. Matthew Burton read Harold’s own poems superbly and I love all Grey’s poems about heart surgery. Apart from That was announced by Orlando as Master of Ceremonies, as ‘my mother’s professional debut’.
It was not until late June that Harold told me that the Evil Ulcer was receding and we began to envisage a world without