Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [132]
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediment. Love is not love,
Which alters when it alteration finds
The truest lines on love that Shakespeare ever wrote, and I have always thought absolutely appropriate to us in these last years.
16 December
Our pre-Christmas lunch (for those with whom we wouldn’t spend Christmas) was notable for Harold presenting the grandchildren with £50 notes, to mark the British Library’s completion of the purchase of his archives. I was about to say: from his lottery winnings, which in one sense he has. I watched these delightful kids waving their £50 notes at him as they sat at the table and he came in on his stick, slowly but benevolently. The notes seemed almost as bright as Atalanta Fitzgerald’s beautiful Botticelli-like face. In the meantime the adults, who immediately felt like children themselves – but not children getting £50 notes – looked on disgruntled. ‘Don’t touch!’ I cried to them. To the children: ‘Don’t listen to any parental schemes for keeping your money safe.’
31 December
New Year’s Eve. Dinner with Simon and Victoria Gray at the Café Anglais. How many New Years have we seen in à quatre? This year however we parted before midnight.
Harold’s friendship with Simon was precious to him and had already lasted over thirty-five years since he directed Butley with Alan Bates; altogether he directed nine of his stage plays, as well as for television and the film of Butley. Simon was one of the people in the world Harold really loved – quite apart from relishing his company as everyone did who knew him, famously ‘our funniest friend’. As in any long and deeply affectionate association there were transient disagreements, as when Harold objected to Simon mocking his political views as he saw it, in a TV play (I begged Harold not to take umbrage but was ignored, which left Victoria and me to mutter, ‘The men, God bless them …’, our separate friendship unaffected). It is therefore good to record that in this coming summer, which was to be the last summer of their lives, they were closer than ever. Our last image of Simon was a photograph taken in the box Harold took that year at Lord’s, smiling, a jest on his lips. Victoria was at his side smiling too.
2008
15 January
The Granta party at the Twentieth-Century Theatre, in Westbourne Grove. We talk to Ian McEwan and Martin Amis. We have to leave, so I address them: ‘Could you giants of modern literature help Harold down the stairs?’ Harold will have none if it. ‘Out of my way, giants of modern literature,’ he commands – and plunges forward. It’s all right. He manages to stay upright. Symbolic or what? Harold refuses the support of the young lions.
20 January
We’ve been invited to Sunday lunch at Chequers by Gordon and Sarah Brown: this is because I met Sarah Brown at a ladies lunch and we discussed the Chequers portraits which I had reproduced in my biography Cromwell. At lunch Harold volunteered: ‘I have decided I will not go to Chequers. If I went, I might ask about Guantanamo Bay, also a case of schoolgirls arrested on an American base in Gloucestershire (I hadn’t heard about this). I might embarrass you.’ Me, taking a deep breath: ‘You could never embarrass me, but you might upset me.’ Harold, sweetly: ‘I don’t trust myself.’ And as I very much want to go, I decide hastily not to argue the point any further. After all, I needn’t feel any guilt at leaving him. God bless Harold!
Thereafter Harold’s various visits to hospitals for various procedures, were interleaved with the opening of The Lover and The Collection. I console myself by obsessing over the American election, the Democratic contest,