Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [134]
While we were at Westbrook House enjoying our Dorset holiday in the pleasant house with the pond and ducks, the tragedy occurred which plunged Harold into a profound depression that I believe never quite lifted till the end of his life. The telephone rang and it was Victoria Gray telling me the news that Simon had died, in a small sad voice of total disbelief. I had to go upstairs and break the news to Harold, who crumpled before my eyes. He said he had a premonition when he saw my face. He put his head in his hands and wept.
With someone like Harold, it is impossible to divide off the reactions of the body to those of the mind: with hindsight, the liver cancer which was diagnosed in October (but not present in May) may have been developing at exactly that moment. But certainly Harold went into a state of depression, expressed in virtual lack of mobility, which never lifted except briefly in the next months. He struggled to read Eliot at Simon’s funeral, helped up the steps to the pulpit by Matthew Burton. (I had been quite unsure that he would manage it.) And we gave the wake following the funeral in our house. It was after that that Harold gave me exact instructions about his own burial, sitting in his chair, who was to read what, the privacy of the event which he wanted. I think Harold was contemplating his own mortality from the moment of Simon’s death onwards in a way he had never quite done for seven years of illness because the need for courage and endurance did not encourage reflection. I told Harold this: ‘Death kept coming to grab you and you eluded him.’
One of the gleams of happiness occurred when I persuaded Harold that he was needed to go to Dublin for the opening of No Man’s Land because it was not jollity but a ‘professional engagement–your advice is wanted’. He felt better after this decision – and we won the Test Match with a six! So we went. Harold adored the production with Michael Gambon, David Bradley, Nick Dunning and David Walliams; this great play about age and memory – and death and drink – was the last play he actually saw. And we had an idyllic spree, Celtic, which covered my birthday. (A 1913 volume of Yeats, green with golden embellishments, was my present from Harold to chime with a Yeats exhibition at the National Library of Ireland.) We both enjoyed a state of elegiac happiness for a few days including a visit to a restaurant perfectly entitled (for me) Aqua, surrounded on three sides by water, for my birthday lunch.
At the end of the first night of No Man’s Land, Michael Gambon gestured from the stage to Harold and he managed to stand up. The whole audience then stood up and clapped. Harold looked very genial, in Edward Fitzgerald’s favourite word. But he was visibly moved.
7 October
Fabulous opening night of No Man’s Land at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London. We began by sitting in a box together, for ease of access for Harold, but in order to spy Gambon’s second act entrance, that extraordinary sprightly tread which takes one by surprise after the weakness of his gait and the falls in the first act, I moved to an empty seat in the dress circle. Peter Stothard told me that the reason it was empty was because a big financial man had arrived and been rushed away to deal with the latest crisis in the City: ‘a vast aboriginal calamity’ to quote the line from the play when the financial adviser fails to arrive. Of course in the autumn of 2008 that line got a big laugh: whereas in 1975 like most of the rest of the play it had been received in dead silence.
3 November
Arrive on foot at Essenza to find Harold sitting looking wan. I sat opposite to him, then