Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [136]
I did not guess that the real answer was ‘days’. At the time I told myself there would be lots and lots of months. All the same I hated the very word ‘months’. Dr Westaby kindly said there was no point Harold stopping drinking. He also told Harold that seven years ago, he never expected him to be alive for so long. I noticed that Harold left down the stairs, however, with more agility than when he had arrived. I said: ‘I know just what you are going to do when we get home.’ And sure enough Harold instructed me to fetch a bottle of champagne from the cellar and sat sipping: ‘Oh, the enjoyment of this glass! I had forgotten how absolutely lovely champagne was.’
That was Wednesday. On the last Sunday, we had lunch at Scott’s, along with the Billingtons and Honor Fitzgerald, aged thirteen, whose parents were away celebrating their wedding anniversary. Harold was convivial although possibly, with hindsight, beginning to be a little confused. We watched a DVD of The Reader that night and Harold admired David Hare’s screenplay and Kate Winslett’s vigorous, intelligent acting at length. But he refused to eat.
The next morning, Monday 22 December at about seven o’clock in the morning he collapsed. I contacted Dr Westaby and he was taken by ambulance to the Hammersmith Hospital. All round us, as we left, were the preparations for a family Christmas lunch. There was the Christmas tree in the window, and a pile of presents underneath it. In the square people were already getting their houses ready for the traditional Christmas Eve ritual of candles in all the windows. (When I returned home, the square would be in darkness except for flickering candlelight which seemed to be a salutation to Harold.) The ambulance took us through streets full of cheerful, busy people shopping urgently, holding parcels and children by the hand.
Harold to me as he lay waiting for a bed: ‘What are your plans,’ pause, ‘generally?’ It was our last real conversation. I replied: ‘First of all I’m going to have wonderful support from family and friends, but by the way, you’re not dead yet. Secondly, I’m going to pop home for a short while to preside over Christmas lunch.’ The last word I heard him say was ‘the key’. It seemed to be a question.
By the evening, and all the next day, he was unconscious, lying in a room which looked high over West London facing a clock tower as in some Oxford college.
Wednesday 24 December
Harold was very calm and still. I thought of Rilke’s ‘The Poet’s Death’, ‘his mere mask, timidly dying there, tender and open’. In the late morning all the grandchildren who were in England came to visit him and give him a last kiss. Their ages ranged from twenty-one to eight, all shapes and sizes. The scene was like a Victorian painting called ‘Farewell to a Grandfather’. The last to leave the room was Simon Soros, who bent and kissed Harold’s hand. That night he began to write a kind of reggae poem on the subject: with the title ‘Grandpa Harold’. It was exactly what this grandfather, to whom these children had brought so much pleasure, would have liked.
About twenty past seven I was sitting reading Tolstoy’s Resurrection by Harold’s bedside. He was breathing but with a strong rattling sound. The nurses were outside. The children and grandchildren had dispersed for Christmas. I was alone in the room. I was happy like that. Suddenly the rattling stopped. Harold opened his black eyes very wide, almost staring, although he didn’t respond when I spoke to him as before: ‘It’s me, Antonia, who loves you.’ Then he went quite tense, his whole body. Finally he went still