Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [14]
24 August
Strange and pleasing day at Iver with the Johnsons. Harold dropped me there on his way to cricket. I thought Paul might be very disapproving. He was on the contrary extremely warm to me, as one who had had a hard time. Marigold and I went to watch Harold at his cricket, first time for me, seeing Harold play. Luckily for me, my father was a cricket enthusiast, one who knew Wisden by heart as a boy, so I knew the rules. We minced towards the field, fearing to be discovered watching the wrong match. Harold came towards us, looking very dashing and jolly. Then we watched resolutely. One run and not out! Well, it could be a lot worse.
27 August
My forty-third birthday. I’m in the aeroplane returning from Scotland where I went on a freezing sea picnic at Rosemarkie with the children, and afterwards hosted some agreeable charades. Hugh and I talked about money – frankly, we’re both broke.
28 August
The birthday ended arriving at Launceston Place and finding the flashes of press photographers. Harold drew me in and gave me a wonderful necklace of coloured stones. He hovered nervously as I opened it: ‘You can change it.’ We went defiantly out to dinner. Harold suddenly very angry to photographers: ‘Why don’t you fuck off?’ I bowed my head and recited my mantra in such circumstances: ‘Oh God our help in ages past/Our hope for years to come.’ The next day the photographs were on the front page of a tabloid. The necklace looked pretty. But – when people are being maimed by bombs in pubs and the world teeters economically – does a dinner date really rate such a billing?
29 August
Went to No Man’s Land … Supper with the two knights (Gielgud and Richardson). Both very courtly towards me. Richardson discussed Pepys and Gielgud discussed Shaw’s Good King Charles’s Golden Day, both with regard to my future biography of Charles II. Harold’s son Daniel, who has chosen to live with us, is silent but pleasant company.
6 September
Maurice Jarre, composer for The Last Tycoon, came round and played a haunting tune to Harold’s lyric. Even I could pick it up! Must be a hit. (To think he composed Lara’s Song for Dr Zhivago.) Dinner at Donald Pleasence’s. Last time I went to that house what tensions were in our lives. Sense of calm is overcoming us both. Looked at Harold in the garden and he did indeed look very calm. Then some American children started shrieking next door, closely followed by an electric saw the other side … Things changed.
8 September
Heinemann’s lunch for Tony Powell’s twelfth volume of A Dance to the Music of Time. Sat next to Tony who had Jilly Cooper, blonde and lissom, on his other side. As the star guest (Tony adored her), she had begun on his right, but he had switched us over. ‘When the Revolution comes, let it come. But at my lunch things will be done properly.’ Being an earl’s daughter, like Violet, I had to be on the right. Tony made a brilliant short speech in honour of his editor Roland Gant, perfectly worked out and ending: ‘how they brought the good news from Aix to GANT’. Harold couldn’t come but I wondered what his placement would have been. Although Tony had this historian’s love of social hierarchy, his real respect, I noted, was always reserved for artists.
15 September
Grace Dudley came to Launceston Place for tea. Made me laugh with a touch of her endearing grandeur: ‘And of course we do over the house at once.’ ‘But, Grace, we have only rented it for six months.’ She loved Harold, who is of course very much the same type as Bob Silvers.
Things got a little better with Hugh going away for several days on political business, so that life was able to continue more or less serenely on the domestic front.
19 September
Our dog Figaro arrived: he actually woke Harold with his friendly damp nose but Harold took it well. Joan Bakewell (with whom, Harold told me, he had had an affair some years before) came to dinner with her new long-haired,