Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [15]
23 September
Felt a little impatient with Pat Naipaul at lunch although I hope I didn’t show it. Not quite strong enough for lame ducks at present. I suppose it’s because I’m a bit of a lame duck. Then I felt ashamed of myself.
26 September
Lunch with Antonia Byatt. We discussed The White Devil, God and The Good. That’s what she’s like. I love her company. In the evening Harold and his son read Hemingway: the half of Harold which is not Beckett is Hemingway.
29 September
A most unpleasant experience. A flurry of calls to me at Launceston Place about a flat which was apparently for rent by one Mrs A. Fraser. Details were correct. Thought it must be a misprint and got on to Classified. But it wasn’t. An enemy hath done this. The Editor Charles Wintour, sweet and sympathetic, had it taken out at once. But such Malice from Unknown Persons is upsetting.
30 September
Dinner with A.J.P. Taylor who had sent me a sweet letter congratulating me on ‘capturing the foremost playwright of the age’. This was both funny and welcome at a time when nobody much was congratulating me on anything (I knew him originally from my childhood in Oxford where he was a don: he had always been kind about my historical efforts). The hostess turned out to be his first wife – he has gone back to her having been abandoned by his second. Filthy North Oxford food: Dutch gin to drink. Harold quite amazed by it all.
5 October
Visit to Natasha at my old school, St Mary’s Ascot. Sister Bridget (my old teacher) hugs me. ‘Don’t do anything desperate. Remember everything passes away.’ I’ve got the most ghastly cold: so I say, ‘Actually I feel I shall pass away at this moment.’ I should say that the reaction of the Catholic Church has been markedly charitable and concerned for the children in the right kind of way.
10 October
Harold’s birthday: I gave him Imperial Cricket bound in white vellum for which I had advertised. ‘£95,’ said Harold, looking inside. ‘I hope it doesn’t cost that nowadays.’ Silence. It had actually.
11 October
Stayed in Brighton. Harold went over to Hove to see his parents. I fell asleep. He came back with charming photographs of his parents in youth, his mother with the same dark sloe-eyes and his father looking quite a card.
14 October
John and Miriam Gross came to dinner to watch a Simon Gray play on TV. They make a most agreeable pair: you can’t actually say ‘with his brains and her beauty’ because Miriam is also very clever.
18–21 October
In Paris to discuss possible Proust film with the director Joseph Losey. Joe: heavy, silvered, ageing but still handsome. He had drunk a good deal of vodka, and addressed me in the light of his Communist past: ‘I don’t generally like your sort, but I like you.’ He said it several times and was prone to repeat it whenever we met. In spite of – or perhaps because of – this, I felt enduring affection for him. Patricia, small-faced and very pretty in a little green hat, a very sympathetic character. A strike prevented us leaving. We couldn’t get a further night in L’Hotel where we had been staying. We sat hopelessly like refugees while fashion figures and their vast dogs gambolled about the red velvet lounge. In the end we were put up in the private apartment of the owner of L’Hotel whose name we never knew. A young man in a white suit accompanied by a white Alsatian, also anonymous, took us there. Harold sat up talking, I went to sleep. Bizarre but friendly episode, including strangers and territory, rather Pinteresque.
23 October
I didn’t sleep, very rare, and took a Mogadon. Made coffee at about 8.40 a.m., very late for me. At 9 a.m. the telephone rang. Jean, our au pair, who had dropped my youngest son Orlando at school, was crying: ‘There’s been a bomb at Campden Hill Square’ (where she had gone to collect post). Celia Goodhart, our neighbour there, took over the telephone. ‘Jean is all right. Terribly shaken, of course. She saw the bomber place the bomb under the car.’ Harold rings Campden Hill Square on his line. He gets Caroline