Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [16]
I am desperate to track poor Jean who must be in need of succour. I finally find her at Kensington police station. With great gallantry considering her ordeal, she is describing the death of the bomber to the police so there is an air of discreet satisfaction. Not from me. With rising horror I realize from the description that it is in fact our neighbour Gordon Hamilton-Fairley, the cancer specialist, who, alerted by his white poodle, had been poking under the car. To compound things, the press have by now surrounded Launceston Place (as well as more legitimately Campden Hill Square).
Hugh is grey in the face with shock at what has happened; he was blown backwards in his chair while drinking coffee by the blast and has just heard of our neighbour’s death. Later he makes a statement of great dignity about Hamilton-Fairley in the House of Commons, ashen but splendidly upright, chest flung out. I collected Orlando from school. All the other children were told by telephone. Flora, with her extraordinary intuition, rang up out of the blue from Florence where she was studying (she never rang up) and thus heard the news. Seeing Campden Hill Square on TV that night – it was the most beautiful autumn day – now looking wrecked and shattered, I felt the most terrible guilt for everything in the world.
There was nothing rational about the guilt. The IRA bomber was part of the so-called Balcombe Street gang who were subsequently convicted and imprisoned. The bomber had gone for Hugh, it was said later, as a hard-line Tory over Northern Ireland – which wasn’t even true: as a Catholic himself, Hugh had a lot of sympathy for the plight of the Catholics over there. Hugh however was not a member of the government and his conspicuous car in an outlying area was unprotected. As a result a noble man had died. But when is guilt ever rational?
24 October
We visited Campden Hill Square. Small, deep, round, black hole outside. Also a policeman. All the windows boarded or cellophaned. Stepped in, went upstairs, collected some of my work (I used to go there most days and stored all my work there).
30 October
The hundredth performance of Otherwise Engaged. Party on a boat given by the producer Michael Codron, who wore boating costume himself. It is a beautiful starry night. We crowd into the open poop of the boat as it slides through the canal. The star Alan Bates looks ragged but very glamorous. I was hardly in a party mood but tried to disguise it.
3 November
Harold agrees to go to an Andy Warhol party at Emma Tennant’s. Harold: ‘I’m ready for anything.’ Emma: ‘And anything is just what he will get.’ The party was fine – except we didn’t get to meet Andy Warhol.
The autumn proceeded with a lot of turbulence, including threats of further press revelations from Vivien – Me: ‘What is there left to tell?’ – plus private happiness.
18 November
Lunch with my aunt Violet Powell. She told me of the early days of Tony Powell’s reviews, especially A Buyer’s Market when they were so terrible that a lesser man might have abandoned the project (the sequence A Dance to the Music of Time). Herself at Chester Gate, up early to go to church, looking at the papers first and finding the reviews ghastly. She thought: a more religious person would have gone to church first and read the reviews afterwards. Me: ‘But at least that way you could pray for endurance.’ (Which is what I pray for these days.)
A bomb at the Walton Street restaurant. Thought of all our friends who might be there and try in vain to get news on the radio.
21 November
My father gave me lunch at Beotys, where all went well till the fatal 3 p.m. when I know he felt we had got on too well, on topics like the Irish bombers. So he insisted on trying to give me a lecture. Heated. Depressing. Pointless. Furious with Dada’s morality. All right to be unfaithful to my ‘saintly