Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [2]
8 January 1975
A very enjoyable dinner party at Rachel and Kevin’s house in Addison Avenue: a long and convivial table. I was slightly disappointed not to sit next to the playwright who looked full of energy, with black curly hair and pointed ears, like a satyr. Gradually the guests filtered away. My neighbours Richard and Viv King offered me a lift up the road. ‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘I must just say goodbye to Harold Pinter and tell him I enjoyed the play; I haven’t said hello all evening.’ They waited at the door. I went over to where Harold was sitting. ‘Wonderful play, marvellous acting, now I’m off.’
He looked at me with those amazing, extremely bright black eyes. ‘Must you go?’ he said. I thought of home, my lift, taking the children to school the next morning, the exhausting past night in the sleeper from Scotland, my projected biography of King Charles II … ‘No, it’s not absolutely essential,’ I said.
About 2.30 in the morning, poor Rachel and Kevin were visibly exhausted, and we were the last guests. In the end, it was Harold who gave me a lift home, in a white car with a driver (he never drove at night having once been found ‘weaving’ in Regent’s Park). I offered him coffee. I actually gave him champagne. He stayed until six o’clock in the morning with extraordinary recklessness, but of course the real recklessness was mine.
We sometimes speculated later what would have happened if I had in fact answered: ‘Yes, I really must go.’ Harold, convinced by then that I was his destiny, would gallantly reply: ‘I would have found you somehow.’ But we had few friends in common: Edna O’Brien was one, and the producer Sam Spiegel another. But fundamentally we lived in different worlds. The night of 8/9 January was the chance and our chance.
Subsequently the tabloids made much of our different backgrounds, the working-class Jewish boy from the East End and the Catholic aristocrat with her title. But we were, in our early forties, a long way from our backgrounds and, as usual with the tabloids, these descriptions were more for headlines than accuracy. Although Harold was technically born into the working class – his father worked in a tailoring factory – ever since the success of The Caretaker in 1960 he had been extremely well-off by most standards: he was able, for example, to retire his father, worn-out with his labours, to salubrious Hove where his parents would live happily for another thirty years.
Again technically, since my father was an earl and my mother a countess, I could be argued to be an aristocrat. But my father, born Frank Pakenham, only succeeded to the Earldom of Longford when I was nearly thirty; my childhood was spent in a modest North Oxford house, my father, with no private income, teaching at the University. My mother, being a Harley Street doctor’s daughter, was in any case convinced (and thus convinced us) that the middle classes were the salt of the earth whereas the aristocracy was feckless, unpunctual and extravagant, an assumption that our beloved father’s attitude to life did nothing to discourage. I had no inherited money myself, and had earned my own living since the age of twenty-one, first working for a publisher and, after marriage, by journalism and books.
After the publication of Mary Queen of Scots, an unexpected bestseller in 1969, I found that for the first time in my life I had money to spend. Most of it went on the delightful task of renovating Eilean Aigas, our house in the Highlands on an island in the River Beauly, which gave the impression of being untouched since the ’45 rebellion. Our finances had been so perilous before this, since Hugh was entirely dependent on the then modest salary of an MP, that he had actually sold the house to a cousin by the previous Christmas – providentially the cousin’s finances proved to be equally perilous and he reneged on the deal just in time for my windfall. To give only one example, I put in a heated open-air swimming pool round which the New Year celebrations regularly made the welkin ring.