Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [20]
Driven through Checkpoint Charlie by a ‘non-German’ because Germans go through another point of entry. Our non-German is half Bulgarian with a Turkish passport. Showing passports a long, chilly procedure, in and out of car. Form-filling, both sides. Cold level look given to me by passport man on the East side: I begin to wonder if I am a spy. Car prodded like a bull at a fair. East Berlin very depressing except for a spontaneous visit to the Theatre of the Berliner Ensemble (Brecht). Young man showed us round. Longed to say: ‘Dies ist der fantastisches Englander Schreiber (my pidgin German) Harold Pinter.’ Didn’t have the nerve. (In any case Harold not yet performed in East Germany: too bourgeois or something.) My visit did for me and I spent the rest of the evening in bed reading Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons while Harold went to Beckett’s own production of Waiting for Godot. Wept (over book not his absence). Harold returns, enormously impressed.
14 February
On to Hamburg, also to see No Man’s Land. Harold said publicly that he had discovered new things about his own play. Afterwards back at the Atlantic Hotel I felt a bit sleepy what with one thing and another. Not so Harold who continued to sit against the window, a dark silhouette, discussing No Man’s Land till long after I remember.
15 February
Said goodbye to Klaus Juncker with real regret. Harold thought his early-morning energy was a bit much but I said that was surely a good thing in an agent. Arrived at L’Hotel in Saint-Germain. Tiny exquisite Empire-ish furnishings. It was lovely to see Rebecca (aged eighteen, studying there) who stalked in looking very tall and beautiful, like a young Diana, in high green suede boots and black culottes to which she drew attention as being ‘very French’, although bought in Kensington High Street. ‘I’m starving,’ she said. ‘Is there any champagne?’ Dinner with the Loseys and Harold’s translator Eric Kahane.
16 February
The girls (Rebecca’s friends Chloe, Naomi and Beatrice) came to inspect the suite, led by Rebecca as cheer-leader. Harold heard her clear voice at the bottom of the stairwell: ‘Mummy’. Gave them all lunch: they ate like schoolboys. He took me for dinner at the restaurant where in May last year we had a delicate conversation about rock pools and waves sweeping us ever nearer the sea. Drinks at the British Embassy with Nicko Henderson, the Ambassador: my father’s old friend. Both Nicko and Mary Henderson very warm. Nicko talked with irritation about my father’s behaviour to me. My father’s worship of success and publicity. When Nicko joined the Foreign Office, my father said: ‘Won’t you mind never having any publicity?’ I was very touched by Nicko’s loyalty. He showed Harold the ballroom where he imagined me dancing long ago, also the dining room. Nicko: ‘Can you imagine you and Antonia at either end of this table?’ Harold: ‘Yes, and no one else there!’
17 February
Harold bought me a ravishing outfit at Saint-Laurent Rive Gauche: blue and white stripes, Tissot or maybe Renoir. ‘We’ve seen a thing or two,’ Harold said as we left, referring to my zest for art galleries, which I think came as a surprise, maybe not an entirely welcome one.
22 February
Signs of a détente with my parents: Mummy proposes to visit tomorrow ‘at drink time’ when she must know Harold is here, ‘to see the children’. Meantime Dada makes a jolly telephone call over our visit to the Paris Embassy (duly reported, I note, by Nicko): ‘I am sure Nicko would make a character in Harold’s next play.’ Overture of sorts, I think.
This was the beginning of a real friendship between my mother and Harold; her natural warmth and her interest in his work meant that there would be fifteen happy years in which we took her on family holidays abroad until she pleaded old age – to our sadness. Mummy and I swam together vigorously in the sea, she in her seventies rather more vigorously than me, while Harold lurked inside reading poetry.
23 February
Orlando emerged