Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [25]
22 September
Harold diagnosed as having both glandular fever and hepatitis. He must have felt so weak for so long.
26 September
Off to Boston. Harold very pale when I arrived, looked young and poetic. One can see his faintness rising in his face. Woke at dawn and began to write a new mystery set in the Highlands: The Wild Island (which became Tartan Tragedy). Gradually Harold’s strength returns and his pink-olive complexion re-establishes itself. The Ritz-Carlton is immensely of another age: Claire Bloom ejected for wearing trousers!
28 September
Saw The Innocents. Music by Harrison Birtwistle appropriately spooky. Claire Bloom said she had an off night but I thought she was brilliant.
30 September for a few days
Provincetown, Cape Cod for Harold to recover. Harold writing – I don’t know what. He shouted at Steve McQueen down the long distance, which must be a good sign as he has been totally wan. Steve McQueen: ‘Don’t shout at me, Harold, I’m not your butler.’ Harold: ‘I don’t shout at my butler.’
8 October – Full moon. Thought it might mean something
London. Saturday morning. Telephone rings at 8 a.m. (I am still on American hours). Hugh: ‘Come round at once. I think we should get divorced as soon as possible.’ Me, utterly gaga: ‘Ugh, yes, yes. But won’t next week do?’ Hugh: ‘No, now.’ So I go round, visiting Mummy on the way at Chesil Court and preventing her having her hair done before Any Questions?, saying cruelly: ‘You look fine and anyway it’s radio.’ She is a mine of good sense. Thinks it is a good thing. Says: ‘Dada thinks you should live alone and be a femme de lettres.’ Me: ‘Femmes de lettres don’t live alone. They have exciting love lives. Tell Dada he knows nothing about the subject.’ Really good talk with Hugh. He is positively enthusiastic about the idea of the divorce.
We worked out a house swap: Hugh to get Eilean Aigas and me to get Campden Hill Square. Although the greater presumed value of Campden Hill Square meant that I had to hand over to Hugh my surviving capital, it still seemed the right thing to do. The gap in 1976 was not all that great as London property prices had not risen dramatically, especially in Notting Hill which was not yet fashionable, and our house had twice been badly damaged by bombs, in the war and 1975. Eilean Aigas, much as I had loved transforming it with the Mary Queen of Scots money, and queening it myself there ever after, was morally Hugh’s because it was within his family estate. Campden Hill Square on the other hand he had strongly resisted buying in 1959 – too far from the House of Commons, halfway to Portsmouth, etc. etc., egged on by his powerful mother Laura, Lady Lovat who accused me of ruining her son. Whereas I had walked into the house, tipped off by the neighbour Billa Harrod that an old lady had died and there would be a sale. It was all dark brown, untouched for sixty years, one old bathroom, no French windows, thus no drawing-room access to garden. ‘I have to have it,’ I said. After a while Hugh reluctantly agreed.
10 October
As the I Ching said, after Stagnation, Progress. Good old I Ching. Harold’s forty-sixth birthday. Poetry reading at Launceston Place to celebrate. I read Henry Vaughan. Simon Gray read Wordsworth’s Lucy poems including my favourite lines about death and burial: ‘Rolled around in earth’s diurnal course / With rocks and stones and trees’.
An extremely exhausting time followed. But on the telephone Dada actually asked after Harold’s health. Mummy: ‘Of course Harold is exactly the sort of serious person Dada would like. Maybe we could all meet out of doors; like quarrelling dogs, it’s better out of doors.’ I think: ‘Aha, cricket!’
20 October
I have a ridiculous anxiety dream in which the exquisite, slender Claire Bloom, playing the Governess, gets pregnant and has to play