Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [30]
31 March
Angus Wilson and Tony Garrett come to dinner. They argue about Otherwise Engaged. Angus: ‘Simon Hench is part of the uncompassionate society of the strong turning on the weak, as represented by Mrs Thatcher.’ Harold: ‘No, it’s not. It’s about the demands the weak make on the strong.’
5 April
Laverstock life in Dorset where we stayed with the Warners. Jogging: even Harold appeared in his turquoise tracksuit, athletic glasses, and jogged away somewhere or other. Mine is blue and burgundy, Simone’s black and white, Orlando’s scarlet, Damian’s bright blue.
29 April
Long but good meeting with Hugh at Campden Hill Square. A certain melancholy reality begins to creep in. Talk of going up to Eilean Aigas to collect ‘my things’ – like a housemaid! But the whole house is ‘my things’.
Harold took a noble resolution under the circumstances that he would come and live with me in Campden Hill Square ‘for my children’s sake’ and we would not buy another house; because they would like to remain in the house they knew (and where some of them had been born). It can’t have been easy; and things were as usual very fraught in Hanover Terrace. But he told his son: ‘I’m not going under.’ It’s been such a long time, of course. I had my doubts along the way about the going under. Again and again, Harold told me, he was saved by his feeling that I represented life, as opposed to the condition he was in when he wrote No Man’s Land. He had after all expressed this in his poem to me of 1975: ‘I Know the Place’ which now ended without the original comma after ‘me’:
Everything we do
Connects the space
Between death and me
And you.
Chapter Six
OPEN-BOATING
28 May
Quiet as a Nun WAS published. The Daily Mirror saw ‘echoes’ of my affair with Harold … if you can see them in Nun, which is about a TV reporter obsessed with a married MP and a creepy Gothic convent, you can see them anywhere. A really nice, generous review from P.D. James, my heroine, in the TLS, made my day. Harold took me to watch the MCC against Australia at Lord’s: ‘I’ve never escorted a lady to cricket before.’ When a really nasty review appeared in the Sunday Times, I didn’t mind and I actually acquired the drawing of me as a nun by Mark Boxer.
5 June
Harold took Orlando to cricket (his club Gaieties CC) and after being on the TV show Read All About It, I went and found them. Orlando really loved it and the whole team sweet to him. Man among men is how Orlando sees himself.
16 June
We had a break in the South of France. The whole thing was overshadowed by me choosing to read Ellmann’s life of Joyce. In the aeroplane on the way back I burst into tears. Me to Harold: ‘What day is it?’ Harold looks desperate, thinking it is one of our anniversaries he has missed. Me: ‘It’s Bloomsday!’ More tears. While I cry, Harold: ‘Don’t be sad, darling, he knew he was a great writer.’
Earlier we found we were walking past the Villa Mauresque. Me, meaningfully to Harold: ‘All this was earned by a writer’ (meaning Somerset Maugham).
19 June
Hugh has read The Wild Island and begins by being very sulky: ‘Is Colonel Henry meant to be me?’ ‘No, no’ (actually it’s his brother Shimi, if anyone). He gets crosser and crosser and I suddenly realize he wants it to be him. Once I say ‘Of course it’s you!’ he’s sunshine itself.
20 June
Harold observes that we are happy. ‘When I saw you coming towards me in your blue dress, I was most happy to have made the choice.’ Me: ‘I suppose it’s rather like when the bombing stopped in 1940: you only noticed gradually they weren’t coming; you don’t know at the time. You don’t say, “that was the last Stuka”.’ But Harold had to go through those two years of intermittent colossal pain and unhappiness, which otherwise would not have given due weight to his eighteen years of marriage.
3 July
Went to Natasha’s open day at St Mary’s Ascot. I had a good time with the nuns commenting approvingly on Quiet as a Nun, all except Sister Oliver who said: