Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [31]
9 July
Dinner at L’Artiste Assoiffé as once we sat planning our new lives two years ago. Me: ‘Leaving aside all the emotional side, I never knew I had it in me to break my marriage. Didn’t know I had the guts.’ Harold: ‘Me too.’ Me: ‘You don’t regret having met me that night?’ (For we had been discussing all the tiny accidents which made the one meeting which changed so many lives so totally.) Harold: ‘I’m the luckiest man in the world.’ Later we sit in the Ladbroke Arms incongruously among off-duty police officers from across the way and think of our future in Campden Hill Square.
This is the first time Harold said these light words to me – ‘I’m the luckiest man in the world’ – which became a mantra he often repeated. Sometimes I tried responding by quoting Ophelia: about myself sucking ‘the honey of his music vows’ but as Harold was no Hamlet and I was certainly no Ophelia, in the end I took to merely nodding and agreeing. The words remain inscribed on many, many anniversary and birthday cards.
This particular Diary ended on a very happy note. Before we moved in, however, we took the three youngest children on a holiday to Ireland where we stayed with Thomas and Val Pakenham at Tullynally and Harold’s friend Robert Shaw, new wife and numerous children in the west.
25 July
Tullynally Castle, Co. Westmeath. Damian on his first visit to Ireland, merely read The Deep by Peter Benchley and didn’t look out of the window. Exactly the same atmosphere in the great hall, dark and lofty, as there was in the forties when Thomas and I used to come and stay with Uncle Edward and Aunt Christine (my father’s elder brother, whom he succeeded in the Longford title in 1961, while Thomas inherited the property directly).
Otherwise a ballcock packs up somewhere, flooding the stairs, with Thomas and Val swearing at each other to mend it. Very funny. Oh, Anglo-Ireland! But I do admire Val intensely for the way she copes with all this: huge house, small children, endless guests including hungry relatives and very little help. And Thomas.
30 July
Harold has been and gone and it has all been a great success. Except for the flies. It is impossible to exaggerate his hysterical hatred of flies: we nickname him the Moscophobe. Down at the lake: ‘But Harold,’ says Val, ‘these are nice, clean Tullynally flies.’ ‘No, they are not. They’re evil aggressive flies and what is more they are attacking me.’ It was perfectly true; flies know their enemy. Finally he broke and ran like a horse, hooves stampeding, eyes rolling, back to the car, back to Tullynally and the flyless eighteenth-century library, the leather seats, the calm, which he loved.
But at breakfast the next day when Thomas suggested that Harold might like to count and list all the (mainly eighteenth-century) plays in the library for an article which he, Thomas, is writing, Harold looks politely blank as if Thomas must be talking to someone else.
5 August
There are – how many? ten, I think – of Robert Shaw’s children in this house in Galway. Dark vital girls from his first marriage, paler children from his marriage to Mary Ure, and the baby boy with large blue eyes ‘Miss J.’ his present wife has given him, who is handed with love from girl to girl. The house is beautifully set. Water from Lough Mask on three sides. Robert looked magnetically handsome in a green tracksuit matching his green eyes. The trouble was that he had just returned from a fortnight’s tour of Japan and Australia promoting The Deep; this meant that for him day was night and the strain of it all meant that he had a good deal of drink taken. I am beginning to hate drink – not of course to the point of refusing wine myself! although I’m not drinking at lunch. Yet how difficult it is to face the truth of what one drinks oneself while sharply noting it in others. Meanwhile the rain fell softly down. But there were