Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [33]
27 November
Harold has begun to write a play: that’s the great news. I think Benjie’s friends crowding into the kitchen at half-term and making a fearful raucous noise, drove him upstairs. What happiness it brings him! He’s quite different.
The play began with the image of Harold finding out from Michael Bakewell that he, Michael, had long known of Harold’s affair with his wife Joan – from Joan herself. But Bakewell had not let on to Harold when he met him in the role of radio producer. Harold began by saying: ‘I hope Joan won’t mind.’ At the time when I had not of course read the play, I thought she would be flattered. Joan and I got on well and we sometimes lunched together, when she was extremely helpful over my TV presenter heroine Jemima Shore. Harold’s seven-year affair with Joan, as described to me when we first met, was very much an on-off affair with prolonged gaps; it was also complicated by the fact that without Joan’s knowledge (or Vivien’s for that matter) Harold became obsessed with a woman in America whom he described as looking like Cleopatra, so there were many layers of deception. Harold and I, Joan and Jack Emery saw each other from time to time, always pleasant occasions. Harold told me that neither he nor Joan had ever contemplated breaking their marriages. In any case, Harold and I had, and needed to have, an unspoken amnesty where our respective pasts were concerned.
4 December
Harold has been reading the play, jokingly called Unsolicited Manuscript, to me. I see that it has completely taken off from the original image, as Harold tells me all his plays do wherever they start. It has become as much about the masculine non-homoerotic friendship, which means so much to Harold, witness his passion for cricket and his affection for cricketers. Harold says he was never particularly close to Michael Bakewell: certainly he’s never mentioned his name in two and a half years, and yet he goes on a lot about his male friends, sees a lot of them, it’s important to him. All the lines about playing squash: more Simon Gray I would guess. Without the twist of the wife. After all, Harold points out, wherever you start, finally a play is rooted in the imagination, is it not? Harold often returns to this theme about which he feel strongly. I notice he resents any effort to link his plays closely to a particular incident in his past, i.e. The Homecoming, sometimes claimed by this person or the other. (Who would want to claim The Homecoming??) I point out that it’s human nature to make these links. He doesn’t accept that.
The play is very funny, but there is also a lot of pain there. I wonder what its real title will be?
10 December
Verity Lambert and I agree on Maria Aitken for Jemima Shore in the TV version to be made by Thames TV. I am thrilled. She comes round for a drink: I know she’ll be superb because she’s naturally starry.
25 December Christmas Day
The first Christmas of my life in London. I love it. One’s own home, no journey. I think of my favourite Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, ‘Heaven-Haven’, except that is about a nun finding refuge and I’m more of a Reverend Mother (as my mother used to call me, referring to my organizational powers, not my piety). On that subject we went to Midnight Mass at Westminster Cathedral: nearly three thousand people and no seats by 11.15 p.m. I went to Communion for the first time in three years. It was almost impossible not to because priests rushed at you with wafers. Ah well, perhaps they are carrying out God’s secret will. Home at 1.30 a.m.: Harold still up and slightly inebriated after a reunion with Mick Goldstein from Australia. Children opened their stockings and so did Harold. He was extremely puzzled. ‘Did you give me all this?’ he kept asking. ‘No, Father Christmas did.’ ‘Did you … ?’ He was still examining his stocking with care and still looking baffled the next morning when he was not at all inebriated.
27 December
Harold wrote for twelve hours the play he now calls Betrayal. He’s very excited.
31 December
Harold finished the first draft of Torcello