Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [37]
Of our expeditions, there was one successful one: for my sake we went to the Dead Sea so that I could add wallowing there to my swimming experiences. Harold’s own strain at the journey and the heat was alleviated by the imaginative sympathy of Lois Sieff, wife of the chairman of Marks & Spencer, here on a visit. ‘He needs a cold beer,’ she said – and promptly went and got one. Masada on the other hand was a disaster. Arriving at the cable car at an early hour (the energetic Peter Halban made us rise early to avoid the tourists), Harold starts like a nervous horse at the sight of the stable door. Claustrophobia, fear of heights, you name it … In the end he puts his head down and endures the journey upwards. I busy myself having a historical experience, having done much reading on the subject: the gallant stand of the Jews in their mighty fortress, which cannot be stormed from the front but having to watch the encroaching rampart which the Romans are building at the back growing ever nearer and nearer … with no possibility of escape.
But Harold is totally shaken by the vertiginous rise, and at the prospect of returning on the narrow footpath to get to the cable car – on the outside this time, above the vast abyss which he has glimpsed while I am sight-seeing – simply says he can’t go down. He looks terribly white. I mean, will he live up here? Like the Zealots? Till the Romans come again? Peter Halban is wonderful. He simply forces the upcoming tourists to travel on the outside, keeping the inside for Harold. Then Harold brilliantly takes off his spectacles which means he can see nothing and I guide him down, with much trepidation, thinking of the two Jewish women who survived the mass suicide of the inhabitants of Masada by hiding in the gullies. Is there a gully for me? Josephus reveals to me later that one of the surviving women is ‘intelligent beyond the run of women’. I can’t help thinking that someone intelligent beyond the run of women might not have insisted on taking Harold up Masada, and resolve not to be so foolish again.
For all my good resolutions I never did quite cure myself of this tendency to suggest we went out in open boats in storms, up the Leaning Tower of Pisa at sunset and so forth and so on. I like to think that Harold really loved me for it. Perhaps all it really showed was that Darwinian law by which two open-boaters must not be linked to each other, otherwise human endeavour would get altogether too reckless.
Chapter Seven
A SUPER STUDY
31 May 1978
Harold took me out to dinner and asked me to be his Literary Executor (he was forty-seven so the possibility of death seemed mercifully remote). I was enormously flattered and promised to be sterner than any Literary Executor has ever been before: ‘Not a comma will be changed, not a pause unpaused.’
2 June
Harold had an upset fit (three years later, things very bad in Hanover Terrace) and said we had to go and live in Ireland for tax reasons. Had vision of Harold, cross and lonely in a bog, drinking a great deal, and me soon to equal him. Luckily the fit passed.
24 June
Read Tom Stoppard’s new play Night and Day, admirable. Like Professional Foul. Feel privileged to be his friend. At a buffet in their house, Miriam is in curvaceous beige, black black hair and eyelashes flowing, the highest heels you ever saw. She’s fantastic.
1 July
Our friend Diana Phipps gave a fancy-dress ball in the country. Harold went in a dinner jacket and red bow tie. He said he was an out-of-work violinist. I wore a wreath of bay leaves and my usual golden kaftan and said I was a muse. Told an Austrian princeling – one of Diana’s relations – that the essence of a fancy-dress party was to spend no money (I picked the bay leaves in the garden, although I must admit they were wilting badly). I suddenly notice he is wearing a vast