Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [38]
29 July
The Guardian match (Harold’s own team v. the Guardian’s at Gunnersbury). Damian aged thirteen saved the match as eleventh man by refusing to run when John Hurt opposite tried to score a single and might have been run out. He put up a magisterial hand and stayed him. So it was a draw. Ronnie Harwood ebullient and rather good; Simon a great bat after having grumbled about his low position in the batting order last year; Tom as ever highly professional as wicket keeper in huge bright red gloves. Harold scored a duck, was mistakenly clapped heartily by us (Natasha Harwood and me) as he walked back to the pavilion because we were chatting and hadn’t noticed, thus he got in a wax. Furious with Guardian for putting on a fast bowler in a bad light, having taken off his own; etc. etc. All good fun. Many cheerful drinks afterwards at a pub in Strand-on-the-Green.
We took the children to Italy for two weeks. Marina di Pietrasanta turned out to be North Oxford-by-the-Sea. Totally flat. Much bicycling: we all bicycled, including Harold, in stately fashion. Children adored eating Italian food in very cheap family restaurants every night. I swam in the sea. Children only cross when I said that everybody but everybody had to have a siesta as I wanted to read my book. I learned afterwards that they went secretly bicycling about the town, every afternoon. Best expedition – beyond the obligatory one when I urged Harold to drive us up some vertiginous mountain – was to Puccini’s villa at Torre del Lago to see Madama Butterfly. As the light of the Italian summer faded across the lake, you saw her still white form, waiting for his return.
I paid for it all. I was after all the one who wanted to go, the holiday being in the nature of an experiment (although Harold paid for all the dinners). As a result we flew out in very economical fashion, thanks to an offer I’d seen in a small advertisement in a newspaper. Harold said later that he’d enjoyed it all very much, the novelty, having never spent two weeks in a house with eight people in his life before. But in future he would pay for everything and thus make the appropriate travel arrangements. Thirty years of so-called FamHols followed, abroad and latterly in England: all a great deal more luxurious.
28 August
Harold very shaken by the death of Robert Shaw. First, the friend: ‘I’d looked forward to all our conversations when we were old.’ Then the dread: he died, in effect, of drink. Harold has promised me he won’t.
31 August
Argument with John Gross on the subject of James Joyce’s love letters. I haven’t read them out of deference to Harold’s strong views about Joyce’s privacy being invaded. Francis Wyndham said rather sweetly: ‘I felt it was all right for me to read them, but no one else.’ John said Joyce the writer was a public person. Definitely not Harold’s view.
6 September
Harold and I have a row before I fly to Edinburgh to give a talk, it’s my fault not his. Harold, percipiently: ‘Isn’t this about the length of time you have been working on Charles II? Not about us at all.’ He’s right.
After that I really buckled down to it and it was finished early the following year, published in early September. I hadn’t had a full-length non-fiction book out for six years (although I’d written a short book on King James VI and I, and two mysteries). The book went well in the UK, owing much both to the editing and the commercial promotion of my publisher at Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Christopher Falkus, who was a genius at making book club deals. It went much less well in the States, where my friend and editor Bob Gottlieb of Knopf said gloomily: ‘Here in the US we don’t know the difference between Charles I and Charles II.’ Strong implication: ‘and we don’t care’. The book is dubbed Royal Charles in the hope, it seems, that some