Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [40]
Despite these good resolutions, the spring of 1979 was not particularly calm. The strike situation at the National Theatre rumbled on, and bedevilled a production once again; this time Simon Gray’s Close of Play which Harold directed. ‘Union selfishness and violent behaviour at the National’ was what convinced Harold to vote Tory in May. I too voted Tory but that was quite unashamedly in order to see a woman walk into No. 10. Neither of us knew much about Mrs Thatcher’s politics: on a trip to the Booksellers’ Conference in Guernsey, I took the trouble to break away and watch the new Prime Minister making this historic entry. Mrs Thatcher, a small, broad, light blue figure, paused and read aloud from St Francis. A journalist got bored and indicated she should now stop. Mrs T. put up her hand and stayed him. Implacably she read on. So they were warned.
Subsequently Harold, by his own account, regretted his vote. I didn’t: it was just this kind of defiance of what had hitherto been the masculine establishment which appealed to me (although I never voted for her again). My mother hated Mrs Thatcher and told me she hit my father – an unprecedented event – when he said something nice about her reading of St Francis. Mummy, gloomily: ‘Of course taxation will change and we’ll all be much better off.’ Me, to tease: ‘But, Mummy, won’t you give it all to charity?’ Mummy: ‘Yes, a charity called the Bernhurst carpet.’
Although the children flourished, one of my cats – Rocky the rover – disappeared at the age of eighteen months. I thought of what it must be like for the parents of ‘disappeared’ children, as I listened for the sound of the cat-flap which did not come, and glimpsed the wrong cat at street corners. (His brother Rowley, after King Charles II’s popular nickname, clung close to me and lived for another sixteen years.)
4 April
Excitement! Harold will buy the little house in Aubrey Road! I wanted to buy it myself in September in Monopoly fashion, since it abutted my garden, but my bank politely suggested that since I could not afford the house I was in, it was not on. Harold desperately needs something for his books. Also as he says about Campden Hill Square, which was becoming a cheerful maelstrom of activity: ‘Although I adore all your children and their numerous friends …’ Me: ‘I know. They’re not exactly shrinking, are they?’ Harold talks about the ‘reclusive’ side of his nature. I say that my idea of happiness is to be alone in a room in a house full of people.
So Harold’s wonderful Super-Study, as it was called (actually his study and his secretary’s office) was born, joined to the big house by the garden, with a new door. Harold walked to work, as he put it. Before he could change his mind, I hastily moved into his previous study and for the first time in my life did not work in a little hole off my bedroom.
9 April
Harold has signed the deed of separation with Vivien.
14 May
Evening with Beckett and Pinter. Beckett is exhausted from directing Billie Whitelaw in Happy Days at the Royal Court. ‘We are discovering a woman, whereas I believe Peggy Ashcroft arrived with a preconception.’ (But he also heard she was very good.) Harold is moved to enact most of Close of Play for him, as Beckett seems never to go to the theatre and was quite alarmed at the notion that he should actually visit this. His eyes shine at Harold’s depiction. Barbara Bray behaves quite well until the end when she starts declaiming that everything in art is political: she is rehearsing for doing The Critics on radio and I suspect that Close of Play will not fare well. Harold, vehemently: ‘Nothing I have written, Barbara, nothing ever, is political.’ Sam: ‘This very absence of politics is in itself a political statement.’ But Barbara couldn’t leave it at that. She went on and on. Finally, Beckett, lighting one of his little black cheroots: ‘Oh, why do you talk so much … ?’ After that, we all got on better. Barbara still talked but she stopped lecturing