Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [44]
Chapter Eight
IT IS HERE
1980
1 January
I know the eighties are going to be good in so many ways. The seventies were violent, as the newspapers were saying; it spread everywhere. I decide to ‘know thyself’ as the Bible tells us to do. I know that I am hard-working, affectionate and kind. I also know that I am lazy, nagging and neurotic. God – if She exists – knows how that works out.
5 January
First night of Betrayal in New York. Bar full of rich Philistines. It was thus amusing when I heard one say to the other in the interval: ‘Yeah, I like it, but it won’t have broad appeal. You see, we’re a very special audience.’ One turns to me and says kindly: ‘This will interest you. We’re going to play squash.’ (A subject Robert and Jerry discuss aggressively in the play.)
6 January: Twelfth Night
And the three kings did come bearing gifts – or two of them. There was a rumour via somebody’s children’s nanny (New York!) that Mrs Kerr, wife of the great Walter Kerr of the New York Times, on whose word we depend for the survival of Betrayal, rather thought that Walter … And it was true. Harold, putting down the paper. ‘Well, I can only call this a rave.’ I have never heard him use such language before. The telephone rings off the hook and so we shall go back to England in a haze and a blaze of glory. Before we went home, Harold proposed to Sam Spiegel that he should make a film of Betrayal.
On 8 January 1980 we had known each other for five years and Harold was coming up for the fifth anniversary of his departure from the former marital home. He would thus shortly be entitled to seek a divorce unilaterally on these grounds.
7 February
Harold very exercised over Chile: the Foreign Office now apparently denying that Dr Sheila Cassidy was tortured. I feel exercised over the whole world – not that there’s much point in that.
23 February
After the most horrific delays, The French Lieutenant’s Woman the movie is at last on as of Thursday night. Hear Harold’s voice about midnight. ‘Oh, my God’ very loud. Thought it was off. But it’s on. Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons. Delighted to think that the wonderful Meryl will be in my life if only a tiny bit: I fell in love with her in the TV series Holocaust, affection continued when I met her in person at Karel Reisz’s: she was so extraordinarily jolly and sensible, despite the porcelain beauty. As for Jeremy Irons, Betsy Reisz and I had constantly pointed out to Karel that he was deeply attractive to women: take it from us.
Flora aged twenty-one and Robert Powell-Jones, a Chancery barrister, got engaged on 29 February and married almost immediately afterwards – for the good old-fashioned reason of being deeply in love; this, despite the fact that Flora was still at Oxford. Although the marriage did not last, and Robert died sadly young, I shall always treasure the memory of that happy time including the years when they came on the FamHol with us, Robert, the polymath, learning local languages with engaging facility and stunning us with the erudition he took for granted.
12 March
In Barbados. At night we discuss biography (prompted by Charles Osborne’s life of Auden) and the question of Harold’s biography, if any. ‘What a morbid subject,’ he says. I don’t find it so. On the one hand, I never believe anyone I know will die; on the other hand, to me biography (of the dead) is a professional subject, not an emotive one, something to do well if done at all. After much talk it is established that Harold would want a reference to Joan and the off-and-on Seven Years, but his alluring American friend who overlapped should be mentioned under the name of Cleopatra. (I have since met ‘Cleopatra’ and found her fascinating.) Harold: ‘I’ve had girlfriends since