Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [45]
Every time I swim out from the villa where the water is deep and turquoise, I think of Eliot’s lines: ‘I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.’ Harold in horror: ‘You don’t mean you saw a pair of claws?’ He doesn’t think it much better to want to be a pair of claws, despite his love of Eliot.
6 April
First meeting of the Pinters and the Longfords; they come over from Hove to Bernhurst. Jack was in splendid form: ‘All politicians are villains, Lord Longford,’ he said. ‘Take it from me.’ And he made his jokes; Harold looked black and everyone else loved them. Frances in her usual sweet way was absolutely out to enjoy herself.
Went to a lecture given by the great Barbara Tuchman, my role model, at the Guildhall. At dinner thereafter, a handsome blond American businessman tries to pick me up then desists, at the sight of my place card. (‘I thought you were the sort of girl I could ask to lunch at Bray and now I see you’re Lady Antonia Fraser.’) Surely a non sequitur?
20 May
Seckford Hall, Suffolk. We are here having one of our breakaways, what Damian calls a PinHol (which is extremely luxurious and à deux) as opposed to a FamHol. Damian says that one day when he receives one of my traditional postcards of some idyllic spot with the message ‘Wish you were here!’ he will just leave school and turn up to gratify my wish. There was something strange and dream-like about our journeyings in East Anglia, in between reading Flaubert’s letters, recommended by everyone I know.
26 May
Now it’s work – for Harold. We’re in Dorset and visiting the sets of The French Lieutenant’s Woman. The Reiszes are staying in the Dairy House where John Fowles actually wrote the book plus Jeremy Irons plus Master Sam Irons aged eighteen months. The next day is the first day of shooting and later we have dinner with John Fowles. He and I discuss fans’ letters which ask for advice. His is, briefly: ‘Those who need to ask how to be a writer will never make it.’ Mine, to married women wanting to be ‘a writer like you’: ‘You need to be a very, very selfish person.’ No doubt households, hitherto peaceful, are being widely disrupted where the wife has taken my advice.
30 May
The film of Betrayal is going ahead with Mike Nichols as director. The divorce also really seems to be going ahead; although Vivien once again changes her mind at the last moment and says she must be the one to divorce Harold; it must not after all be of his petition as has been arranged – ‘Not fair.’ ‘That’s reasonable,’ I say to Harold, thinking his dark mutterings on the subject for once unjustified. In a hot week in London – most meals in our garden – I fall platonically in love with Mike Nichols and so, I think, does Harold. We feel in his company that we have become not only more intelligent and even witty (no one is funnier than Mike) but somehow more glamorous.
The marvellous friendship lasted although Mike did not in the end direct Betrayal. Other projects fell through but Harold did at least act in a cameo role in Wit, directed by Mike Nichols, as the father of the star, his civil rights campaigning friend Emma Thompson. We once stayed with Mike and Diane Sawyer at their house on the Hudson River, where a freshly baked loaf of bread was delivered to our door every morning: although neither Harold nor I ate bread, we agreed it was the acme of luxury.
9 June
Harold criticizes Jonathan Pryce’s delivery of ‘To Be or Not To Be’ at the Royal Court. He spoke the immortal lines directly and burningly to Ophelia, although she is supposed to be off stage, according to Shakespeare’s text, in order for Hamlet to greet her entry at the end of the speech: ‘Soft you now! The fair Ophelia …’ Harold: ‘When Ophelia says to Hamlet at the end: