Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [47]
21 September
Harold wrote a radio play Family Voices while we were in Praia, and Dame Peg received it with rapture. She will play in it, Peter Hall will direct, also as a Platform at the National. I found a lot of my wistful middle-of-the-night thoughts about Benjie (who spent nine months away as a jackeroo in Australia) mysteriously echoed; yet I had never discussed the subject with Harold.
We had a merry time planning our wedding party at Campden Hill Square: it was to take place on the eve of Harold’s fiftieth birthday on 10 October.
26 September
Went to Jean Muir’s salon in Bruton Street and had a fitting for my ‘wedding dress’ – actually a swirling white crepe number, high neck, scattered crystal new moons and stars, which I will wear at the party. I shall feel like Titania.
It was just as well we planned both the wedding and Harold’s birthday together because in the event, there was a final flick of the serpent’s tail from Vivien, who refused to sign the decree absolute at the last minute. Even her lawyer was appalled, Harold told me. The cat-and-mouse game was very wearing on all our nerves. But we were able to have a good party all the same, at which most people thought we had actually got married. It was especially pleasing that both sets of parents came: Jack and Frances sat with the latter’s brother, Uncle Lou, who assiduously wrote down the names of the guests ‘in case I forget’.
Although we did not manage to get married, we went on a not-the-honeymoon to Venice and Palermo where there was a conference about Haroldo Pinter. On the eve of the conference there was an awkward moment when Harold announced he would not attend the discussion about his works due the next morning: ‘I can’t just sit there, listening to “And you, Harold Pinter …” ’ Seeing crestfallen faces, I volunteered cheerfully to attend: after all I hadn’t written all the plays … All went well, except for an annoying English don based in Palermo who insisted on translating for me what I could perfectly well understand, such was the perfection of the academic diction, the rotund flourishes. I asked him to stop translating. That is to say, all went well until the professor reached his peroration. He referred to Pinter’s modesty at not being present, and then something I couldn’t quite catch. But I was the foremost to clap at the end, clapping ever longer and stronger despite TV camera zooming about (they did seem to be getting very close as I clapped). ‘I don’t think you quite realize,’ hissed my companion, ‘that you are clapping yourself. The professor’s last words were to say that although we don’t have Pinter, we have sua moglie – his wife.’ Hence the cameras. Of course the irony was that I wasn’t actually his moglie at this point, but we had drawn a discreet veil over that, due to the general confusion in the newspapers about what did or did not happen on 19 October.
While we were away Harold talked interestingly about Vivien in a way that he had never done before. The resentment that developed in her at his success as early as 1963 onwards. How she scarcely spoke to him for two months because he accepted to act in Huis Clos (acting was her thing and in any case that particular director had treated her badly). And then when he himself came to direct! Horrors! Much trouble when he wrote Landscape in 1967 and asked Peggy Ashcroft to star instead of her – she thought it was her right. Once again she withdrew into a prolonged enigmatic silence ‘which played better on the stage than at home’. Harold spoke of her now – after five years, five very turbulent years – without guilt but with pity. Then he added honestly: ‘But she was a great actress, also a wonderful comic talent which people forgot when she was creating the mysterious, sexy Pinter Woman so unforgettably, the way no one could do better.’
27 November – The Diary of Lady Antonia Pinter
That is how I began the entry for our wedding day. Even the surname had a surprise element: I had not really intended to change my name. After twenty-four years