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By Root 713 0

Fraser remained of course my professional name despite being that of my first husband; at the time I took comfort from the fact that the great Agatha Christie found herself in exactly the same situation after Colonel Christie vanished and she married Max Mallowan. Later, owing to my great affection for Scotland and Scottish history – to say nothing of the name itself – I tacitly allowed it to be assumed, anyway in the US, that it was in some mysterious way an extra maiden name. On my passport, to avoid confusion over professional journeys and tickets in an age of security, I finally made it one of my forenames. But my witness Emma Tennant gave me a fountain pen with the name Antonia Pinter engraved on it. I took rather a fancy to it, and Harold even more so; quite touchingly, when I realized that both his wife and son had abandoned the name Pinter. So we became – at long last – the Pinters.

The use of ‘Lady’ in the Diary entry refers to an amusing moment outside the Registry Office. The world’s press was in excited attendance, hoping for a dramatic last-minute cancellation as had happened in October. As we left, one optimistic journalist called out: ‘How does it feel to be plain Mrs Pinter?’ ‘She’s not,’ snapped Harold. The next day the Daily Mirror of all people explained the rules of the British peerage to its readers: how ‘Lady’ came from my father, an earl, not my previous husband, and being purely a ‘courtesy’ not a real title, I could carry it with me however many times I married. ‘Besides,’ added the Mirror sweetly, ‘Lady Antonia is not plain.’

We had already had our honeymoon, which turned out to be not-the-honeymoon. Now we went down to the Bear at Woodstock; the snow had begun to fall all over England (to adapt the passage about Ireland at the end of Joyce’s story The Dead which Harold loved and was fond of quoting). In the morning, in piercing cold and bright sun, we strode out through Blenheim Park. Peasants, as they seemed to us to be, were gathering wood in the snow round the dark palace in a scene out of Brueghel, or come to think of it, Dr Zhivago. That night, I see that we talked about this Diary. I showed the long entry about our wedding to Harold; he applauded it.

28 November

My Diary: it’s not about great writing. It’s my friend, my record, and sometimes my consolation as in the bad years of 1975/6; while in the last few weeks it has recorded my celebration. Harold: ‘Well, it’s a great record of – us.’

29 November

Went to lunch with Isaiah and Aline Berlin in Headington. Aline greeted us with champagne: ‘We’re very much in favour of marriage. We too changed our lives in mid life.’ They had been forty-one and forty-seven, she told us; we were roughly the same, forty-two and forty-four when we met.

2 December

Dinner with Claire Bloom and Philip Roth. They presented us with a handsome jar of pot-pourri although Philip disapproves of marriage as he frequently lets the world know. Philip: ‘I was married once in 1959. Let me tell you about it. In fact I’ve written about it.’ Typical Roth humour: always very funny (he’s marvellous company) but never very far from the works of Roth.

At the end of Long Day’s Journey into Night Mary says: ‘I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time’, a line that has always wrenched me. That was not true of us: we were extremely happy to have achieved at last what we had wanted for so long. And got happier. This is borne out by the stream of cards accompanying flowers, late-night messages, little Valentine boxes, the occasional letter (we were seldom apart) and above all the poems which I treasured. After Harold’s death, I found in his desk almost every note or message I had written him over twenty-eight years of married life. My favourite of all the poems he wrote me, ‘It Is Here’, written a few years later, sums it up:

What sound was that?

I turn away, into the shaking room.

What was that sound that came in on the dark?

What is this maze of light it leaves us in?

What is this stance we take,

To turn away and then turn back?

What did we hear?