Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [5]
Back here to wait for Harold. A knock. He was there. He clutched me and we clutched each other. At first it was almost desperate, he had suffered so much. Finally he said: ‘I feel like a new man’ (as perhaps Solomon said to the Queen of Sheba).
12 March
Beautiful white and pink and green orchids from Harold with a note: ‘My heart.’
13 March
Day transformed at six when Harold rang up and said he wondered what my evening arrangements were. They had just finished testing leading ladies for the film of The Last Tycoon, produced by Sam Spiegel, for which Harold had written the screenplay: Harold read the Robert De Niro part. Met at the Stafford Hotel. We talked and talked. Harold back on the kick of saying he’s going to tell Vivien sooner or later. ‘I should like to go away with you. Maybe Antarctica? But would you follow? I would like to be married to you when I’m eighty.’ ‘I’ll be seventy-eight.’ Where is all this passion leading, I ask myself. The trouble is – when I am with him I don’t care about anything and when I am not with him I don’t care much either as I am always thinking about him.
14 March
Drink with Harold on his way from the National at the Strand Palace Hotel. Naturally he has told Peter Hall who was directing No Man’s Land, ‘I’ve fallen in love’, because of the need for an alibi.
16 March
Harold caused me a great deal of heart-beating terror by announcing he was going to tell Vivien: ‘I don’t want to pretend I’m on a lecture tour.’ I suppose I’m used to being on that lecture tour and it seems a perfectly good way of life. But Harold’s force is burning me up and fascinating me all at the same time.
22/23 March
Weekend of considerable tension. Harold rang up Sunday evening and said he had told Vivien on Saturday: ‘I’ve met somebody.’ Her rage at his dishonesty in deceiving her (for two and a half months). Vivien says about me: ‘She’s a very bonny lady.’ But – with whisky and nightfall more rage at the deception.
I did not know at this point that Vivien was on her way to being a serious alcoholic; a condition which would lead to her death in her early fifties. Nor did Harold discuss the subject with me at this point, either in extenuation of his own behaviour or out of guilt. There was the odd oblique reference which I did not understand.
24 March
In a way it is unfair for Vivien to pick on the deception as opposed to Harold’s feelings, as he has always wanted to tell her; he couldn’t before she went away and certainly couldn’t when she was so ill. But nothing is fair in love (or war) whatever they say. For the first time I faced up to what another life would be like and whether it could ever exist. Or would be right. Right for whom? Never right for some. Diana Phipps: ‘Everyone must feel the temptation to leave their life behind. Don’t forget that in fact no one ever does leave their life behind. You take it with you.’
In the meantime, as they say, I always wanted to be in love. Ever since I was a little girl. And I always wanted to know a genius, which I suppose Harold sort of is, but that did not lure me to him in the first place. I was lured, compelled by a superior force, something drawn out of me by him, which was simply irresistible.
27 March
Last day before Scotland for the school holidays. It is snowing and I went for a snowy walkin the park. Nevertheless there were wet heaps of grass to be seen where some incurable optimist had started to cut it. So, through the snow and blustering wind came the unmistakeable smell of summer: lawn mowings. Met Harold at the Royal Lancaster as once before. He gave me the first bound copy of No Man’s Land with such a romantic inscription that I shall hardly be able to leave it about. The situation seems very fraught in the Pinter home