Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [50]
The image from childhood is dark green, bottle green, black trunks, vast flowering bushes, along the drive, a prison of green, sudden curtains drawn on the sky, far more sky than had ever been imagined, shut out again by black and green and stone, shut inside the castle, shut inside the castle, long black nights, crash of the sea, misery, strangeness, separation, happiness – rowing across the lake, fish running, seeing live fish for the first time. Not fishing for tiddlers, as in the River Lea in London.
It is still dark green, the hedges, the narrow roads through woods, on the way to the castle. But the skylighter, flashing, bursts of rain and sunshine.
Something enclosed about the place, private. When I was an inhabitant I couldn’t get out. Now I can’t really get in.
Somewhere there was a glade. We couldn’t find it. Perhaps it was never there.
The whole experience is well lost. It was desolate. But I was scarred by its beauty.
Felt a thousand times happier to be accompanied by my most charming and lovely companion, my wife. If only she had been there then!
(Signed) Harold Pinter
12 March
At the PEN Writers’ Day I sat next to Mario Vargas Llosa whose handsome horse-like features and flashing smile made a most favourable impression on me. As a result when he said that he admired Harold’s work intensely ‘especially Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ – which just happens to be by Edward Albee – I merely replied ‘Mmm’ where a less attractive man might have got a curt correction.
18 March
Harold went to the House of Lords and had lunch with Dada, about the only person not in trouble – so far as we know – to be invited. (Dada’s guests tended to be down on their luck for any number of reasons.) He adored it and gave a wonderful description of Dada taking him round the dining room, and introducing him as ‘my son-in-law the playwright’, mainly to dukes, it seems: he then interrogated them about the amount of Harold’s plays they had seen. It was the ladies, or rather the duchesses, who came up trumps, said Harold. Apparently dukes don’t do plays. Then a wonderful thing happened. Harold was drinking a glass of port. ‘Do you know what that is?’ asked Jack Donaldson. ‘Dow 1963,’ replied Harold with élan. They called for the waiter. ‘It’s Dow ’63,’ he replied. General astonishment of all lords and dukes present, even the waiter. Actually Dow ’63 is the only port Harold had heard of. But Dada tremendously impressed: he likes the traditional things of his youth. ‘My son-in-law, you know, he may be a playwright, but he’s a fine judge of port …’
27 April
Harold has gone to America for two days (naturally he travels on the day of a Civil Service disruption) about the film of Betrayal. Harold remembers it is the five months’ anniversary of our wedding and sends me white stocks, roses and freesias with the message, pace Betrayal: ‘Five months!!!’ Robert exclaims to Emma over her affair: ‘Two years!’ I thought as I got into my bed alone that if my marriage only lasts five months, I will have known what it is to be really happy.
12 May
Tony Powell came to dinner. It was lovely to see his handsome silver head here again. Tony talked about how good writers should be friends with other good writers, as pretty girls should live together to make them seem prettier. He loved the story of Dada and the port: it is evident that he finds Dada as ridiculous as ever – they were at Eton together – and showed gloomy interest at hearing that Dada now drinks a lot of white wine.
I spent a great deal of time that summer preparing my commentary for the Royal Wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer – all very enjoyable and profitable as well – while Harold directed Simon Gray’s new play Quartermaine’s Terms, first of all on tour and then in the West End. We met at the end of the Wedding Day,