Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [53]
29 July
Off to the US for a FamHol, fixed up in the spring when Harold had a play on in Rhode Island and I took the opportunity to rent a house. Harold, sleepily, the morning of our departure: ‘East, West, home’s best. Won’t it be wonderful when we get back from America and you say that?’
This more or less represented Harold’s view on travel, especially since it always seemed that dreadful unexpected things that did not happen to other travellers, happened to him. Nevertheless a good time was had by all, the boys in their casual breakfast wear – shorts and that’s it – transfixing the visiting Mrs Gandhi’s security guards at the Carlyle Hotel on the way, and the house by the sea, with its old books and faded flowered covers reminding me of Eilean Aigas in Scotland. The sea in which I persistently swam, to the bafflement of the courteous local inhabitants, was so cold that the boys screamed with pain and wished, they said, for the Pacific.
5 August
Incident at dinner left me shaken. An extremely gracious dinner at which only Harold is not wearing a tie. Many tables. Harold and I are separated. Suddenly I notice Harold’s black face and think someone has raised the subject of El Salvador. Later I learn that an old, rather drunken man has made a series of remarks described as ‘Fascist’ but actually blaming the Jews for starting both world wars. Harold, very wearily as he said later, feels he cannot let this pass. Hostess naturally very upset (at the drunken man, who was described as ‘a bit of a lunatic’, not Harold). Harold tells me the worst moment is overhearing someone explaining to the ‘Fascist’ that he, Harold, is Jewish, as if that was in any way the point. Having recorded this, I should also record that the next day at Bailey’s Beach Harold was the centre of polite and sincere attention, and every single person who had been at the dinner came and apologized formally and sweetly. One Senator’s wife said she spoke ‘on behalf of Rhode Island’.
27 August 1982
My fiftieth birthday. Harold has brought us all to the North British Hotel, Edinburgh. I’m probably one of the luckiest women to be fifty. To be happily married, no, very happily married to someone who is the centre of my life, to have six of the best in the way of children. Harold of course tells me that I look twenty-seven, and when I say, ‘Oh, come on,’ and he replies, ‘Well, thirty-seven then,’ I’m affronted and find I prefer twenty-seven after all.
Picnic on King Arthur’s Seat. I see Benjie after a long gap because he has been working in Scotland and going to a restaurant without my glasses, cry out: ‘My son, my son!’ A total stranger rises from his seat and says, ‘I’ve always wanted to have a mother.’ Benjie looks incredibly well and handsome when I do manage to find the right person: how could I have been mistaken?
9 October
World premiere of Other Places at the NT, the overall title for A Kind of Alaska, Victoria Station and Family Voices. I suppose I will see Alaska many, many times in my life with many, many actresses but I shall never see the experience of Deborah more simply, perfectly and painfully created than by Judi Dench. Those first movements after twenty-nine years asleep: the little broad child-woman, stubby legged, strong as an animal, balancing, unbalancing, falling. And at the end, after the regression (totally convincing, it was happening to her) those last, sad words of a woman going back into the void: ‘I think I have the matter in proportion.’ Pause. ‘Thank you.’
14 October
Press night. I began to sob, silently I hope, during Judi’s last agonizing, heart-rending speech, and as we got into the little manager’s office afterwards, collapsed in floods. Peter and Jenny Hall backed out hastily, thinking they had walked in on some personal tragedy: ‘The play, the play–’ I wept.