Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [54]
Dr Oliver Sacks came from the US and this was the beginning of the privilege of his friendship. Later Harold gave him dinner, together with his close friends Jonathan and Rachel Miller. Harold asked Ollie: ‘May I ask what it is you do?’ He meant: ‘Do you plan to cure people, do good, alleviate, or make medical discoveries?’ Ollie responded with a long letter. I get a helpful book on migraine from him which helps me to understand this wretched condition from which I am a mild and my mother a serious sufferer.
1983
I record in my Diary in 1983 that ‘our bridge is strangely brilliant these days’. We win and win, defeating far better players like Peter Jay and Hugh Stephenson and the Waldegraves. I write a poem for our wedding anniversary which expresses my romantic feelings about our union in that respect (as Susanna Gross says much later: bridge, because it’s about partnership, is a romantic game).
FOR MY PARTNER
You’re my two-hearts-as-one
Doubled into game
You’re my Blackwood
You’re my Gerber
You’re my Grand Slam, vulnerable
Doubled and redoubled
Making all other contracts
Tame.
27 November 1983
24 January
Went for a walk with Harold in Kew Gardens in winter sunshine. A notice runs: ‘The wildlife may attack you at certain seasons of the year.’ Harold points to it: ‘But I am in a mellow mood.’ A placid meander: vivid yellow witch hazel, and the huge lovely new temperate plant house.
3 February
In Jamaica where Harold’s old school friend (co-evacuee to Caerhays) Maurice Stoppi now lives with his wife, Tiny Henriques – and she is tiny, also exquisite with speedwell blue eyes behind her Christian Dior sunglasses. Maurice vividly remembers Harold as a little boy of ten with a shiny black cash notebook, scribbling stories in it with the stub of a pencil: ‘Cars screeched down the streets of Chicago and there was the rat-a-tat of cross machine-gun fire’, etc. Taxed Harold with this later: ‘Your first work?’ ‘I do remember the notebook. My father gave it to me. He nicked a bundle of those notebooks from the ARP station where he was a warden in the Blitz. So I must have wanted to write something.’
Harold now writes the first of many little poems about my habit of swimming which intrigues him (he himself rarely swims; when he does it’s with a great splashing like a dog retrieving a ball). It includes the lines: ‘How you swim / Like a flower / Unfolding forever’. Then he reads me ‘Dover Beach’, and he proceeds to make it his task to learn it by heart. Later he talks about his current inability to write since the death of Vivien six months earlier. All he can do is write a private poem about his happiness with me but: ‘Happiness is not dramatic,’ he says sternly. Harold: ‘While she was alive, if you think about it, so much of my work was about unhappy frozen married relationships.’ He gives the example of Landscape and the wife’s retreat at the end into memories of a happy marriage-that-never-was. Harold: ‘I could never write the Strindberg thing. It’s not my way. Not the way of my art anyway. Too cruel.’
17 February
New York on the way back. Poor Harold arrives with a serious chest infection which does not help him to face the ceremonies arranged by Sam Spiegel for the launch of the film Betrayal with equanimity. The best thing that happens to us is having dinner in Soho with Oliver Sacks. This is the place where he comes and sits in a booth and just scribbles and scribbles: ‘I always have a notebook and pen with me. The pen must be green.’ For me, meeting Ollie is like having bumped into a prophet by chance. Harold very ill, almost floating with it but groans: ‘I’m sorry you’re not having a nice time.’ As though he was. Actually meeting Ollie is as nice a time as anyone could possibly have.
The next year we went to City Island to see him. He was standing bear-like as ever, in the porch of his little dark-red clapboard house, smiling in the sunshine. Harold swears his first words were: ‘And so …’ The house was extremely close to the sea and Ollie told us that he swims in and out of the moored boats