Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [55]
18 February
Sam Spiegel arranges a two-hour press conference. Harold cuts and runs, to find me just finishing lunch with the distinguished scholar Elaine Pagels. We are discussing the asceticism of the Jewish–Christian tradition, and how St Augustine thought that in Paradise there would have been no desire, thus no pleasure in sex; thus pleasure in sex is wrong. Despite the sheer fascination of this conversation, Harold went upstairs and collapsed. I learned later that the questioning went like this: Man: ‘The first performance of The Caretaker was at the Royal Court, wasn’t it?’ Harold: ‘No.’ Man: ‘What is interesting is that my father had a pub just round the corner from the Royal Court.’ Harold: ‘Oh.’ He flees and meets second interviewer in the lift. Second interviewer: ‘Ho, ho, now you can’t escape me.’ Harold: ‘Oh, yes I can,’ and so on. And so he did.
15 March
Rebecca West dies. I felt oddly sad, despite her great age – no feelings like ‘She had a good life.’ More: ‘Why couldn’t it go on?’ She was always very nice to me. Unlike the rest of the world, I think she liked our ‘scandal’ and identified with it! I always remember her in a taxi after we judged the Booker Prize together. She asked me about Mary Queen of Scots, newly published: ‘Are you making lots of lovely money?’ Me: ‘Well, certainly more than I’ve ever had.’ Rebecca: ‘Then spend it’ – said triumphantly – ‘while you are young and pretty.’ Nothing Puritan about her.
19 May
Harold’s anvil is beginning to strike sparks. At Le Caprice, he starts to talk about a play about imprisonment and torture: ‘These people would be very aware of their condition … wryly so. Nothing explicit. No blood, no torture scene.’ Me: ‘Quick, quick, there must be a paper and pencil here. This is Le Caprice, Jeffrey Archer’s favourite restaurant.’ Harold then cites the end of Jacobo Timerman’s book about being a political prisoner in the Argentine. He describes a woman taken down from her cell for the morning session. The guard is heard saying: ‘Hurry up, you stupid bitch.’ She’s never seen again.
This was the first sighting of the play that became One for the Road but the image vanished until the following January.
9 June
General Election. Harold and I toddled up the hill to Fox Primary School to vote. He finally decided to vote SDP as a protest against the Tories, and also against Labour’s dishonesty over nuclear weapons (Healey and co. not telling the truth whichever way you look at it).
23 July
The Guardian Match (Harold’s own XI against the newspaper’s team). As Simon Gray, ever to the point, said: ‘The Guardian Match is like Christmas, all that anticipation, dread, drama, regret, disappointment, pleasure – and then it’s over.’ It’s true. Like Christmas, the Guardian Match, in my mother’s favourite rhyme, ‘comes but once a year but when it comes it brings good cheer’. Buffet here first in garden, including Ossie Gooding, the prized West Indian bowler, and Benjie, specially here from Scotland. At the match all three boys play. As Hugh specifically broke away from Ascot and ‘the Big Race’ in order to see his three sons performing, it was written in the stars that all three (normally accomplished players) should get ducks. But Hugh in genial mood nonetheless. His appearance was much appreciated by all and he marched about pouring tea for the cricketers out of the huge teapot with much vigour as though this was a constituency event; he particularly liked Ossie Gooding with whom he was able to discuss the West Indies, where he had gone many times as Under-Secretary at the Colonial Office.
26 July
In Chichester to see Patricia Hodge, heroine of both the film Betrayal and the TV series Jemima Shore Investigates, as Rosalind, a ravishing girl by Watteau come to life. I dashed into Chichester Cathedral at 9 a.m. while Harold bought some shoes nearby, in his eternal quest for a good pair of shoes (shades of Davies in The Caretaker). A strange mystical experience. For I saw for the first time the Earl and Countess of Arundel lying in stone. Larkin’s poem