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to their joint tomb was pinned to a nearby pillar. Their hands were touching. ‘All that remains of us is love.’ Deeply moved. Flew to the shoe shop and extricated Harold who clearly thought it was a little early in the morning for all this. Other thoughts were running through his head, to do with plastic bags of shoes and American Express, while I meditated soppily on our ‘stone fidelity’. Finally he did put down the shoes and he did recite the poem and all was well. So in a way, the faint absurdity, it was quite a Larkinesque scene, if not quite in the touching romantic way I had originally imagined.

27 November

Gave a party for our third wedding anniversary. Everyone commented on the congenial atmosphere. Rachel pointed out that everyone we asked (the first fifty people who came into my mind) was creative. True when I looked: whether Jean Muir or Alan Bates.

1984

6 January

Harold has a row with two Turkish girls on the subject of torture at a family birthday party; (‘little monsters’). I fell asleep afterwards and awoke to hear Harold saying ‘I’m writing.’

7 January

Late at night Harold comes back from the Super-Study: ‘I’d like to read it to you.’ And oh my God! It’s all there – power and powerlessness. I dreamed about it in agonies all night. My personal nightmare: powerlessness to protect those you love. Harold will call it One for the Road: he used Anglo-Saxon names to make it universal ‘although such things don’t usually happen here’. Goes through names of cricketers. I stop him when he starts choosing a name for the child. The child is not seen (thank heaven). But Harold changes his mind: ‘No, I’ll have the child there.’ And writes a new scene there and then, producing the most chilling line of all: ‘My soldiers don’t like you either, my little darling.’ Harold: ‘It feels so good to write. I’d forgotten.’ Me, feelingly: ‘Well, you haven’t lost your touch, to put it mildly.’

15 February

Paris. Pinter to Beckett (in the Coupole) after talking for some time about politics: ‘I’m sorry, Sam, if I sound very gloomy.’ Beckett to Pinter: ‘Oh, you couldn’t be more gloomy than I am, Harold.’ It’s exactly the sort of dialogue people would imagine the two masters having when alone. Beckett shows extraordinarily good manners in waiting for me and Damian, late in arrival, and then talking knowledgeably to Damian about rugger.

13 March

First public preview directed by the author of One for the Road. I understood why Andrew Graham-Yooll’s wife had to leave: ‘She felt we might so easily have been the parents of Nicky.’ During rehearsals I had watched the two little boys who shared the part of Nicky (according to regulations) playing tag all round the theatre. I wanted to cry out: ‘Oh, run away, run away, you don’t know what is going to happen to you.’ Alan Bates as Nicolas: I suppose it’s the most terrifying performance I have ever seen. Harold has written two plays within two years, the most moving part for a woman, the ‘frozen’ Deborah in A Kind of Alaska, and the most terrifying part for a man, that of Nicolas. The actors refused even to take a bow. They felt it would be wrong. Harold says: ‘I’m letting them off today. I’ll put it back tomorrow.’ The play was actually performed at lunchtime, which added in a strange way to the emotion of it all. Emerging after such a powerful experience into the daylight of King Street, a Hammersmith shopping street, was in itself weirdly dislocating. ‘There’s Marks and Spencer’s, people look unmoved and busy, don’t they know … ?’

As to the character of Nicolas, Simon Gray who had played a conclusive part in persuading his great friend Alan Bates to take the role, had described it to him, after reading the play, as a ‘Dickensian role … school of Fagin’. All I can say is that in performance, the grotesque and thus humorous Faginesque element which one had read in the text seemed to vanish in view of what happened to the man, the woman and above all the child: the ruined family.

15 March

Shattering press night – or rather press lunch – of One for the Road. It’s worse when you