Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [63]
7 March
Salman rings up. ‘Antonia I have a favour to ask you.’ He wants to come and spend the night to see his son and meet his own family.
12–13 March
The visit. We arranged for the entire equipage to be downstairs in the more or less self-contained basement, in order to have some privacy, not quite realizing that there is not and should not be, any such thing as privacy from Special Branch. Although they were – and are, I’m writing this with them still in the house – amazingly tactful.
At 12.15 p.m. a ring on the front door bell, an hour early. Rushed to it. I see an enormous, handsome, burly black man with a broad smile: ‘Lenny … Special Branch.’ He showed me his card, adding: ‘You’ve got visitors.’ He went over the garden to the Super-Study, where Salman in a red beret and scarf with his wife Marianne were let in the back way. Much drawing of our curtains, so as to obscure visitors but not so as to draw attention to our house on a bright Sunday morning. Two more Special Branch, all in thick jerseys and all wearing lovely reassuring smiles. In the middle of it all Orlando arrived from Cambridge since I had forgotten to tell him to keep away. It’s complicated by the fact that he has brought his guns with him in the boot of his car, being about to shoot for the University at Bisley. Special Branch rose however magnificently to this challenge and gave him excellent advice. (They were rather disappointed later when, after all this, he didn’t win.)
The Rushdie family: Mrs Rushdie sad and dignified in a sari; sister Samin very fine-looking, aquiline features with Salman’s heavy-lidded eyes, in flowing trousers and loose tunic holding enchanting baby Maia. Zoffeir, a sweet, gentle little boy looked more like his mother in type. Salman tells us: ‘This is nothing to do with Islam. This is a monster which has come out of a bottle as sometimes happens in history.’
17 March
We presented our word-wide petition to the UN offices here. Received by a Dr Jensen in a grey suit, grey hair, little eyes, very polite. Though he told us ‘privately’ that he sympathized with our point of view, he burbled on about the Secretary-General’s need to balance ‘freedom of speech’ with ‘religious freedom’. Which actually means nothing at all if you think about it, since the Muslims are free, as they should be. It’s Salman who isn’t. And nobody should be free to make death threats with impunity.
A year later when the danger had only intensified, Salman invited Harold to read his lecture at the ICA, in Pall Mall, in his place. There was no way, under the present circumstances, Salman could appear in person. Harold of course immediately accepted.
6 February 1990
How brave, everyone kept saying when it was announced. I kept a straight bat: ‘But of course there’s no real danger.’ It was only in the afternoon that it hit me. Up till then I had been buoyed up by Salman’s pleasure a few nights ago, at being able to answer back in his own words at last. Me to Harold: ‘Are you apprehensive?’ Harold: ‘A bit, naturally. But mostly about getting my tongue round the words, not getting dry, doing justice to his language which is not my own.’ Me, anxiously: ‘This ghastly situation is spiralling.’ I referred to the deaths of innocent people such as Salman’s Japanese translator: ‘You could withdraw.’ By way of reply, Harold quoted Horatio nagging Hamlet and Hamlet’s reply. Horatio: ‘I will say you are not fit.’ Hamlet: ‘If it be now, ’tis not to come … the readiness is all.’
The security was extraordinary, two sets of guards and masses of police outside – all a few hundred yards from Buckingham Palace. But the event at the ICA had of course been publicly announced. So who knew what might happen … ? As for the lecture, tears had come into my eyes when I first read it a week ago: under such dire circumstances,