Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [75]
Recently my books hadn’t sold particularly well, although I was extremely content with what I had done. But the fact is that any book on Henry and his six wives sells. As a young publicist said to me on the day of publication in England, on the way to a radio show, when I suggested that the book appeared to be subscribing well: ‘I think it’s the subject, isn’t it?’ Maybe she wasn’t destined for a life of diplomacy, but the fact is that she was right. Biography in my experience, however brilliant, rarely transcends its subject in terms of sales. The quality however soars or sinks with the writer.
Whenever required, Harold entered enthusiastically into my expeditions on what I called ‘optical research’, the term invented for tax purposes, which could be put in another way as ‘Going to places and looking at them’. Even though I never quite cured myself of impulsive gestures such as ushering Harold on to turrets of perilous height or worse still, into claustrophobic dungeons … Sometimes his visits to what he called ‘your own world … the world of history which you love’ coincided harmoniously with his own film work. This happened when Harold was invited by Canadian director Patricia Rozema to play Sir Thomas Bertram in a version of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.
It was set, for reasons which seemed good to the director, in an early Jacobean mansion in Northamptonshire. Even though one of the points of Jane Austen’s novel (hence the title) is that Sir Thomas has built his house himself with money he has earned. And he has earned it from the slave trade, as was certainly stressed in the film. If ever there was a case for the usual graceful Georgian mansion, this was it. But apparently ‘that had been done before’, as reported by Harold, presumably in Pride and Prejudice.
Never having read the novel, Harold was tickled with the script because the part of Sir Thomas was such a good, meaty one. My historian’s yap about the date of the house did not bother an actor with a good part one whit. Like most actors in films, I imagine, Harold’s complaints were mainly about his stockings with garters not staying up. Nor did he mind the inevitable delays. He stayed in his caravan ‘thinking about cricket’, in his own words.
So I went to Oundle where Harold was staying in order to be with him while he was filming. It was golden autumn weather. An amiable round of historical sight-seeing followed. We looked at four churches and one cathedral, Peterborough, where I was delighted to see that the tomb of Catherine of Aragon on which I had reverently placed flowers when I was working on her life, even now had a huge bouquet. Then I took Harold with me to Fotheringhay where Mary Queen of Scots had been executed in 1587. It was what Henry James called ‘the visitable past’. For although essentially the past of the tragic queen, it was also my past, thirty years ago at the time when I was working on my biography, in a different life before I met Harold. Fotheringhay looked of course exactly the same, the surviving lump of masonry more like an asteroid which had landed from space beside the River Nene, than the last remnant of a once great castle. The thistles on the mound were grown high. I remembered picking a huge bunch in the sixties; I also remembered the story I had picked up of a Highland piper who used to come and play a lament in memory of Queen Mary on the anniversary of her execution in February. No sign of a piper now, but I gathered another enormous bunch of thistles for remembrance. We both contemplated the mound in silence.
After that we went on to the eighteenth/seventeenth-century