Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [76]
Chapter Thirteen
MARRIAGE – AGAIN
In the summer of 1990 Harold and I began to have talks about the possibility of getting married – or rather having a ceremony of validation – in a Catholic church. In one sense, the strict Catholic sense, the deaths of our previous partners in 1982 and 1984 respectively, had left us free to marry. I see from my Diary that I must have mentioned it in passing in late 1984.
22 December
I told Harold lightly that I sensed a reservation about our getting married in a Catholic church. Harold: ‘That’s very perceptive of you. It’s my parents. They just wouldn’t understand. And they are not going to last many more years.’
That made complete sense to me and the subject was dropped. After all, the senior Pinters had been through a lot, one way or another, the price of being parents of an only child who was Harold, proud of him as they were.
Now the subject re-emerged. Of course we considered that we had been married in the eyes of God, if She/He exists, in November ten years earlier. What we discussed was a mixture of reaffirmation, as Christian couples sometimes do renew their vows at appropriate anniversaries, but also something more practical. I thought that if I died suddenly it would be an unnecessary grief for my children to have to deal all over again with my situation vis-à-vis the Catholic Church. They might have to ask: is our mother entitled to a Catholic Requiem Mass? Questions of that order. In the meantime I had returned to the practice of the Catholic religion, attempting to attend Mass regularly.
By a happy coincidence, we were enjoying a friendship with Father Michael Campbell Johnston SJ, formerly in El Salvador. Like many Jesuits, he was a leading supporter of Liberation Theology in South and Latin America. I had always been emotionally prone to the Farm Street Jesuit Church, where my father had been received as a Catholic in 1940. And I had worked on documents there for Mary Queen of Scots, thanks to my friend the Archivist Father Francis Edwards SJ. Attendance by Harold as well as myself at the première of a film commemorating the murdered Archbishop Romero – the party was actually at the home of the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster – led to a propitious atmosphere.
It may seem odd to relate that Harold, a determinedly non-believing and non-practising Jew, and I, an aspiring if extremely imperfect Catholic, should have lived together for thirty-three years in perfect amity where religion was concerned. We had lots of discussions about religion, always the spiritual side (he wasn’t interested in doctrine), very occasionally about the social decisions of the Church – and no rows.
That could not be said about our political discussions, where as the years passed I decided to my own satisfaction that Harold really enjoyed a good political argument, didn’t he? So I gave it to him. Only our firm rule that we should not, as in the Bible, let the sun go down upon our wrath made sure that, even if there were pretty late sundowns, dawn at least always found us reconciled. Religion was different. Harold had a deep sense of the spiritual, hence his love of such poets as Eliot, and when we were abroad liked to sit in dark churches while I tried to brighten them up by lighting candles to St Antony.
1 April
The Beckett memorial evening at the National Theatre. What I got from it again and again was ‘I must go on, I’ll go on.’ Not the so-called despair with which Beckett is too loosely credited. Other impressions: how no one is ever dead in the Beckettian world, particularly not Beckett and particularly not the dead. The seriousness of Harold’s old friend, Delphine Seyrig, in Footfalls, an existentialist nun in black