Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [78]
Luckily Harold did not feel later that I had jumped the gun, perhaps because most of the rest of our conversation was about the murdered Jesuits in El Salvador (I had read a most affecting pamphlet on the subject by Father Jon Sobrino SJ). I told Father Michael that Harold had come to respect the Catholic Church through its work in South America: indeed we were on the cover of the Catholic Herald that very morning, seen at the CIIR reception, the Cardinal beaming at me. A good omen? Discussed telling Harold’s parents. Tell them long, long after, if at all, was my advice. As to telling mine: fear of Dada’s publicity-mad streak prevented me; this really was a private matter for us both since all too much of our lives hitherto had been lived out, however reluctantly, in public. I would tell my mother in time, when it was all over, and she could then please herself by telling my father.
11 June
Theatre Museum, Covent Garden: Labour’s reception for ‘people in the Arts World’. The first thing which struck me about the Labour turn-out, male and female, was how smartly dressed they were. Has the word gone out? ‘Look successful! So we can Be successful.’ I really like Glenys Kinnock: a great person, direct, decent and intelligent. Neil Kinnock embraced me: ‘Hello, love.’ Me: ‘I thought you’d given all that love stuff up – glad you haven’t.’ Glenys: ‘All that is just a silly Southern reaction.’
15 June
We visit Father Michael together. One moment of nerves when reading out the provisions of the ceremony from the form, he says to Harold: ‘You are supposed to have instruction.’ Harold’s eyes glitter. ‘But I’m sure your wife can do it,’ he continues smoothly. Equally, at the age of fifty-seven, I had to sign a statement (like Sarah in the Bible) promising to bring up ‘the children of the marriage as Catholics’. At the CIIR meeting afterwards, everyone congratulated Harold on the various stands he has taken about Nicaragua and Latin America generally.
22 July
In New York. Harold talked proudly for the first time of the Pinter Review (American-based periodical of the Pinter Society). He is youthfully boastful about it. I think this is because it includes an article in this issue about ‘Harold Pinter, Citizen’: the thing which concerns him most these days being the-artist-is-also-a citizen. (He still doesn’t read the literary stuff, but then out of choice he never does that.) I am reminded of Simon Gray’s joke: Simon declined to contribute to Pinter Review I on the grounds that he was founding his own English Pinter Society. This imaginary society duly got acknowledged in Pinter Review I as ‘our sister organization’, since Harold forgot to tell the editor that it was all a joke. There were more acknowledgements in Pinter Reviews II and III. Future scholars in the British Library will never believe it didn’t exist and will comb the records endlessly. Now Carlos Fuentes, who is doing a piece for Pinter Review IV, proposes to sign it: ‘Carlos Fuentes, President, Mexican Pinter Society’.
27 August
The day my dream – fantasy as it had seemed for a long time – came true and in a ceremony of ‘grave simplicity’ (Harold’s words) we had our close-on ten-year marriage ‘convalidated’ (Father Michael’s words) in an upstairs chapel at Farm Street. I learnt later from Diana Phipps that it had been the chapel used by the gallant Czech airmen in the war. Edward Fitzgerald, our newish son-in-law, and Rebecca were our witnesses; their daughter Blanche, aged three months, was parked in a suite at the Connaught Hotel the