Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [79]
I bore a wedding bouquet of white roses, freesias and myrtle – picked from my own myrtle, grown from a cutting from Mummy’s wedding bouquet. In an access of discretion, Rebecca insisted on carrying it for me across the road ‘in case anyone should realize you are getting married’ although an unlikelier scenario – a middle-aged woman and man not in bridal clothes – is difficult to imagine. No one else was invited other than Diana Phipps, who had intended to come from Czechoslovakia, but at the last minute Olga Havel came to stay.
Harold had cogitated in advance whether he would join in anything (nothing he didn’t agree with) but in fact as the ceremony progressed, joined in more and more, I noticed. Rebecca read from the Song of Solomon, Edward delivered St Paul to the Colossians with its admonition about ‘forbearing one another’: ‘And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony’. Then we all declaimed Psalm 148: ‘Praise him, sun and moon, Praise him, shining stars.’ And this is where Harold began to join in, for as I pointed out, this is your Old Testament. The Gospel was the wedding feast at Cana, chosen by me because it seemed so absolutely right for us – the best wine left till last.
After it was all over, we went to the Connaught and drank a great deal of champagne. Little Blanche attempted to gnaw my knobbly pearl ring which Harold had given me as birthday present-cum wedding ring, blessed by Father Michael. The huge blue-green eyes which would make her a great beauty in eighteen years’ time were at present fixed avidly on the sanctified jewel.
Later Harold and I went to see the Turners in the Clore Gallery: that was an extension of the beauty of the day, a day which had begun with good wishes from Salman Rushdie and Olga Havel (it transpired that Václav Havel had visited the ‘Czech’ Chapel when in England). Then Harold watched the English team save a cricket match and I fell asleep.
The advent of Edward Fitzgerald into our family circle had brought happiness to every single member of it, starting with my father, who found in Edward the soul-mate he’d craved in his work for prisoners generally thought to be beyond redemption. That side of Edward – which enabled Harold to quote Yeats to him many years later: ‘He served human liberty’ – was immensely appealing to him. Then there was a personality rightly termed ‘genial’. (Edward’s favourite word.) A radical lawyer, he had been described to me before we met as looking like Dionysus and working for every good – if hopeless – cause, quite apart from having a double First in Classics at Oxford.
As for Harold, he had been especially touched when Rebecca invited him to give her away at their wedding. Pouring himself into a hired morning suit for her sake, he reflected: ‘I haven’t worn one of these since I acted Sir Robert Chiltern in A Woman of No Importance.’ The other eternally happy event in the family circle occurred the year before when Flora gave birth to Stella.
15 May 1987
Having been invited to attend, about 1 a.m. I received a call from the hospital – the baby wouldn’t come before breakfast. I was curiously wakeful, most unlike me at that time of night, and thought I might just as well get up and go to the hospital; I wore my Tree of Life brooch (lucky). Walked into the room in St Mary’s. ‘You’re just in time,’ said Sister. It was an amazing sight, one of the most thrilling, unexpected moments of my life, the emergence of a tiny human being into a new world. It was an experience I’d had six times myself but never witnessed. (It was my mother who witnessed the births