Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [80]
This first stage in the welcome enlargement of the family circle was completed in late 1990, when Benjie brought his new girlfriend to play tennis with us at the Vanderbilt Club.
We had joined the Vanderbilt five years earlier: we liked the fact that the décor of the bar resembled the Carlyle Hotel in New York but the whole structure was actually perched on top of a railway hangar at much less chic Shepherd’s Bush. I knew it was for Harold when I saw the notice: ‘Members Personal Laundry Done’. Harold said: ‘As I pull a muscle every time I play cricket [he was fifty-five], I shall concentrate on active tennis.’ There were those that maintained Harold remained a maniacal squash-player to the end of his days on the tennis court. The art of serving certainly eluded him: as against that, he had been Pinter the Sprinter at school – as he often reminded us – and could outrun many younger men. All in all, many of our happiest leisure hours were spent at the Vanderbilt.
14 December 1990
Lucy Roper-Curzon, aged twenty-one, looks like the nymph Ondine, tall and slender with fair floating hair, enormous almond-shaped blue eyes, translucent complexion fresh from some spring and wears nymph-like clothes to play tennis: a long trailing diaphanous skirt which contrasts strangely with our rugged tracksuits. She proves to be by far the best player on the court, her long skirts no obstacle to fast running, her slender arms capable of the most swingeing hard strokes.
Lucy and Benjie got married the following July at Pylewell, the Elysian country house of her parents John and Elizabeth Teynham. The magic setting on the Solent, combined with the family life all round – Lucy had nine siblings including musicians and a sculptor, and there was even a cricket pitch – made this a favourite place for us to visit.
By the time of Harold’s death twenty-one years later, Stella had become Senior to sixteen other grandchildren; the last born that he knew was Ruby, who contributed a memorable photographic image (which he had on his desk) of Harold dangling a toy before her. The baby with her angelic white-blonde curls and wide blue eyes gazes in polite amazement at the strange behaviour of a grown-up man. It was actually a rattle he had brought from Nicaragua to amuse Stella all those years ago: known as ‘the revolutionary rattle’. Harold adored small babies; all round he loved the relationship of quasi-grandfather (the children’s real grandfather had died three years before Stella was born) terming himself ‘Grandpa’ with zest. Benjie’s three sons, close together in age, Thomas, William and Hugh, getting up at first light to play cricket together on a lawn outside some holiday house, recreated his own childhood obsession. Later it dawned on the grandchildren that ‘Grandpa’ was a name with which to impress their teachers: ‘Oh, really, not the Harold Pinter …’ would be said with thoughtful interest in reaction to the throwaway line from a grandchild which introduced the name. As Harold’s plays were regularly set for public exams over the years, I guessed that his reputation soared upwards in the eyes of the younger generation.
On the subject of family life, Harold and I had once discussed the matter generally when we were in Venice. We both had a sense of Armageddon, brought on by Margaret Atwood’s extraordinarily prophetic novel-of-the-future The Handmaid’s Tale, for which he had been asked to write a screenplay. The book haunted my dreams in the most terrifying fashion: every ‘intelligent’ woman’s nightmare, complete powerlessness, total subjugation of one sex to another for breeding purposes as well as giving me fresh insight into what it was like to be a seventeenth-century woman. We get on to the