Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [81]
Perhaps it was relevant that Harold was beginning to lose touch with his son, who was living in the country; he once said about the relationship that he felt ‘a great sense of failure’. Eventually in about 1993 Harold stopped having personal contact with his son altogether (although he continued to support him). There was no actual break-up so far as I know, merely a distancing. It seems that they both preferred it that way. Instinctively I could see that it was not easy for anyone to bear a famous and distinctive name – which is why Harold’s son had chosen to give up the Pinter name before we ever met. Unfortunately, unlike a name, the burden of being a son of a famous man is not so easily put aside. Nevertheless Harold’s son had the right to choose to pass from his father’s story, a right I will respect.
At the time, as Harold discoursed on the loss of the family circle of his childhood, I made a different point: ‘There is another side to the family too. You wrote the most chilling and discerning play about the subject once. I think it’s called The Homecoming. We have to ask ourselves: Why on earth did Teddy choose to come back to that nest of vipers? He just couldn’t resist it.’ Harold quoted Lenny’s welcome to Teddy with a smile then wrote it down for me in my Diary: ‘Hello, Lenny.’ ‘Hello, Teddy.’ ‘I didn’t hear you come down the stairs.’ ‘I didn’t.’
Our shared life with children and grandchildren was mercifully nothing like as dramatic. As to family holidays, in the eighties up to the mid nineties, they were once summed up with the following Pinteresque comment reported in my Diary when we were in the Algarve with my mother: ‘As Harold says about our conversations here, two people here call me Mummy, and one person calls her Mummy, and two people here call her Grannie and I call three people Darling, and she calls three people Darling (but not the same three people).’ Or then there was a passionate poem written in Paxos in August 1987. What actually kicked it off was passion of another sort: Harold’s rage against the Italian tourists who defiled the beach below our rented house with raucous goings-on in the small hours and caused him much helpless anguish as he brooded in the darkness above, refusing to go to bed with the words: ‘I’m guarding the house.’ But as ever with Harold, the original touchstone soon became quite irrelevant compared to the joy of creation. These lines referred back to his first poem to me, ‘Paris’, written in 1975, quoting the last line at the start.
TO ANTONIA
‘She dances in my life’
Still you turn in my arms
Still we clasp
Still you swim in the big and brilliant bay
And come backing the wave
To my side
And you dance in my arms
And you turn
And stay in my clasp
Where I found you forever
In the only first time in my life
Which calls out again and again
In the light of this moon on our sea
In our fierce and young and tender tide
My dancer my bride.
A feature of these holidays were the play-readings which reached their height of excellence, surely, when something we dubbed the Playwrights Express landed in Paxos: the Simon Grays and the Ronnie Harwoods.
We address Simon and Ronnie on arrival; they had both written published Diaries in the past: ‘When are you going to write the Diary of this week?’ we ask. Simon, casually, lighting a cigarette: ‘Oh, I’ve written that in advance.’
There was much planning of walks round the island but Ronnie says he must work, referring to the ‘scorpions in my mind’. ‘Oh well,’ says Simon, ‘that leaves adultery for the rest of us.’ Later I suggest a play-reading, tossing up between the works of Simon and the works of Ronnie. Simon: ‘As a matter of fact, I did bring a couple of copies of Otherwise Engaged over on the boat.’ He looks for a laugh. Me, smoothly: ‘That makes five copies, because actually I took the precaution of bringing with me three copies each of Otherwise