Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [82]
At this auspicious moment we decided to plan for the time when the auguries would not be so favourable.
19 March 1992
Feast of St Joseph. I have long been concerned that for people who cared so passionately about graves, beauty and history, we don’t have graves which we can, as it were, look forward to occupying. We are forever visiting writers’ graves: Tennyson, Williams, Joyce, Philip Larkin when we were in Hull. (At the latter grave, shortly after Larkin’s death, we had seen a deadish fuchsia, really dead cornflowers in a glass and some perky flourishing scarlet geraniums. Harold hissed: ‘No flowers on my grave.’) Coincidentally I read about Trollope’s grave in the magazine The Trollopian, together with an account of Kensal Green Cemetery, still run by the General Cemetery Co. after 150 years.
I made an appointment and told Harold what I had done. Me: ‘Will you drive me to my grave or I drive you?’ Then a burly man of suspicious aspect drove us through the long avenues of the graveyard in a decommissioned taxi of ancient date. As a metaphor for death, a dusty black taxi, left ticking over while we inspected areas, was something Cocteau wouldn’t have dared. At one point, he poked his head back through the glass partition and asked: ‘When did the deceased pass away?’ ‘We are the deceased,’ we replied, merrily.
I asked for somewhere secluded, adding, ‘We’re writers,’ as though we would be toiling away in the future and need some peace. Thus we strolled and clambered among the most beautiful mausoleums, ivy-covered columns, Gothic, oriental oaks, birds; all with a splendid secular early nineteenth-century feel to it (the cemetery was founded so that people of all religions – or none – could lie together in it, which suited us). Afterwards we went for an exceptionally jolly lunch à deux, which also suited us.
Chapter Fourteen
MOONLIGHT AND ASHES
Harold and I both voted Labour in the 1992 election, having supported the party at the previous one, and counting ourselves as supporters of the new leader Neil Kinnock. As always seemed to happen to me (call it prejudice!), I was an even stronger supporter of Glenys Kinnock, but then she was not actually the candidate. Reading the newspapers we noted that words like ‘a new era’ were being bandied round.
9 April
Polling Day. Ended up at Melvyn and Cate Braggs’ house in Hampstead. I was quietly confident that Labour would win. Therefore the behaviour of various important TV executives after 10 p.m. and mutters like ‘It doesn’t look good’, passed me by completely. Lots of departures by other people also failed to make a mark. In the end Harold and I were left looking at the television in bewilderment – the results seem to be perfectly all right to us. The room was empty except for a couple of cheerful men. They proved to be Salman Rushdie’s bodyguards. I suppose in the world of bodyguards, business is always good, whatever the outcome of the election. We trailed home to Notting Hill Gate listening gloomily to the radio as we went. It was shaming to have the defeat of the Tory, Chris Patten, in his Bath constituency, hailed as some kind of Labour victory: he is after all a decent, liberal man, and it’s sad he’s not in Parliament, whatever his allegiance. Afterwards we learned that certain Tories were supposed to have rejoiced as well. A depressing business.
Five years later, by which time the Labour Party was being led by Tony Blair, we both voted for the party again. I had listened to Tony Blair speak to the Fabian Society shortly after the unexpected, sad death of the previous leader, John Smith, and had been deeply impressed by his sincerity. After all the so-called sleaze swirling around in politics at the time, here at last was a straight man.