Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [9]
12 June
Went to Edinburgh for the launching of Scottish Love Poems. I am intensely proud of this book: it seems to set the seal on my Scottish life. Splendid party included twenty poets. The men were either old and hoary (Hugh MacDiarmid, with his thick, thick head of white hair, Sorley MacLean) or young and drunk. The poetesses were grave and gentle, Liz Lochhead bright-eyed and laughing. All were very nice to me.
Confided my situation to Stephanie who was clear and helpful on the subject. This was in my bedroom at the North British Hotel. In the lift on the way down I decided: ‘Yes, I will do it.’
13 June
It was ‘a summer’s day of unusual heat’ – one of Harold’s favourite quotations from T.S. Eliot. Harold, in a very jolly mood and elegant in his black silk shirt and biscuit-coloured suit. I wore my favourite biscuit-coloured lace dress which made Emma Tennant say, when we visited her, that we had clearly decided to dress alike for the foreseeable future (no way!). He seems to have guessed that I will say Yes. We went to the Belvedere Restaurant in Holland Park, a room looking over the iris garden. I took a deep breath and with a kind of heat in my face rather than a blush: ‘What I am trying to say,’ I began, ‘is that if you asked me to marry you now, I would accept you.’
14 June
The next day I had to tell Hugh. It was beyond anything ghastly, beginning with the moment when I fetched him inside from the thunderous garden where he was smoking and reading the FT. It now thundered inside. In the end I summoned Harold round. He drank whisky, Hugh drank brandy. I sat. In a surreal scene, Hugh and Harold discussed cricket at length, then the West Indies, then Proust. I started to go to sleep on the sofa. Harold politely went home. Nothing was decided.
16/17 June
My mind is strangely blank about the past days. Just as well perhaps. I do remember I went to the ICA to hear Harold read Philip Larkin. His deep voice has been one of the things I have loved about him from the beginning. My heart turned over when he read an early poem: ‘Love, now it is time for us to say goodbye.’ Drink in the pub with the poet Ian Hamilton, man with a sympathetic and even beautiful face but not saturnine as I had imagined. (Harold is saturnine.)
19 June
Lunch with my mother at Chesil Court, having written her and my father a long letter so that they would understand that we could not discuss ‘Whether’ only ‘Why?’ and ‘When?’ She said it was a good thing such a letter had been written (I knew that was the right approach because she is after all a writer and currently studying Byron). At the end she told me she would not come to Marylebone Registry Office, ‘but I will do anything else’.
20 June
Told Thomas: known as my ‘Irish twin’, being a mere eleven months younger than me, and my closest person since his birth which, as I sometimes pointed out, ruined my status as a happy only child. Thomas said: ‘I have always thought ever since playing tennis with you in Norham Gardens (during our shared North Oxford childhood), that you would be very difficult to be married to.’ Pause. ‘I myself am very difficult to be married to.’ Then he talked at length about himself. Restored to the point – me! – he said: ‘You have a special problem. You are a woman and a strong character yet you want your husband to be stronger. Women with strong characters who want to dominate are always fine because there are plenty of weak men around. Also plenty of strong men for weak women. But yours is a special problem.’ ‘Come off it, Confucius,’ I said. But actually he’s quite right in a maddening way. Hugh’s superior age – fifteen years – and experience in the war had blinded me at the age of twenty-three to the fact that although he was certainly a strong character, he was essentially a loner.
George Weidenfeld (my publisher, also my oldest adult friend, ever since I worked for him aged twenty-one) very charming to Harold at dinner, which pleased me.