Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [90]
Then there were charities in favour of liberty and against torture, to say nothing of presents and entertainments for the family, or provision of comfortable transport for my parents, indomitable but frail in their nineties. Rather like his courage, Harold took his own generosity for granted, just as he took for granted what we might euphemistically call his outspokenness and could not quite see why other people sometimes objected.
As to patriotism, it might surprise people who only knew of Harold’s criticisms of the government to learn that by his own standards Harold was extremely patriotic. I do not mean the sporting test – although naturally Harold had backed the English cricket team since youth. He also, for example, felt strongly that his manuscripts should go to the British Library, whatever the lure of well-endowed American universities which some of his contemporaries had felt. Thus he began by letting his papers go on loan, and ended by selling them not long before his death for a handsome price with which he was more than content. As for me, just as I wanted to lie one day in the next-door grave to Harold, I decided that our papers should lie together too. So I joined him.
25 July 1994
We decided to pay our manuscripts a visit. Harold’s were in the familiar, and efficient, green box-files. Mine were in a smart woman’s shopping bags: Jean Muir, Ferragamo, The White House, Christian Dior, stuffed with tacky and tatty proofs and papers. I couldn’t resist it: I took out my phial of Miss Dior perfume from my purse and sprayed my manuscripts. Harold looks up from his inspection of his early works, which he has quite forgotten about: ‘That is the most impressive thing I’ve ever seen in a library. I shall never forget it.’ I’m hoping the perfume will steal upon the sense of some researcher in a thousand years’ time.
In the high summer of 1997 Harold’s father, living in a nursing home since Frances’ death in 1992, began to go downhill – health-wise, that is. He was ninety-five. Mentally he had remained astonishingly vigorous, one might even say combative, well into his nineties. One famous New Year’s Day when Frances was still alive we went down to Hove to see them both. ‘You’ll find my father rather frail,’ said Harold. Actually we’d hardly sat down in the restaurant before Jack was at it hammer and tongs about Harold’s visit to the Israeli Embassy to protest about the solitary confinement of Vanunu: they’d read about it in the Jewish Chronicle. ‘When are you going to do something to defend Israel?’ ‘I am defending the rights of an Israeli citizen.’ And so on and so forth, Jack getting visibly more forceful with every minute. In the end, I said placatingly to Frances: ‘They are so alike, aren’t they?’ Knowing this was a peace-making appeal that her loving mother’s heart could not resist.
8 September 1997
A message to say that Jack Pinter is fading fast. Harold saw him a few days ago and Jack said: ‘I just want to get into that bed and fall asleep.’ And that I suppose is what he is doing. In a strange re-run of Frances’ dying days in 1992, it is now the TUC Conference in Brighton, just as it had been the Tory Conference then. So we are surrounded by police at our hotel, due to the presence of Tony Blair, otherwise many big, burly trades unionists, mainly male, smoking cigars. But this time the Guardian is outside every door in the morning when I go to swim, not the Telegraph.
When we saw Jack, he had a look of peaceful determination on his face. He died in the small hours. The next morning Harold had an encounter at the Town Hall trying to register the death, which, he said, put up his blood pressure. A maddening bureaucrat kept saying, ‘You need an appointment,’ as he sat idling behind his desk although there was no one else present. ‘But you’re free.’ Bureaucrat: ‘That’s because the next person will not arrive for half an hour.