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of her second marriage, she called descriptively The Centre of the Bed. In a draft which she sent to him, Joan interleaved her own account of the affair with pages of dialogue from Harold’s play Betrayal. Harold was furious at what he termed to me the ‘claiming’. I pointed out that, however unpleasant it was for him, Joan had a right to tell her own story: ‘In her words, however, not yours.’ So the unauthorized Pinter pages were duly removed and there was a truce. It was endangered, however, according to Harold, when Joan quoted to him the comment a woman journalist friend made on the book: ‘You managed to humanize Harold Pinter: I always thought he was just an angry and aggressive man …’

I myself had found Joan’s original reaction in 1975 – sensitivity on the exposure of her private life however great the work of art – very sympathetic. And she had been completely honest with Michael Billington in 1997, the first the world knew of the relationship. Now I felt she was distracting attention from her own remarkable achievements by too great an emphasis on a long-ago affair: when there was after all so much more to be said about her career.

However by then, working on Marie Antoinette as I had been doing, gave me quite a different perspective on press scandal and satire. The pamphlets attacking her in the Bibliothèque Nationale were so gruesome in their (invented) salacious detail that one could only sigh with horror: and then grapple with the biographer’s problem of how to quote them in sufficient detail to make the point of what Marie Antoinette had endured, and not so much as to coarsen the whole tone of the book. Compared to this vitriolic campaign, the serialization of Joan’s harmless memoirs in the papers seemed very small beer. Harold wrote her a letter expressing his unhappiness: ‘You should register the fact and take it on board.’ And there the matter rested. There were, as there had always been on this subject, two fundamentally different points of view, that of the artist using some elements (not all) from real life to create fiction, and that of the actual person, some of whose life was used.

16 October 1998

Vienna. Anniversary of the execution of Marie Antoinette. It seemed an appropriate day to visit the Imperial Crypt. (The Blue Guide inaccurately says La Reine is buried where she was executed, whereas in fact she was moved to Saint-Denis after the Revolution was over.) Took Harold. 143 Habsburgs and one commoner: Maria Theresa’s governess who died in 1750. Harold was impressed by this respect accorded to a governess. I was struck by how much life, as it were, there was in the Habsburg crypt, flowers, messages, compared to the crypt of Saint-Denis where the Bourbons lie, frozen and apparently unvisited (I was certainly the sole visitor all three times I went there).

Here people throng reverently. Instructions are reverent too: ‘Please take off your hat. No Photos. No young children.’ Masses and masses of dried flowers in bouquets with ribbons of the imperial colours and also some fresh flowers. White carnations for Maria Theresa by her vast connubial tomb, roses and piles of bouquets à la Princess Diana for the Empress Elizabeth, lots of flowers for Franz Josef, lots for Archduke Rudolf. Crowned figures of death, skulls grinning under their diadems, remind me of Mexico. But outside the magic circle of royalty, there is a great deal of appropriate dust and darkness. Harold very thoughtful. He sees the light of ‘walking around a bit’ in my eye – this is my euphemism for sight-seeing, a word which causes him to shy like a nervous horse – and quickly says: ‘I’m going back to the hotel to read Mary Queen of Scots.’

He’d never read this, my first historical biography, published six years before we met and took this opportunity of leisure in Vienna to do so. It made for odd conversations in the evenings when I tried to tell him my discoveries about Marie Antoinette and he tried to tell me his discoveries about Mary Queen of Scots …

I would like to report our foreign travels to be one continuing progress of