Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [97]
15 May
Run-through of Landscape directed by Harold in an empty room at the Shelbourne Hotel on Sunday morning for the Reiszes who have to return to London in advance of the play’s opening. We trail through desolate banqueting suites to get there, a room containing nothing but a wooden table, a teapot and a mug. Only audience: ourselves and Michael Colgan. It was the most appropriate setting: the couple somewhere alone in the big house, in this case the big hotel. And wonderfully done. Penelope Wilton so tender, so lost, Ian Holm beginning tender, finally so violent. Could there ever be a finer performance?
20 May
After the first night of Moonlight, directed by Karel Reisz, there was quite a roister. Hangovers all round the next day when the weather is freezing. Everyone, but especially Alison Lurie and Diane Johnson, visiting from Paris, are rushing out and buying scarves and shawls. We too rush out and spend a fortune on a set of Waterford glass at Blarney’s Woollen Mills in Nassau Street. As Harold tested the weight of the glass in his hand – the heaviness is so lovely – he said sadly: ‘I only wish this glass had a drink in it now.’
Our stay near Chichester when Harold was acting in The Hothouse had been such a success that we decided to enjoy merry England rather than merry airports in the summer in future. Thus for ten blissful years we rented a house near Dorchester called Kingston Russell, in essence a late seventeenth-century hunting lodge transformed into an elegant if slightly bizarre country house, like a stage set, only a single room thick. That is to say, at one moment you were gazing at the amazing façade and the next moment you had already stepped into the back garden. Harold was captivated by the natural beauty of Dorset since he loved anything that could be construed as ‘England’ – which was perhaps why cricket appealed to him aesthetically so much, the cricket on the village green, the cricket match of a David Inshaw painting (the most famous one was actually painted in the neighbouring village of Long Bredy so that we were able to contemplate the celebrated pitch with reverence).
In 1999 Harold was toying with a play tentatively entitled Restaurant. He had begun it late one Saturday night when we had been unlucky in our very, very loud neighbours at the next-door table in a famous West End restaurant. It was not going well.
16 August 1999
Little Hugh Fraser is three and we are at Kingston Russell. He came into the kitchen in Lucy’s arms, fair and small and snuggly and said in a very loud voice: ‘Look out! I’m the birthday boy.’ The next person to come in was Harold who was none of these things just extremely dejected. He said that he had chucked in Restaurant because the people in it were just too nasty. He didn’t even let me read it. ‘You’d hate it. Just letting off some bile.’
But later that night, when we were feeling rather exhausted, what with the birthday breakfast and a lot of people over to lunch, the subject came up again. By now the only adult guests left were Benjie and Lucy. For want of anything else to do, I suggested idly to Harold: ‘Why not read it to us?’ So he did. And it was hysterically funny, if only for Harold’s brilliant enaction of the so-called nasty people.
Benjie: ‘You should have some criminals coming in and interrupting it all.’ This was uncanny because that had been Harold’s original plan – but he couldn’t get ‘the ideology of it all’. So he rushed away to his study at the side of the huge, rather empty house, which looked out to trees and the night sky. He worked very late. The next night he read us more; the people who interrupted were not terrorists, but a maître d’ such as Jeremy King at the Ivy and a maîtresse d’ such as Carol at Lola’s, in Islington.
18 August
Harold worked on the play, which is now called Anniversary. At 1 a.m.