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this is the best verdict on Celebration, which turned out to be Harold’s last play. It includes the shiver brought about by the Waiter’s last speech after all this raucous materialistic jollification: ‘My grandfather introduced me to the mystery of life and I’m still in the middle of it. I can’t find the door to get out. My grandfather got out of it. He got right out of it. He left it behind him and he didn’t look back. He got that absolutely right. And I’d like to make one further interjection …’ The stage directions read: ‘He stands still. Slow fade.’

27 November 1980. The Pinters: leaving Kensington Registry Office.

At 52 Campden Hill Square celebrating the wedding which actually took place six weeks later.

In my white Jean Muir ‘Titania’ dress.

The Pinters meet the Longfords: Bernhurst, East Sussex, 1980. Jack Pinter, Elizabeth Longford, Frances Pinter, Antonia, Frank Longford, Harold.

At 52 Campden Hill Square. © Ivan Kyncl

John Fowles and Harold during the filming of The French Lieutenant’s Woman.

Harold and Karel Reisz, the director.

With Oliver Sacks, City Island, NY, after Harold was inspired by his Awakenings to write A Kind of Alaska.

Harold showing me Caerhays Castle, Cornwall, where he was evacuated at the beginning of World War II.

Harold at the grave of Tennessee Williams, St Louis, having directed Sweet Bird of Youth with Lauren Bacall.

Roger Lloyd Pack, Alan Bates and Harold: cast party at Campden Hill Square after the first production of One for the Road which Harold directed at the Lyric Studio, Hammersmith.

The Playwrights’ Express comes to Paxos: Simon Gray, Harold, Ronnie Harwood.

Doing ‘optical research’ for my book The Warrior Queens: Boadicea’s Chariot; Grime’s Graves near Ixworth.

Harold in the ‘cow shed’ in Corfu, painted by Elizabeth Longford as he wrote the screenplay for Kafka’s The Trial.

East Coker church containing the memorial to T.S. Eliot where Harold recited ‘Little Gidding’ by mistake.

Listening to Eliot.

As Goldberg in a TV production of The Birthday Party including Julie Walters, Ken Cranham and Joan Plowright. Harold inscribed the photograph himself: ‘Uncle Cuddles … love H’.

Harold, Liv Ullmann and Nicola Pagett, Old Times, Los Angeles, 1985.

Antonia, George Galloway and Harold releasing ‘the Black Balloon’ and carrying crosses symbolising the Nicaraguan war dead outside the US Embassy, Grosvenor Square, 1987.

Harold and Václav Havel, 1989.

Havel interviews Harold about the theatre.

Olga and Václav Havel, Rita Klimova and Diana Phipps welcome us with a Union Jack outside Havel’s house, Hradecek, Czechoslovakia, 1989.

Harold greets Daniel Ortega, President of Nicaragua, on his arrival at Campden Hill Square, 1989.

Listening to Daniel Ortega.

At Cibo’s restaurant for Harold’s sixtieth birthday party, 10 October 1990.

Venice in January: sunshine and Corvo Bianco.

I bring down the Berlin Wall. Photographed by Harold, February 1990.

Harold at James Joyce’s grave, Zurich.

Salman Rushdie, the West Indian fast bowler Ossie Gooding and Harold, before the Guardian match.

At the Comédie Française for Le Retour.

Harold and the grandchildren. Harold and Blanche, Dorset, 1998.

Ruby is not impressed by the ‘revolutionary rattle’, 2007.

In front of Harold’s 1992 portrait by Justin Mortimer at the National Portrait Gallery.

The two ‘Haikus’ we wrote in Chez Moi restaurant when Harold was about to have an operation for oesophageal cancer.

Tom Sternberg, producer, Harold and Jude Law, during the planning of the film Sleuth, Dorset, 2003.

Edna O’Brien and Jude Law, Dorset, 2003.

Dominique de Villepin, Prime Minister of France, presents Harold with the Légion d’Honneur at the French Embassy, London, 2007.

The last photograph of us taken together. Lord’s, July 2008. © Lucy Fraser

Simon and Victoria Gray.

Harold’s seventieth birthday, 10 October 2000. © Susan Greenhill

PART THREE

Chapter Sixteen