Must You Go?: My Life With Harold Pinter Page 19

  On the subject of family life, Harold and I had once discussed the matter generally when we were in Venice. We both had a sense of Armageddon, brought on by Margaret Atwood’s extraordinarily prophetic novel-of-the-future The Handmaid’s Tale, for which he had been asked to write a screenplay. The book haunted my dreams in the most terrifying fashion: every ‘intelligent’ woman’s nightmare, complete powerlessness, total subjugation of one sex to another for breeding purposes as well as giving me fresh insight into what it was like to be a seventeenth-century woman. We get on to the discussion of the family. Talked of the break-up of the wide, warm, family circle of his childhood and what had been lost. Harold: ‘You’re different. You’ve still got one.’

  Perhaps it was relevant that Harold was beginning to lose touch with his son, who was living in the country; he once said about the relationship that he felt ‘a great sense of failure’. Eventually in about 1993 Harold stopped having personal contact with his son altogether (although he continued to support him). There was no actual break-up so far as I know, merely a distancing. It seems that they both preferred it that way. Instinctively I could see that it was not easy for anyone to bear a famous and distinctive name – which is why Harold’s son had chosen to give up the Pinter name before we ever met. Unfortunately, unlike a name, the burden of being a son of a famous man is not so easily put aside. Nevertheless Harold’s son had the right to choose to pass from his father’s story, a right I will respect.

  At the time, as Harold discoursed on the loss of the family circle of his childhood, I made a different point: ‘There is another side to the family too. You wrote the most chilling and discerning play about the subject once. I think it’s called The Homecoming. We have to ask ourselves: Why on earth did Teddy choose to come back to that nest of vipers? He just couldn’t resist it.’ Harold quoted Lenny’s welcome to Teddy with a smile then wrote it down for me in my Diary: ‘Hello, Lenny.’ ‘Hello, Teddy.’ ‘I didn’t hear you come down the stairs.’ ‘I didn’t.’

  Our shared life with children and grandchildren was mercifully nothing like as dramatic. As to family holidays, in the eighties up to the mid nineties, they were once summed up with the following Pinteresque comment reported in my Diary when we were in the Algarve with my mother: ‘As Harold says about our conversations here, two people here call me Mummy, and one person calls her Mummy, and two people here call her Grannie and I call three people Darling, and she calls three people Darling (but not the same three people).’ Or then there was a passionate poem written in Paxos in August 1987. What actually kicked it off was passion of another sort: Harold’s rage against the Italian tourists who defiled the beach below our rented house with raucous goings-on in the small hours and caused him much helpless anguish as he brooded in the darkness above, refusing to go to bed with the words: ‘I’m guarding the house.’ But as ever with Harold, the original touchstone soon became quite irrelevant compared to the joy of creation. These lines referred back to his first poem to me, ‘Paris’, written in 1975, quoting the last line at the start.

  TO ANTONIA

  ‘She dances in my life’

  Still you turn in my arms

  Still we clasp

  Still you swim in the big and brilliant bay

  And come backing the wave

  To my side

  And you dance in my arms

  And you turn

  And stay in my clasp

  Where I found you forever

  In the only first time in my life

  Which calls out again and again

  In the light of this moon on our sea

  In our fierce and young and tender tide

  My dancer my bride.

  A feature of these holidays were the play-readings which reached their height of excellence, surely, when something we dubbed the Playwrights Express landed in Paxos: the Simon Grays and the Ronnie Harwoods.

  We address Simon and Ronnie on arrival; they had both written published Diaries in the past: ‘When are you going to write the Diary of this week?’ we ask. Simon, casually, lighting a cigarette: ‘Oh, I’ve written that in advance.’

  There was much planning of walks round the island but Ronnie says he must work, referring to the ‘scorpions in my mind’. ‘Oh well,’ says Simon, ‘that leaves adultery for the rest of us.’ Later I suggest a play-reading, tossing up between the works of Simon and the works of Ronnie. Simon: ‘As a matter of fact, I did bring a couple of copies of Otherwise Engaged over on the boat.’ He looks for a laugh. Me, smoothly: ‘That makes five copies, because actually I took the precaution of bringing with me three copies each of Otherwise Engaged and The Dresser.’ In the event we read both on successive nights. At the end, we agreed that it was miraculous that six people, three of them playwrights, in a rented house in Greece, could enjoy themselves for a week in harmony. After all, we were on an island. It could have been an Agatha Christie situation …

  At this auspicious moment we decided to plan for the time when the auguries would not be so favourable.

  19 March 1992

  Feast of St Joseph. I have long been concerned that for people who cared so passionately about graves, beauty and history, we don’t have graves which we can, as it were, look forward to occupying. We are forever visiting writers’ graves: Tennyson, Williams, Joyce, Philip Larkin when we were in Hull. (At the latter grave, shortly after Larkin’s death, we had seen a deadish fuchsia, really dead cornflowers in a glass and some perky flourishing scarlet geraniums. Harold hissed: ‘No flowers on my grave.’) Coincidentally I read about Trollope’s grave in the magazine The Trollopian, together with an account of Kensal Green Cemetery, still run by the General Cemetery Co. after 150 years.

  I made an appointment and told Harold what I had done. Me: ‘Will you drive me to my grave or I drive you?’ Then a burly man of suspicious aspect drove us through the long avenues of the graveyard in a decommissioned taxi of ancient date. As a metaphor for death, a dusty black taxi, left ticking over while we inspected areas, was something Cocteau wouldn’t have dared. At one point, he poked his head back through the glass partition and asked: ‘When did the deceased pass away?’ ‘We are the deceased,’ we replied, merrily.

  I asked for somewhere secluded, adding, ‘We’re writers,’ as though we would be toiling away in the future and need some peace. Thus we strolled and clambered among the most beautiful mausoleums, ivy-covered columns, Gothic, oriental oaks, birds; all with a splendid secular early nineteenth-century feel to it (the cemetery was founded so that people of all religions – or none – could lie together in it, which suited us). Afterwards we went for an exceptionally jolly lunch à deux, which also suited us.

  Chapter Fourteen

  MOONLIGHT AND ASHES

  Harold and I both voted Labour in the 1992 election, having supported the party at the previous one, and counting ourselves as supporters of the new leader Neil Kinnock. As always seemed to happen to me (call it prejudice!), I was an even stronger supporter of Glenys Kinnock, but then she was not actually the candidate. Reading the newspapers we noted that words like ‘a new era’ were being bandied round.

  9 April

  Polling Day. Ended up at Melvyn and Cate Braggs’ house in Hampstead. I was quietly confident that Labour would win. Therefore the behaviour of various important TV executives after 10 p.m. and mutters like ‘It doesn’t look good’, passed me by completely. Lots of departures by other people also failed to make a mark. In the end Harold and I were left looking at the television in bewilderment – the results seem to be perfectly all right to us. The room was empty except for a couple of cheerful men. They proved to be Salman Rushdie’s bodyguards. I suppose in the world of bodyguards, business is always good, whatever the outcome of the election. We trailed home to Notting Hill Gate listening gloomily to the radio as we went. It was shaming to have the defeat of the Tory, Chris Patten, in his Bath constituency, hailed as some kind of Labour victory: he is after all a decent, liberal man, and it’s sad he’s not in Parliamen
t, whatever his allegiance. Afterwards we learned that certain Tories were supposed to have rejoiced as well. A depressing business.

  Five years later, by which time the Labour Party was being led by Tony Blair, we both voted for the party again. I had listened to Tony Blair speak to the Fabian Society shortly after the unexpected, sad death of the previous leader, John Smith, and had been deeply impressed by his sincerity. After all the so-called sleaze swirling around in politics at the time, here at last was a straight man. I liked his smile. It was an enthusiastic, boyish, above all an honourable smile. Such a man could not lie. So I joined the Labour Party on the day he was elected leader (as it happened, in spite of living in and around parliamentary politics for the first forty-two years of my life, I had never joined a political party; although party workers of all persuasions were always among the people I liked most).

  1 May 1997

  Polling Day. Voted, with Harold, at noon up at Fox Primary School. Only one teller, a Tory, a jolly blue-rinser who bemoaned the lack of tellers for the other parties: ‘Once we tellers had such wonderful talks …’ The truth is, we are now a small safe Conservative seat. Later we went up to Melvyn and Cate’s in Hampstead as before, in a hired car. Me to Harold: ‘Would it be the height of radical chic to ask for a driver who is a Labour voter?’ Melvyn beaming and friendly as usual, but that means nothing: he was beaming in 1992. Michael Foot, who was ostensibly co-host (as in 1992) very frail, there with his dog, Dizzy, aged seventeen, also very frail. A touching sight. I sat next to him on the sofa. Michael Foot didn’t quiver when the various TV programmes referred insistently to his ‘disastrous leadership’. Others present included Salman as before and his wife Elizabeth West, expecting a child imminently, looking like a Madonna with her mystically beautiful and tranquil face. Also Kathy Lette jumping up and down like a sexy frog as – at last! – the results came in and this time it really was going to be a victory. No, a landslide.

  We decided to indulge ourselves by going to the BBC party. Christopher Bland, Chairman of the BBC, very bonhomous. Enormous security to get in (the IRA does not go away). It was another kind of rout. Such delight as the Tory grandees crumbled on the screen and crumbled in our sight at the party. Allegiances were being hastily shuffled. For example, I like to think that John Birt’s face shaded from blue to pink as in a Disney cartoon, while I was watching. Later we had yet another party at home with the cats, Catalina and Casimir, strong Labour voters both of them, and champagne. By three o’clock in the morning everything was a blair, I mean a blur. Memorable day to be compared with that marvellous summer’s day in 1945 when following the landslide victory of Labour, my father’s friends predicted to this awed, happy schoolgirl that Labour would ‘rule Britain for fifty years’. Of course it was actually six … but this time it was going to be different.

  The chart of Harold’s loss of faith in the Labour government began with the situation in former Yugoslavia. Along with many others, including me, he disapproved strongly of NATO’s action against Serbia following the failure of the Rambouillet Agreement starting in March 1999. This NATO campaign had of course the full support of the British government. None of this was easy, starting with the situation in Kosovo. What action, if any, should be taken by outsiders when atrocities were taking place? There were after all atrocities by Albanians as well as Serbs. What was the role, what should be the role of the all-powerful US? Personally I rather agreed with a letter in the Guardian, rather rude, saying that Kosovans didn’t give a toss about US foreign policy: they just wanted to be rescued.

  Yet under any circumstances, it was difficult to see that NATO bombs constituted any solution to a place already tormented by so many historical, tribal issues. Bombs, after all, are no respecters of persons.

  8 May 1999

  We get the news of the NATO bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. It is announced ‘with regret’. Just one of those mistakes. Oh, so that’s all right. To say nothing of a cluster bomb in a market, grandmas and grandpas bestrewed about, dead amid their vegetable stalls. This week has naturally been dominated by the war. Harold’s broadcast on Tuesday was icily brilliant, pale (chest infection), all in black (natural plumage) and then he spoke the now famous words: ‘What is moral authority? Where does it come from? Who bestows it upon you? … It is power.’ Then he clenched his fist very slowly. Letters are flowing in via the BBC. I try to persuade Harold to find some way of answering them. ‘People feel powerless, so they write to you and thank you for speaking up for them. They mustn’t feel they’ve reached another void.’ All this time he has felt quite ill, but is resolute.

  Harold remained a resolute defender of the Serbs as being unfairly victimized, held solely responsible for a ghastly situation in which many others were equally guilty. In later years, he was informed he had become a hero to the Serbs, which he found unexpected and gratifying. In later years, also, Harold and I came to disagree on one aspect of this war and its consequences. That is to say, the trial of the Serbian leader, Milosevic for war crimes. While I had deplored the bombing of Belgrade, I supported this trial. Harold, on the other hand, disapproved of it strongly, signed letters protesting against it – in his opinion there were many other ‘war criminals’ and he was generally extremely active on the subject.

  For a long time he never argued the point with me, but in the face of all Harold’s activities my silence was no doubt eloquent. Harold did finally raise it at dinner one night. He explained that he did not (necessarily) believe Milosevic was innocent but that he thought what happened was illegal: the Court of Justice was in essence just NATO – his enemy. I put my opposite point of view: that it was good to try war criminals and although this court, like Nuremberg, was not perfect (think of the USSR then presiding over a court condemning atrocities!) yet it was better than no court at all. You will never have perfect human justice at a court run by imperfect humans. I pointed out the case of Pinochet: there had been something uncomfortable about a Spanish judge, a member of the former imperialist power, doling out justice to a Chilean. But it was still the right thing to do.

  The radical and surprising action recently taken against Pinochet, indicted while in England by a Spanish judge for what he had done to a Spanish citizen in Chile during his ‘reign’ as leader, was dramatic and encouraging, unlike the whole situation of former Yugoslavia. Harold’s sympathies for those who had suffered after the fall of the Allende regime – the ‘Disappeared’, many of them very young who had been first interrogated, then tortured, then eliminated – remained as acute as ever. In 1998 he wrote a poem on the subject, inspired as it turned out by a visit to the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery to see an exhibition of the Dutch painters of Utrecht, entitled ‘Masters of Light’.

  19 July 1998

  Extraordinary daring effects; all the painters had been to Rome and there was a strong Caravaggesque feeling.

  We liked The Denial of St Peter especially, the amazing construction, the arm blocking the candle completely, the candle which illuminates the girl’s face. Then Harold gave a sort of groan; ‘I haven’t got any paper.’ But I had some at the back of my little diary. Ripped it out. So he sat down there and then in the National Gallery and wrote a poem which came to be called ‘The Disappeared’. He told me later that a large image of Samson, the shackles especially prominent, was the key inspiration. What did people think of this dark figure scribbling furiously? I did not wait to find out but went and shopped for Art Kitsch upstairs.

  THE DISAPPEARED

  Lovers of light, the skulls,

  The burnt skin, the white

  Flash of the night,

  The heat in the death of men.

  The hamstring and the heart

  Torn apart in a musical room,

  Where children of the light

  Know that their kingdom has come.

  In October 1998 an enormous amount of time was consumed talking about General Pinochet, rejoicing at his detention, worrying at the result of the judgment in
the House of Lords. Harold was philosophical: ‘At least things about Chile in those days have been aired. People of twenty-two who have never heard of Chile, let alone Pinochet, and the tortures which were administered, now know all about it.’

  25 November

  Pinochet judgment in the House of Lords due at 2 p.m. We settled ourselves in front of TV, focused on BBC 24. View of the House of Lords totally empty, then a few peers saunter in, followed by the five Law Lords, who all seem to be very tall. Perhaps becoming a Law Lord makes you grow. We watchers have been coached in what will happen beforehand by Joshua Rozenberg, BBC legal correspondent. If the appeal is ‘Allowed’, then Pinochet is in trouble. So when the first Lord gives a ‘Disallowed’ to the Appeal, I put my thumb down to Harold beside me. Lord Lloyd also indicates ‘Disallowed’. It seems all is lost (as we had expected). Then: Lord Nicholls: ‘Allowed’. Then Lord Steyn: ‘ALLOWED’. Lastly Lord Hoffman, a grim-looking man, but how we loved him! Because he indicated: ALLOWED. It was, so Rozenberg told us from the box, the first time such a judgment had been televised. We drink to the ruin of dictators starting with Pinochet.