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Excerpt: 'Must You Go'

NPR | By Antonia Fraser

Published November 1, 2010 at 4:30 PM EDT

CHAPTER ONE

First Night

I first saw Harold across a crowded room, but it was lunchtime, not some enchanted evening, and we did not speak. I was having lunch in the Etoile restaurant in Charlotte Street; my companion pointed to a trio of men lunching opposite us. They were in fact Robert Shaw, Donald Pleasance and Harold; they were discussing Robert's play, The Man in the Glass Booth, in which Harold would direct Donald. My companion admired Robert Shaw intensely: the handsome red-headed star who was said to do his own stuntwork and embodied machismo. Apparently I said thoughtfully: 'I'll take the dark one.'

On the next occasion I heard Harold's voice, once aptly described by Arthur Miller as his 'awesome baritone', before we met. There was a recital about Mary Queen of Scots at the National Portrait Gallery, based on my book. Harold's wife Vivien Merchant took the part of Mary, an actor took all the male parts and I read the narrative. These were professionals and I was intensely nervous; a kind friend in the audience told me afterwards that my knees were visibly shaking in my natty white trouser suit which had perhaps been the wrong call as a costume. Nevertheless things were running along smoothly – Vivien was an accomplished reader who gave Mary the correct Scottish accent – when suddenly there was some kind of interruption, a man's voice raised, at the back of the gallery. Afterwards I enquired rather crossly what had happened. 'Oh, that was Harold Pinter,' I was told. 'He attacked the attendant for opening the door in the middle of the recital.' 'I didn't hear the door,' I muttered, having just learned that the projected LP of the recital would have to be abandoned due to the disturbance. Later, when I was introduced to Harold, I asked him if it had indeed been him. 'Yes,' he replied with satisfaction, 'I do that kind of thing all the time.' In similar situations in the future, I sometimes reflected wryly: 'I can't say I wasn't warned …'

And so to the evening of 8 January 1975 when I went to the first night of The Birthday Party at the Shaw Theatre, directed by Kevin Billington, husband of my sister Rachel. The author was of course there and there was to be a dinner party afterwards at the Billingtons' house in Holland Park.

At this point, Hugh and I, Harold and Vivien, had both been married, oddly enough, for exactly the same period almost to the day: that is, eighteen years since September 1956 when Harold and Vivien got married in a Registry Office in Bournemouth (they were in rep there) while I dolled myself up as Mary Queen of Scots and Hugh wore a kilt at the Catholic Church in Warwick Street, Soho, with a full sung Nuptial Mass. Hugh and I had six children; Harold and Vivien had one. Hugh had been a Conservative MP since 1945; Vivien was a celebrated actress. I was forty-two; Harold was forty-four.

I considered myself to be happily married, or at any rate happy in my marriage; I admired Hugh for his cavalier nature, his high spirits, his courage – friends nicknamed him 'Fearless Fraser' after some 1930s trapeze artist – his independence, his essential decency and kindness. I even admired him for his detachment, although his lack of emotional intimacy – he once told me that he preferred families to individuals – was with hindsight probably what doomed us. I on the other hand was intensely romantic and always had been since early childhood; the trouble with romantics is that they tend to gravitate towards other like-minded people, or people they choose to regard as such. So there had been romances. But I had never for one moment envisaged leaving my marriage.

Harold, I learned much later, did not consider himself to be happily married. He too had had his romances, perhaps more than the world, which cast him as the dark, brooding, eponymously 'Pinteresque' playwright, realized. Later he also told me that he had never been in love before, but had once loved Vivien very much, her essential vulnerability inspiring him with a wish to protect her, before other matters drove them apart. They led essentially separate lives in an enormous stately six-storey house in Regent's Park Terrace; but he too had never contemplated leaving his marriage.

8 January 1975

A very enjoyable dinner party at Rachel and Kevin's house in Addison Road: a long and convivial table. I was slightly disappointed not to sit next to the playwright who looked full of energy, with black curly hair and pointed ears, like a satyr. Gradually the guests filtered away. Richard and Viv King offered me a lift up the road. 'Wait a minute,' I said. 'I must just say goodbye to Harold Pinter and tell him I enjoyed the play; I haven't said hello all evening.' They waited at the door. I went over to where Harold was sitting. 'Wonderful play, marvellous acting, now I'm off.'

He looked at me with those amazing, extremely bright black eyes. 'Must you go?' he said. I thought of home, my lift, taking the children to school the next morning, the exhausting past night in the sleeper from Scotland, my projected biography of King Charles II … 'No, it's not absolutely essential,' I said.

About 2.30 in the morning, poor Rachel and Kevin were visibly exhausted, and we were the last guests. In the end, it was Harold who gave me a lift home, in a white car with a driver (he never drove at night having once been found 'weaving' in Regent's Park). I offered him coffee. I actually gave him champagne. He stayed until six o'clock in the morning with extraordinary recklessness, but of course the real recklessness was mine.

We sometimes speculated later what would have happened if I had in fact answered: 'Yes, I really must go.' Harold, convinced by then that I was his destiny, would gallantly reply: 'I would have found you somehow.' But we had few friends in common: Edna O'Brien was one, and the producer Sam Spiegel another. But fundamentally we lived in different worlds. The night of 8/9 January was the chance and our chance.