Must You Go?: My Life With Harold Pinter

  I think I cried out: ‘I don’t believe it!’ Anyway, that was what we kept saying the whole day and night thereafter: ‘I can’t believe it!’ ‘I don’t believe it!’ ‘I can’t take it in!’ So many tears recently, of joy (Gate Theatre), fear (Dublin Casualty) and now joy again. Suggested some champagne – it was 11.50 a.m., very early, but why not? – while we watched TV. Idiotically, I added: ‘To see if it’s true.’ Actually the noon news was a long story about sick poultry and it wasn’t until one o’clock that I actually saw Harold on TV.

  In the meantime our two telephone lines became like mad hissing snakes. The world started to ring and bang on our door. Actual banging. Harold went out on the steps at 1.30 p.m., with his stick and wearing the cap: thank heaven for the cap, nautical in aspect, which looked great and made Harold have the air of a cheerful old salt, despite the white bandage. What a fortunate prophetic search that was! Sitting in the drawing room I heard some chuckles, so evidently Harold on the steps was in good if somewhat dazed form. Then the US woke up and Damian (in Mexico) said that while he was talking to me, he had twenty-seven messages on his BlackBerry; Natasha said she had thirty in Paris. The senior grandchild, Stella, at Yale, telephoned later to say that she had just gone walking round the University with a smile on her face, letting everyone congratulate her. I even managed to get to Bush House to talk about the Gunpowder Plot although I have absolutely no memory of what I said, I suspect I just babbled on about Harold.

  ———

  It may sound odd in retrospect but it is true that neither of us had ever remotely thought that Harold would win the Nobel Prize. Occasionally people had politely suggested it, and I had always given Harold’s politics as the reason why he would never win. And I meant it. That very morning we had casually hoped that our friend Orhan Pamuk, he who had escorted Harold and Arthur all those years ago, would win, to help him in his current troubles with the Turkish authorities. Harold now learned that a Nobel Prize transforms your life forever: in his opinion entirely for the better. His plays entered the stratosphere of productions. Equally dear to his heart was the fact that he would now have a political forum in his Nobel Speech.

  14 October

  We are living in a house full of flowers. Harold’s pronouncement on the subject of his speech: ‘It will be wise, lucid, sane and tolerant.’ He reported that he then immediately lost his rag with a foreign TV interviewer who asked him why he wrote in dialogue, also why he thinks human rights are important.

  16 October

  The whole Nobel experience has sapped Harold’s physical strength and he has only a month to write his speech. Me: ‘Please don’t forget dear old literature altogether.’ Harold: ‘No, I am thinking of the double theme of literature and then politics in literature.’ I was even congratulated at the communion rails by Father Isidore at Mass on Sunday. I muttered ‘Amen’ automatically. Among messages of congratulations was one from my brother Thomas: ‘Ten thousand feet up on the Chinese border with Burma I am drinking whisky to celebrate.’

  17 October

  Harold is inviting the whole family to Stockholm. He offers me a dress or rather dresses in which to beguile the King of Sweden and any other passing king. I haven’t had a ball dress for years. Kenneth Rose told me that Lady Gwendolen Cecil, biographer of her father Lord Salisbury, used up her old evening dresses by gardening in them. I may do the same.

  While the excitement grew, so did the weakness. There were terrifying falls including one when Harold lay for two hours outside the door of his Super-Study and I watched television in the drawing room (I did not hear his cries and thought he was having a meeting). I shuddered. Yet he still managed on occasion to make my breakfast on Sunday morning with the mantra: ‘I am the luckiest man in the world.’ And he did a dialogue at the Royal Court with Ian Rickson in which his love of the English language and the English countryside got stressed. The shoes were a terrible problem, his poor swollen feet, until an angel in the shape of our next-door neighbour Paul Smith came to his rescue, searching London for an adequate pair and finally offering his own shoes.

  28 October

  Read Harold’s speech: the first draft. The beginning (Art) is brilliant, Harold at his best, writing like quicksilver. The middle is the usual stuff, all perfectly legitimate but familiar, and then it becomes Harold again. Very funny, offering to be President Bush’s speech-writer. When asked, my main comment was that the synthesis was a bit spare. Harold rushed away and was last seen scribbling furiously, whether he accepted my suggestions or not.

  Harold had numerous tests with a view to being helped by the wonder drug so as not to depend on steroids for too long. Damian arrived in London from Mexico and I asked him to be candid as to how he found Harold. Damian: ‘If I hadn’t been prepared by seeing the Nobel pictures when he was so terribly frail, I would have been shocked.’

  7 November

  The day I delivered Love and Louis XIV (after five years’ work) was carefully chosen to be A Great Day. I am some rotten picker of Great Days. When Judy Daish rang me about six with regard to Louis, to say: ‘How exciting …’ I didn’t even know what she was talking about. For at noon Harold had said: ‘They are taking me into hospital. Now.’ A test taken on Friday had come through ‘bad’; I still don’t know what that meant. Harold told me later that he had postponed leaving for half an hour in order to finish the second draft of his Nobel Speech. We went to Chelsea & Westminster. The Great Fear was well and truly back when I thought of the poor skeleton with its hacking cough I had held in my arms that morning. And when I returned in the afternoon, Harold was palpably worse, in a state of great distress.

  A number of doctors gathered round. His throat was swelling and he couldn’t breathe: there was talk of an emergency tracheotomy. The dreadful rasping breathing, the convulsions, no other word will do. Two nurses, one middle-aged white, one young black woman, were bending over Harold. Older woman as Harold rattled: ‘You hear that sound? That’s called Strydel and when you hear it, you send for everyone in the hospital.’ Much later I learned that Strydel is the Death Rattle to you and me. Dr Bunker asked me gently what I knew about Pemphigus and gave me a lot of statistics which seemed to indicate that Harold at seventy-five had a one in two chance of survival. I looked at the book on my lap which happened to be called The Terror (about the French Revolution; I’d just instinctively grabbed it when I left the house).

  A terrible period for Harold ensued: he was transferred to intensive care at the Royal Marsden and by degrees the immediate danger had passed far enough away for him to be able to leave the hospital. I transformed the house into an abode for a person whose legs were too weak to do anything with them. Then at the end of November he had a bad fall in the night and I couldn’t get him up (later we learned this art from a South African nurse Elzanne whose cry: ‘I’m with you, Mr Pinter’ became a tender joke). So it was back to the Royal Marsden for a prolonged stay and treatment. Obviously in all this, the visit to Stockholm was out of the question. But it was characteristic of Harold’s extraordinary spirit that he was absolutely determined nonetheless to deliver his speech: he had his forum and he was determined, intensive care or no intensive care, to take advantage of it.

  9 November

  Harold was declared ‘out of danger’ and sent for a yellow pad. Harold: ‘Those are good words to hear about oneself, “out of danger”.’ I wondered to myself: will Harold ever be out of danger?

  25 November

  Harold has a very painful infection in his poor swollen leg. Just when you think things can get no worse, at 2 a.m. I was aware that Harold was falling. Then he cried out. The next half-hour passed with two adults, seventy plus, struggling with numerous bits of equally unfit bedroom furniture to raise one of them back up. Judy Daish and Gordon, the blessed pair, came round instantly when summoned at 3 a.m. and even Big Gordon had a problem getting Harold up. So Harold went back to the Marsden in a wheelchair.

  Sleepless and exhausted, I had to go and see a rough cut o
f Marie Antoinette which Sofia had brought from California, on her way to Paris to show me. Oh my God, I thought, I shall fall fast asleep in a warm dark private cinema and there is no way I can ever, ever explain that. So I rushed into the Covent Garden Hotel and drank two of the strongest coffees I could find: I was buzzing.

  Then came the rock music. I had written in my Diary on this subject when I visited the set at Versailles, recording my puzzling conversation with Richard Beggs, the Sound Designer.

  17 May

  Richard wonders whether the sound of an aeroplane which drove the sound men mad might not be incorporated into the film as a token. Token of what? I don’t get this at all. But not at all. Even odder is his reference to Rock’n’Roll when I ask him about the music. I had expected him to say Gluck, Mozart, that sort of thing – the music to which I used to listen when I researched and wrote the book. He obviously can’t literally mean Rock’n’Roll. I expect the phrase has another meaning which I am not cool enough to know. I must ask Natasha.

  Now I realized that Rock’n’Roll was no code … the first blast of it nearly made me jump out of my comfortable chair in the viewing theatre at the chic Covent Garden Hotel. Although I got to love it in the wild party scene. (In the end the music was Rameau’n’Rock’n’Roll, leading to some highly original music credits.) In March, in another chic viewing theatre at the Charlotte Street Hotel, Harold also nearly jumped out of his chair at the first blast before settling down to enjoy it.

  And I adored it, the whole concept, Sofia’s notion of the young girl at a loss in an alien world of hostile grandeur.

  27 November

  Just spoke to Harold. I am in bed and so for that matter is he. Although not beside me. It is our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. There is no doubt at all that our marriage is very, very, very … to the infinite degree happy beyond all possible expectations. It takes something like these last months to realize the depth of love (on both sides).

  Chapter Nineteen

  FORTITUDE

  3 December 2005

  Harold said: ‘I could as easily get to Stockholm as I could climb the Andes.’ He talked to Michael Kustow about going in a private ambulance to a studio and recording his speech here. Both Mike and David Hare – who will introduce it on television – think the speech is wonderful.

  4 December

  Harold was so amazing yesterday. In an ambulance – which took one hour from SW3 to SW1 but luckily he did not notice – we went to the Channel 4 studios. Harold had one foot in a surgical sandal (ulcer is terribly painful) and one in a cut-down shoe. He refused to wear a tie and was right about that. In the studio, he was placed in a chair in the centre, a rug of checked pale reds over his knees. He looked frail and isolated, like Methuselah’s older brother. Yet on the monitor, he looked young – young and vigorous! Almost as young as the backcloth of him in an open tan shirt, at least twenty years ago. And then he went for it, coolly, huskily, no hint of a rant – he let the words convey the passion, not him – and on and on, remarkably few breaks, that is to say that the thirty-eight minutes took no more than a hour to record.

  Fascinating, masterly, deceptive speech, starting exactly where you want him to go, art, the enigma and all that, and then pow, exactly where perhaps cravenly, many don’t want him to go, the politics. ‘Sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror,’ says Harold. Yes, indeed. I hear smashing sounds all round me.

  ———

  I would like to be able to record that that supreme effort, by a man in much pain who goes in an ambulance from a cancer hospital to issue a clarion call to the world, was followed by a rallying of Harold’s health. But it was not so. The dark days of the early spring of 2006 were probably the time of greatest discomfort of all – so far. It might be nice to be like Elizabeth Bennet, who recommended her ‘philosophy’ to Mr Darcy at the end of Pride and Prejudice: ‘Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.’ But that would be to ignore Harold’s extraordinary fortitude – no other word is appropriate.

  Back to Nobel Days:

  7 December

  Nobel Day. Watched Harold’s speech on More4. I was quite stunned afterwards since there was far more acting than I remembered. I marvelled at the well-judged pauses, the relaxed gestures. And the strategy for the speech: I like the idea of the American Embassy gathered round and as Harold talks about his work at the start: ‘So that’s all right: the guy is talking about Art.’ And then, Wham, Bam. After watching, I visited this rather pitiful, utterly brave creature in his cell, his skeletal appearance striking me all over again as he sat in his dark blue dressing-gown. Harold felt a bit low, he said, towards evening. A reaction? He did all that and still he was in hospital having four dressings a day …

  31 December

  Harold to Betsy Reisz and Haya Clayton, who came to play bridge: ‘This is the worst year I’ve ever had.’ Much worse than 2002 when he was only in hospital for two weeks. The Nobel Prize hardly seems to count in the field of his emotions.

  2006

  8 January

  Harold gave me two presents to celebrate the anniversary of ‘Must you go?’, both alike in dignity. One was a marquise ring, a lozenge-shaped Edwardian ring of diamond tracery, which is designated the Nobel Ring. The other was a list of corrections for Love and Louis XIV – the latter even more heroic under the circumstances than the former. We debated the French for ‘Must you go?’ Me: ‘Est-ce qu’il faut t’en aller?’ Harold: ‘But I would have called you “vous”.’

  29 January

  Tony Blair has written Harold a letter about the Nobel Prize. It’s rather a good letter under the circumstances, mentioning their ‘disagreement’ – well, you could call Harold naming Tony Blair a war criminal a disagreement – but congratulating him all the same on what he has done for literature. It is ‘Dear Harold, Yours Tony’ although they have never met. Harold has replied today: ‘Dear Prime Minister, Yours Harold Pinter’, but referring to his ‘generous’ congratulation, considering their ‘disagreement’. It is good to use the word ‘generous’ because it makes Harold, by implication, look generous too.

  5 February

  Jeremy King and Susanna Gross came to play bridge. Much talk congratulating me on my ‘bravery’. Felt rather embarrassed as I haven’t been particularly brave, to be honest, being very often in despair. In retrospect I think I was brave in 2002 but it was the bravery of ignorance. This applies to quite a lot of courage, of course, but not all.

  18 February

  A great day. Harold went over to the Super-Study, last seen on 7 November when he took half an hour to complete his Nobel Speech and then went to the Chelsea & Westminster Hospital.

  27 March

  Harold had lunch with Ian Rickson today and it looks as if Krapp’s Last Tape is a real goer and it’s my measure of hope.

  This was a plan for Harold to play in Beckett’s masterpiece of a monologue at the Royal Court, directed by Ian Rickson. Over the next six months, it became, for me, a touchstone for Harold’s health, his real survival. When he felt up for it, I was encouraged, when not, cast down. And so it went on.

  9 April

  Harold spoke to me very tenderly and sweetly last thing at night (recently he’s been going to sleep so early that we haven’t talked). He thanked me as though he had thought the words out very carefully, for all the devotion, practical and otherwise, I had shown to him. Me: ‘You would have done exactly the same for me.’ Which is absolutely true. All this in view of the coming visit to hospital in order to deal with the ulcer on his leg, the latest extremely painful ordeal.

  14 April

  Good Friday. And a fine penitential day. I walked into Harold’s room at the Cromwell Hospital, ready to collect him and take him home after a five-day stay. I saw the dark head in bed with the sheet more or less over it. Luckily it wasn’t Harold dead: I had simply got the wrong room.

  5 May

  Harold’s pain is worse. Nice doctor with an Indian name admits that it is rare for an ulcer
to last five months. You can see the pain breaking over him in waves and he gives an involuntary groan. I can hardly bear to write about this latest martyrdom, for that is what it is, which has lasted nearly a year, since last July.

  However Harold did come with me to Paris in late May where the French translation of Marie Antoinette was launched to coincide with Sofia Coppola’s film. He spent most of his time holed up in our suite at the Hotel Meurice while I raced round Paris giving live interviews in French, of which I hope never to see a recording. But he came: and that was wonderfully loyal after the virtual twelve months of illness. Heroically he even made the lunch given for me at the British Embassy, to honour Marie Antoinette the book. Harold put on a tie and suit for the first time for – I don’t know how long. The Embassy chef produced a magnificent cake, of the sort she never told the people to eat, in the shape of the Queen herself. Big pink skirts, high powdered coiffure, which I did not dare put a spoon into. Lots of ambassadorial jokes: ‘Go on, lift the skirt of Marie Antoinette.’ Later, in the Dark Bar, we had our now familiar argument about History. Harold’s position: ‘Things are getting worse and worse all the time’ versus mine: ‘Some things are getting better for some people some of the time.’ Gut feeling versus the study of history. Jewish despair versus Catholic – what?