Celebration of old times

Towards the end of 1979, Antonia Fraser gave an interview to the Washington Post in connection with her book Charles II (renamed ‘Royal Charles’ so as not to confuse a sequel-bombarded American public). She records her final exchange with the interviewer in the tersely effective style of the diaries from which this book is adapted:

Man, hopefully, at the end: ‘Just one more question, what is Harold Pinter like about the house, all those pauses and enigmatic statements, I’ve always wondered?’ Me, briskly: ‘Keep wondering.’


‘Keep wondering.’ Excellent phrase: curt, witty, and just abrupt enough to see off a line of inquiry without giving offence. Her husband would, you’d have to imagine, have responded with a robust Anglo-Saxonism.

And there’s the reason that this book is so interesting: we did keep wondering, all of us. What was it with those two? We need wonder no more. As an act of memorial devotion, Lady Antonia has turned her daily diaries into this memoir of their 33-year relationship.

It takes you through from their pursuit by the tabloids, their patient but determined struggle to reconcile their friends and families to their relationship, their years of political activism, a good few cricket matches, a lot of meals out, the odd Nobel Prize. Plus, of course, constant reading and writing: a mutual pleasure in, and seriousness about, literature. One of the things that comes through most strongly is how focused and how sheerly happy Pinter was when writing.

This book — full of funny and tender things — satisfies on more than one level. It is an intimate account of the life and habits of a major artist; it is a pencil sketch of British high society in the second half of the 20th century; and it is, more than either of these things, and much more unusually, a wonderfully full description of the deep pleasures and comforts of married love.