Antonia Fraser' book about his life with Harold Pinter

fonte/ The Observer/ by Rachel Cooke
I thought about this refrigerator as I read Must You Go?, Fraser's account of her 33-year relationship with ­Pinter (they lived together from 1975 until the playwright's death from cancer on Christmas Eve, 2008). Mostly, her memoir confirms the impression gained from her fridge: that the Fraser/Pinter household was somewhat grand, that the couple usually took supper outside the home – in restaurants, at the houses of their well-connected friends – rather than on a tray in front of Prime Suspect (Harold, writes his thriller-loving wife, "did not understand the mentality of one who was keenly awaiting the next Lee Child"). But, still, I do worry about that loaf because Fraser also reveals that she and Harold did not eat bread, not even when they were staying with the film director Mike Nichols and his TV anchor wife, Diane Sawyer, where it was delivered to the door fresh every ­morning. Who was the brown-sliced for? A passing tradesman?

Must You Go? is replete with Lilliputian details about bread, flowers and the like; Fraser, being both a wife, and one now cruelly bereft, has delivered a book filled with the comforting and the quotidian rather than the dripping, bloody facts so beloved of biographers. Her only real revelation is the news that Pinter, while sleeping with Joan Bakewell, with whom he had an affair before he was married to Fraser, was also carrying on with an American woman she refers to as "Cleopatra" (Fraser naughtily calls it a "more intimate" relationship than the one he enjoyed with Bakewell).

Her diaries, which comprise the majority of the text, have an infuriatingly excised quality. Determined only to "call back yesterday" so far as Harold is concerned, she reveals next to nothing about her thousands of famous acquaintances – though, happily, even she can't resist describing how she heard Diana, Princess of Wales, tell Shimon Peres that, yes, she'd love to visit Israel, "anything for some sun". Also that, at the height of the Rushdie crisis, William Shawcross, adoring biographer of the Queen Mother, confessed he would have "withdrawn The Satanic Verses if he were Salman"). The result is often staccato, and a tease. On the subject of life with Harold, however, Fraser's memoir is also unremittingly delicious: strange, rarefied, frequently hilarious.

Fraser first clapped eyes on Harold Pinter across a crowded restaurant, and she liked what she saw. But the bolt of love struck only on their third encounter, at a gathering to celebrate the first night of The Birthday Party, directed by Fraser's brother-in-law, Kevin Billington. At home time she approached the playwright, who had black, curly hair and pointed ears "like a satyr", to tell him she'd enjoyed the play. Pinter looked at her with his black eyes. "Must you go?" he asked. Fraser wearily considered the logistics of tomorrow: the school run, the research to be done on her biography of Charles II. "No," she said. "It's not ­absolutely essential." They talked until six in the morning. At this point, Harold and Antonia had both been ­married for 18 years: he to the actress Vivien ­Merchant, she to Hugh Fraser, the ­Conservative MP. Between them they had seven children.

Their affair was a great scandal, or at least it was seen as such by the newspapers. No one else – with the possible exception of Merchant – seems to have been terribly bothered. Four months into their passion, Hugh Fraser asked his wife if she was in love with someone else. "Yes!" she said. She then revealed this someone's name. "The best living playwright," said Hugh. "Very suitable." Two months later Harold came to talk to Hugh about the prospect of his shacking up with Antonia: "Hugh and Harold ­discussed cricket at length, then the West Indies, then Proust. I started to go to sleep on the sofa. Harold politely went home." Fraser thinks that returning to the bachelor state suited her ­emotionally distant husband, though she is also sweet enough to acknowledge that she might not have been the perfect wife. Her diary for 16 August 1975 reads: "Harold in London begins to plan our new life. Me: 'I've got to learn to live with someone. Togetherness. I've never really had that.' True. Thought I would when I first married but Hugh didn't want that. I remember instituting Bible readings in bed... but Hugh, horrified, went to sleep! Who can blame him?"

So, the Jewish boy from the East End and the ­Catholic aristocrat embarked on life together and it was bliss, for all that her parents, the Earl and ­Countess Longford, initially ­disapproved ("Furious with Dada's morality... I thought about trying to explain to him about passion, but what's the point? He only likes ­people like Myra Hindley, who are apparently repenting of ­passion"). Life seems to have been one long round of dinners and first nights and important meetings, of doting children and ­adorable grandchildren; though she occasionally claims she and Harold were "broke", they spend an awful lot of time in smart hotels. But this is not to say that Pinter was easy. He wasn't! He had a pathological hatred of flies, a bizarre desire to stick up for ­Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian leader, and, outside the soothing confines of their home, a humour like fire and brimstone.

Fraser's memoir sags in the middle, during what she calls the "high noon" of their marriage – largely, I suppose, because they're pretty happy. In the 1980s Harold is admittedly beset by an existential despair at the state of the world. But there is always the consolation of his wife. "I love you wildly, and that is my solace," he tells her. There are other consolations, too, like the validation of their marriage, a delightful show of Catholic sophistry in which a priest agreed to a "dispensation" for Pinter so that he and Fraser could have the church ceremony she craved – without conversion, or even instruction. Also, later, the glorious election of Tony Blair to the leadership of the Labour party. Only he turns out to be such a disappointment – that blasted war in Iraq – that Fraser must go to Chequers for lunch alone.

Pinter was richly rewarded for his labours. He turned down a knighthood but happily accepted the award of Companion of Honour. In 2005 he received the Nobel prize for literature. But by this time he was terribly ill, having been diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus in 2001. Reading about his treatment, and his wife's fears – she Googles survival rates, and her stomach turns over – is sad and touching. Except that, however physically frail, Pinter remained a monster of egotism. Fraser describes a visit to her husband's surgeon, in which he details which bit of Harold he intends lopping off. But the playwright's mind will wander. On the doctor's desk is a copy Pinter has sent him of his clunking great poem Cancer Cells (boy, Pinter was a bad poet). Fraser writes: "We'd both been eyeing it and in unspoken accord longed to know what he thought of it. 'I got your poem,' he said at last. 'Very enjoyable,' he said with a humorous, almost indulgent smile. It was the most inappropriate word, surely, for such a poem!" We're told that Pinter was cheered by this. Well, it made me smile, too, if not for precisely the same reason.