I demand reparations for my ancestors’ fall from grace At the front of the book I find an Ex-Libris: ‘Hugh Et Antonia Fraser.’ A quick check confirms it: before Harold Pinter, the historian Lady Antonia was married to Hugh. She even talks about being ‘ghosted’ by her husband, a term I had thought solely the preserve of the modern millennial. She writes with clarity and confidence on the SW1 of her day, but what’s fascinating are the parallels with modern life: the money worries, the snobberies and snubbings, the late-night working practices of Fleet Street’s finest, the professional rivalries. Married to the Times journalist Frederick Lowndes, she died in 1947 this little book was published in 1946. It wasn’t until I got home and started reading it that I realised who the author was: Marie Belloc, sister of Hilaire, a successful novelist in her own right. As some readers may know, my Twitter handle is so I bought it for the princely sum of £2.99. She was a Roman Catholic, mother of six children, and the daughter of the Earl of Longford.Browsing my local Oxfam, my eye was drawn to a faded hardcover with the title The Merry Wives of Westminster. He was a Jew from the East End of London. They were both approaching middle age and both were married, Pinter to the actress Vivien Merchant – who had starred in his early plays – and Lady Antonia to Hugh Fraser, a Conservative MP and the brother of Lord Lovat.
‘He stayed until 6 o’clock in the morning with extraordinary recklessness, but of course the real recklessness was mine.’ ‘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 Charles II… “No, it’s not absolutely essential,” I said.’ In the end it was Pinter who took her home. ‘Must you go?’ were the first words Harold Pinter said to Antonia Fraser as she made to leave a dinner after the first night of a revival of The Birthday Party in 1975. This book is a love story and a very moving one.
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