Power of prayer
Lady Antonia Fraser has remained a committed Catholic all her life, says Maria Perry-Robinson

12 March 2010

Must You Go?
by Antonia Fraser
Weidenfeld & Nicolson
£20

Played upon a stage, it might be condemned as an improbable fiction, but this love story is told by one of our leading biographers with compelling honesty. That Lady Antonia Fraser, a self-confessed romantic, writes not of her heroines, Mary Queen of Scots or Marie Antoinette, but of herself, is one of its chief charms. She tells it as it happened, relying on diaries edited in the rawness of her widowhood. Never sentimental, she enlivens every page of this affectionate memoir with humour, wit and minute observation.

This book is also a testament of faith. Lady Antonia is no cradle Catholic. She was the eldest of eight children brought up amidst the rough and tumble of a nursery which her sister, Judith, once described as “red in tooth and claw”.

Educated first in Oxford at the highly competitive Dragon School, where dons traditionally sent their children, she went to St Mary’s Ascot after her eccentric father, Lord Longford, and her incredibly sane mother, Elizabeth, became Catholics.

She acquired a compendious knowledge of saints and a lifelong habit of prayer – a habit she has passed on to her children and grandchildren by unswerving example.

When she met Harold Pinter on January 8 1975 at the first night of his play The Birthday Party she was already an internationally famous writer. As a Catholic mother of six, all seen regularly at Mass at the Carmelite Priory in Kensington Church Street, she was also an icon of wholesome family life.

Her marriage to Hugh Fraser MP seemed rocksolid. Her beauty and charm as a hostess were regularly celebrated in the glossy magazines. It follows that to Harold’s passionate entreaty: “Must you go?” uttered at 2.30am, she should, strictly speaking, have replied: “Yes, I must.”

Instead they stayed together for the next 33 years. Hard on the heels of this life-changing decision came the scandal, which, as Mary Kenny has said elsewhere, caught the imagination of the chattering classes. Lady Antonia left her husband, lived with Pinter and thereby altered the course of English literature. She did so without losing the trust or respect of her children and she continued to pray steadfastly, mostly at the Carmelites, where she was seen for the next two decades, abstaining correctly from Communion, but otherwise a committed Catholic.

Committed she remains, as we follow her through a trail of candle-lighting; to St Anthony (what did she lose?), annually for poor Marie Antoinette on the anniversary of her execution; even on one occasion for a departed pet.

After their divorces and the deaths of Hugh Fraser and Harold’s ex-wife, actress Vivien Merchant, the Pinters, who had married legally in 1980 at the Kensington registry office, went through a ceremony of validation in the house chapel at Farm Street conducted by Fr Michael Campbell-Johnston SJ.

Harold was persuaded, among other things, by his respect for Fr Michael’s work among the persecuted Jesuits of South America. Their marriage lasted. Their love deepened, enhancing both their careers. Harold and Antonia were separate luminaries, who shared a house but never a telephone. Their story is full of fun and laughter, literary anecdotes and bright with family holidays.

There are also wonderful forays into the bygone ambience of the House of Lords, where Lady Antonia’s father sat as a seventh earl. Notably, Lord Longford, a sherry drinker, a prison visitor and a Knight of the Garter, felt his admiration for his son-in-law increase when Harold, challenged in the presence of several dukes to recognise the port, replied without hesitation: “Dow ’63.”

On the serious side there are tales of the Pinters’ legendary commitment to international issues; their support of Václav Havel, their reception of Daniel Ortega, the revolutionary president of Nicaragua; their opposition to the Iraq war, all rising to the moment when Lady Antonia, with her phone continuously engaged, was interrupted by her husband’s buzzer and heard his dazed voice saying: “I seem to have won the Nobel prize.”

For Catholic divorcees this story is also an affirmation of the power of prayer.