For Antonia Fraser and Harold Pinter, it wasn’t just love at first sight; it was love at last sight as well.

The famed British historian and author was 42 years old and (she thought) happily married with six children on Jan. 8, 1975, when she went to a party to celebrate the opening night of a revival of The Birthday Party by playwright Pinter.

She was aware of his presence all evening, but didn’t get a chance to speak to him until she went to say her goodbyes. He obviously had been feeling the same way, because he simply looked at her and asked, “Must you go?”

Fraser didn’t. They talked all night and soon began an affair, which became a marriage. They lived happily together, not ever after but until Pinter’s death from cancer on Dec. 24, 2008.

Now she has collected her diary excerpts about Pinter from those years, linked them with some of her current thoughts and put it all together in the book Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter.

The now 78-year-old author was sitting in her Toronto publisher’s office one morning this week, looking and sounding not unlike an upscale, more diminutive Julia Child.

Asked right off what she loved most about her man, she replies, “It was his sense of humour. I know, nobody expects that. People who’ve only read his plays think ‘Oh how dark he must have been!’ but they don’t realize that when you see them on stage, they’re also extraordinarily funny.

“But Harold was very witty and I loved teasing him. After we had been living together for five years, he asked me to marry him and I paused a moment as if I were thinking about it, which drove him crazy. That’s what it was intended to do.”

She laughs a hearty schoolgirl laugh, not unlike the well-bred Catholic girl she was.

“You know, something else I was thinking about when he asked me to marry him, was that if I did, I would finally be in a state of grace again after living in sin for all those years.”

Fraser takes an almost Pinterian pause, then continues: “You know, it’s true. I was brought up to believe you are either in a state of grace, or not. As a teenager, you would worry if one awful thought meant you were damned forever and I suppose I carried that around with me for years.”

Although as a fellow writer, Fraser was very empathetic about Pinter and his creative process, the book is not a catalogue of what Pinter wrote. But there is a very revealing set of entries around the creation of Betrayal, the first play Pinter created after getting together with Fraser.

“Because it’s about an adulterous affair, everybody always thought it was about me. But it wasn’t. Absolutely not. He had never even met my husband, and so much of the play is about the relationship between the adulterer and the man he’s betraying.

“The play is about another affair Harold had many years before, where he did know the husband well. I suppose all the tension of our relationship made him uncover it in his subconscious. When I read it or see it now, I don’t want to ask who it’s about, I want to ask, how many betrayals are there? Wife of husband, friend of friend, lover of lover? Like all of Harold’s plays, it makes you think. That’s one of the many reasons I admire his writing so much.”

Fraser is the literary executor of Pinter’s estate, which means she has to keep an eagle eye out for how his legacy is being handled.

“But to Harold, that meant if the words in the text were being honoured, all was well. Beckett’s estate forbids Waiting for Godot to be done with women, for example, but I think an all-female production of The Caretaker would be jolly good.”

On being told the Stratford Shakespeare Festival was doing The Homecoming with a black actress as Ruth, Fraser clapped her hands in approval. “I saw that done once in London and it worked splendidly. Harold would want the plays to keep fresh and alive.”

Looking back on their years together, Fraser singles out 2001 as the “best of times, worst of times” scenario for the couple.

“The year started with Harold incredibly happy, acting, writing, directing, seeing his work done all over the world. It was our prelapsarian time in Eden, before the Fall.” For one moment, her eyes start to fill with years. “Oh, if only we knew what was to come.”

She collects herself and calmly narrates the catalogue. “My father died in August, then there was 9/11. In December, Harold was diagnosed with esophageal cancer, which has a 92 per cent mortality rate. It was 21 years from when we got married until that diagnosis.”

Fraser thinks back to how she reacted: “I didn’t curse God, but I was a bit frozen. I suppose I realized that, as the caregiver, there was a certain burden placed on me. I couldn’t collapse. I couldn’t be frightened. I couldn’t be in a state of terror.”

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The gods weren’t through with Fraser and Pinter. He seemed to have achieved a complete recovery but a few years later, he became ill again. This time, the cancer struck his liver.

“He had suffered from so many different things that all I wished him was peace at the end. Liver cancer is so terrible that you cannot wish someone you love to live on with it.”

In the midst of all this, Pinter was awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature. “It was unquestionably the most exciting day of our lives, but I’d like to rewrite it so he wouldn’t have been so ill.”

She looks out the window at a grey Toronto morning. “When I think of those years, I think of a production of The Duchess of Malfi I once saw with Eleanor Bron. Death was played by a hooded figure who sometimes stood very near the Duchess, but then would move to the back of the stage. But he never, ever left.

“Sometimes I dream that if Harold could come back, I would go through all the seven years’ illness again. I just wouldn’t want him to go through it.”

As our time together ends, I remind Fraser that when she first visited Tennessee Williams’ tomb, she prayed, “If he’s anywhere, oh God, let him be at peace,” and I wondered where she thought Pinter was.

“I don’t honestly know. People ask me if I think I’ll join him in the afterlife. But, you see, I truly feel that he hasn’t left me and I haven’t left him.”

Five Faves She Would Have Had An Affair With

Lord Byron: Oh I absolutely would have said yes to him. They called him “mad, bad and dangerous to know” and they were right.

Richard the Lionheart: He would always have been away on the Crusades and I could have ruled the country. Then when he came back, he’d be very nice to me because he missed me so much.

Charles II: He was a hedonist. He liked women as well as loving them, which was very rare in the 17th century.

Count Axel von Fersen: He was Marie Antoniette’s lover and he was supposedly very chivalrous and incredibly attractive. Well, with her, would he have to have been?

George Clooney: Apart from being incredibly attractive, he has that same twinkle in his eye that Harold had, which I find irresistible.