the end of the affair

By Joan Bakewell

I have it in front of me now and it started a tumult. It is an airmail letter addressed to me c/o American Express, Bocca da Piazza 1261 Venice. It has two 10- cents stamps and is postmarked Jamaica, dated July 8, 1962. Inside are eight flimsy pages of airline paper headed: “Flying with BOAC”. The letter is from Harold Pinter. It is the first of many such in a relationship that was to last some eight years. Others followed from New York, Boston, Wisconsin, Sicily, Berlin and even Venice, sometimes addressed to Mrs White, more usually to Miss Kydd (a character from his very first play, a one-acter called The Room, commissioned by Henry Woolf, who would years later loan us his own rented room). Each letter was sent c/o a sympathetic friend who could be relied on to keep our secret. Just such a letter was to be the focus of the plot of one of his most celebrated plays, Betrayal.

It is more than 30 years now since Harold wrote that play. It was set in a period that stretches backwards from the late Seventies into the late Sixties, and drew on things that happened a few years earlier. The play portrayed many of the events of the affair between us, with an accuracy verging on the literal. At the time when he first sent me the script, I was deeply distressed to have our private affair so glaringly presented on stage. In the years since then, I have come to regard it as a brilliant exposition of loyalty, love and betrayal between people who care for each other. I have seen many productions of it and grown reconciled to what I first regarded as a judgment on my behaviour. Time passes – and now I look back on it all with fond memories.

Right now, it is being presented at London’s Comedy Theatre with Kristin Scott Thomas as Emma – the woman who is not me, but whose life corresponds very closely to an important part of my own. I went along to talk to the cast as they embarked on rehearsals. There was plenty to talk about.

Some things stay the same: men and women have always fallen passionately in love. But the world in which they live and are judged changes. In many senses, this is now a period play. Not only are the settings and locations different, but social attitudes have changed, too. The 1960s were a different world – and Sixties London was a good place to have an affair. They were giddy times, and the city’s young people were buoyant with a creative optimism that made people inclined to smile rather than frown. And people always smile on lovers. For some seven years, Harold and I met easily and often in London’s pubs and cafés. I sped around London happy as a lark in my first car, a Morris Minor, finding no traffic jams and few parking restrictions. We were so in love we felt it was worthwhile to dash across London to spend half an hour in each other’s company. The Little Akropolis restaurant in Charlotte Street became our regular haunt, and its Greek proprietor took us under his wing.

This would be trickier now, not because we might be recognised, but because the technology has changed. We made our clandestine arrangements in snatched moments from our homes or public telephones. The play refers to “the pip, pip, pip phone calls” made from a pub. There were no mobile phones, phone bills weren’t itemised, no ring-back facilities, no texting, no Twitter, no Facebook – all of which can ambush today’s lovers. Our plans left no trace.

Today there’s something cloying about people’s compulsive need to be in touch all the time. In the 1960s, husbands and wives set out for their day’s work and came together again only when that work was done: there were none of those “I’m on the train” messages telling every stranger within a 10-yard radius the details of your private life. This difference was more than technical. People had individual lives to lead and were less dependent on each other for the rough and tumble of daily living. The call from the supermarket (“Which pesto sauce do you want?”) was unthinkable. And not only because we’d never heard of pesto. People simply had to make decisions for themselves and it made them more resourceful. Harold and I were very resourceful indeed.

Betrayal opens with two people – Emma and Jerry – having a drink in a London pub: they are ex-lovers, and they are meeting to reminisce and to bring each other up to date with their now separate lives. Their conversation is in some ways similar to that between Harold and myself at the Lord’s Tavern pub beside Lord’s Cricket ground early in 1969. It contains a bombshell. Emma tells Jerry that the previous night she and her husband, Robert, agreed to end their marriage, and that she has confessed to him that she has had a long affair with Jerry. It was the moment I told Harold that my husband had known of our affair. That night the two men met: I don’t know what they said to each other. I never asked.

The point that is unique to the play’s plot, and not like my life at all, is that Robert and Jerry are best friends: Jerry had been best man at Robert and Emma’s wedding. Robert is a publisher and Jerry a writer’s agent, so they have professional links. They also regularly play squash together, then shower and go for lunch. Theirs is as close as a friendship can be between men. None of this was true of Harold’s relationship with my husband Michael, which was far less intimate. Michael was a BBC radio producer who admired Harold’s work and sought to promote it within the BBC script department and went on to direct it on radio. We both knew Harold and his actress wife Vivien socially – we dined in each other’s homes, sent holiday postcards, our children went to each other’s parties. Jerry refers to throwing Robert’s daughter up in the air and catching her at just such an occasion. Such an event actually happened, though I can’t recall whether it was at Harold’s home or my own. Neither can Robert or Jerry: the overlapping of life and fiction is tantalising.

The play moves backwards through nine scenes, each one revealing more of the affair: how the lovers had their own flat, came there in the afternoons, how the discovery of a letter from Jerry to Emma, holidaying in Venice, brought the affair to light. Michael and I holidayed in Venice right through the Sixties, and many letters flew back and forth. From then on – moving forward in the play but backwards in time – we see how the deceptions multiplied with each of the three people being complicit in the tangle of loyalties. Audiences find their sympathies shifting back and forth: many have an uneasy sense of their own dilemmas. Fidelity/infidelity in a long marriage is of universal fascination. And the play’s ambiguities are what create the tension.

Again the incidentals of Sixties life reflect those times: Harold and I had a flat in Kentish Town – 38 Burleigh Road. We chose it because at that time the place was rundown and not the sort of place where we were likely to bump into friends. In the play the location has moved to Kilburn – at the time of writing, it had yet to become popular. “Whoever went to Kilburn in those days?” reminisces Jerry. Later, when the Burleigh Road house was sold, we moved to 73 Park Hill Gardens in Hampstead, a much riskier place, but by then we were taking bigger risks.

Reading the play again and talking with Kristin Scott Thomas, I realise how Emma’s life was very much that of a woman of the Sixties. She is basically a housewife with a small child. As I was. I had married at 22 to someone who had been a fellow student at Cambridge. At the time, the theories of the psychologist John Bowlby were all the rage: that small children needed a close bond with their mothers, otherwise they would grow up damaged. So, once my daughter was born when I was 25, I gave up any idea of working. The concept of a career simply didn’t arise. I would be a wife and mother. But I was also a Cambridge graduate. I got restless for some life of the mind. I began to do a little broadcasting here and there but not much. And I began going along to Michael’s rehearsals. He was directing some of Pinter’s radio work at the time, and then I went with him to the party where I met Harold. It was where we had our first encounter. The last scene of Betrayal carries something of its force.

In later years – years that come early in the play – Emma has developed a career of her own: she is running an art gallery and can’t be free in the afternoons. Jerry is more and more busy, too, often in America. It is how the affair petered out in my own life. I got my break in a BBC television programme called Late Night Line Up in 1965. Running a family, an affair and a career was exhilarating but in the end unmanageable. As Jerry indicates in the play, how can they meet when Emma’s not free in the afternoons and he’s in America? We gave up the flat. We brought the affair to an amicable end.

What seems so odd today is that for seven years the affair remained largely secret. Slowly a number of people came to know – what with flats and phone calls, letters and close friends – but there was no gossip that reached the press. On one occasion, the filmmaker Joseph Losey remarked casually to Pinter (they were working on The Servant at the time): “How’s your affair going?” And Harold was outraged at such a breach of the understood etiquette. He found out who had talked – it was the writer David Mercer – searched him out, and gave him a thorough dressing down. People cowered before Harold’s disapproval.

There was something different about life then. People had a sense of the right to privacy that the rise of celebrity seems to have been eroding ever since. It was assumed that affairs arose from the dynamic of human relations – the unavoidable attraction of more than one other person in one’s life – and were viewed benignly until people began to get hurt. In our case, the theatre world, which is often lampooned as fluffy and shallow, proved impressively loyal. On the night Betrayal opened at the National Theatre, I was one of many guests invited to the after-show dinner celebration at La Barca restaurant. Lord Longford greeted me loudly – “They say this play is about you, Joan” – but was quickly hushed up by a flock of sympathetic friends. It had all been over long ago, and there was no need to speak of it.

In fact, it was Harold himself who made the whole thing public. In the mid-1990s, with Harold’s consent, Michael Billington embarked on a biography. Harold rang and asked me to talk to him.

“Really? Are you sure? What shall I say?”

“Tell him the truth. There’s no point in keeping the secret any more.”

So I did. Harold and I were each happily re-married by then but continued to be good friends. He felt that the passing of time had made things less explosive. He was wrong: when the biography was published in 1996, the revelations were seized on and made much of by the press. From then on, it was public knowledge. Ironically, when in 2003 I published my autobiography, The Centre of the Bed, it was Harold who was angry. He wrote a stinging letter telling me he was not happy at our relationship being “thrown open to the public”. He always liked to be in control. Such a dilemma is the crux of Betrayal.

Our friendship survived and shifted in the long years that followed. We met not often but regularly. He was always wonderful company, a great wit and story-teller, a source of quotations, ideas and laughter. He sent me the scripts of each new play as it was completed. Above all, we remained concerned about each other’s lives. When I remarried in 1975, Harold, who had just separated from his first wife Vivien, came along to the party and was the last guest to leave. On my wedding night, we sat drinking – just the three of us – until two in the morning.

Then in 1982 when Vivien died – of alcoholism at the age of 53 – he asked me if I would go along to her funeral. There were only a few of us, but it was a beautiful and thoughtful occasion. I was, then and always, pleased to be his friend.

 'Betrayal’ is at the Comedy Theatre, Panton Street, London SW1 (www.thecomedytheatre.co.uk), unt