Even as We Speak

by Clive James

  No life, and no future. Soon the press were piling it on, and steadily the intrusiveness got worse. It became known that she was trying to lessen the effects by getting a few media figures on her side. It was manipulation, but what else does a marionette dream of except pulling strings? So I thought I knew what it was about when she sent me an invitation to lunch at Kensington Palace. I thought there would be at least half a dozen of us there to receive the gentle suggestion that a few supportive words would not come amiss. (Even for my generation, words like ‘supportive’ are losing their inverted commas by now: her unashamed use of me-speak has influenced the language.) But after I was shown up the staircase to the sitting room I found myself alone. When she came into the room, it was as if that first conversation in Cannes had been frozen by the pause button and now the button had been touched again to re-start the tape. ‘Sorry there aren’t any film stars,’ she said. ‘There’s just me. Hope you don’t get bored.’ The cahoots were back. We sat down at a small table in the next room and immediately established the protocol that would become standard, and which I will always cherish as one of the best running gags I was ever involved in. She ate like a bird while encouraging me to eat like a wolf, as if I weren’t being fed properly at home. There was a catch under the joke: that I had a home, she made it clear, was enviable. She envied me my long marriage. When I told her that I had been a neglectful husband and father, and that my guilt had begun to erode my peace of mind, she said that I must have done something right, if we were all still together, so I should take comfort from that. Her own marriage, she said, was coming apart. She told me why and how. I could hardly credit my ears. Armed with nothing else except what she told me then, I could have gone to a telephone and blown the whole thing sky high. But the cahoots ruled that out. The tacit bargain was: You tell me what you can’t tell anyone else and I’ll tell you what I can’t tell anyone else, and then neither of us can tell anyone else about what we said.

  No, it wasn’t mutual therapy. But I suppose it was a mind game. There must have been dozens of other people that she played it with, but she infallibly picked those who would never break the deal. (If she had chosen her lovers on the same principle, she would have given a lot fewer hostages to fortune, but desire doesn’t work like that.) She would make each of her platonic cavaliers believe, or at any rate want to believe, that he was the only one. The joker in her real life doubled as the ace of diamonds in the game: it was her childhood. Everything in her tormented psyche turned on what had happened to her at the age of six, when her parents separated and left her to a loneliness that nothing could cure. Then, while I was clearing her plate after I had cleared mine, she popped the question: ‘Something like that happened to you, didn’t it?’ It was the Princess of Wales who was asking me, so I gave her the answer. Yes, it did. When I was six, my mother got the news that my father had been killed on the way home from the war.

  No, my mother cried. No, no, oh no. I was the witness of her distress, I couldn’t help her, and I had been helpless ever since. I sometimes thought, I said, that everything I had ever written, built or achieved had been in order to offset that corrosive guilt, and that I loved the world of women because I feared the world of men. Diana touched my wrist, and that was it: we were both six years old.

  No, it was no trick. It might have been a mind game, but her mind was her most vivid reality, the battlefield on which she looked for peace. It was a good mind, incidentally. Of all the poisonous dreck ever written about Diana in the newspapers, the most despicable was based on the assumption that she was stupid. Journalists who read three books a year and had scarcely two ideas to rub together about anything called her an ignoramus. The truth was the opposite. Schopenhauer (‘Chopin who?’ I can hear her say), who was a great reader himself, pointed out the danger of letting books get between us and experience. What Diana knew was based on experience, and she knew a lot, especially about the mind. Well aware that her own was damaged, she sought comfort from those who would admit to the same condition. She spent too much time with gurus, spiritualists and exotic healers, but that wasn’t frivolity: it was desperation. For the rest of the time, which was most of it, she had a remarkable capacity to do exactly the opposite of what she was notorious for: far from being obsessed with her own injuries, she would forget herself in the injuries of others. It was the secret of her appeal to the sick and the wounded. When she walked into a hospital ward, everyone in it recognized her as one of them, because she treated them as if they could have been her. They were her. She was just their souls, free for a day, in a beautiful body that walked so straight and breathed so easily. The sick, she would often say, were more real to her than the well: their guard was down, they were themselves.

  No, I didn’t figure all that out straight away, but as time went on it became more apparent to me that I was her patient. I missed her after that first lunch, with a mild version of the forlorn longing I have seen among friends of mine when their shrinks go on holiday. So I did something so presumptuous I still don’t believe I had the brass neck to go through with it. I asked her to lunch. The separation was practically official by now, she was kind of up for grabs, so why not, you know, ask her to lunch? I made the phone call to her secretary and hung up feeling like someone who was going to get a flea in his ear the size of a hummingbird. But ten minutes later the secretary was back on the line. The Princess of Wales would be delighted. How about the Caprice?

  No, I didn’t get there half an hour early – only twenty minutes. I took up my elaborately casual position at the corner table, double-cleaned my fingernails with my door key, and watched the forecourt through the window. As always, she was on time to the minute. When she stepped from the chauffeur-driven car, it wasn’t just the way she looked that stymied me. No escort. She had been threatening for a while to start going out without an escort, and now she was actually doing it, the crazy little twit. The chill of fear I felt was probably useful in making me appear cool as I rose for an air kiss that stopped every knife and fork in the room, as if time had been switched off. The rattle of cutlery started again after she sat down, and there we were, tête-à-tête. It wasn’t cahoots yet, though. By this time, two camps had formed, Charles’s and Diana’s. Diana’s people were busy calling Charles a stuffed shirt, and Charles’s people were just as busy calling Diana a dingbat. I wanted to make it clear to her that I was for both of them, and against anything that would make them irreconcilable. I couldn’t, either in public or in private, say a word against the Prince. Putting it in jokey form – always her preferred way of hearing a lecturette – I told her that if we were caught talking high treason she would be given the privilege of dying by the sword, whereas I, a commoner and a colonial, would be lucky if they even bothered to sharpen the axe. She laughed, said she understood completely, and made it evident that she admired Charles’s qualities as much as I did. Things bubbled along nicely. Cahoots again. I got both our meals to eat as usual, and from the next table the director-general of the BBC was looking at me as if I were a combination of Errol Flynn and Neil Armstrong. He was stuck with the Home Secretary. Christ, what fun she was. But the chill of fear came back when she started to talk about the possibility of going on television with a personal interview. I knew it wouldn’t be with me, but that wasn’t the reason I counselled her against it. I said if that happened the two-camps thing would go nuclear, and continue until there was nothing left. She would be on the run forever, and there would be nowhere to go. Nowhere would be far enough away. She seemed convinced, but of course she was pretending. She had already decided.

  No, she wasn’t always the straight goods. She often pretended. She would listen to advice and warnings that – as you’d later discover – had been rendered obsolete by what she had already done, and pretend to consider them. Then, when the news came out, you found that she had been watching you lead yourself up the garden path. It could hurt.

  No, I don’t think she was being malicious, or even mischievous. There was just a
lot of stuff she couldn’t share. At least once, however, she lied to me outright. ‘I really had nothing to do with that Andrew Morton book,’ she said. ‘But after my friends talked to him I had to stand by them.’ She looked me straight in the eye when she said this, so I could see how plausible she could be when she was telling a whopper. I would have been terminally pissed off if I hadn’t suspected that she knew I knew, and just didn’t want to be remembered as admitting it. In the Panorama interview, she did admit it, so I had two reasons for feeling that historic programme as a personal wound, quite apart from my premonition that it would wound her. It multiplied her popularity, but it propelled her in the direction I had spent a lot of time telling her she should never think of going: over the wall, out of the country, away from her protection.

  No, there was no chance she would listen. She hated the protection. She saw the protectors as assailants. She believed, against all the evidence of her own beautiful eyes, that there was some kind of enchanted place called Abroad, where she would be understood and where she could lead a more normal life. This place called Abroad became a recurring theme in future conversations at other restaurants. Kensington Place, in Kensington Church Street near Notting Hill Gate, was one of her favourite hangouts, and she thought it funny that I always booked a table against the back wall, instead of up front, near the window. There was an acre of unshielded glass and she – she – wanted to sit near it. It scared me rigid. Sometimes I could barely eat my own lunch, let alone hers. But it seemed she would rather have gone down in a hail of broken glass than live in fear. She could live in her own fear – the fear of never finding happiness, of never making the pieces fit, of Mummy and Daddy never being together again – but she could never live in mine, the fear for her life.

  No, she never took my advice even once. Well, just once. Before she went to Japan on her big solo diplomatic trip, she asked me what would be the best thing she could do there, apart from all the hospitals and stuff. She knew that I was a student of the Japanese language and Japanese literature, and she thought I might have some nifty scheme up my sleeve. I told her I did, but it wouldn’t be easy. I told her that if she learned even a few words of the language – just the standard phrases about how pleased she was to be there – she would knock them out. I could lend her my teacher, a gentle but determined little woman called Shinko. Diana, after her standard protestations about being too thick, said she was up for it. Shinko, quietly experiencing the same emotions as I would have done if I had been asked to teach the Emperor of Japan croquet, marched up to Kensington Palace and did the job. Diana flew to Japan, addressed a hundred and twenty-five million people in their own language, and made the most stunning impact there since Hirohito told them that the war was over.

  No, she didn’t forget. When she got back, she called me to lunch at Bibendum. We did all our standard numbers, culminating in the hallowed dessert routine, by which I ordered one crème brûlée with two spoons and finished the rest of it before she had swallowed her single mouthful. As usual, she had finessed that deadly third glass of wine into me without my even noticing. But there was an extra petit four with the coffee. It was a little red box that opened to reveal a pair of cufflinks: gold ovals enamelled in pink with the chrysanthemum of the Japanese imperial family. ‘Domo arigato gozaimash’ta,’ she said. Thank you very much for what you did. ‘Did I get that right?’ Yes, I told her: you got that right.

  No, there is not much more. Our last lunch was at Kensington Palace and Harry was present with one of his friends, so there were no cahoots. She was putting distance between us. Later on, quietly and nicely, I was dropped from her list. I understood completely. I had wanted her to be Queen. I had wanted, when I grew old, to see her in the gradually, properly altering beauty of her middle age. I had wanted to see her beside Charles, on the day when he took his proper place as the most intelligent and concerned monarch this country has ever had. I had wanted to have lunch with her once a year and do the dessert routine again. But she wanted life. She was going on to those other, faraway adventures which she knew I didn’t believe in. I hoped I would hear about them someday.

  No, I never saw her again. Neither will anyone now. Not even once. Never even once again.

  No, I can still see her. She’s leaving the Caprice, heading for the back door, because a Range Rover full of photographers has just pulled up in the street outside. She’s turning her head. She’s smiling. Has she forgotten something? Is she coming back?

  No.

  New Yorker, 15 September, 1997

  POSTSCRIPT TO A REQUIEM

  Complete with all its stylistic arabesques, the preceding obituary is reproduced in the form it took when it was first published in the special edition of the New Yorker which appeared in the week of the accident. The following weekend, a slightly shorter version appeared in Britain, in the Sunday Telegraph, and that was the version which was subsequently reprinted, sometimes in further abridged form, in newspapers and magazines in other languages, and was reproduced in its entirety in the book Requiem which came out to mark the anniversary. Not at my initiative, but with my agreement, the second version was shorn of the first version’s opening paragraph. Some London journalists, usually professing more sorrow than anger, had taken particular exception to this, quoting it dutifully as evidence of how at least one of Diana’s admirers had lost his head. Even the second version, as I have subsequently discovered, provides ample opportunity for critics deploring the state of modern journalism (or anyway deploring the modern state of my journalism) to demonstrate how a once-keen critical brain can be softened to sponge cake by the moist air of celebrity. When the Requiem volume came out, one of its reviewers – somehow contriving to forget that it was he, and not I, who was a member of the sweating team of Stakhanovite shock-workers currently pouring forth yet another load of loosely mixed sand and gravel on the topic of Diana – kindly said of my piece that I must have regretted ever having written it.

  When I read what he and some of his colleagues said, I did regret having written it, but only for the moment. Self-justification is a bad reason for writing a postscript to anything, but I would be conspiring at my own hanging if I failed to record that on this topic my fellow scribblers were the only people I heard from who said that I had done the wrong thing. Other people said that I had spoken for them. From all over the world I received letters by the hundred. The harshest admonishment any of them proffered was that if I had let grief unhinge my equipoise, that was only appropriate, because they too had felt bereavement with such force that all their normal stability had trembled on its base. To be fair to my colleagues in the media, those I knew personally were ready – unusually ready, but those were unusual times – to concede that my cry from the heart had struck a note whose authenticity they recognized, even if it had come from a heart that had spent too much of its existence worn on a sleeve. One famously unfoolable TV critic had been telling me for years that the Royal Family was a swindle perpetrated on honest labourers such as herself. She phoned me in such a fit of tears that she could hardly choke out her message, which was that her anguish was made worse because she had not expected it could ever happen – that she too had been slammed into a wall, and all her best hopes for herself had been stopped with no appeal. Since she had previously, in private if not in print, been vocal in her opinion that Diana was a genetically engineered hybrid of a minx, a prize poodle and a sacrificial goat, this was a dramatic reversal of her past feelings. She said she knew it and that made it worse.

  She was no isolated case. Stuff like that was going on all over London. I saw strong, respected men looking as if one of their children had died in their arms. It made me feel a bit better about snivelling at my desk, and it made me feel a lot better about having written my poem, because I had got out some of the strangely personal grief that I now knew a lot of people had been feeling, and feeling all the more intensely because it was against their expectations and convictions – against their will. It was not so much the amount
of the emotion, as its contrary nature, that made the episode historically remarkable, and might well, eventually, make it recalcitrant to historical assessment, because a lot of intelligent people later on decided that they had been wrong to shed tears, and the less honest among them are already saying that they never did. The whole convulsive purgation of pity and terror is coming to be remembered as a weak moment. That it might have been a strong moment is not an idea anyone very much wants to pursue. I don’t either: empiricism, not mysticism, is what I value in British culture. But there is nothing empirical about pretending that something didn’t happen.

  If you believe, as I do, that a poem is any piece of writing that can’t be quoted from except out of context, then a poem is what my lament for the Princess is, at least in the eyes of its author. In the eyes of some of my critics it was a suicide note, and they might well be proved right in the long run: perhaps what was left of my reputation as a writer of critical prose was wrecked for keeps. But the point was that it didn’t seem to matter at the time, because what we self-appointed public mourners said was for her, even if – especially if – we seemed to be grieving for ourselves. A few detractors alleged in print that my tribute was nothing but an opportunistic effort to boost my importance by claiming a friendship that had had small basis in fact. (My own assurances that the friendship had had small basis in fact were taken to be Machiavellian deceptions aimed at furthering this end.) A suitably attentive textual analysis could easily support that view, and folie de grandeur might well have been my subconscious impulse. But as far as I can remember my feelings, they were precisely the opposite. Though writing about myself has always been my stock in trade, on that occasion I was as close as a pathologically solipsistic man can ever be to self-denial. All I could see, even in a mirror, was her face.