Why Kensington Palace? Because, I suppose, it had been her home. But this wasn’t something one was conscious of assessing. It was simply the only and obvious place to go. In the Broad Walk it was again apparent that others agreed with me. From all directions people were moving towards the Palace, not many, perhaps a hundred in all, but, viewed from the vantage of the north slope of the park, one could see how the Palace was exerting an irresistible, magnetic pull. Nobody was walking in any other direction. And it was all taking place silently.
At the great gilded gates facing south, people had begun to leave flowers. A dozen or so bunches were propped against them, some attached to the wrought iron scrolls. There were a couple of badly painted portraits of the Princess, seemingly the work of children, and a red satin heart with Diana, we love you on it. Obviously people were bringing personal items. A shrine seemed to be in the offing. Eventually a group of tourists arrived and began taking photographs but another mood took hold of them, their cameras halted and the tourists just stood there. I shifted about, vaguely nonplussed. Nobody spoke much, but there was unselfconscious eye contact and no barriers between people. If anyone said anything it was not in a whisper but in a quiet voice and was usually something like ‘I can’t believe it.’ Goodness knows how long I remained there. The atmosphere was enthralling.
When I got back to the flat, my brother Peter rang. He too had been affected by the news and said he found himself unable to settle or do anything. ‘It’s like when John Lennon was murdered,’ he said. ‘She was the star of the nation. We’ve got no one like that now.’ But for me the Lennon comparison wasn’t enough. I thought also of President Kennedy and the suicide of Marilyn Monroe. They weren’t enough either. Leaving the Ritz in Paris with a lover and – bang! The most legendary personality of the age had made the most astonishing exit. But later that day I continued as planned and drove down to Sussex to help Elisa sort out her mother’s house, pointing at objects, putting stickers on some of them, relegating others – it was fascinating and objective, with that thank-God-not-me pleasure one has when taking someone else to the dentist.
Inside a coffin Princess Diana duly returned from France, coming in at Northolt aerodrome northwest of London. She disembarked to the sound only of a wind blowing across the runway. You will be able to hear this wonderful wind on the film. There was bound to be a film. They were recording everything. Meanwhile the pilgrimage of the people to Kensington Palace had swelled to unimaginable proportions. The Queen and the Royal family held themselves aloof from the rising flood, trying to outgrand popular sentiment. But the only effect of this was that they began to look smaller and smaller. Their stultification became embarrassing, pitiful, scandalous. The Queen throughout her entire reign had never looked so cheap, and when public feeling began to spill over into outrage, Her Majesty was forced to bring down to half-mast the Royal Standard which until then had been flying at full pitch over Buckingham Palace. There had been explanations of why the Royal Standard did this; how it could only be this-or-thatted for such and such an occasion: none of it washed. The callous statement atop the palace had to learn its simple, humane lesson – and learn it it did. Down came the standard to half-mast and the nation sighed with collective relief.
It would be several months before the Queen’s stoicism found its admirers; compassion, sensitivity and self-revelation are warm human qualities; but for life one needs toughness too. And in later life nothing so becomes one as stoicism. The Queen’s endurance in the face of the endless daily round, of her children’s ineptitudes, of the crude insults and constant sniping, of terrorist death threats and the betrayal of servants and the intense public pressure to invade her most private space and very soul, is a story for someone else on another occasion, but one does wonder -was this her most vulnerable moment?
At a party to launch a literary gazetteer of Russia, done by Anna Benn and Rosamund Bartlett, the male intellectuals were putting forth a sneery attitude to the mourning of Princess Diana, including, to my surprise, Anna’s editor Peter Straus. They spoke of ‘mass hysteria’ and ‘fascistic mobs’. English intellectuals are generally of a puritan cast and puritanism is a post-Shakespearean development in English society. The intellectuals feared being castrated by participation in popular feeling, and cynicism was their weapon against it – but the impression they gave was of being dead at their core. For what was so striking about the public mourning of Diana was its dignity. Rather more hysterical indeed was the chatter of the intellectuals, and it is faintly alarming that such people are unable to distinguish between acts of mourning and acts of political fascism. As for cynicism and stoicism, they are not the same; in the classical world they were opposing philosophies, I believe. It is true that sometimes a nausea can arise at an excess of emotion and even I, at the literary party, asked ‘Do you remember the previous Princess Diana?’ ‘No. Who was that?’ ‘Julie Christie in Darling.’Diana jokes appeared very quickly. What’s the difference between a Skoda and a Mercedes? Diana wouldn’t be seen seen dead in a Skoda. And far behind her, way off in the distance, hardly discernible, was another ghost, that of her Egyptian lover who died with her. Soon the conspiracy theorists would go into action. It would get nasty.
Regardless of one’s particular reaction to the event, nobody was without a reaction. For the time being Diana’s death abolished solitariness and we all lived in a village, everyone pushed out of the centre of their own existence by it. Yet among the heaps of nonsense which have followed in the years since, the question which has never been answered, and indeed not often asked, is why was there this bewildering and unprecedented reaction to her death? All the answers to the question so far have been too partial, too concerned with advancing an angled view. Nobody has quite nailed it. I don’t mean the crash itself. We’ve nailed that. Of course it was an accident. This has been demonstrated over and over again in numerous court cases and public enquiries. What we haven’t nailed is our response to it. Nobody has come up with a satisfactory explanation which marries human psychology to history, and this, presumably, is why the subject doesn’t quite go away. The event may be fading into history but not that question, and its psychological aspect might begin with an analysis of this factor: the importance of being bewildered. Mystification is absolutely essential to our feeling of being alive.
People were drawn to Kensington Palace from all over the world. On my first visit, the Sunday morning of the crash, I’d been so intoxicated by the atmosphere that subsequently I could hardly keep away. One of the reasons so many people came is that they understood this unique atmosphere could be captured only by direct experience and never conveyed by pictures or sounds or words (sorry; I’m doing my best). On my second visit the transformation was mind-boggling. It was way beyond anything which could be called a shrine. Bouquets piled high, fluttering with ribbons, glinting with cellophane, flowed like a sea from the Palace gates all the way down to the Kensington Road, and all the surrounding trees and railings were engulfed too. Many perfumes wove about in the air including that of rot. You’d think it impossible for such a multitude of mourners to avoid hack phrases but the originality of the messages was very moving. One I wrote down. ‘To Princess Diana. Thank you for treating us like human beings and not criminals. You were one in a million. From David Hayes and all the lads at H. M. Prison Dartmoor’.
On this second visit it was once again a beautiful late summer’s day, the whole of London clear and gently burnished. Kensington Palace was radiant in the sunshine. I’d never before observed it so attentively, a great country house in a park, nothing brash, its warm red brick settled in verdure and touched here and there with gold. Though solemn and sad, the mood was the opposite of depressing. It was nourishing and sexual. The drama of Diana’s death had invigorated everyone’s sense of mortality and this usually arouses the finest eroticism.
On that night of Anna Benn’s Russian party, I took Elisa down to counteract the cynicism of the intellectuals, the mediocrity of that response (bec
ause even from a strictly sociological point of view these events were gripping). Was this my third visit? I can’t remember. Thousands of people of all kinds were sauntering on one of the last balmy nights of summer. Throughout the park, spreading further and further from the palace, points of focus had been created where flowers and candles were placed round tree-trunks, and though electric lamps had been rigged up by the police, there were not so many of them as to ruin the delicacy of the scene. Indeed the throb of the generators provided an undertone to the tremor of candlelight among leaves. Groups of young people made bivouacs, sipping at the atmosphere as at the rarest wine. Their faces, lit by amber candlelight from beneath, looked suspended in serenity. The scents of flowers came and went, came and went.
At St James’s Palace the books of condolence were placed in booths. The booths had to be increased from five to fifteen to forty-three, the maximum number which the rooms could accommodate. I did not go to sign. Joining a long queue to sign my name in a book was not for me. As for the cortege route, it was to have been from St James’s Palace to Westminster Abbey, but those in charge were obliged to extend it because of the great numbers expected to line the roadside. The cortege would now leave from Kensington Palace, an altogether more fitting point of departure anyway, which would quadruple the length of its journey. Temporary loos, drinking fountains, and crowd barriers were arriving in the centre of town by the lorryload.
We were all amazed. We were amazed to be amazed but very willing to be amazed. We were all in something very much more amazing than usual. Greek tragedy plus individuality equals Shakespeare. We were all in a Shakespearean tragedy. This was not cinema or television or virtual reality, but actual, visceral reality, and yet like theatre there was something fantastic about it. Between Diana’s death and her burial, many films of her were shown on television, moving images of a soul in limbo. It made one think – how very weird it is, this business of being a human being, of being alive. There’s not much mystery about death. It’s being alive that’s the mystery. Death is the normality, life is the exception.
And who was this woman who lay everywhere upon the air like incense? She embodied so many archetypes and was so was rich in contradiction: virgin and ravished virgin, prey and huntress, married mother, single mother, Venus and Jezebel, aristocrat and friend, royal and deposed, rebel and saint, survivor and sacrifice, her life a playground between image and authenticity. Most of this was fortuitous and to my knowledge she destroyed no one, while many, many careers were forged by her death.
Nobody wants a mere saint these days. Like a goddess of Greek mythology, Diana was loved for her failings as well as for her gifts. And she was often hated for the same reasons. Her quest for love was everyone’s quest, but her rejection, like all rejections, was hers alone to cope with. After many difficulties, it seemed she was killed on a trajectory that was once again rising. But who knows. Who can say what would’ve happened to her in life. As it was, her sudden death became a sharp reminder of the temporary state of affairs in which we all live, of the ruthlessness of ultimate truths.
My father, an airman during the Second World War (and who was stationed at Northolt for a while), said ‘There’s been nothing like this before.’ One may ask: would it have been worse if she’d survived the crash as a vegetable? Yes, that would have been much worse. What about survived it but disfigured, would that have been worse too? I don’t know. I couldn’t say. A disfigured princess can be noble, but can she be magical?
At 8 o’clock on the evening before the funeral, her body was to be brought to Kensington Palace where there would be a vigil with two priests sitting beside the coffin through the night. As the hearse left St James’s to drive to Kensington the silence was disturbed only by the flashbulbs of onlookers which made a wondrous flicker in the twilight. It was the ghostliest thing I’ve ever seen on the BBC ten o’clock news, for all London was transfigured, bathed in an uncanny light. The Promenade Concerts at the Albert Hall continued in full swing of course. My brother and his wife were going to one the next evening. The organisers had changed the first half to Faure’s Requiem but the second half, Rachmaninov’s First Symphony, was left unchanged. The premiere of this symphony, in St Petersburg in 1897, had been a fiasco and its ridicule by the musical establishment triggered a nervous breakdown in Rachmaninov. He destroyed the score and wrote nothing for three years. However the orchestral parts were discovered in the St Petersburg Conservatoire after Rachmaninov’s death and the music was reconstructed. It is a masterpiece of sadness, with one flaw. I think there has been a mistake in the reconstruction of the last movement in which the soaring main theme, like something from a Hollywood romance of the nineteen-thirties, does not return properly and as a result the work, integrated until this point, ends uncertainly. It is as though a page were missing. Someone should think about restoring that missing page. I tried to join my brother for the performance but there were no tickets left.
My friend Von, the one I’d gone to the Tina Turner concert with, rang and said ‘Do you know why people loved her? I can give you one of the reasons. She was the first royal to wear heeled shoes without tights. Gradually she shed her hats and coats and by the time she died she was practically Newcastle upon Tyne on a Friday night. Fabulous.’
London had slowed right down. People were impassioned but slowed right down. Which are the two best conditions for sex. On September 29th several weeks after all these events, I noted in my journal that I’d had forty sexual partners in the month following Diana’s death, including a group of women in a naturist Jacuzzi in Brighton where I’d found myself by chance. Most of the encounters had something accidental about them, and were not coarse or contrived. I’m not bragging. And I’m not going into lots of details. But I’ve known nothing like it since and it wasn’t only me. By definition I was being met halfway. One could hardly venture out of the front door without some interaction taking place in which strangers became friends. It reached an airy culmination off the Portobello Road around 10.30 one morning. I was on my way to buy fruit from Nellie’s barrow when a pair of eyes crossed my path, there was the look, I followed him down an alleyway and hey presto, it was all happening screened by packing cases in a little warehouse behind Woolworth’s; the whole thing took place in a furtive delirium of, at most, five minutes. Gradually of course everyone relearned the word ‘no’ after that transcendental, unexpected burst of ‘yes’. What remains is that the people who liked Diana were a lot nicer than those who didn’t.
On the day of the funeral, September 6th, I awoke spontaneously at 6.15 am. It was a Saturday but didn’t feel like one, or like any other day. I had a bath and breakfasted and put on a black suit and my funeral tie. It’s the one I always wear for funerals, Yves Saint Laurent from the early .970s, black with white squares scattered across it. At about half past seven I set out. The streets of Notting Hill were empty. On a Saturday morning Notting Hill’s most commercial day, the principle day of the Portobello Road market, every shop was closed. There was no traffic either – well, occasionally there was a car. Several people, also wearing black, were walking in the same direction as myself. The sky, as it had been every day since the previous Sunday, was blue and filled with sunshine. What an exceptional week it had been simply from the weather point of view. And everywhere the eeriest calm. The Greeks saw death as blue. Homer writes somewhere about Blue Death. How right they were in so much, those Greeks. The moment you see death as blue its tranquillising wonder is restored.
In Kensington Gardens the activity thickened. If you walk southwards down the Broad Walk from the Bayswater Road – and I now saw that large, quiet crowds were doing so – you can see on your right the backs of the great houses along Kensington Palace Gardens. The noblest mansions of Piccadilly and Park Lane, of Grosvenor Square and Berkeley Square, were pulled down, tragically, only a generation or two ago, but the atmosphere of traditional wealth can still be found in this one road, Kensington Palace Gardens, sublimely redolent of London’s impertur
bable splendour.
Between the Broad Walk and this romantic vision of richesse is a large fenced paddock where another timeless spectacle could to-day be observed. Horses were being groomed by cavalrymen whose jackets were off and white sleeves rolled up. A dark-green gun carriage, with big spoked wheels, stood on the far side. The flowers, tons and tons of wilting blooms, celebrated across the globe as the greatest ever amount of offered flowers in one place, they were easier to take in now with a sweep of the eyes, since there were no crowds near them, only several figures on the paths gouged through the waist-high mounds, figures who paused every so often to read the messages. I bumped into an old friend, David Jenkins, with his family. We exchanged greetings and observations before walking on independently.
More and more people were crossing the grass towards the Kensington Road and here it was that they crowded, packed either side of the highway, along with officials in uniforms, and the press and television corps. This funeral was to be the biggest media event in history, broadcast live throughout the world. I halted on a damp bank on the park-side of the railings not far from the Kensington Palace exit on to the main highway. Hardly anyone spoke. Such a huge number of people, over a million along the route, each settled into a kind of alert tenderness, created a mood of great nobility, and of something more than that. The previous week had been remarkable but nothing in it had attained to quite this level of…of what? Is it possible to identify what it was? Let me say something like this: I’ve never before or since felt such a public sense of wonder. What was particularly strange was the peace. It was so peaceful. And safe. In the crowded heart of London town. The one grating sensation was a police helicopter puttering overhead. Its noise faded and returned, faded and returned.
How to Disappear Page 19