“I feel there is something between us.”
“It’s just the formality and restraint of being British colliding with my brash Americanism. Sometimes when I’m in a restaurant district back home, like Chinatown or North Beach, I might knock on a café window and with hand signs ask the people sitting at the window table if the food is good. It works there, but when I tried that here last night, the people at the table just gaped at me through the window like I was crazy.”
“They probably thought you were a whore soliciting, don’t you think?”
“My God, I hope not. Okay, so you said you had to keep yourself tidy for what lay ahead. Did you expect to marry the prince?”
“No, of course not, how would I know he’d be attracted to me?”
“But you say you had to keep yourself tidy for what lay ahead. That’s an indication that you did not expect to lead an ordinary life.”
“I don’t quite agree that being a virgin is as medieval as you believe.”
“No, it’s not the virgin part I find puzzling, that’s just having good old-fashioned values. It’s the fact that you saw something out of the ordinary down the road.”
“I don’t follow you. I don’t see what that has to do with the case.”
“I’ve heard criticism that you came into the marriage with the romanticized notion of marrying the prince because of his position rather than for himself and that you became disenchanted when you discovered being married to him was no fairy tale come true. It’s a theme that the prosecutor will push, so we need to be prepared to deal with it.”
“It’s rubbish. It’s completely false. I did love him for himself. I may have had idealistic and, yes, even romanticized notions about love and marriage, but not about marrying a prince.” She was quiet, then said, “To a young girl reading a fashion magazine, the notion of dating a prince would be titillating. But you have to remember, I spent a lot of time in the sandbox with his two younger brothers.”
“But not your husband.”
“Obviously not—my husband was an adult when I was a little girl. But my point is that I was not infatuated with the notion of marrying a prince. Marrying a Royal would have been considered a good marriage by women of my background, but not an unheard-of one. The fact that he was the Prince of Wales and that I would be the next queen certainly entered my mind. Marriage is not something I would have entered without love.”
It was too great a leap of faith for Marlowe to believe that marrying a prince and becoming a queen wouldn’t be an earthshaking experience for any woman. “I don’t want to beat a dead horse, but we still have to deal with this issue because the prosecutor definitely will. You said you had to keep yourself tidy. Isn’t the implication that you wanted to be chosen as the prince’s bride? Why else would you keep yourself a virgin?”
“For my husband, whoever he might turn out to be.”
Marlowe finally got it—the innocent heroines in the romance novels that the princess read were virgins ravaged by dashing heroes. She wanted a fairy-tale marriage. It also struck her that in terms of the mores in which the princess was raised in, the woman’s sense of romance was completely unrealistic, not just old-fashioned but so fantastic, it was hard for Marlowe to comprehend how they got into the head of a young woman growing up during the turmoil and excesses of the sexual revolution. She wondered if the princess had also given thought beyond romance to the practical demands of being married to a prince.
“Were you aware of the responsibilities that came with marrying a prince, what role you would need to play?”
“Of course, yes, but I also thought I would get help from my husband and others in the system. What I wasn’t prepared for was all the sudden media attention. It was all very daunting—terrifying, really.”
“When did you first start interacting with your future husband?”
“I attended his thirtieth birthday party. I was just seventeen, but my sister had been dating him off and on for a couple of years. Following that, there was another social gathering a few months later. But it was at a barbecue at a country estate when I was turning nineteen that he took notice of me. We were seated on a bale of hay and I told him how forlorn he had looked the prior year when he had attended the funeral of Earl Mountbatten, his great-uncle who had been assassinated by the IRA. I told him that he had looked so lonely that he should have someone looking after him.”
“And what was his reaction?”
“Quite strange. He practically leaped on me, talking to me about how he felt about the earl’s death. After that, we began to date.”
“What was it like to date him?”
She giggled. “I had to call him ‘sir.’”
“Sir?”
“Well, you have to remember he was the heir to the throne. Besides being the Heir Apparent, he was Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall, Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Earl of Chester, Baron of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles, and Great Steward of Scotland. Isn’t that a mouthful?”
“Very impressive.”
“Even though we were dating, the formalities had to be maintained.” The princess cast her eyes downward and then looked up at Marlowe. “If you’re wondering whether our romance was fiery, I confess that the formalities had to be maintained there, too. We were not alone very often. He maintained a circle of close friends, there were always servants hovering around, and of course the Royal Protection officers lurk about.”
“Tell me about his friends.”
“Frankly, I found them intimidating. All of them were older than me, of course. I always had the impression that they had little respect for me as a person, for my opinions. They were better educated than me, but that did not make them better people.”
“You didn’t like his friends?”
“They didn’t accept me as an intellectual equal, they treated me like I was the prince’s toy. They would name-drop people and concepts knowing that I wouldn’t be familiar with them. It was done very subtly and was humiliating. No, I didn’t like them, they were always over the prince like a bad rash and condescending toward me, but they were tame compared to the newshounds.
“The media people—the rat pack, as I call them—were animals, the hounds of hell constantly snapping at my heels. They came at me from all angles, recording my every move. I had no peace. I couldn’t leave the house without the camera rolling. They even rented a flat across the street from mine that would give them a view of my bedroom window. I can’t tell you what it was like. They got on top of buildings and peered over fences with binoculars, hired helicopters to spy on me when I was on a country estate, hurtled questions at me constantly, shouting them at me every time I stepped outside. One moment I was a nineteen-year-old egg-and-flouring a boy’s car for standing me up on a date, and the next I was an international phenomenon. I tried to be nice, answered questions in the hopes they would leave me alone, but nothing helped. They really didn’t want ordinary pictures, what they wanted was to catch me doing something compromising. Even scratching my nose was a sensation.”
“You didn’t get any help from anyone?
“No, no guidance from anyone, neither in dealing with the newshounds nor in the Royals’ quirky traditions. I was invited to Balmoral, the Queen’s castle in Scotland, and I knew nothing about how to act. One poor guest was yelled at just for trying to sit in a chair last sat in by Queen Victoria.
“My husband was not a receptive person toward other people’s weaknesses. He had not been brought up to be empathetic. He was strong himself. He had to be, being the crown prince was not an easy job, whether it was some bully at school who wanted to be able to say he knocked him off his feet or an IRA assassin who wanted to put a bullet in his head. I soon found that I was on my own and I didn’t know how to handle it.
“Right after the engagement was announced, I went off to Australia for ten days with my mother and stepfather. I pined for him, called him every day, but he never returned the calls. Finally I got exasperated and asked his secretary if I h
ad to make an appointment to speak to my fiancé. When I returned, one of his aides brought me a bouquet of flowers. No note attached.”
“This was right after you got engaged?”
“Yes. It made me wonder if I wasn’t making a mistake. I spoke to my mother and father and to my friends and the opinion was universal that the prince was very busy and I was being overly sensitive. Do you think I was being too sensitive?”
“You were nineteen years old and in love. I don’t think it’s being too sensitive to want your fiancé to shower you with love.”
“I ended up being the one to apologize for him not calling me. It always came down to that, that he would do something that got me upset and I would show my displeasure and end up begging his forgiveness. I was so confused, I thought that it was just me, that I was immature and didn’t understand how more worldly people acted. They stuck me away in Buckingham Palace to prepare for the wedding—you know, select the gown and jewelry and my wardrobe and all that. It would take months of preparation.”
“It must have been a very busy and hectic time.”
“Yes, it was, but I can’t tell you how alone I was there. The place was full of dead energy, like heavy air. It was so depressing. Instead of wild embraces with my lover, I was left alone when I wasn’t being measured and sized. I felt like I had been locked up in a museum. I found myself crying at night, lying in bed and feeling sorry for myself. But it all paled in comparison to discovering there were three of us in the marriage.”
“Three of you?”
“My husband’s first love, and ultimately, I was to discover, his only true love.”
“An old girlfriend.”
“More than that, his soul mate, if his actions are to be judged. I suppose I was naive in that area. I didn’t have any boyfriends, so I had no one to compare him with. The woman is more than a friend, she’s his confidante. The fact that I was married to him and that she was married to someone else didn’t seem to bother the two of them.”
“Are you saying they kept up their relationship even after your marriage?”
“It wasn’t just a matter of keeping up their relationship—I don’t know when it actually became sexual, if that’s what you mean. It was the way she was shoved down my throat right from the beginning. I hadn’t twigged on to it before the marriage. I discovered very soon after the ceremony at St. Paul’s that my marriage was overcrowded.”
She handed Marlowe sheets of paper. “This is what I remember about my honeymoon. Some women would have enjoyed a boat trip with several hundred men, but to me it was the honeymoon from hell.”
The Prince took her by the hand and danced with her. He would dance with no other maiden, and never let loose of her hand, and if anyone else came to invite her, he said, “This is my partner.”
—CINDERELLA
38
In her room, Marlowe read the princess’s remembrances.
Royal Yacht Britannia
I stood on the deck of the Britannia with the wind blowing in my face. It was late afternoon and we were off the warm coast of southern Spain. We had sailed through the Strait of Gibraltar and were not far from that tall rock that rose from the sea and was such a bone of contention between the British and the Spanish. I leaned against the railing and closed my eyes, letting the late afternoon breeze caress me. My marriage was still only days old and this moment with Europe on one side and North Africa on the other was a rare moment when I could be alone with my thoughts since the majestic ceremony at St. Paul’s.
So many thoughts swirled in my head, I had a hard time concentrating. I was confused and distraught. My nerves were raw and I knew I showed my anxiety inappropriately, sometimes appearing irritated or even hiding my frayed nerves behind a giggle or loud laugh. I was terribly sick and tired and raw inside. The apprehension that began the day the prince asked me to marry him started as a dull worry and grew into a smothering ball of anxiety.
At first I hid my terrible fright behind nervous giggles with my girlfriends as we laughed in awe over the fact that I was to be the next queen of the Brits. “Oh, God, we’re going to have to curtsy to you when you’re queen, Duch! How will we keep from laughing!” they howled.
Duch was my nickname among my friends. I told the prince my close friends call me Duch, but he said that wasn’t dignified.
After he asked me to marry him, when I moved for a short time into Clarence House to be near the Queen Mother, before I moved into Buckingham Palace to prepare for the wedding, I was suddenly alone with my thoughts—and my fears. There had been no one to share them with. I couldn’t speak to the Queen Mother about the silly thoughts and fears swirling around my head. Ancient and revered, she was hardly human to me. Like Westminster and St. Paul’s, I thought of the Queen Mum as one of the nation’s historical treasures rather than the grandmother of my future husband. A grand lady, born at the turn of the century, for eight decades she had been an exemplary of British motherhood and refined social charm.
Her father was the Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne and she claimed descent from Robert I, the Bruce, King of Scotland. I thought that because her father, like mine, had been an earl, we would have common ground, with her teaching me about the Royals. But perhaps it was because of her advanced age, or the sixty-year difference in our ages—an eon of difference in terms of culture. The Queen Mum had lived her youth, young womanhood, and entire married life in a different world than I was born into. I was raised in the world of the sexual revolution, the Pill, the Beatles, the rise of feminine consciousness and battle for women’s rights. It was a far different world than the one in which the Queen Mum had helped rule Britain. She gave me little guidance as to what my role would be. I suspect that she had spent so much of her life as a Royal, she had hardly known life outside the palace.
My moment of tranquillity was interrupted by a ship’s steward.
“His Royal Highness requests your presence in the salon, ma’am,” he said. “He would like you to bring your diary.”
I tried to smother a sigh, but it slipped out like so many of my emotions, I was so fragile at the time. The summons sounded like my employer asking me to bring my dictation pad. And he literally had. My diary was my schedule of appointments. Before the wedding, it had mostly been filled with parties and hair and nail appointments. Now I would have “official” duties, but it was also scary because I had no idea of how I was to act, what I was to say. I didn’t know even how I was to dress for the public.
I knew that I was a puzzlement to the ship’s crew. I often went into the royal galley and helped myself to bowls of ice cream and snacks. One time I overheard one of the cook staff ask if I had a tapeworm. It wasn’t the first time I had puzzled the servants with my eating habits. How can you eat so much between meals and still be so slim? was always the spoken—and more often unspoken—question.
It wasn’t possible to tell them that I had my own secret formula for weight loss. I made almost as many trips to the loo to disgorge the food as I did into the kitchen. I had learned that by vomiting out what I consumed, I could temporarily satisfy my urge to eat while remaining slim. I had started a vomiting-after-meals routine several months earlier when the prince said that I was looking a bit thick in the waist. It was a not-too-subtle hint that he wanted me to look the very best for our wedding. It was a wedding that would be beamed around the world by satellite. I knew I had to please him, that he, the queen, and millions of people expected me to look dazzling for the ceremony.
There was nothing wrong with the way I was losing weight, really, but people were funny about such things, so I kept it a secret after I had gotten a strange look from one of my friends when I mentioned that I had discovered a surefire way to keep off the pounds. It certainly worked well, though I found myself bingeing more frequently, needing a quick fix of something sweet and tasty and then depositing my stomach contents in the loo. What people didn’t understand was that my body wasn’t perfect. If I let up for a moment, I began to look fat and bloa
ted. That made me angry about myself, but I had to keep my wool on and not show my anger to other people.
Food was not my problem, of course, it was something else. I found myself more and more depressed. Gobbling down a bowl of ice cream or a candy bar helped get rid of the feelings, the anxieties, that overwhelmed me. It helped, but soon I felt depressed again. Sometimes I felt like I had no control over my life.
First it was my family. The thing about marrying the prince was a big thing, of course, especially with my father. I wanted to please him. I never really was tops with him—I mean, I know he loves me, but I don’t think he really respected my intellect. My friends say that it’s the same with their fathers, that it’s a male thing, especially with older men, because the society they were raised in only tolerated women maintaining the house and wifely chores in the bedroom. Now that I was a princess, I hoped he was really proud of me.
Crazy thoughts always seemed to creep into my mind. Sometimes I wondered if it was all worth it, you know, trying to please everyone, wanting approval, needing love. A girlfriend at school whose mother killed herself told me that her mother used to say there were worse things than being dead, that at least then she would be able to get some peace.
Horrible. That thought sent me into the kitchen for a quick fix before I got my diary. It had been so hard, these last few months. With all the excitement, all the attention, the newspeople following everywhere I went, people alternately showering attention on me and making demands for my time, sometimes I felt like I was in the middle of a big circle with people walking around me, all of them shouting, “Do this!” “Don’t do that!” “Jump this way!” “Jump that way!”
Getting through the marriage ceremony and going on a honeymoon had not brought that big sigh of relief that everyone said it would. I cried my eyes out. This was not the honeymoon I dreamt of during those years after puberty when my hormones suddenly were screaming that I was a young woman with desires and sexual urges. I dreamt of beaching a small sailboat on a paradise isle with my new husband, of running naked on the deserted beach, making love on the warm sand with gentle ocean waves licking at our feet—
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