Denied her photo opportunity with the troops, she seethed. For some time after the Washington trip I felt my fortunes with the Princess had recovered, but what she saw as my failure to get her to the war zone put me straight back in the doghouse. Once again I felt the chill of being the flavour of last month.
All the signs were there – a flatness in her voice, an avoidance of eye contact except when administering a scold, the very obvious redistribution of favours towards others, including former enemies, and a cool indifference to every programme suggestion I made. My morale plummeted. I was heading for the rocks again. My gloom was deepened by the knowledge that she was the sole arbiter over whether what I did was right or wrong, even if what I produced was exactly what she had asked for.
After spending an afternoon in a bleak barracks in Northern Germany, surrounded by bravely cheerful women and children, I looked out of the car window at the black branches of the trees against the snow-covered ground. The grey gloom gathered. My macabre mood suffered an unexpected downward twist as I realized that we were passing the site of Belsen concentration camp. What was the matter? What could I do to put things right? God, I wish I’d stayed in the Navy.
Worse was to come. The frigid silence in the car was suddenly broken. The Princess was using the special voice that was calculated to remind you that everybody else was now her new best friend. ‘Graham,’ she said, ‘you’ll never guess who’s been sent to the Gulf.’
‘No, Ma’am,’ said Graham, turning round in the front seat.
‘James Hewitt.’
‘Oh,’ said Graham, carefully noncommittal.
‘Oh God!’ I said to myself.
It was like a revelation. This explained everything. My boss was gripped by concern for her beloved, an emotion doubled by remorse. So far as I knew, she had abruptly cut her links with him more than a year previously, much to the relief of those few of us who had even an inkling of the friendship’s true depth. Now her remorse would be redoubled by his imminent exposure – at least in theory – to Saddam’s bullets. That explained her sudden personal interest in the impending war. It soon grew into an obsession.
I was numb with shock and a sudden comprehension of her coolness towards me. I understood just enough of the skewed dynamics of her emotions to know that James’s reappearance spelt trouble for me.
I certainly did not feel – and never had felt – the remotest attraction to the woman who to the world may have been the definition of desirability but to me was only ever my boss. I knew her too well for any of that. Nevertheless, having chosen me as her main, long-term source of male support and advice, the Princess had also cast me in the role of fall guy in any imaginary competition for favours of another sort. As I repeatedly saw – such as in her pointless plotting over speech-writing duties – it added to the excitement of her life to feel that she had kept a secret from me. I did not mind that too much, but I certainly minded when I realized that she was equally excited by the idea that I might disapprove of her friendships with other men, that I might be jealous. Given the aridity of her love life, to have rivals for her affections – even imaginary ones – must have been wonderfully soothing to her fragile sense of self-worth.
A whole new list of dreadful possibilities was raised by this piece of news and began to run unstoppably through my head like a computer print-out. I was the perfect scapegoat for the unrequited passion that was now reignited in her mind. Not only was the man she adored now preparing to die a hero’s death in the desert, but her distinctly unheroic and arguably rather less dashing paid companion – me – was happy to plan his holidays while she had to face the ordeal of a royal family Christmas entirely unsupported.
Of course, I had known about James Hewitt. About 18 months earlier – in July 1989 – the Princess had invited me, as she put it, to ‘help out’ with a lunch that she was giving privately at Kensington Palace. This in itself was not particularly unusual. I was increasingly called in to act as a sort of surrogate host for her entertaining. This could be professionally hazardous – it was necessary to develop an intuitive awareness of her conversational requirements from minute to minute – but it was also a good way of keeping track of her current attitudes to people and events.
This lunch was different. The guests comprised some senior officers from the barracks in Windsor where the Princess had been learning to ride, a General who was also a prospective private secretary to the Prince and, on my right, a taciturn but beautifully groomed Captain with strikingly coloured hair. She had already introduced us.
At that time James Hewitt and the Princess were more than two years into a passionate romance. Among a tightknit circle of close staff it was common knowledge, a knowledge borne with sympathetic understanding but constant anxiety that its public exposure was inevitable sooner or later. That anxiety was heightened by the kind of effort at innocent social contact – such as this lunch and her sons’ riding lessons with James at Windsor – which gives illicit lovers such a thrill but fools practically nobody. I imagine a similar anxiety existed among the Prince’s staff as they quietly accommodated his need for Mrs Parker Bowles.
The Princess respected our tacitly supportive conspiracy and we all happily pretended that nothing was happening. This was easier than it sounds in the atmosphere in which we lived. We were very practised at presenting an image of outward respectability while coping behind the scenes with the harsh reality of the Waleses’ foundering marriage. The worst strain inevitably fell on the PPOs, but even under this hardest of tests their loyalty and discretion never wavered.
Not long after that lunch James was due to depart for Army duty in Germany. In the face of the impending separation, the Princess felt deserted and reacted self-protectively to what she unconsciously saw as a rejection. This tendency was only exacerbated by the royalty which overlaid her childhood traits and which encourages the belief that wishes are usually to be treated as commands. She therefore took care to reject him first, ending the relationship as she ended so many – by ignoring him so pointedly and for so long that in the end, mystified and hurt, he quietly withdrew, leaving her own hands clean and her conscience appeased.
The ensuing separation lasted until the prospect of James’s imminent involvement in the Gulf War triggered an intense resumption of the Princess’s interest. It was this that I had just witnessed in the car and, from his monosyllabic response, I knew that Graham’s heart was sinking almost as fast as mine.
I thought back to that happy lunch in the summer of 1989. For obvious reasons, the Princess had studiously avoided paying too much attention to the diffident Captain, concentrating her unusually animated chatter on the senior guests. They responded with ponderous civility. Thus left on the margins, as the two youngest officers present we naturally fell into conversation. I found him rather nervous, very polite and good company. I could not disagree with people who said that he lacked any great intellect, but to be fair, as a junior cavalry officer his talents were necessarily more practical. I certainly could not fault his coolness. Considering the high-octane mixture of anxiety and passion that must have been struggling beneath his snappy suit, it would not have been surprising if he had burst into flames on the spot.
As has been widely reported since, his affair with the Princess erupted again on his return from the Gulf and never, I think, truly evaporated. Their opposite personalities created too strong an attraction. Although by every outward sign – and by a huge conscious effort – the Princess relegated their passion to a distant friendship soon after the war’s end, I believe the elemental psychological link remained.
That link, and her attempts to cut or replace it, lay at the heart of many of the Princess’s apparently impulsive actions. The huge energy required to sustain the affair now had nowhere to go but into attempts to build her new, independent life as a public figure in her own right.
In addition, ending her feelings for James demanded a concentration of emotional effort that perhaps helped her to identify and resolve
many of her own internal demons. It appeared to encourage her to think of herself as a confident, self-sufficient person, freed at least partly from the need for constant reassurance. It also enabled her to share the pain she detected in others. It also, however, fuelled her need for revenge against people and experiences that she felt had treated her unjustly.
In the contacts I had with him in the years that followed, most of them at times of great stress, I had no reason to change my opinion of James or of his good nature. Nonetheless, as the sad details of his affair with the Princess became public, he was confirmed as just the most prominent member of a long list of impressionable men only too ready to believe that a distracted Princess’s interest in them was actually safe and healthy affection.
I had noticed as long ago as our first outing to Essex that the Princess’s attitude to sex and relationships was as distinctive – and as worrying – as her attitude to many other of life’s great conundrums. The framework in which she pictured love certainly seemed to have been conditioned by long-suppressed traumas in her early life. In the opinion of a senior relationship counsellor who knew the Princess, her experiences in childhood, including the protracted pain of her parents’ acrimonious divorce, had permanently damaged her ability to give and receive love. I had certainly observed her deep unwillingness to make a commitment either in relationships or in her work. I also recalled her precipitate withdrawal from introductory training as a marriage guidance counsellor – training that would quickly have revealed such early experiences. ‘God, they had me in pieces!’ was all she would say.
I do not believe that she would have wanted her experiences to be ignored, or that she would have felt it a disservice to her memory to record what I saw. She so often expressed her own pain by identifying with others in areas such as mental illness, addiction and eating disorders. There was no doubting the affinity she felt with the women she encountered in mental hospitals, homeless hostels and women’s refuges. Then there was the bulimia. The idea that fellow victims subconsciously recognize each other’s experiences is widely acknowledged by therapists.
Equally compulsive was her need to control people and relationships. In extremis, she reverted to a fantasy version of events to perpetuate the illusion of controlling them. This was matched by a need for power over everything that affected her life. She built and defended a strong power base by using her innate strength of character, hugely enhanced by her acquired royal status.
The constant search for affection which resulted was cruelly matched by an inability to accept true devotion when it was offered, no matter how generously. No matter, either, whether it was offered by a kind-hearted man or a besotted world. Only in her devotion to her children, and in their unconditional love for her, did she seem to find release.
In the end, she reacted to men’s interest in her by protecting herself in the only way she knew how – by avidly consuming what was offered, then throwing away the empty husk with cold and apparently heartless rejection. Faced with this attitude, the attempts of men like her husband, James and others to heal such deep-seated hurt were bound to fail. Worse, such attempts would be treated by the Princess as signs of weakness, and in her mind, strength was paramount in relationships. She longed to feel safe in the affections of a strong and confident man, yet her contradictory need to control everything made this practically impossible. From this paradox developed the erratic use of her own power and, ultimately, her preference for men she could perceive as inferior.
It is, perhaps, supremely ironic that it was infamously the Prince who publicly questioned the nature of love during their syrupy engagement interview. The Princess was emphatic that she felt it and, inwardly, was perhaps expressing an even greater need for it. Unfortunately, if love is a language, she was speaking Greek and the men who came closest to her all spoke Latin.
ELEVEN
GUNS
In the first months of 1991, the world’s media was gripped by Gulf War fever. The Princess was gripped by it too, and by her own volatile cocktail of romantic emotions. She sat in Kensington Palace, writing letters to the front line. She was scathing in her attacks on those she felt did not share her personal identification with the loved ones who could only watch and wait, with the added frustration that her feelings were supposed to be secret.
She looked up from her desk, eyes red-rimmed and loaded with reproach. ‘What is it, Patrick?’ From a corner of the room her TV blared reports about allied air strikes. It was permanently tuned to the satellite news channel. She made no move to turn down the volume.
‘I wonder if we could go through some of these invitations, Ma’am.’
Her eyes blazed. ‘I can’t think of doing normal work while this war’s going on. I don’t know how anybody can. These men are waiting to die.’ She had a happy inspiration. ‘And it’s disrespectful to their families!’
‘But Ma’am, there’s nothing frivolous in these invitations. Nothing that would look bad here, or from the Gulf.’
Her face was set in an expression of defiant suffering. Suddenly I was impatient. This had been going on for weeks. ‘Look here, Ma’am. We’re all very worried. I’ve got friends out there too.’ This was true. ‘But life has to go on here as well. I mean, our parents went through years of this in the last war, and this one hasn’t even started properly yet. When it’s all over people are going to remember who carried on working despite the worry …’
It was no good. In a world of so much false emotion, here was a real crisis and she was going to experience it to the full. What was more, I was not who or what she wanted, and the comforting familiarity of routine work would have robbed her of the dramatic tension that I supposed she felt as love.
Her understanding of love was probably less complete than would normally be the case for a woman of her age. It is, after all, the trickiest of all subjects even for well-adjusted people, and that was a state I do not think even she would have claimed for herself. Given this fact, the prospect of the object of her affections suffering a violent death, however unlikely it might appear to me, stoked her lurking neuroses into a blaze of suspicion and undirected activity. When a gift of jade earrings, sent from James, was misdirected to the office and subsequently went missing, the unrestrained fury of her reaction was quite unsettling.
‘Patrick! I know they’ve been stolen!’ Her eyes flickered over my face accusingly. For a mad second I even thought she was checking my ears for the missing objects of desire.
Wearily I went along with her over-reaction and, as so often in moments of difficulty, sought the professional advice of the PPOs. After an uncomfortable investigation (in which the shadow of royal suspicion fell on her anxious and innocent secretaries) the missing gift miraculously came to light. If it had not, I reflected in a desperate moment, she might well have inflicted on her staff the time-honoured Roman practice of decimation – had there been enough of us.
The ground war duly came and then was over in a matter of hours. British casualties were mercifully light and suddenly the Princess’s inflamed sentiments had to readjust to the rather more mundane prospect of James’s safe return.
Her unspoken contempt for my failure to go and die instead still had some way to run, however. I had evolved the philosophy that nothing I said or did should betray for a second, to her or to her eyes and ears in the office, that I was anything other than totally indifferent to her feelings of antipathy towards me. This, I hoped, would either drive her to commit some unpardonable offence against me, or help her quickly to conclude that I could be more use to her alive than undead.
Meanwhile, I suffered private agonies of doubt. The absolute requirement to keep a stiff upper lip – for the staff, for my family and for my own self-respect – took an enormous effort to sustain. Again I contemplated The Times appointments section. I quickly realized, however, that it was better to go forward than try to extract myself from what was still, on paper, one of the most desirable jobs in the world. So I told myself, and the few close fri
ends I allowed to share my worries, that I was happily digging my garden and that when she wanted me, she could come to the door and send for me. Otherwise I would get on with my own life and do my best to enjoy its many blessings.
The tactic worked, both then and subsequently, whenever an outbreak of similar hostilities was threatened. Above all else she hated to be ignored and there was nothing more frustrating for her than to find her thunderbolts falling on ears that were apparently deaf.
It was an unedifying experience. We were, after all, supposed to be a force for good in a society that desperately needed the unaffected care of the beautiful Princess. It was another reminder of the contrast between the public and private faces. I had no deep philosophical objection to this. I knew the Princess was not perfect and she had to find her own way of coping with the stresses placed on her. My job was to absorb any flak that came my way and help her see the positive side of her own predicament. If I could not stand the heat … The alternative was never far from our minds when she made life difficult.
As I was slowly readmitted to her unpredictable favours, the final scales fell from my eyes. The Princess was never going to give me a quiet life. Our relationship would be that of two people thrown together by various degrees of adversity. In the final analysis, I could expect no loyalty from her. I did feel needed by her, though, and in turn I tried to develop the unspectacular dependability in running her public life that was necessary to balance her tortuous private emotions.
The heated domestic politics of the time could have been designed to inflame the most stable Princess. We were also learning that mere public success did not necessarily make her life any easier on the home front. I pondered the realization that her very popularity meant that certain types of independent action, notably overseas tours, were bound to become areas of potential conflict. The near disaster of Washington had only strengthened the arm of those who wished to see her fledgling independence curtailed. It was evidence – albeit not conclusive – that she could be an embarrassment as well as an asset abroad.
Shadows of a Princess Page 27