Diana's Nightmare - The Family (47 page)

Althorp's love of outrageous people in spite of his father's warnings drew him closer and closer to Guppy. He even saved Guppy from being beaten up during an excursion into the town of Oxford - just one of the actions for which Guppy intended to thank His Lordship during his best man's speech at Althorp's wedding breakfast. Unfortunately, an attack of nerves at the prospect of addressing an assembly which included the future king and queen of England ultimately prevented the best man from saying anything at all.

After his university days it had been downhill all the way for the doe-eyed graduate who was certainly clever enough to have earned a good living, but could not bear the ignominy of working his way up in the world like ordinary people had to do. It was in the autumn of 1989, so fateful to the Royal Family's fortunes, that Guppy put the final touch to a fantastic plan for what he called the perfect crime. It involved staging a fake armed robbery of sapphires, rubies and emeralds in the heart of New York, claiming back £1.8 million insurance from Lloyd's and salting the proceeds into Swiss bank accounts. The crime was executed in room 1207 of the Halloran Hotel in mid-town Manhattan and when police from the city's Seventeenth Precinct arrived they found Guppy weeping alongside his accomplice, Ben Marsh.

Within three weeks of the insurance payout, in a classic double sting, Guppy and Marsh plundered their own gemstone company of two-thirds of the money, siphoning off at least £500,000 to a bank account in Geneva. Wanting still more, they clumsily circulated the 'stolen' jewels back on the market, making a further £400,000. Another accomplice betrayed the pair, turning Queen's evidence after serving eighteen months for his part in the crime.

In choosing such an unstable character as Guppy to be his close friend and best man, Charles had unwittingly allowed his family to be sullied by association with a wretched criminal.

ONCE the Bishop of Stockwood had delivered his blessing and released Johnnie Spencer's remains to rest among his ancestors, Diana took his widow's arm and helped her to the door where photographers recorded the touching reunion in grief. Raine looked down at the bouquet of white lilies and sweet peas at her feet and smiled as she read the handwritten card: 'I miss you dreadfully Darling Daddy, but will love you forever. . . Diana'. It was recorded as the moment that ended fifteen years of feuding between the two most important women in Johnnie Spencer's life. But not everyone was fooled.

Back at Althorp House, Diana's mood changed dramatically. Knowing that her stepmother had repaired to her boudoir, the Princess sat talking with her brother and sisters in the Tapestry Room. When Raine came downstairs and entered the room, the stepdaughter who had shown her such touching affection in front of the cameras just an hour earlier turned on her heels and walked out of the house to stand beside the ornamental lake. Raine went back to her room and wept. Little wonder Prince Charles had removed himself from the midst of the feuding Spencers by climbing into his scarlet flying machine and returning to London to keep his tea date with Sheik Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa.

The animosity which Diana, her sisters and brother had shown towards Raine boiled over on the very day of Lord Spencer's death, Sunday, 30 March. Staff at Althorp House, summoned to a meeting to be informed of their master's passing, were also told in no uncertain terms that his widow was no longer welcome in the house. Soon after the funeral, Diana personally inspected Raine's luggage before it was taken out through a side door. Despite holding riches few in the world could match, she could not bear to think of Raine possessing anything of her father's that now belonged to her, her sisters and brother. She ordered a maid to open the four Louis Vuitton suitcases Johnnie had bought for their world tour the previous year so that she could examine the contents. Then, noticing that two pieces of the luggage bore the initial 'S', Diana took a view that they must have been her father's share of the luggage set and told the distressed servant to transfer their contents to black plastic bin liners and return the cases to the master's quarters. Diana even insisted that Raine mark those items of furniture and effects which were hers, so that they could be inspected before the removal men transferred them to her house in Mayfair. Staff at the ancestral home had become unused to seeing (let alone receiving orders from) the Princess. So much did she dislike Raine's company that she had stayed at Althorp on only a handful of occasions in the preceding five years and even then such visits usually ended in strife.

When she did stay on the weekend of her brother's wedding, Diana fell out with Raine over the sleeping arrangements for William and Harry. The Countess had put them in the nursery but Diana wanted them closer to her own quarters. When an argument broke out, servants heard the Countess loudly insist: 'This is my house and those are the rooms I have given you.' Declaring 'Right, that's it. I've had enough, I'm off,' Diana dashed down into the courtyard and told her detective to fetch her car. Another vehicle blocking the way gave her a few moments to defuse her anger and return to the house, but the noisy sequence of events was witnessed by several members of the household who were by now convinced that Diana's serene public image was something of a sham. As on so many occasions, she got her way and her room was changed although the atmosphere was loaded with prickly hate for the remainder of her stay.

No wonder few had seen the slightest nod of assent from Diana when Lord St John had told the funeral congregation that Johnnie might have died fourteen years earlier had it not been for the 'devotion, care and commonsense of his wife Raine who was leading them in their mourning and rejoicing'.

The good lord chose to ignore whatever he had heard about Raine being Diana's
bete noire
in much the same manner as Diana paid no heed to his subsequent call that the dowager countess should be canonised. That was no way to talk of a woman who Diana had once pushed down a short flight of Althorp stairs then neatly side-stepped her as she lay on the floor, frightened and shocked, to march off without so much as a backward glance. 'What has happened to Diana?' Raine later asked her personal assistant and trusted confidante, Sue Ingram. 'I just do not understand that girl.'

What had happened to Diana was that Raine had had the temerity to marry her father. The Spencer children had all been disturbed in varying degrees by the noisy rows between their mother and father. Diana was just six when Frances walked out on Johnnie and only seven when the whole sad business of their bitter parting was publicly aired in a messy and painful divorce.

If not perhaps a marriage wholly made in heaven, the nuptials which united Johnnie and Frances had certainly been most grandly sealed in society terms. The Queen, Prince Philip and the Queen Mother were among 1,700 guests who attended the wedding at Westminster Abbey and a reception at St James's Palace for 900. The death of Frances's father, the fourth Baron Fermoy, allowed his widow to turn Park House on the Sandringham estate over to them. Frances gave birth to her first child, Sarah, almost nine months to the day after their wedding, and Jane followed soon after. It was the loss of a third child, a male, just ten hours after birth that sparked a change in Johnnie's attitude to Frances. Nevertheless, the need to breed prevailed and Diana Frances followed on 1 July, 1961, and finally Charles, the much wanted heir, three years later.

Her friends needed no especially keen sense to detect that ten years into the marriage, Frances had lost her respect for Johnnie and there was plenty of gossip about his sudden rages. During expeditions to enjoy some social life in London she met Peter Shand Kydd at a dinner party. He was everything that Johnnie was not: a rough diamond and a natural extrovert. Shand Kydd had inherited his family's wallpaper business - a trade that did not sit well with Lady Fermoy's grandiose ideas for her daughter - and was married to the artist Janet Monro Kerr by whom he had three children.

During a skiing holiday on which they had persuaded both their spouses to join them, Frances and Peter discovered that they were hopelessly in love and at the age of forty-two (Frances was thirty-one) he left his wife. They arranged clandestine meetings at an address in West London not far from the apartment block in Earl's Court where Diana was living when Prince Charles courted her.

When Frances finally walked out of Althorp saying she wanted a trial separation, Sarah and Jane were away at boarding school and she took Diana and Charles with her.

By the time they returned for a sham celebration of the Christmas festivities, however, Spencer had summoned some inner strength and refused to allow his wife to take the two youngest children away again. They fought, and she lost, a bitter custody battle behind closed doors in the Family Division of the High Court.

She went back into battle in a scandalous divorce action in the spring of 1969 and was devastated when she lost again. In those times it was rare for custody of the children to be given to a father but her allegation of cruelty in the marriage was unproven whereas his of her adultery was indefensible since she had been named as the other woman in the successful case brought by Mrs Peter Shand Kydd the first.

The domestic strife in these times of battle played heavily on Diana's mind and brought on her life-threatening illness,
bulimia nervosa.
A series of nannies - more than one of whom bullied her and Charles - and medical advisers were unable to repair the damage and the Earl had to accept the fact that the failure of his marriage had seriously disturbed his daughter. The seeds of her nightmare had been sewn.

Brought up in the traditional unhealthy way of the British aristocracy, he had been taught to conceal his own emotions and was totally ill-equipped to guide Diana through puberty. Whenever a crisis arose he took the easy way out. 'You'll cope, I know you can do it,' was one of his favourite remarks, flattering but unhelpful. Then, just at the time when she most needed her father, the chocolate box figure of Raine arrived on the scene to take him away. Diana's fury was matched only by her spite for what she saw as the grandiosity of a woman who could not abide traffic jams and would have had her chauffeur drive on the pavement if he could.

BORN on 9 September, 1929, the daughter of Barbara and Alexander McCorquodale (of the wealthy printing family), Raine knew full well what it was to come from a broken home. But whatever the imbalance in her own psyche it was the very reverse of Diana's. She had been brought up by her imperious and socially ambitious mother who as Barbara Cartland was the creator of slushy romantic fiction which was to form a central part of Diana's literary diet. Her parents were divorced when she was just four with Barbara declaring that Alexander was 'a drinker and not a good lover. He left when Raine was very small. She loved him very much but hardly saw him.'

No shrinking violet, Raine's strong will, combined with an ingrained need to feel important, served her in good stead during her formative years. She paid a great deal of attention to her appearance, especially her hair. Wartime rationing being what it had been, she was used to wearing other people's clothes, but the garments, she had been known to point out, always belonged to the
right
other people.

The lessons in elocution and deportment she had received at Mrs Fyffe's School in London, later relocated to Cambridgeshire, served her well in her quest for a life of grandeur to which the compelling Ms Cartland clearly believed they were entitled. Harry Hull, the taxi driver paid four pounds to drive Raine the twenty-four miles to school and back each day, remembered her as 'a bit of a haughty thing' who said she would have preferred him to wear a uniform. The finer points of her education for life were taken care of at lightning speed at a finishing school in the Bernese Oberland town of Murren.

As the debutante Miss Raine McCorquodale, she had been noticed by the mothers of several prominent young men since her coming-out on the lawn of Buckingham Palace on the afternoon of 28 May, 1947. Wearing a second-hand dress bought for five pounds ('Well, it was by Molyneux,' she later protested), Raine underwent the Monarch's inspection ceremony, as was required by young ladies of her day whose parents expected them to marry into fashionable society. So striking a young lady was she perceived at the King's review of the '47 crop and at the forty dances she attended, that Raine was named Debutante of the Year - a title Diana never allowed her to forget.

Raine had known what it was to be pursued by men since the age of sixteen when she received her first marriage proposal from the Italian doctor treating her adolescent boils. She explained to the foreign medic that the painful memory of her parents' split had made her frightened of marriage. Fearful or not, within a year of rejecting him, she had captured her first husband, Mr Gerald Legge, on the ski slopes of Switzerland.

In a masterpiece of planning, though hardly a subtle manoeuvre, her mother gave a dinner party for twenty- four before Raine's coming-out dance and apart from Raine, her mother and grandmother, all the guests were men. The audition was unnecessary, the cast had already been decided: Raine had fallen for Gerald Legge in what she described as their 'incredibly romantic' mountain-top meeting, and he became a regular visitor to River Cottage, the 400-year-old thatched house at Great Barford in Bedfordshire where she lived with her mother, nursemaid, lady's maid, nanny and Barbara's female secretary.

As the future Earl of Dartmouth and a member of a wealthy family, Gerald was considered eminently suitable for a place in her heart and at the tender age of eighteen she was allowed to marry him. Although not every man found her as bewitching - more than one cad complained aloud of her 'awful teeth and bad breath' - Legge had not been without competition and had she paid more attention to the overtures of Oliver (Viscount) Lymington, she might well have gone on to become the Duchess of Portsmouth. His inadequate health put paid to the prospect.

Attended by no less than sixteen bridesmaids, Raine became Mrs Gerald Legge in a service at St Margaret's, Westminster. She wore a grand tiara loaned by family friend Lady Patricia Lennox-Boyd for the grandest of receptions which was staged at Londonderry House. Lord Mountbatten was among the guests and the wedding presents on display included a set of graduated bows of diamonds from the bridegroom's uncle and aunt, the Earl and Countess of Dartmouth, and a five-strand pearl bracelet with aquamarine clasp and a white fox cape from her mother.