Diana's Nightmare - The Family (55 page)

'Somewhere, someone is going to make out that I am mad, that I am guilty by association, that the mud will stick,' Diana told him. 'I am bemused by this constant attention, a level of intrusion that I had reasonably thought would diminish.'

Knowing that Kay would report everything she said in his newspaper, she delivered a message to the nation: it is said that some people want me to return to the public stage - well, this is hardly going about it the proper way.'

She also let it be known that Oliver Hoare had acted as an intermediary when she and Charles were unable to agree details of their access to William and Harry - albeit, apparently, after the nuisance calls to Tregunter Road had stopped. Indeed, Hoare had telephoned her several times that very weekend. 'He is a friend,' said Diana. 'He has helped me and I have phoned him.'

Time and again, she denied making the nuisance calls, but if she offered any explanation as to how they were made from her telephones, then Kay's newspaper never reported it. Hoare was said to have shouted Diana's name at his silent tormentor once he had been informed of the origins of the calls. She was alleged to have responded: 'I'm so sorry, so sorry. I don't know what came over me.' But in her version to Kay, she shook her head in vehement denial and repeated 'No, no, not at all'.

'Do you realise that whoever is trying to destroy me is inevitably damaging the institution of monarchy as well?' she demanded. Who, the reporter asked her, would do such a thing? 'I know there are those whose wish is apparently to grind my face in it,' came the reply, 'I knew I could not rely on anyone sticking up for me, but nor could I allow such hurtful things to be said about me in silence any longer. What should I do, close my ears and eyes to it all?'

The police had traced some of the calls to telephone boxes in streets in the Kensington Palace area and when Kay asked if she had made those calls, Diana's answer was more than just curious: 'You can't be serious,' she said, 'I don't even know how to use a parking meter, let alone a phone box.' This sounded disingenuous to even Diana's most loyal supporters. Prior to becoming Princess of Wales, she had been a London motorist living in one of the city's busiest suburbs, yet she claimed that she had never even learned to put coins in a parking meter.

'I know everyone wants me to be having affairs and this man fits the bill, but it's not true,' explained Diana. 'Besides, if I were as obsessed as these calls would suggest, why would I have had supper with him a few weeks afterwards?' Diana had indeed dined with Oliver Hoare and Beatriz Flecha de Lima, one of Lucia's daughters, on 13 March, six weeks after the calls had ceased. She had been photographed at Oliver's side as he drove her back to Kensington Palace after the meeting. Just as Diana was recovering from the whole unpleasant episode,
Princess In Love
burst into print.

Before she left Kensington Palace for her morning workout at her new gym, the Harbour Club in Chelsea, Diana took a call from Richard Kay. According to a
Daily Mail
colleague, they discussed the imminent publication of Hewitt's ghosted memoirs. Diana acknowledged that she had written letters to him and said that she was going to demand their return. According to the newspaper, Diana also wanted it made known that she and Hewitt had never made love: 'He wanted to, but I never let it happen,' she maintained. 'His account is fantasy.'

But by now almost no one believed Diana.
Princess in Love
stripped the final fig leaf from her dignity, leaving her naked and cold in the marketplace. Anna Pasternak, an Oxford graduate with wild, wind-swept tresses and a penchant for deeply purple prose, is related to the author of the Russian classic
Dr Zhivago
but her own fragrant literary style might have made even Mills & Boon blush.

Buckingham Palace dismissed the book as 'grubby and worthless' but Hewitt had sworn an affidavit testifying that everything he had told Ms Pasternak was the truth. According to Hewitt, he and Diana had first made love in her own bed at Kensington Palace, and later in her four-poster bed at Highgrove as well as her bathroom there, in a poolhouse at Althorp and in his bedroom at his mother's house in Devon. In Ms Pasternak's version, the cavalry officer held nothing back. The betrayal was everything that Diana had feared it would be.

Captain Hewitt (for now it was revealed that he had failed his exams and was not entitled to be called major) had disclosed to Ms Pasternak that he had been hooked from the first moment he had met Diana. They had ridden together in the royal parks in early morning sunlight and at sunset, and she persuaded the posse of police and officials that always flanked her to hold back or disappear altogether.

According to Hewitt, Diana enjoyed being able to talk to him as a friend for he was not in awe of her. It had been in the barracks after a crisp morning ride that she confided to him that her marriage had been falling apart for years. The media speculation that it was a sham was true and she and Charles were leading virtually separate lives. She felt more undermined than supported by people closest to her, even Fergie. 'I am surrounded by people but so alone,' she had said. Even when they did not meet, they spoke on the telephone at least once a day. Diana sought her eager swain's advice on her clothes and he listened to her rehearse the speeches she was to deliver at public engagements.

The setting for Diana's seduction of her new friend and riding instructor could not have been more regally romantic. She invited him to a candle-lit dinner in her apartment at Kensington Palace and, after they had drunk champagne and feasted on roast beef followed by apple tart and cream, in a room heavy with the scent of his favourite lilies, she had sat on his lap and they embraced. Without uttering a word, Diana had led him to her bedroom.

There was no danger of them being disturbed by her husband. Even when he was at the Palace, Charles slept alone in a separate suite of rooms. After they had made love, Diana had lain in Hewitt's arms and wept before falling asleep. Unafraid of his nakedness, the young lothario eventually went to her bathroom and put his clothes back on, pausing only to inspect the cluster of photographs of William and Harry around her wash basin and along the side of her bath. Hewitt said that he returned to the bedroom to 'kiss her awake'. He told her how beautiful she was and how she made his heart sing, which presumably removed any fears she might have been entertaining that he might have lost his respect for her. Some time after 2 a.m., he had left Diana's apartment and driven from Kensington Palace to his flat in nearby South Kensington.

In the following months, their affair gathered momentum. They met in low-profile restaurants and at prearranged rendezvous points. When Hewitt was posted to a barracks near Windsor Castle, they made use of Windsor Great Park's wide open spaces for early morning rides. Their evenings were spent in the Wales's apartment at Kensington Palace, where Hewitt said their love affair continued to blossom.

They also met once a month at Highgrove, where at night Hewitt would tread carefully along the corridor to join Diana in her creamy bedroom, three rooms from his own. Taking advantage of Charles's absence, they made love in her four-poster, but he rose early so that William and Harry, who slept in the next room, did not bound in and discover them in bed together.

Hewitt claimed Diana had grown to hate the house, believing that it was where Charles and Camilla had spent their happiest moments. Now, in the company of her own lover, she came alive in it. At breakfast, in front of the staff, they played the part of hostess and guest, although Hewitt believed that Nanny Barnes had guessed their secret. They never kissed in front of the children, who enjoyed the military tales their 'Uncle' James would tell them.

In the early evenings, Diana and James would sit catching the perfume of the thyme walk in Charles's herb garden or the scent of the overhanging roses. After they had bathed and changed, they would sit watching television and reading magazines, scanning the pages of
Country Life
to pick out homes they would fantasise about living in together.

As 1988 arrived, Diana knew that she must face a meeting with Hewitt's mother. James related that he asked Shirley if he could bring a girlfriend home for the weekend. Was it anyone she knew, his mother enquired? The Princess of Wales, said the Life Guard. When his mother asked which bedroom she would be sleeping in, he told her that she would be using his own and there was no further discussion on the matter.

In the company of Ken Wharfe, Diana and her libidinous soldier spent the first of several weekends in the pretty cottage. They walked on the beaches of Exmouth and Budleigh Salterton and picnicked together on Dartmoor, Diana often wearing a damson-coloured Puffa jacket he apparently gave her as a present. Hewitt would sometimes take Wharfe to the local pub, leaving open pages of Tennyson and Wordsworth or Shakespearean sonnets for Diana to read. In the evenings around an open fire, they would all chat for hours before James and Diana said goodnight and retired to his room, whey they indulged their passion in two single beds pushed together. They assured each other of undying love and each said how much they needed each other.

They went also to Althorp, where Diana introduced Hewitt to her father, her stepmother Raine and her stepgrandmother, Dame Barbara Cartland. Once again, Diana took her willing lover by the hand one hot night, leading him to Earl Spencer's poolhouse for a session of love-making. 'Nobody will find us,' Hewitt claimed she whispered in his ear.

When he was dispatched to the Gulf War, Hewitt said that Diana sent not only food hampers, but also Turnbull & Asser shirts . . . and those passionate, intimate letters. On his return, a member of the Highgrove staff was sent to meet him and he was bundled into the boot of a car to be transported secretly back through the gates of Charles's home.

The affair ended almost as suddenly as it had begun. According to Hewitt, Diana 'withdrew' and 'distanced herself from her old circle'. Strengthened for a new life that had to exclude him, she had loved him enough to leave him. She just walked away.

On the day that
Princess in Love
was published, Ms Pasternik appeared on TV, saying: 'I decided to tell this story because it was too beautiful a love to remain secret.' Elsewhere, she claimed that 'theirs was a love that arose through force of circumstance,' adding that she hoped the book would contribute to 'a proper understanding of and sympathy for Princess Diana.' Somehow, Diana managed to maintain her sense of humour. 'I'm going straight home to bed with a bowl of cereal,' she told late-night revellers at a champagne party she attended.

Hewitt was branded 'a rat' and 'a traitor', and his name was posted ignominiously on the gates of the Life Guards' barracks in London and Windsor, marking him as a disgraced former member of the regiment and barring him from the officers' mess, which he had hitherto enjoyed visiting. On the day of publication Diana lunched with two elderly and highly respectable ladies, Lady Rees-Mogg, wife of the former
Times
editor, and Lady Weinstock whose husband was head of GEC, both of whom could both be relied upon not to raise the matter.

Opinion pollsters, though, interrogated the public on the issue and their survey showed that exactly half of those questioned thought that Diana's standing had been harmed by Hewitt's revelations, and forty-eight per cent thought it would harm the monarchy. However, fifty-three per cent still blamed Prince Charles for the breakdown of the marriage compared with ten per cent who held Diana responsible.

With divorce remaining the only sane option for the royal casualties, Charles and Diana prepared to send out separate Christmas cards for the second year running. In the photograph of her 1993 card, Diana had struck the formal pose of a very regal King Mother with a royal prince stationed at either side: William dutiful and serious, Harry admiring her majestic profile. 'We three', as Diana called them, were photographed against the formal backdrop of an eighteenth-century tapestry at Kensington Palace. The message Diana seemed to be sending out to the world then was that she was still a force to be reckoned with, even though she was leaving the Royal Family. To emphasise the point, she had dropped the royal crest in favour of the Spencer family's coat of arms. Just like 1993, the year now passing into history had turned into an
annus terribilis,
and Diana needed her young princes as never before. They would not let her down.

The princes were devastated when their own father invaded the Royal Family's privacy - more than any dreaded tabloid had ever dared - to confirm to the world that he had never loved Diana, that their marriage had been a disastrous sham from the start and that the wedding had taken place only after Prince Philip had pressured him into proposing to save Diana's honour. 'Frequently I feel I'm in a kind of cage, pacing up and down in it and longing to be free,' Charles had written in a letter to a friend in 1986. 'How awful incompatibility is, and how dreadfully destructive it can be for the players in this extraordinary drama. It has all the ingredients of a Greek tragedy. I never thought it would end up like this. How could I have got it all so wrong?'

This letter was among a batch of private correspondence which Charles handed over to Jonathan Dimbleby for inclusion in a new biography on his life. But by betraying his own family in this way, the Prince appeared more like the Duke of Windsor than a Greek hero.

When he had first arrived at Ludgrove School, William walked into the kitchen and spied a picture of his mother which some wag had stuck on to the door of the refrigerator. One of the staff, a young woman, had tried to cover it up, thinking it might seem disrespectful in the eyes of her son. But her alarm was misplaced. William marched straight up to the photograph and beamed proudly at his beautiful mother, it's all right,' said the future King. 'She looks jolly nice.'

He and Harry would always love Diana no matter what anyone else might think.