Even as We Speak (28 page)

No, there was nothing between me and her beyond a fleeting friendship. Many other men knew her better. Some men knew her intimately, and now, at last, I do not envy them, because what they have
in their memories must make loss feel like death. (I never thought I could be sorry for James Hewitt, the dim former cavalry officer who repaid her for her favours by selling his story, but think
of where he is now, deprived even of the reason for his ruin, his empty head already rotting on Traitors’ Gate.) As for the man who knew her most intimately of all, Prince Charles, he is a
man as good and honest as any I have ever met, and I know him well enough to be sure that today he is on the Cross, and wondering whether he will ever be able to come down. My own knowledge of her
is minute compared with his and theirs, but now, for the first time, I wish I had never met her at all. Then I might not have loved her, and would not feel like this, or at any rate would feel it
less. But I did meet her, and I did love her.

No, it was not a blind love: quite the opposite. Even before I met her, I had already guessed that she was a handful. After I met her, there was no doubt about it. Clearly on a hair trigger, she
was unstable at best, and when the squeeze was on she was a fruitcake on the rampage. But even while reaching this conclusion I was already smitten, and from then on everything I found out about
her at first hand, even – especially – her failings and her follies, only made me love her more, because there were none of her deficiencies that had not once been mine, and some of
them still were. In her vivid interior drama I saw my own. I didn’t find out much, but what I did find out I found out from close up, from a few feet away across a little table; and I knew it
certainly, and it made me love her more truly. I was even convinced (this was not for certain, but it was a deep and ineradicable suspicion) that she would get herself killed, and that conviction
made me love her to distraction, as if I had become a small part of some majestic tragic poem: an obscure, besotted walk-on mesmerized by the trajectory of a burning angel. I feared for her as I
loved her, and the fear intensified the love. It was too much love for so tenuous a liaison, and one of the reasons I never spoke of it in public was a cheaper fear – the simple, adolescent
fear of appearing ridiculous.

No, you don’t have to tell me. I am appearing ridiculous now, but it is part of the ceremony, is it not? And what flowers have I to send her except my memories? They are less than a
wreath, not much more than a nosegay: just a
deuil blanc
table napkin wrapping a few blooms of frangipani, the blossom of broken bread. London has gone quiet; the loudest human sound is
the murmur of self-communion; and we are told that half the world has done the same. In the old times, when the plague came, people would cast off their sense of self, say what was on their minds,
find what had always been in their minds but had remained unsaid even to themselves, and make love to strangers. There will be no
Totentanz
, this time, no orgies, no mass kicking over of
the traces. But there will be something of the same liberation from the very British drive to protect the self, and I will be surprised if some of the new openness does not remain. The lake of
flowers submerging Kensington Palace has released a perfume that has changed the air. And although those who did not participate in the vigil might sit in judgement on us for our mass delusion, we
will judge them, in our turn, for their inhuman detachment.

No, nobody can escape her image in these days after her death – it is as if the planet were being colonized with her replicated smile – and each time I see it, it brings back a
reality that was even lovelier. I first saw Diana – the living human being, not the image – at the Cannes Film Festival. Sir Alec Guinness was getting a lifetime-achievement award, I
was to be the master of ceremonies at the dinner, and Charles and Diana had come down from London just for the evening. There was a reception beforehand. The whole British film world stood around
nursing drinks. It was like watching a movie composed of nothing except cameo appearances. A bit of some TV crew’s lighting rig fell on a PR girl’s head and she regained consciousness
in the arms of Roger Moore: she thought she was in a James Bond movie. Then Charles and Diana came in and started working the room. With astonishment, I suddenly found myself on the roster of
familiar faces Diana wanted to meet. There she was, right in front of me, and I instantly realized that no kind of film, whether still or moving, had done her justice. She wasn’t just
beautiful. She was like the sun coming up: coming up giggling. She was giggling as if she had just remembered something funny. ‘I think it’s terrible what you do to those Japanese
people. You are
terrible
.’ She was referring to the clips from Japanese game shows which I screened on the TV programme that I hosted each week. I started to protest that they were
doing that crazy stuff to each other; it wasn’t me doing it to them. But she quickly made it clear that she was only pretending to be shocked. She said she never missed my show and always had
it taped if she was out. While I was still feeling as if, all at once, I had been awarded the Booker Prize for fiction, the Nobel Prize in Physics, and the Academy Award for Best Actor, she
switched the topic. ‘Ooh. There’s that odious man Maxwell over there. Don’t want to meet
him
again. Yuck.’

No, she really meant it. She made a face as if she had just sucked a lemon. And that did it. I was enslaved. Looming hugely at the far side of the stellar throng, the publishing tycoon Robert
Maxwell was doing his usual simultaneous impersonation of Victor Mature and King Farouk: a ton and a half of half-cured ham wrapped in a white tuxedo, his pan-scrubber eyebrows dripping
condescension like spoiled lard. At the time, the old crook hadn’t yet been rumbled. Some of the cleverest men in Britain were still working for him and helping to vilify anyone who
questioned his credentials. But this young lady, with a head allegedly composed almost exclusively of air, had the bastard’s number. On the other hand, after knowing me not much more than a
minute she had just handed me a story that would have embarrassed the bejesus out of the Royal Family if I had passed it on: it would take only one phone call, and next morning the front page of
every British tabloid except Maxwell’s
Mirror
would consist almost entirely of the word ‘Yuck’. Either she was brave to the point of insanity or else I radiated
trustworthiness. I decided it must be the latter. For the air of complicity she had generated between us in so brief a time, the best word I can think of is ‘cahoots’. We were in
cahoots.

No, it couldn’t last. With the two-minute mark coming up, she started regretfully signalling that our lifelong friendship would have to be temporarily put on hold. Her pursed lips
indicated that although she would rather stay talking to me until Hell froze over, unfortunately her duties called her away to schmooze with far less illustrious people than me. Her mouth saying
that she was looking forward to my speech, her eyes saying, ‘Plant you now and dig you later,’ she fluttered a few fingertips and swanned off in the direction of Sir Alec. What would
she say to him?
Help me
,
Obi-Wan Kenobi
.
You’re my only hope
. I wish I hadn’t just thought of that.

No, I didn’t see her again for a long time. But I thought of her often, and especially when I saw Charles. In those days, I was one of the outer ring of his advisers. The
system worked – probably still works – like this. The inner ring of advisers are on call full time for anything. In the outer ring, you get called to the centre when the upcoming job
touches on your areas of competence: in my case, television, Australia and occasionally the arts. Flattered to get the nod, I gladly made trips to see him. Born to a life in which people magically
appeared when needed, he sometimes had trouble remembering that his fifteen minutes with you at Highgrove or Sandringham would cost you a whole working day, but apart from that he was impeccably
sensitive, courteous, and just plain thoughtful – a quality of his which is continually underestimated, and one which will make him a great king when his turn comes, as come it must.
(Diana’s declaration, in her
Panorama
interview, that Charles might never reign was the single biggest mistake she ever made, but haven’t
you
said foolish things about
the person you loved after it all went wrong?) Our meetings, though invariably friendly and increasingly funny, were always strictly business, so it was no surprise that Diana wasn’t around.
But when my wife and I asked him to dinner he came alone, his wife was never mentioned, and sadly I began to realize that that was no surprise either. The word was out that they were sticking
together for the sake of the monarchy and the children but were otherwise going their separate ways.

No, it couldn’t go on like that. I still think it should have, and right up to the divorce I published articles in the
Spectator
saying that they owed it to all of us to stick
together somehow, or else the press would be confirmed in its hideous new role as a sort of latter-day Church of England with witch-finders for priests. But I was making the fundamental mistake of
being more royalist than the King. The two people at the centre of events were pursuing happiness, American style, and it was becoming more obvious all the time that they had known enough
unhappiness to justify the pursuit. During Charles’s fortieth-birthday party, at Buckingham Palace, I met her again. There were no cahoots this time. She said that she had enjoyed my latest
documentary and that she was glad to see me, but she didn’t seem to be glad about anything else: the lights in her face were dimmed down to about three-quarter strength, so she looked merely
lovely, at a time when her full incandescence should have been outshining the chandeliers. Charles did his formidable best to jolly everyone along. The Duchess of York chortled around in her usual
irrepressible manner, a bumper car in taffeta. It was fun to go for a piss, stand in a reverse lineup of hunched dinner jackets, and gradually discover that I was the only man staring at the
porcelain who was not a crowned head of Europe. But generally there was something missing, and nobody could be in any doubt what it was. She was still there physically, but her soul had gone AWOL;
and without that soul the party had no life.

No life, and no future. Soon the press were piling it on, and steadily the intrusiveness got worse. It became known that she was trying to lessen the effects by getting a few media figures on
her side. It was manipulation, but what else does a marionette dream of except pulling strings? So I thought I knew what it was about when she sent me an invitation to lunch at Kensington Palace. I
thought there would be at least half a dozen of us there to receive the gentle suggestion that a few supportive words would not come amiss. (Even for my generation, words like
‘supportive’ are losing their inverted commas by now: her unashamed use of me-speak has influenced the language.) But after I was shown up the staircase to the sitting room I found
myself alone. When she came into the room, it was as if that first conversation in Cannes had been frozen by the pause button and now the button had been touched again to re-start the tape.
‘Sorry there aren’t any film stars,’ she said. ‘There’s just me. Hope you don’t get bored.’ The cahoots were back. We sat down at a small table in the next
room and immediately established the protocol that would become standard, and which I will always cherish as one of the best running gags I was ever involved in. She ate like a bird while
encouraging me to eat like a wolf, as if I weren’t being fed properly at home. There was a catch under the joke: that I
had
a home, she made it clear, was enviable. She envied me my
long marriage. When I told her that I had been a neglectful husband and father, and that my guilt had begun to erode my peace of mind, she said that I must have done
something
right, if we
were all still together, so I should take comfort from that. Her own marriage, she said, was coming apart. She told me why and how. I could hardly credit my ears. Armed with nothing else except
what she told me then, I could have gone to a telephone and blown the whole thing sky high. But the cahoots ruled that out. The tacit bargain was: You tell me what you can’t tell anyone else
and I’ll tell you what I can’t tell anyone else, and then neither of us can tell anyone else about what we said.

No, it wasn’t mutual therapy. But I suppose it was a mind game. There must have been dozens of other people that she played it with, but she infallibly picked those who would never break
the deal. (If she had chosen her lovers on the same principle, she would have given a lot fewer hostages to fortune, but desire doesn’t work like that.) She would make each of her platonic
cavaliers believe, or at any rate want to believe, that he was the only one. The joker in her real life doubled as the ace of diamonds in the game: it was her childhood. Everything in her tormented
psyche turned on what had happened to her at the age of six, when her parents separated and left her to a loneliness that nothing could cure. Then, while I was clearing her plate after I had
cleared mine, she popped the question: ‘Something like that happened to you, didn’t it?’ It was the Princess of Wales who was asking me, so I gave her the answer. Yes, it did.
When I was six, my mother got the news that my father had been killed on the way home from the war.

No, my mother cried. No, no, oh no. I was the witness of her distress, I couldn’t help her, and I had been helpless ever since. I sometimes thought, I said, that everything I had ever
written, built or achieved had been in order to offset that corrosive guilt, and that I loved the world of women because I feared the world of men. Diana touched my wrist, and that was it: we were
both six years old.

No, it was no trick. It might have been a mind game, but her mind was her most vivid reality, the battlefield on which she looked for peace. It was a good mind, incidentally. Of all the
poisonous dreck ever written about Diana in the newspapers, the most despicable was based on the assumption that she was stupid. Journalists who read three books a year and had scarcely two ideas
to rub together about anything called her an ignoramus. The truth was the opposite. Schopenhauer (‘Chopin who?’ I can hear her say), who was a great reader himself, pointed out the
danger of letting books get between us and experience. What Diana knew was based on experience, and she knew a lot, especially about the mind. Well aware that her own was damaged, she sought
comfort from those who would admit to the same condition. She spent too much time with gurus, spiritualists and exotic healers, but that wasn’t frivolity: it was desperation. For the rest of
the time, which was most of it, she had a remarkable capacity to do exactly the opposite of what she was notorious for: far from being obsessed with her own injuries, she would forget herself in
the injuries of others. It was the secret of her appeal to the sick and the wounded. When she walked into a hospital ward, everyone in it recognized her as one of them, because she treated them as
if they could have been her. They
were
her. She was just their souls, free for a day, in a beautiful body that walked so straight and breathed so easily. The sick, she would often say,
were more real to her than the well: their guard was down, they were themselves.