Even as We Speak (29 page)

No, I didn’t figure all that out straight away, but as time went on it became more apparent to me that I was her patient. I missed her after that first lunch, with a mild
version of the forlorn longing I have seen among friends of mine when their shrinks go on holiday. So I did something so presumptuous I still don’t believe I had the brass neck to go through
with it.
I
asked
her
to lunch. The separation was practically official by now, she was kind of up for grabs, so why not, you know,
ask her to lunch
? I made the phone call
to her secretary and hung up feeling like someone who was going to get a flea in his ear the size of a hummingbird. But ten minutes later the secretary was back on the line. The Princess of Wales
would be delighted. How about the Caprice?

No, I didn’t get there half an hour early – only twenty minutes. I took up my elaborately casual position at the corner table, double-cleaned my fingernails with my door key, and
watched the forecourt through the window. As always, she was on time to the minute. When she stepped from the chauffeur-driven car, it wasn’t just the way she looked that stymied me.
No
escort
. She had been threatening for a while to start going out without an escort, and now she was actually doing it, the crazy little twit. The chill of fear I felt was probably useful in
making me appear cool as I rose for an air kiss that stopped every knife and fork in the room, as if time had been switched off. The rattle of cutlery started again after she sat down, and there we
were, tête-à-tête. It wasn’t cahoots yet, though. By this time, two camps had formed, Charles’s and Diana’s. Diana’s people were busy calling Charles a
stuffed shirt, and Charles’s people were just as busy calling Diana a dingbat. I wanted to make it clear to her that I was for both of them, and against anything that would make them
irreconcilable. I couldn’t, either in public or in private, say a word against the Prince. Putting it in jokey form – always her preferred way of hearing a lecturette – I told her
that if we were caught talking high treason she would be given the privilege of dying by the sword, whereas I, a commoner and a colonial, would be lucky if they even bothered to sharpen the axe.
She laughed, said she understood completely, and made it evident that she admired Charles’s qualities as much as I did. Things bubbled along nicely. Cahoots again. I got both our meals to eat
as usual, and from the next table the director-general of the BBC was looking at me as if I were a combination of Errol Flynn and Neil Armstrong. He was stuck with the Home Secretary. Christ, what
fun she was. But the chill of fear came back when she started to talk about the possibility of going on television with a personal interview. I knew it wouldn’t be with me, but that
wasn’t the reason I counselled her against it. I said if that happened the two-camps thing would go nuclear, and continue until there was nothing left. She would be on the run forever, and
there would be nowhere to go. Nowhere would be far enough away. She seemed convinced, but of course she was pretending. She had already decided.

No, she wasn’t always the straight goods. She often pretended. She would listen to advice and warnings that – as you’d later discover – had been rendered obsolete by what
she had already done, and pretend to consider them. Then, when the news came out, you found that she had been watching you lead yourself up the garden path. It could hurt.

No, I don’t think she was being malicious, or even mischievous. There was just a lot of stuff she couldn’t share. At least once, however, she lied to me outright. ‘I really had
nothing to do with that Andrew Morton book,’ she said. ‘But after my friends talked to him I had to stand by them.’ She looked me straight in the eye when she said this, so I
could see how plausible she could be when she was telling a whopper. I would have been terminally pissed off if I hadn’t suspected that she knew I knew, and just didn’t want to be
remembered as admitting it. In the
Panorama
interview, she did admit it, so I had two reasons for feeling that historic programme as a personal wound, quite apart from my premonition that
it would wound her. It multiplied her popularity, but it propelled her in the direction I had spent a lot of time telling her she should never think of going: over the wall, out of the country,
away from her protection.

No, there was no chance she would listen. She
hated
the protection. She saw the protectors as assailants. She believed, against all the evidence of her own beautiful eyes, that there
was some kind of enchanted place called Abroad, where she would be understood and where she could lead a more normal life. This place called Abroad became a recurring theme in future conversations
at other restaurants. Kensington Place, in Kensington Church Street near Notting Hill Gate, was one of her favourite hangouts, and she thought it funny that I always booked a table against the back
wall, instead of up front, near the window. There was an acre of unshielded glass and she –
she
– wanted to sit near it. It scared me rigid. Sometimes I could barely eat my own
lunch, let alone hers. But it seemed she would rather have gone down in a hail of broken glass than live in fear. She could live in her own fear – the fear of never finding happiness, of
never making the pieces fit, of Mummy and Daddy never being together again – but she could never live in mine, the fear for her life.

No, she never took my advice even once. Well, just once. Before she went to Japan on her big solo diplomatic trip, she asked me what would be the best thing she could do there, apart from all
the hospitals and stuff. She knew that I was a student of the Japanese language and Japanese literature, and she thought I might have some nifty scheme up my sleeve. I told her I did, but it
wouldn’t be easy. I told her that if she learned even a few words of the language – just the standard phrases about how pleased she was to be there – she would knock them out. I
could lend her my teacher, a gentle but determined little woman called Shinko. Diana, after her standard protestations about being too thick, said she was up for it. Shinko, quietly experiencing
the same emotions as I would have done if I had been asked to teach the Emperor of Japan croquet, marched up to Kensington Palace and did the job. Diana flew to Japan, addressed a hundred and
twenty-five million people in their own language, and made the most stunning impact there since Hirohito told them that the war was over.

No, she didn’t forget. When she got back, she called me to lunch at Bibendum. We did all our standard numbers, culminating in the hallowed dessert routine, by which I ordered one
crème brûlée with two spoons and finished the rest of it before she had swallowed her single mouthful. As usual, she had finessed that deadly third glass of wine into me without
my even noticing. But there was an extra
petit four
with the coffee. It was a little red box that opened to reveal a pair of cufflinks: gold ovals enamelled in pink with the chrysanthemum
of the Japanese imperial family. ‘
Domo arigato gozaimash’ta
,’ she said. Thank you very much for what you did. ‘Did I get that right?’ Yes, I told her: you got
that right.

No, there is not much more. Our last lunch was at Kensington Palace and Harry was present with one of his friends, so there were no cahoots. She was putting distance between us. Later on,
quietly and nicely, I was dropped from her list. I understood completely. I had wanted her to be Queen. I had wanted, when I grew old, to see her in the gradually, properly altering beauty of her
middle age. I had wanted to see her beside Charles, on the day when he took his proper place as the most intelligent and concerned monarch this country has ever had. I had wanted to have lunch with
her once a year and do the dessert routine again. But she wanted life. She was going on to those other, faraway adventures which she knew I didn’t believe in. I hoped I would hear about them
someday.

No, I never saw her again. Neither will anyone now. Not even once. Never even once again.

No, I can still see her. She’s leaving the Caprice, heading for the back door, because a Range Rover full of photographers has just pulled up in the street outside. She’s turning her
head. She’s smiling. Has she forgotten something? Is she coming back?

No.

New Yorker
, 15 September, 1997

Complete with all its stylistic arabesques, the preceding obituary is reproduced in the form it took when it was first published in the special edition of the
New
Yorker
which appeared in the week of the accident. The following weekend, a slightly shorter version appeared in Britain, in the
Sunday Telegraph
, and that was the version which was
subsequently reprinted, sometimes in further abridged form, in newspapers and magazines in other languages, and was reproduced in its entirety in the book
Requiem
which came out to mark
the anniversary. Not at my initiative, but with my agreement, the second version was shorn of the first version’s opening paragraph. Some London journalists, usually professing more sorrow
than anger, had taken particular exception to this, quoting it dutifully as evidence of how at least one of Diana’s admirers had lost his head. Even the second version, as I have subsequently
discovered, provides ample opportunity for critics deploring the state of modern journalism (or anyway deploring the modern state of
my
journalism) to demonstrate how a once-keen critical
brain can be softened to sponge cake by the moist air of celebrity. When the
Requiem
volume came out, one of its reviewers – somehow contriving to forget that it was he, and not I,
who was a member of the sweating team of Stakhanovite shock-workers currently pouring forth yet another load of loosely mixed sand and gravel on the topic of Diana – kindly said of my piece
that I must have regretted ever having written it.

When I read what he and some of his colleagues said, I
did
regret having written it, but only for the moment. Self-justification is a bad reason for writing a postscript to anything,
but I would be conspiring at my own hanging if I failed to record that on this topic my fellow scribblers were the only people I heard from who said that I had done the wrong thing. Other people
said that I had spoken for them. From all over the world I received letters by the hundred. The harshest admonishment any of them proffered was that if I had let grief unhinge my equipoise, that
was only appropriate, because they too had felt bereavement with such force that all their normal stability had trembled on its base. To be fair to my colleagues in the media, those I knew
personally were ready – unusually ready, but those were unusual times – to concede that my cry from the heart had struck a note whose authenticity they recognized, even if it had come
from a heart that had spent too much of its existence worn on a sleeve. One famously unfoolable TV critic had been telling me for years that the Royal Family was a swindle perpetrated on honest
labourers such as herself. She phoned me in such a fit of tears that she could hardly choke out her message, which was that her anguish was made worse because she had not expected it could ever
happen – that she too had been slammed into a wall, and all her best hopes for herself had been stopped with no appeal. Since she had previously, in private if not in print, been vocal in her
opinion that Diana was a genetically engineered hybrid of a minx, a prize poodle and a sacrificial goat, this was a dramatic reversal of her past feelings. She said she knew it and that made it
worse.

She was no isolated case. Stuff like that was going on all over London. I saw strong, respected men looking as if one of their children had died in their arms. It made me feel a bit better about
snivelling at my desk, and it made me feel a lot better about having written my poem, because I had got out some of the strangely personal grief that I now knew a lot of people had been feeling,
and feeling all the more intensely because it was against their expectations and convictions – against their will. It was not so much the amount of the emotion, as its contrary nature, that
made the episode historically remarkable, and might well, eventually, make it recalcitrant to historical assessment, because a lot of intelligent people later on decided that they had been wrong to
shed tears, and the less honest among them are already saying that they never did. The whole convulsive purgation of pity and terror is coming to be remembered as a weak moment. That it might have
been a strong moment is not an idea anyone very much wants to pursue. I don’t either: empiricism, not mysticism, is what I value in British culture. But there is nothing empirical about
pretending that something didn’t happen.

If you believe, as I do, that a poem is any piece of writing that can’t be quoted from
except
out of context, then a poem is what my lament for the Princess is, at least in the
eyes of its author. In the eyes of some of my critics it was a suicide note, and they might well be proved right in the long run: perhaps what was left of my reputation as a writer of critical
prose was wrecked for keeps. But the point was that it didn’t seem to matter at the time, because what we self-appointed public mourners said was for her, even if – especially if
– we seemed to be grieving for ourselves. A few detractors alleged in print that my tribute was nothing but an opportunistic effort to boost my importance by claiming a friendship that had
had small basis in fact. (My own assurances that the friendship had had small basis in fact were taken to be Machiavellian deceptions aimed at furthering this end.) A suitably attentive textual
analysis could easily support that view, and
folie de grandeur
might well have been my subconscious impulse. But as far as I can remember my feelings, they were precisely the opposite.
Though writing about myself has always been my stock in trade, on that occasion I was as close as a pathologically solipsistic man can ever be to self-denial. All I could see, even in a mirror, was
her face.