Spare (45 page)

We paused at the front door. Five o’clock, on the dot. Wouldn’t do to be late.

Meg looked beautiful and I told her so. She was wearing a black-and-white dress, with a full skirt, patterned with flowers, and when I put my hand on her back I could feel how delicate the material was. Her hair was down, because I suggested she wear it that way.
Pa likes it when women wear their hair down.
Granny too. She often commented on “Kate’s beautiful mane.”

Meg was wearing little makeup, which I’d also suggested. Pa didn’t approve of women who wore a lot.

The door opened and we were greeted by Pa’s Gurkha butler. And by
Leslie, his long-time house manager, who’d also worked for Gan-Gan. They led us down the long corridor, past the big paintings and gilt-edged mirrors, along the crimson carpet with the crimson runner, past the big glass cabinet filled with gleaming porcelain and exquisite heirlooms, up the creaky staircase, which rose three steps before jogging right, up another twelve steps, then jogged right again. There, at last, on the landing above us, stood Pa.

Beside him stood Camilla.

Meg and I had rehearsed this moment several times.
For Pa, curtsy. Say, Your Royal Highness, or Sir. Maybe a kiss on each cheek if he leans in, otherwise a handshake. For Camilla, no curtsy. Not necessary. Just a quick kiss or handshake
.

No curtsy? You sure?

I didn’t think it appropriate.

We all went into a large sitting room. Along the way Pa asked Meg if it was true, as he’d been told, that she was the star of an American soap opera! She smiled. I smiled. I desperately wanted to say:
Soap opera? No, that’s
our
family, Pa.

Meg said she was in a cable drama that aired in the evening. About lawyers. Called
Suits
.

Marvelous
, Pa said.
How splendid.

We came to a round table laid with a white cloth. Beside it stood a trolley with tea: honey cake, flapjacks, sandwiches, warm crumpets, crackers with some creamy spread, shredded basil—Pa’s favorite. All surgically laid out. Pa sat with his back to an open window, as far as possible from the popping fire. Camilla sat across from him, her back to the fire. Meg and I sat between them, across from one another.

I wolfed down a crumpet with Marmite; Meg had two smoked-salmon tea sandwiches. We were starving. We’d been so nervous all day that we hadn’t eaten.

Pa offered her some flapjacks. She loved them.

Camilla asked how Meg took her tea, dark or light, and Meg apologized for not knowing.
I thought tea was tea.
This sparked a rollicking discussion about tea, and wine, and other libations, and Britishisms versus Americanisms, and then we were onto the larger subject of Things We All Like, which led straight to dogs. Meg talked about her two “fur babies,” Bogart and Guy, both of whom were rescues. Guy had a particularly sad story. Meg found him at a Kentucky kill shelter after someone abandoned him in deep woods, without food or water. Beagles, she explained, were put down in Kentucky more than
in any other state, and when she saw Guy on the shelter’s website she fell in love.

I watched Camilla’s face darken. She was the patron of Battersea Dogs & Cats Home, so these kinds of stories always hit her hard. Pa too. He couldn’t bear to think of any animal suffering. He was undoubtedly reminded of the time his beloved dog, Pooh, got lost on the grouse moor in Scotland—probably down a rabbit hole—never to be seen again.

The conversation was easy, all four of us talking at once, but then Pa and Meg fell into a quiet chat, and I turned to Camilla, who seemed keener on eavesdropping than talking to her stepson but, alas, she was stuck with me.

Soon, we all switched. How weird, I thought, that we’re just instinctively observing the same protocol as we would at a state dinner with Granny.

Eventually the conversation broadened again to include everyone. We talked about acting and the arts generally. What a struggle it could be to make your way in such a trade, Pa said. He had a lot of questions about Meg’s career, and he looked impressed by the way she answered. Her confidence, her intelligence, I thought, caught him unawares.

And then our time was up. Pa and Camilla had another engagement. Royal life. Heavily regimented, overscheduled, so forth.

I made a note to explain all this later to Meg.

We all stood. Meg leaned towards Pa. I flinched; like Willy, Pa wasn’t a hugger. Thankfully, she gave him a standard British cheek-to-cheek, which he actually seemed to enjoy.

I walked Meg out of Clarence House, into those lush, fragrant gardens, feeling exultant.

Well, that’s that then, I thought. Welcome to the family.

I flew to Toronto.
End of October 2016. Meg was excited to show me
her
life,
her
dogs—
her
little house, which she adored. And I was eager to see it all, to know every last detail about her. (Though I’d snuck into Canada once before, briefly, this would be my first proper visit.) We walked the dogs in big, open ravines and parks. We explored the sparsely populated nooks and crannies of her neighborhood. Toronto wasn’t London, but it also wasn’t Botswana. So, be ever cautious, we said. Maintain the bubble. Keep wearing disguises.

Speaking of disguises. We invited Euge and Jack to join us for Halloween.
And Meg’s best friend Markus. Toronto’s Soho House was having a big party and the theme was “Apocalypse.” Dress accordingly.

I mumbled to Meg that I’d not had great luck with themed fancy-dress parties, but I’d give it another go. For help with my costume, I’d turned to a friend, the actor Tom Hardy, before I left home. I’d phoned him to ask if I could borrow his costume from
Mad Max
.

The whole thing?

Yes, please, mate! The whole kit.

He’d given it all to me before I left Britain, and now I tried it on in Meg’s little bathroom. When I came out, she roared with laughter.

It was funny. And a little scary. But the main thing was: I was unrecognizable.

Meg, meanwhile, wore torn black shorts, a camo top, fishnet stockings. If that’s the Apocalypse, I thought, bring on the end of the world.

The party was loud, dark, drunk—ideal. Several people did double-takes as Meg passed through the rooms, but no one looked twice at her dystopian date. I wished I could wear this disguise every day. I wished I could reuse it the next day and visit her on the set of
Suits
.

Then again, maybe not. I’d made the mistake of googling and watching some of her love scenes online. I’d witnessed her and a castmate mauling each other in some sort of office or conference room…It would take electric-shock therapy to get those images out of my head. I didn’t need to see such things live. Still, the point was moot: the next day was Sunday, so she wasn’t working.

And then everything was rendered moot, everything was changed forever, because the next day was when news of our relationship broke wide open.

Well, we said, staring anxiously at our phones, it was going to happen eventually.

In fact, we’d had a heads-up that it was likely to happen that day. We’d been tipped, before heading off to the Halloween Apocalypse, that another apocalypse might be coming. More proof that the universe had a wicked sense of humor.

Meg, you ready for what’s headed our way?

Kinda. Are you?

Yes.

We were sitting on her sofa, moments before I left for the airport.

Are you scared?

Yes. No. Maybe.

We’re going to be hunted. No two ways about it.

I’ll just treat it as if we’re in the bush.

She reminded me of what I’d said in Botswana, when the lions were roaring.

Trust me. I’ll keep you safe.

She’d believed me then, she said. She believed me now.

By the time I touched down at Heathrow, the story had…fizzled?

It was all unconfirmed, and there were no photos, so there was nothing to fuel it.

A moment’s reprieve? Maybe, I thought, all will be well.

Nah. Calm before the shit storm.

In those first hours
and days of November 2016 there was a new low every few minutes. I was shocked, and scolded myself for being shocked. And for being unprepared. I’d been braced for the usual madness, the standard libels, but I hadn’t anticipated this level of unrestrained lying.

Above all, I hadn’t been ready for the racism. Both the dog-whistle racism and the glaring, vulgar, in-your-face racism.

The
Daily Mail
took the lead. Its headline:
Harry’s girl is (almost) straight outta Compton.
Subhead:
Gang-scarred home of her mother revealed—so will he be dropping in for tea?

Another tabloid jumped into the fray with this jaw-dropper:
Harry to marry into gangster royalty?

My face froze. My blood stopped. I was angry, but more: ashamed. My Mother Country? Doing this? To her? To us? Really?

As if its headline wasn’t disgraceful enough, the
Mail
went on to say that Compton had been the scene of forty-seven crimes in the last week alone. Forty-seven, imagine that. Never mind that Meg had never lived in Compton, never even lived near it. She’d lived half an hour away, as far from Compton as Buckingham Palace was from Windsor Castle. But forget that: Even if she
had
lived in Compton, years ago or currently, so what? Who cared how many crimes were committed in Compton, or anywhere else, so long as Meg wasn’t the one committing them?

A day or two later the
Mail
weighed in again, this time with an essay by the sister of London’s former mayor Boris Johnson, predicting that Meg
would…do something…genetically…to the Royal Family. “If there is issue from her alleged union with Prince Harry, the Windsors will thicken their watery, thin blue blood and Spencer pale skin and ginger hair with some rich and exotic DNA.”

Sister Johnson further opined that Meg’s mother, Doria, was from “the wrong side of the tracks,” and as stone-cold proof she cited Doria’s dreadlocks. This filth was being blasted out to three million Britons, about Doria, lovely Doria, born in Cleveland, Ohio, graduate of Fairfax High School, in a quintessentially middle-class part of Los Angeles.

The Telegraph
entered the fray with a piece slightly less disgusting, but equally insane, in which the writer examined from all angles the burning question of whether or not I was legally able to marry a (gasp) divorcée.

God, they were already into her past and looking at her first marriage.

Never mind that my father, a divorcé, was currently married to a divorcée, or my aunt, Princess Anne, was a remarried divorcée—the list went on. Divorce in 2016 was deemed by the British press to be a scarlet letter.

Next
The Sun
combed through Meg’s social media, discovered an old photo of her with a friend and a professional hockey player, and created an elaborate yarn about Meg and the hockey player having a torrid affair. I asked Meg about it.

No, he was hooking up with my friend. I introduced them.

So I asked the Palace lawyer to contact this paper and tell them the story was categorically false, and defamatory, and to remove it immediately.

The paper’s response was a shrug and a raised middle finger.

You’re being reckless
, the lawyer told the newspaper’s editors.

Yawn
, said the editors.

We already knew for a fact that the papers had put private investigators onto Meg, and onto everyone in her circle, in her life, even many not in her life, so we knew that they were experts on her background and boyfriends. They were Meg-ologists; they knew more about Meg than anyone in the world apart from Meg, and thus they knew that every word they’d written about her and the hockey player was hot garbage. But they continued to answer the Palace lawyer’s repeated warnings with the same non-answers, which amounted to a mocking taunt:

We. Don’t. Care.

I huddled with the lawyer, trying to work out how to protect Meg from this attack and all the others. I spent most of every day, from the moment I opened my eyes until long past midnight, trying to make it stop.

Sue them, I kept telling the lawyer, over and over. He explained over and over that suing was what the papers wanted. They were hungry for me to sue, because if I sued that would confirm the relationship, and then they could really go to town.

I felt wild with rage. And guilt. I’d infected Meg, and her mother, with my contagion, otherwise known as my life. I’d promised her that I’d keep her safe, and I’d already dropped her into the middle of this danger.

When I wasn’t with the lawyer, I was with Kensington Palace’s comms person, Jason. He was very smart, but a tad too cool about this unfolding crisis for my liking. He urged me to do nothing.
You’re just going to feed the beast.
Silence is the best option
.

But silence wasn’t an option. Of all the options, silence was the least desirable, the least defensible. We couldn’t just let the press continue to do this to Meg.

Even after I’d convinced him that we needed to do something, say something, anything, the Palace said no. Courtiers blocked us hard. Nothing can be done, they said. And therefore nothing
will
be done.

I accepted this as final. Until I read an essay in the
Huffington Post.
The essayist said the mild reaction of Britons to this explosion of racism was to be expected, since they were the heirs of racist colonialists. But what was truly “unforgivable,” she added, was my silence.

Mine.

I showed the essay to Jason, said we needed a course correction immediately. No more debate, no more discussion. We needed a statement out there.

Within a day we had a draft. Strong, precise, angry, honest. I didn’t think it would be the end, but maybe the beginning of the end.

I read it one last time and asked Jason to let it fly.

Just hours before that
statement went out, Meg was on her way to see me. She drove to Toronto’s Pearson International Airport, paps chasing her, and made her way carefully through the crowds of travelers, feeling jittery, exposed. The lounge was full, so an Air Canada representative took pity on her and hid her in a side room. Even brought her a plate of food.