Spare (48 page)

I remembered one day at Ludgrove, Mummy stuffing sweets into my sock. Outside sweets were forbidden, so Mummy was flouting school rules, giggling as she did so, which made me love her even more. I remembered both of us laughing as we buried the sweets deep in the sock, and me squealing:
Oh, Mummy, you’re so naughty!
I remembered the brand of those sweets. Opal Fruits!

Hard squares of bright colors…not unlike these resurrected memories.

No wonder I was so keen on Grub Days.

And Opal Fruits.

I remembered going to tennis lessons in the car, Mummy driving, Willy and me in the back. Without warning she trod on the accelerator and we went rocketing ahead, up narrow streets, blasting through red lights, whipping around corners. Willy and I were strapped into our seats, so we couldn’t look out of the back window, but we had a sense of what was chasing us. Paps on motorbikes and mopeds.
Are they going to kill us, Mummy? Are we going to die?
Mummy, wearing big sunglasses, peering into the mirrors. After fifteen minutes and several near smashes Mummy slammed on the brakes, pulled over, jumped out and walked towards the paps:
Leave us alone! For God’s sake, I’m with my children, can’t you leave us alone?
Trembling, pink-cheeked, she got back into the car, slammed the door, rolled up the windows, leaned her head on the steering wheel and wept while the paps kept clicking and clicking. I remembered the tears falling from her big sunglasses and I remembered Willy looking frozen, like a statue, and I remembered the paps just firing and firing and firing, and I remembered feeling such hatred for them and such deep and eternal love for everyone in that car.

I remembered being on holiday, Necker Island, all three of us sitting in a cliffside hut, and here came a boat with a gang of photographers, looking for us. We’d been playing with water balloons that day and we had a bunch of them lying about. Mummy quickly rigged up a catapult and divided the balloons among us. On the count of three we began raining them down on the heads of the photographers. The sound of her laughter that day, lost to me all these years, was back—it was back. Loud and clear as the traffic outside the therapist’s windows.

I cried with joy to hear it.

The Sun
ran a correction
for their porn story. In a tiny box, on page two, where no one would see it.

What did it matter? The damage had been done.

Plus it cost Meg tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees.

I rang Pa yet again.

Don’t read it, darling—

I cut him off. I wasn’t about to hear that nonsense again.

Also, I wasn’t a boy anymore.

I tried a new argument. I reminded Pa that these were the same shoddy bastards who’d been portraying him as a clown all his life, ridiculing him for sounding the alarm about climate change. These were
his
tormentors,
his
bullies, and now they were tormenting and bullying his son and his son’s girlfriend—did that not inspire his outrage?
Why have I got to beg you, Pa? Why is this not already a priority for you? Why is this not causing you anguish, keeping you up at night, that the press are treating Meg like this? You adore her, you told me so yourself. You bonded over your shared love of music, you think she’s funny and witty, and impeccably mannered, you told me—so why, Pa? Why?

I couldn’t get a straight answer. The conversation went in circles and when we hung up I felt—abandoned.

Meg, meanwhile, reached out to Camilla, who tried to counsel her by saying this was just what the press always did to newcomers, that it would all pass in due time, that Camilla had been the bad guy once.

The implication being what? Now it was Meg’s turn? As if it were apples to apples.

Camilla also suggested to Meg that I become Governor General of Bermuda, which would solve all our problems by removing us from the red-hot center of the maelstrom. Right, right, I thought, and one added bonus of that plan would be to get us out of the picture.

In desperation I went to Willy. I took advantage of the first quiet moment I’d had with him in years: The end of August 2017, at Althorp. Twentieth anniversary of Mummy’s death.

We rowed the little boat out to the island. (The bridge had been removed, to give my mother privacy, to keep intruders away.) We each had a bouquet of flowers, which we set on the grave. We stood there awhile, having our own
thoughts, and then we talked about life. I gave him a quick summary of what Meg and I had been dealing with.

Don’t worry, Harold. No one believes that shit.

Not true. They do. It’s drip-fed to them, day by day, and they come to believe it without even being aware.

He didn’t have a satisfying answer for that, so we were silent.

Then he said something extraordinary. He said he thought Mummy was here. Meaning…among us.

Yes, me too, Willy.

I think she’s been in my life, Harold. Guiding me. Setting things up for me. I think she’s helped me start a family. And I feel as though she’s helping you now too.

I nodded.
Totally agree. I feel as though she helped me find Meg.

Willy took a step back. He looked concerned. That seemed to be taking things a bit far.

Well, now, Harold, I’m not sure about that. I wouldn’t say THAT!

Meg came to London
. September 2017. We were in Nott Cott. In the kitchen. Preparing dinner.

The whole cottage was filled with…love. Filled to overflowing. It even seemed to spill out the open door, into the garden outside, a scrubby little patch of ground that no one had wanted, for a very long time, but which Meg and I had slowly reclaimed. We’d raked and mown, planted and watered, and many evenings we sat out there on a blanket, listening to classical music concerts wafting over from the park. I told Meg about the garden just on the other side of our wall: Mummy’s garden. Where Willy and I played as kids. It was now sealed off from us forever.

As my memories had once been.

Whose garden is it now?
she asked.

It belongs to Princess Michael of Kent. And her Siamese cats. Mummy despised those cats.

As I smelt the garden, and considered this new life, cherished this new life, Meg was sitting on the other side of the kitchen, scooping Wagamama from cartons into bowls. Without thinking I blurted out:
I don’t know, I just…

I had my back to her. I froze, mid-sentence, hesitant to go on, hesitant to turn around.

You don’t know what, Haz?

I just…

Yes?

I love you.

I listened for a response. There was none.

Now I could hear her, or feel her, walking towards me.

I turned and there she was, right before me.

I love you too, Haz.

The words had been on the tip of my tongue almost from the start, so in one sense they didn’t feel particularly revelatory, or even necessary. Of course I loved her. Meg knew that, Meg could see it, the whole world could. I loved her with all my heart as I’d never loved anyone before. And yet saying it made everything real. Saying it set things in motion, automatically. Saying it was a step.

It meant we now had a few more very big steps ahead.

Like…moving in together?

I asked if she’d consider moving to Britain, moving into Nott Cott with me.

We talked about all that would mean, and how it would work, and what she’d be giving up. We talked about the logistics of winding down her life in Toronto. When, and how, and above all…for what? Exactly?

I can’t just leave my show and quit my job to give it a shot. Would moving to Britain mean a forever commitment?

Yes, I said. It would.

In that case, she said with a smile, yes.

We kissed, hugged, sat down to our supper.

I sighed. On the road, I thought.

But later, after she’d fallen asleep, I analyzed myself. A holdover from therapy, perhaps. I realized that, mixed in with all my roiling emotions, there was a big streak of relief. She’d said it back, the actual words,
I love you
, and it hadn’t been inevitable, it hadn’t been a formality. Part of me, I couldn’t deny, had been braced for the worst case.
Haz, I’m sorry but I just don’t know if I can do this…
Part of me feared she’d bolt. Go back to Toronto, change her number. Heed the advice of her girlfriends.

Is anyone worth this?

Part of me thought she’d be smart to do so.

By pure chance the
2017 Invictus Games were going to be in Toronto. Meg’s backyard. Perfect occasion, the Palace decided, for our first official public outing.

Meg was a bit nervous. Me too. But we had no choice. Has to be done, we said. We’ve hidden from the world long enough. Also, this would be the most controlled, predictable environment we could ever hope for.

Above all, once we did a public date, it might reduce the bounty on our heads among the paps, which at that point was running at around a hundred thousand pounds.

We tried to make the whole thing as normal as possible. We watched wheelchair tennis from the front row, focused on the game and the good cause, ignored the whir of cameras. We managed to have fun, to crack a few jokes with some Kiwis sitting beside us, and the photos that appeared the following day were sweet, though several in the British press slammed Meg for wearing ripped jeans. No one mentioned that everything she wore, down to the flats and button-down shirt, had been pre-approved by the Palace.

And by “no one,” I mean not anyone at the Palace.

One statement, that week, in defense of Meg…it might’ve made a world of difference.

I told Elf and Jason
that I wanted to propose.

Congratulations, both men said.

But then Elf said he’d need to do some fast digging, find out the protocols. There were strict rules governing such things.

Rules? Really?

He came back days later and said before doing anything I’d need to ask Granny’s permission.

I asked him if that was a real rule, or the kind we could work around.

Oh, no, it’s very real.

It didn’t make sense. A grown man asking his grandmother for permission to marry? I couldn’t recall Willy asking before he proposed to Kate. Or my cousin Peter asking before he proposed to his wife, Autumn. But come to think of it I did remember Pa asking permission when he wanted to marry
Camilla. The absurdity of a fifty-six-year-old man asking his mother’s permission had been lost on me at the time.

Elf said there was no point in examining the whys and hows, this was the inalterable rule. The first six in line to the throne had to ask permission. The Royal Marriages Act of 1772, or the Succession to the Crown Act of 2013—he was going on and on and I could barely believe my ears. The point was, love took a decided back seat to law. Indeed, law had trumped love on more than one occasion. A fairly recent relative had been…strongly dissuaded…from marrying the love of their life.

Who?

Your aunt Margaret.

Really?

Yes. She’d wanted to marry a divorcé and…well.

Divorcé?

Elf nodded.

Oh, shit, I thought. This might not be a slam dunk.

But Pa and Camilla were divorcés, I said, and they’d got permission. Didn’t that mean the rule no longer applied?

That’s them, Elf said. This is you.

To say nothing about the furor over a certain king who’d wanted to marry an American divorcée, which Elf reminded me had ended with the King’s abdication and exile.
Duke of Windsor? Ever heard of him?

And so, heart full of fear, mouth full of dust, I turned to the calendar. With Elf’s help I circled a weekend in late October. A family shooting trip at Sandringham. Shooting trips always put Granny in a good mood.

Perhaps she’d be more open to thoughts of love?

Cloudy, blustery day.
I jumped into the venerable old Land Rover, the ancient Army ambulance that Grandpa had repurposed. Pa was behind the wheel, Willy was in the back. I got into the passenger seat and wondered if I should tell them both what I was intending.

I decided against it. Pa already knew, I assumed, and Willy had already warned me not to do it.

It’s too fast, he’d told me. Too soon.

In fact, he’d actually been pretty discouraging about my even dating Meg.
One day, sitting together in his garden, he’d predicted a host of difficulties I could expect if I hooked up with an “American actress,” a phrase he always managed to make sound like “convicted felon.”

Are you sure about her, Harold?

I am, Willy.

But do you know how difficult it’s going to be?

What do you want me to do? Fall out of love with her?

The three of us were wearing flat caps, green jackets, plus fours, as if we played for the same sports team. (In a way, I suppose, we did.) Pa, driving us out into the fields, asked about Meg. Not with great interest, just casually. Still, he didn’t always ask, so I was pleased.

She’s good, thanks.

Does she want to carry on working?

Say again?

Does she want to keep on acting?

Oh. I mean, I don’t know, I wouldn’t think so. I expect she’ll want to be with me, doing the job, you know, which would rule out
Suits
…since they film in…Toronto.

Hmm. I see. Well, darling boy, you know there’s not enough money to go around.

I stared. What was he banging on about?

He explained. Or tried to.
I can’t pay for anyone else. I’m already having to pay for your brother and Catherine.

I flinched. Something about his use of the name Catherine. I remembered the time he and Camilla wanted Kate to change the spelling of her name, because there were already two royal cyphers with a C and a crown above: Charles and Camilla. It would be too confusing to have another. Make it
Katherine
with a
K,
they suggested.