Spare (55 page)

And that they’re unequivocally on our side?

Everything I’d been taught, everything I’d grown up believing about the family, and about the monarchy, about its essential fairness, its job of uniting rather than dividing, was being undermined, called into question. Was it all fake? Was it all just a show? Because if we couldn’t stand up for one another, rally around our newest member, our first biracial member, then what were we really? Was that a true constitutional monarchy? Was that a real family?

Isn’t “defending each other” the first rule of every family?

Meg and I moved
our office into Buckingham Palace.

We also moved into a new home.

Frogmore was ready.

We loved that place. From the first minute. It felt as if we were destined to live there. We couldn’t wait to wake up in the morning, go for a long walk in the gardens, check in with the swans. Especially grumpy Steve.

We met the Queen’s gardeners, got to know their names and the names of all the flowers. They thrilled at how much we appreciated, and praised, their artistry.

Amid all this change we huddled with our new head of comms, Sara. We plotted a new strategy with her, the centerpiece of which was having nothing whatsoever to do with the Royal Rota, and hoped we might soon be able to make a fresh start.

Towards the end of April 2019, days before Meg was due to give birth, Willy rang.

I took the call in our new garden.

Something had happened between him and Pa and Camilla. I couldn’t get the whole story, he was talking too fast, and was way too upset. He was seething actually. I gathered that Pa and Camilla’s people had planted a story or stories about him and Kate, and the kids, and he wasn’t going to take it anymore. Give Pa and Camilla an inch, he said, they take a mile.

They’ve done this to me for the last time.

I got it. They’d done the same to me and Meg as well.

But it wasn’t them, technically, it was the most gung-ho member of Pa’s comms team, a true believer who’d devised and launched a new campaign of getting good press for Pa and Camilla at the expense of bad press for us. For some time this person had been peddling unflattering stories, fake stories, about the Heir and Spare, to all the papers. I suspected that this person had been the lone source for stories about a hunting trip I’d made to Germany in 2017, stories that made me out to be some fat-bottomed seventeenth-century baron who craved blood and trophies, when in reality I was working with German farmers to cull wild boar and save their crops. I believed the story had been offered as a straight swap, in exchange for greater access to Pa, and also as a reward for the suppression of stories about Camilla’s son, who’d been gadding around London, generating tawdry rumors. I was displeased about being used
like this, and livid about it being done to Meg, but I had to admit it was happening much more often lately to Willy. And he was justifiably incandescent.

He’d already confronted Pa once about this woman, face-to-face. I’d gone along for moral support. The scene took place at Clarence House, in Pa’s study. I remember the windows being wide open, the white curtains blowing in and out, so it must’ve been a warm night. Willy put it to Pa:
How can you be letting a stranger do this to your sons?

Pa instantly got upset. He began shouting that Willy was paranoid. We both were. Just because
we
were getting bad press, and he was getting good, that didn’t mean his staff was behind it.

But we had proof. Reporters, inside actual newsrooms, assuring us that this woman was selling us out.

Pa refused to listen. His response was churlish, pathetic.
Granny has her person, why can’t I have mine?

By Granny’s person he meant Angela. Among the many services she performed for Granny, she was said to be skilled at planting stories.

What a rubbish comparison, Willy said. Why would anyone in their right mind, let alone a grown man, want their own Angela?

But Pa just kept saying it. Granny had her person, Granny had her person. High time he had a person too.

I was glad that Willy felt he could still come to me about Pa and Camilla, even after all we’d been through recently. Seeing an opportunity to address our recent tensions, I tried to connect what Pa and Camilla had done to him with what the press had done to Meg.

Willy snapped:
I’ve got different issues with you two!

In a blink he shifted all his rage onto me. I can’t recall his exact words, because I was beyond tired from all our fighting, to say nothing of the recent move into Frogmore, and into new offices—and I was focused on the imminent birth of our first child. But I recall every physical detail of the scene. The daffodils out, the new grass sprouting, a jet taking off from Heathrow, heading west, unusually low, its engines making my chest vibrate. I remember thinking how remarkable that I could still hear Willy above that jet. I couldn’t imagine how he had that much anger left after the confrontation in Nott Cott.

He was going on and on and I lost the thread. I couldn’t understand and I stopped trying. I fell silent, waiting for him to subside.

Then I looked back. Meg was coming from the house, directly towards me. I quickly took the phone off speaker, but she’d already heard. And Willy was being so loud, even with the speaker off, she could still hear.

The tears in her eyes glistened in the spring sunshine. I started to say something, but she stopped, shook her head.

Holding her stomach, she turned and walked back to the house.

Doria was staying
with us, waiting for the baby to come. Neither she nor Meg ever strayed far. None of us did. We all just sat around waiting, going for the occasional walk, looking at the cows.

When Meg was a week past her due date, the comms team and the Palace began pressuring me. When’s the baby coming? The press can’t wait forever, you know.

Oh. The press is getting frustrated? Heaven forbid!

Meg’s doctor had tried several homeopathic ways to get things moving, but our little visitor was just intent on staying put. (I don’t remember if we ever tried Granny’s suggestion of a bumpy car ride.) Finally we said: Let’s just go and make sure nothing’s wrong. And let’s be prepared in case the doctor says it’s time.

We got into a nondescript people-carrier and crept away from Frogmore without alerting any of the journalists stationed at the gates. It was the last sort of vehicle they suspected we’d be riding in. A short time later we arrived at the Portland Hospital and were spirited into a secret lift, then into a private room. Our doctor walked in, talked it through with us, and said it was time to induce.

Meg was so calm. I was calm too. But I saw two ways of
enhancing
my calm. One: Nando’s chicken. (Brought by our bodyguards.) Two: A canister of laughing gas beside Meg’s bed. I took several slow, penetrating hits. Meg, bouncing on a giant purple ball, a proven way of giving Nature a push, laughed and rolled her eyes.

I took several more hits and now I was bouncing too.

When her contractions began to quicken, and deepen, a nurse came and tried to give some laughing gas to Meg. There was none left. The nurse looked at the tank, looked at me, and I could see the thought slowly dawning: Gracious, the husband’s had it all.

Sorry
, I said meekly.

Meg laughed, the nurse had to laugh, and quickly changed the canister.

Meg climbed into a bath, I turned on soothing music. Deva Premal: she remixed Sanskrit mantras into soulful hymns. (Premal claimed she heard her
first mantra in the womb, chanted by her father, and when he was dying she chanted the same mantra to him.) Powerful stuff.

In our overnight bag we had the same electric candles I’d arranged in the garden the night I proposed. Now I placed them around the hospital room. I also set a framed photo of my mother on a little table. Meg’s idea.

Time passed. Hour melted into hour. Minimal dilation.

Meg was doing a lot of deep breathing for pain. Then the deep breathing stopped working. She was in so much pain that she needed an epidural.

The anesthetist hurried in. Off went the music, on went the lights.

Whoa. Vibe change.

He gave her an injection at the base of her spine.

Still the pain didn’t let up. The medicine apparently wasn’t getting where it needed to go.

He came back, did it again.

Now things both quietened and accelerated.

Her doctor came back two hours later, slipped both hands into a pair of rubber gloves.
This is it, everybody.
I stationed myself at the head of the bed, holding Meg’s hand, encouraging her.
Push, my love.
Breathe.
The doctor gave Meg a small hand mirror. I tried not to look, but I had to. I glanced, saw a reflection of the baby’s head emerging. Stuck. Tangled.
Oh, no, please, no.
The doctor looked up, her mouth set in a particular way. Things were getting serious.

I said to Meg:
My love, I need you to push.

I didn’t tell her why. I didn’t tell her about the cord, didn’t tell her about the likelihood of an emergency C-section. I just said:
Give me everything you’ve got.

And she did.

I saw the little face, the tiny neck and chest and arms, wriggling, writhing. Life, life—amazing! I thought, Wow, it really all begins with a struggle for freedom.

A nurse swept the baby into a towel and placed him on Meg’s chest and we both cried to see him, meet him. A healthy little boy, and he was
here
.

Our ayurvedic doctor had advised us that, in the first minute of life, a baby absorbs everything said to them.
So whisper to the baby, tell the baby your wish for him, your love. Tell.

We told.

I don’t remember phoning anyone, texting them. I remember watching the nurses run tests on my hour-old son, and then we were out of there. Into
the lift, into the underground car park, into the people-carrier, and gone. Within two hours of our son being born we were back at Frogmore. The sun had risen and we were behind closed doors before the official announcement was released…

Saying Meg had gone into labor?

I had a tiff with Sara about that. You know she’s not in labor anymore, I said.

She explained that the press must be given the dramatic, suspenseful story they demanded.

But it’s not true, I said.

Ah, truth didn’t matter. Keeping people tuned to the show, that was the thing.

After a few hours I was standing outside the stables at Windsor, telling the world: It’s a boy. Days later we announced the name to the world. Archie.

The papers were incensed. They said we’d pulled a fast one on them.

Indeed we had.

They felt that, in doing so, we’d been…bad partners?

Astonishing. Did they still think of us as partners? Did they really expect special consideration, preferential treatment—given how they’d treated us these last three years?

And then they showed the world what kind of “partners” they really were. A BBC radio presenter posted a photo on his social media—a man and a woman holding hands with a chimpanzee.

The caption read:
Royal baby leaves hospital.

I had a long tea with Granny,
just before she left for Balmoral. I gave her a recap, all the latest. She knew a bit, but I was filling in important gaps.

She looked shocked.

Appalling, she said.

She vowed to send the Bee to talk to us.

I’d spent my life dealing with courtiers, scores of them, but now I dealt mostly with just three, all middle-aged white men who’d managed to consolidate power through a series of bold Machiavellian maneuvers. They had normal names, exceedingly British names, but they sort more easily into zoological categories. The Bee. The Fly. And the Wasp.

The Bee was oval-faced and fuzzy and tended to glide around with great equanimity and poise, as if he was a boon to all living things. He was so poised that people didn’t fear him. Big mistake. Sometimes their last mistake.

The Fly had spent much of his career adjacent to, and indeed drawn to, shit. The offal of government, and media, the wormy entrails, he loved it, grew fat on it, rubbed his hands in glee over it, though he pretended otherwise. He strove to give off an air of casualness, of being above the fray, coolly efficient and ever helpful.

The Wasp was lanky, charming, arrogant, a ball of jazzy energy. He was great at pretending to be polite, even servile. You’d assert a fact, something seemingly incontrovertible—
I believe the sun rises in the mornings
—and he’d stammer that perchance you might consider for a moment the possibility that you’d been misinformed:
Well, heh-heh, I don’t know about that, Your Royal Highness, you see, it all depends what you mean by
mornings
, sir.

Because he seemed so weedy, so self-effacing, you might be tempted to push back, insist on your point, and that was when he’d put you on his list. A short time later, without warning, he’d give you such a stab with his outsized stinger that you’d cry out in confusion.
Where the fuck did that come from?

I disliked these men, and they didn’t have any use for me. They considered me irrelevant at best, stupid at worst. Above all, they knew how I saw them: as usurpers. Deep down, I feared that each man felt
himself
to be the One True Monarch, that each was taking advantage of a Queen in her nineties, enjoying his influential position while merely appearing to serve.

I’d come to this conclusion through cold hard experience. For instance, Meg and I had consulted with the Wasp about the press, and he’d agreed that the situation was abominable, that it needed to be stopped before someone got hurt.
Yes! You’ll get no argument from us on that!
He suggested the Palace convene a summit of all the major editors, make our case to them.

Finally, I said to Meg, someone gets it.

We never heard from him again.

So I was skeptical when Granny offered to send us the Bee. But I told myself to keep an open mind. Maybe this time would be different, because this time Granny was dispatching him personally.