William and Harry (18 page)

Kate attended St Andrew’s Preparatory School in Pangbourne, just four miles from their home. It was here that she showed natural talent on the sports pitch and a flair for acting. Like William she appeared in school plays, including a production of
My Fair Lady
in which she played the lead role of Eliza Doolittle when she was ten. She then became a boarder at Downe House, an exclusive Roman Catholic all-girls boarding school in Berkshire, but was teased for taking her studies too seriously. While her peers were interested in fashion and boys, the flat-chested gangly Kate was more interested in studying and sport. Her parents decided after two miserable terms that their gifted fourteen-year-old daughter would be better suited to Marlborough College.

The £28,000-a-year private school has an excellent track record for sports, and Kate, who was known as Catherine to her contemporaries, thrived in her new surroundings. A boarder at Elmhurst House, she was a popular pupil, and when her sister and brother joined the school, she gained even more confidence. She had yet to grow into the beauty that was voted the prettiest girl at St Salvator’s, but her easy-going nature ensured she had plenty of
friends. ‘Kate was nicknamed “Catherine Middlebum”, and was always popular because she had no side to her at all,’ recalled her classmate Gemma Williamson.

She was serious, studious and shy, and while her dorm-mates illicitly experimented with vodka and cigarettes, Kate sensibly refused, although she would gamely agree to keep watch. Her best friend and room-mate Jessica Hay remembered Kate as a family girl with strong morals: ‘She didn’t get involved in any drinking or smoking but was very sporty instead and very family-orientated.’ She passed eleven GCSEs and three A levels, gaining A grades in maths and art and a B in English. She also captained the tennis team and played netball and hockey for the school. But, unlike her friends, she had no interest in boys. ‘We would sit around talking about all the boys at school we fancied, but Catherine would always say, “I don’t like any of them. They’re all a bit rough,”’ said Jessica, who was dating William’s friend Nicholas Knatchbull at the time. ‘Then she would joke, “There’s no one quite like William.” She had a picture of him on her wall … She always used to say, “I bet he’s really kind. You can tell just by looking at him.”’

When she finished her A levels, Kate was allowed to take a gap year, part of which she spent in Florence. For three months during the autumn of 2000 she lived with four girlfriends in a top-floor flat above a delicatessen in the city centre, where she coupled her passion for art with learning Italian at the British Institute. She would spend hours wandering around Florence’s historic cobbled streets and capturing the beauty of the imposing cathedral on camera. Photography was a hobby she loved and, in later years one she would toy with turning into a profession. During those sunny art-filled days in Florence she soaked up the
city and its treasures, and, always something of a wallflower at school, she blossomed. While she had never counted herself as pretty, those around her often made a point of commenting on her natural beauty, especially her mother. ‘Kate morphed into something of a beauty that holiday, and we all saw it,’ remembers a friend. ‘Her parents came over to Florence for a long weekend. While her father Michael was quiet, Carole was very gregarious and would not stop telling Kate how beautiful she had become. She had rosebud lips and this amazing mane of hair, and she was gorgeous. When we were at dinner Carole would exclaim to the waiters, “Look at my English rose. Isn’t she so beautiful?” Kate would be cringing in the corner, but she knew it was true.’

This was typical of mother and daughter. While Kate could be painfully shy, her mother was confident and proud, and always believed her daughter was destined for great things. She had high hopes for all three of her children. Kate’s brother quit Edinburgh University after the first year to get involved with the family business, while Pippa continued her degree in English at the same university. She dated J J Jardine Patterson, a scion of the Hong Kong banking family, and counted Ted Innes-Kerr, son of the Duke of Roxburghe, and George Percy, son of the Duke of Northumberland, as close friends. When Kate became friendly with William, Carole by all accounts was delighted. As far as she was concerned, both her daughters had reached the pinnacle of social success. The press picked up on this and nicknamed Pippa and Kate the ‘wisteria sisters’ because of their ‘ferocious ability to climb the social ladder’. ‘Carole has always wanted the best for her children,’ recalled a family friend.

While some at the Palace snootily pontificated that Kate was not blue-blooded enough for the prince, she had other qualities that were far more important to William. She was polite to the photographers who now pursued her and quickly adopted the royal rule of never speaking out. She also insisted that her family never discussed her relationship with William. As Princess Diana’s former private secretary Patrick Jephson noted, ‘We know very little about her and probably never will, providing they do their job right. Historically a degree of mystery about royalty has been an advantage; we project onto them what we want.’ According to one of her friends at St Andrews, she remained level-headed and kept her feet on the ground during the early months of their courtship. ‘She never got above her station, and even though she had secured the most sought-after boy at St Andrews she never gloated. She was actually quite insecure about her looks and never considered herself pretty, she was very sweet and very shy.’

Like Diana, Kate quickly had to adapt to being in the spotlight, but her transition into royal life was much smoother. She enjoyed being at Highgrove, Balmoral and Sandringham, where she would accompany William on shoots during the grouse and pheasant seasons. She had practised with William on the Strathtyrum estate, where they were allowed to shoot birds for food as part of their rental agreement. She and William cherished their weekends on the Balmoral estate. Like Charles, who had been given the use of Wood Farm at Sandringham while he was at Cambridge, the Queen allowed William to use a cottage called Tam-na-Ghar at Balmoral as a getaway. Tucked away in the remote countryside, the 120-year-old cottage, which is surrounded by rolling hills and wild heather as far as the eye can see, underwent a £150,000 renovation complete with a bath tub big enough for two before William and Harry were each given a set of keys.

After their last class on Friday William and Kate would speed up to Balmoral from St Andrews in William’s black Volkswagon Golf followed by his protection officers. It was here that he really got to know the girl who many believe will one day become his wife and with that, the queen of the United Kingdom. Like William, Kate loved walking across the moors and strolling by the River Dee. In the evenings they would cook a meal, share a bottle of red wine and keep warm in front of a roaring log fire. Sometimes they were joined by friends from St Andrews, and often Pippa and James, whose trophy stag heads line the walls of the Middleton family house, would be invited for a weekend’s shoot, when they would compete as to who could bag the most birds.

It was the summer of 2004 when William and Kate’s love affair underwent its first serious test. With one year to complete
before they graduated, the twenty-two-year-old prince needed some space. Until now they had chosen not to discuss what would happen after St Andrews, but with their finals looming, it was an issue that needed addressing.

William decided that a holiday would provide him with some thinking time and planned a boys-only sailing trip to Greece as soon as they broke up for the summer holidays. Despite being an accomplished sailor, Kate was not invited. Instead, William would go with Guy Pelly and some other friends. Kate had had a turbulent relationship with Guy and considered him immature and potentially troublesome. It was Guy who used to buy William porn magazines when they were teenagers, and she had heard all about their drink-fuelled weekends at Highgrove. There was also a rumour among their friends that William and Guy had covered one of their girlfriends in chocolate ice cream which they then licked off after a night of heavy drinking at Club H, and the occasion when Guy challenged William to a midnight skinny dip at their friend James Tollemache’s twenty-first birthday party at Helmingham Hall in Suffolk. They had both been drinking heavily but that didn’t stop them from stripping down to their boxer shorts, diving in and swimming a lap of the murky moat that surrounds the Tollemache’s country estate where the Queen is a regular guest. At one point William had relieved him -self in a field while Harry, who was seventeen at the time, spent most of the night on the dance floor of the Moulin Rouge themed party with a can of beer in each hand according to one guest.

It seemed wherever there was trouble, Guy was not far behind and Kate was wary of him. She was not surprised when she found out that Guy had arranged the yacht with an all-female
crew, but she was annoyed. So she packed her bags and headed home to Berkshire to spend the summer with her family. It wasn’t so much the fact that William wanted a break; Kate was beginning to question William’s commitment to their relationship, and she also had her own creeping doubts about their future after St Andrews.

A number of things had caused her to question William’s commitment, although she had not raised them with him yet. One was William’s friendship with an American heiress called Anna Sloan, whom William had met through mutual friends at Edinburgh University, where Anna was studying. Anna had lost her father, businessman George Sloan, in a tragic shooting accident on the family’s 360-acre estate in Nashville, and she and William had bonded over the loss of their parents. When Anna invited William and a group of friends to Texas for a holiday before he went to Greece, it hurt Kate deeply. She suspected William might have feelings for the twenty-two-year-old heiress. However, Anna was not in the least romantically interested in William, and the friendship was never anything more than just that.

And then there was William’s budding friendship with another stunning heiress, Isabella Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe. The younger sister of William and Harry’s polo-playing friend Jacobi, the impossibly named but exquisite-looking socialite had caught William’s attention. While Kate was girl-next-door pretty, Isabella boasted cover-girl looks, a title and a stately pile to boot. That summer William visited the Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe family home in Chelsea to see her. Isabella, daughter of banking heiress Lady Mary Gaye Curzon, was just twenty-one and single at the
time. Sadly for William, she had no aspirations to date a prince and despite his amorous advances declared that she was not interested.

Meanwhile Kate had accepted an invitation to spend a fortnight in France at Fergus Boyd’s family holiday home in the Dordogne with some friends from St Andrews. Among the group were Kate’s friends Olivia Bleasdale and Ginny Fraser. She had not told them about the trial separation, but from her downcast mood her friends guessed, and one evening she confided to them that she and William were taking a break. ‘She was debating whether or not she should text or call him. She got quite drunk on white wine and really let her guard down,’ recalled one of the group. ‘She said how sad she was and how much she was missing William, but she never mentioned it after that.’

By November they were back at St Andrews, although they had yet to reconcile their differences. I had reported the news of their separation that summer and tellingly there was no denial from Clarence House. Privately William complained to friends that he was feeling ‘claustrophobic’ and was already thinking ahead to the summer after graduation, when he was planning to return to Kenya to see Jecca Craig, another fly in the ointment as far as Kate was concerned. ‘William has been unhappy in their relationship for a while, but the last thing he wants is a high-profile split in the crucial months leading up to his finals,’ I was told at the time. On the advice of her mother, who had been a sounding board that summer, Kate gave William some breathing space. It was made all the harder because they were living together, but instead of spending weekends in St Andrews or travelling to Balmoral, Kate would return home to be with her parents.

It was obviously the break that William needed, and by Christmas they were back together again, although Kate had a condition. Word had reached her of William’s visits to Isabella and she insisted that William was not to contact her again. With their finals looming in May they agreed to take things slowly. Kate had stayed away from Edward Van Cutsem’s wedding to the Duke of Westminster’s daughter Lady Tamara Grosvenor that November but she happily accepted an invitation to Prince Charles’s fifty-sixth birthday party at Highgrove later that month. Charles already saw Kate as a daughter in-law and the following March he invited her to Klosters for his pre-wedding holiday. Kate was photographed taking a gondola up the slopes with Charles and enjoying lunch with the princes and their friends. It had really been intended as a boys-only trip but this time Kate was not left out.

Charles and Camilla were to be married on 9 April 2005 and the prince wanted one last skiing holiday with his sons first. Both brothers had given their blessing for Charles to remarry. ‘Great,’ Harry said on hearing the news. ‘Go for it. Why not?’ William was to be a witness at the civil ceremony together with Camilla’s son Tom, and had the added responsibility of looking after the wedding rings. The British public appeared to have accepted Charles’s long-term mistress. In a YouGov poll at the time 65 per cent of respondents said that the couple should be free to marry compared to just 40 per cent in 1998. The Palace had hoped to break the news of the royal engagement, but to their embarrassment the
Evening Standard
, a London newspaper, got the scoop and ran the story on 10 February before the official announcement. Prince Charles’s communications secretary
Paddy Harverson confirmed the news and explained that there would be no official photocall until the wedding day. The last thing anyone wanted was the newspapers running pictures of Charles and Diana alongside Charles and his new bride. It would cause unnecessary hurt to everyone, especially William and Harry.