DIANA WAS IN love with love. She had believed that once they were married and she had given herself to Charles, he would become the adoring husband and lover of her dreams. Yet she awoke on the first morning of their life together anxious and depressed. The fine linen pillow beside hers was empty and Diana feared that somehow she had displeased her husband.
Except for the servants (who included Charles’s butler, Stephen Barry) they were alone in this great house set amid six thousand acres of rolling countryside with a stretch of the River Nest that locals boasted had the finest trout fishing in England. Charles had risen early to try his luck, and would return for lunch. Diana remained in her room, resting, working on a piece of needlepoint, a gaily flowered cushion cover that would eventually decorate a sofa in the garden room at Highgrove. She had always enjoyed doing tapestry: it calmed her nerves and gave her time to think.
She was now married and her royal life begun, but she was unsure as to what her role was to be. From her marriage she wanted children, of course, and a loving, bonding relationship with her husband. She needed to know that she was not alone and that, with her beside him, Charles would never be alone again either. There was so much about Charles that puzzled her. He seemed at times to be almost besotted with her, but at others he would stiffen, pull back, and there would be an invisible wall that she could not penetrate. He was in constant battle with his father, in awe of his mother, and could not communicate with either on a purely personal level. Diana wanted to bridge that gap, to be there as his physical mate and confidante. She was struggling for a way to make that happen.
However, it seems that, during their honeymoon, Charles had intended to transform his fun-loving young bride of just twenty into a serious and intellectual woman, forgetting that at her age, in his first years at Trinity College, Cambridge, his academic abilities were publicly acknowledged to be less than brilliant Diana was unable to make such an immediate change. She had brought with her a copy of the recently published first novel of Barbara Taylor Bradford—A Woman of Substance—which she quickly packed away when Charles seemed disdainful of it and offered her instead a book by Sir Laurens van der Post
Since Mountbatten’s death, Charles had grown ever closer to Sir Laurens, the then seventy-five-year-old South African writer and philosopher. During the Second World War, he had been Lord Mountbatten’s military political officer, and had been taken prisoner by the Germans during the African campaign. At the war’s end he undertook several missions for the British government in Africa and made many films and had written numerous books about his experiences. His life had been one of high adventure, and dedication to wildlife. Charles had brought seven of his books on honeymoon and was deeply immersed in their philosophy, influenced by Jung. He had intended that he and Diana would read the books and discuss them while they were away. Diana read a few pages, but was woefully unprepared for the first lunchtime quiz.
The first two days of the honeymoon at Broadlands, whose beautiful décor and magnificent gardens she had so admired, were “grim,” she later confessed. She was elated when they left early on Saturday morning, 1 August, for Eastleigh airport where Stephen Barry waited with their luggage. With Charles’s bodyguard, John Maclean, and Paul Officer, the newlyweds flew to Gibraltar where they would join Britannia for the cruise. On the flight they stayed at the back of the plane in their own compartment, the door closed for privacy.
Neither Charles nor Diana was prepared for the reception they received in Gibraltar. Hundreds of cheering people lined both sides of the road of this small but strategically important British colony, as they drove in a converted, open-topped Triumph Stag through the town to the enclosed harbour where the yacht was anchored. The sixteen-day Mediterranean and Aegean cruise would pause at Tunisia, Sicily, Santorini, Crete, and traverse the Red Sea through the Suez Canal. On the penultimate evening of their sea journey, they would stop off in Port Said where President Anwar Sadat and his wife Jehan were to dine with them aboard Britannia. On the morning of 16 August, they would fly from Hurghada to Scotland, where they would spend the next six weeks, first at Balmoral and then at nearby Craigowan Lodge which backed on to the excellent fishing waters of the River Dee.
In the royal suite of Britannia the twin beds had been lashed together and made up as one bed: Princess Anne’s suggestion, as she and her then husband Mark Phillips had also honeymooned on Britannia and spent a rather crowded first night in one twin bed. Everything on Britannia’s royal deck was pristine white with deep red upholstery and dove grey carpets, which, though elegant, lent an austere ambience to the apartments. The royal suite consisted of two large bedrooms, a dressing room, and a sitting room that led to a comfortable veranda. The corridor joining the rooms was lined with drawings of previous royal yachts. A hushed feeling pervaded their apartments as all the hustle and bustle of shipboard activity was kept out of their hearing on lower decks.
On the first morning Charles and Diana slept late, had a cold breakfast of fruit, cereal and yogurt in the sitting room, then went out on deck to sun themselves. The sky was cerulean blue, the ocean a vast expanse of softly rippling waves, the sun shining, and as the royal deck was completely private, they seemed to be sailing alone, a bit reminiscent, Diana said later, “of ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ ” It was the ultimate dream of any two people in love. To the crew and the Prince’s staff, who had seen them the previous night and that morning, they appeared to be just that as they held hands and Diana smiled and looked at her husband with adoring eyes. They called each other “darling.” Even Stephen Barry, who had been privy to Charles’s long relationship with Camilla, and who had harboured serious doubts about the marriage, believed the two were in love.
Mid-morning the Admiral (there was always an admiral, not a captain, aboard the royal yacht) brought them the charts of where they were, pointing out beaches along the coast that might be good picnic spots. After he left they each fell to making their daily entry in their diaries. Two photographs slipped out of Charles’s and fluttered on to the deck near Diana. She picked them up and found, to her horror, that they were of Camilla. Recriminations and tears followed. Diana insisted that he tell her the truth: what did Camilla really mean in his life? had he seen her before the wedding? was he planning to see her again? Charles would not reply and there was a cold look in his eye. Perhaps she did not want to hear the truth, but his implacable silence only confirmed her fear that from the beginning there were three people in her marriage.
From that moment on the cruise was a nightmare for both of them. Diana’s bulimia grew worse each day and the one other woman aboard, her dresser Evelyn, often found her red-eyed. There was always food in the royal suite, fruit, biscuits, sweets, and Diana would devour great quantities of it then purge herself. This occurred four or five times a day, exhausting her and disgusting Charles, who did not know how to handle the situation. As the ship travelled through the night, she would wake, gobble up whatever food she could find, make herself sick then return to bed feeling wretched. Charles was at a complete loss as to how to help her, but they kept up a loving façade before the staff and crew.
They ate lunch alone in their quarters, with Charles still insisting on discussions of van der Post’s books. It seems he was attempting to occupy her mind with something other than Camilla and the bulimia. Although Diana has said that almost every evening they were doomed to entertain the top staff in the main dining room for dinner, Stephen Barry claimed, “They rarely used the main dining room [which also functioned as a cinema]. They preferred intimate dinners in their sitting room where they could serve themselves.”
Diana was most content when they engaged in some form of exercise. They swam, snorkelled, windsurfed and, indeed, had picnics and barbecues on the beaches along the North African coastline they were following, mountains rising in the distance, the sea calm. A small boat would be sent out first to make sure that the chosen spot was deserted. Once assured, it would return to bring the royal couple with John Maclean and Paul Officer for the outing. Charles would usually sunbathe while Diana swam close to shore. A seaman would start the fire for a barbecue, or lay out the picnic, then retreat to the boat to wait for their signal (a police whistle) to pilot the royal couple back to Britannia.
An escort vessel kept a short distance behind Britannia and came abreast from time to time to deliver mail and business papers to Charles. His assistant private secretary Francis Cornish also came and went. “His role,” Barry said, “was to make sure that there would be no problems in the host countries we were passing, and he observed the formalities and courtesies to the other heads of state on behalf of the Prince. The odd helicopter, completely ignored by the Prince, flew over trying to get pictures but no one succeeded.” No crew member was allowed to have a camera on board, but Diana had brought hers and took pictures wherever they went. Charles remained pretty much in the royal apartment or on the veranda, but, as the first week drew to a close, Diana began to roam the ship, going unannounced into the galley to talk to Mervyn Wycherly, the chef, and his assistants, and take some “goodies” away with her. They commented on her enormous appetite and were puzzled that despite it she seemed to have lost a lot of weight since stepping aboard. “By the end of the voyage I would venture the Princess had lost a stone,” one staff member said. Diana was brought the menu choices in the morning to make her selection for the meals to be served that day. When they dined in their apartments they ate from trolleys and served themselves. Ice cream was always included for dessert. “They both loved it,” Barry said. ‘The royal deep-freeze looked like the freezer of an ice cream shop.”
In the evenings, after dinner, movies were shown, and videotapes of the wedding. Charles seemed thrilled to see “the bits he had missed,” and they both had a good laugh over the moment she got his Christian names wrong. During the second week, Diana’s spirits had risen and she attended some of the parties being given by crew and staff, often without Charles. They had both brought along some of their favourite tapes and music wafted in the breeze from their deck as she played Elton John and the Beach Boys and Charles put on Barbra Streisand. Together they listened to Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov and Elgar. A staff member reported that by the end of the second week they did not “seem to be able to keep their hands off each other.”
Diana had managed to block out the incident of the photographs. Love notes were exchanged, and she believed that Charles now truly loved her. Then came the only official engagement scheduled for the cruise—the dinner on board Britannia with President and Mrs. Sadat. Britannia docked in Port Said. The evening was warm with soft breezes and Diana wore a pretty floral gown. When Charles met her in the sitting room to go down to the main dining room together, he was still trying to put in his cufflinks. Diana went to help him but Charles drew away, and she noticed that they were designed in the shape of intertwining Cs. Diana caught the meaning immediately and was shocked but not at a loss for words. When had he received them and exactly what did such a gift imply? Only friendship, Charles replied, and tried to drop the subject. Diana would not let it go. She suspected that Camilla had sent the cufflinks to the ship. She saw it as a bold act by Camilla to show Diana that she was still in Charles’s life, and a gross betrayal by Charles to accept and wear the gift, especially on their honeymoon. She felt humiliated and unloved.
There followed an unpleasant scene. Diana insisted he choose another pair of cufflinks. Charles refused. She wanted to remain in their suite. But she knew she could not offend the Sadats. She went back into her room, repaired her makeup and pulled herself together. When they greeted the Sadats on their arrival, she was still agitated, her usual radiance dimmed.
The four dined in the huge dining salon always used with visiting heads of state, and if the much older Sadats had not been such warm, interested people the evening might have been a fiasco due partly to the size and formality of the room and the number of staff hovering nearby. Also, Diana was clearly upset and withdrawn. Mrs. Sadat sensed her insecurity and made a special effort to bring her into the conversation. It was Diana’s first official engagement and she was woefully ill-prepared. She had not been briefed on any matter that might be of interest to either of the Sadats, nor had she been able to obliterate the shadow of Camilla.
After the Sadats’ departure, Diana once again broached the subject of the cufflinks. Charles was cool, unsympathetic, but he agreed not to wear them again.
The final night on board, the staff and crew presented a theatrical on the forecastle. Diana seemed to regain her good humour as she, Charles and the ship’s officers watched the entertainment, which included one lanky sailor, dressed in women’s clothes, impersonating Diana and telling salty jokes. Diana giggled and blushed. Stephen Barry and four other members of the household staff did a song-and-dance routine dressed in swimming trunks and flippers. “How long were you rehearsing?” Charles asked Barry later. “I noticed you were out of step.”
Early Sunday morning, 16 August, the crew “lined the decks, saluted, and gave three cheers” as Charles and Diana left Britannia to be driven to Hurghada where they boarded a plane to Scotland and Balmoral. “The place was incredibly worn inside,” one house guest recalls, “full of ghastly tartan antimacassars. I’m not convinced it had been redecorated since Victoria’s occupancy. It had an antiquated heating system and without the fires being kept burning I am sure everyone would have froze.”
Shortly after they arrived rumours began to circulate within the family that their marriage had not got off to a good start. Diana’s weight loss and unhappiness were evident as she often seemed on the edge of tears. However, her in-laws never discussed anything personal or troubling. “Certainly not in front of the staff,” she was told—and, of course, there was seldom a time when staff were not present. Every night the routine was the same. Two bagpipers in full Scottish regalia would march around the dinner table as soon as everyone was seated. Afterwards a film was shown. Except for Princess Margaret, the others said little to her.
Diana felt very much the outsider. She gorged herself and vomited more often with each passing day and was continuing to lose weight. She was isolated from anyone she could talk to. After three weeks she and Charles moved to Craigowan Lodge and while he fished, she did her tapestry in the comfort of a small sitting room that overlooked the wooded grounds. With October’s approach came relentless rain. Diana admitted later that she had been “about ready to cut my wrists.” Charles told her that she must not discuss their problems with anyone, including her family, that they would have to be sorted out in a private, dignified manner.
Of all the royal residences, Charles was most relaxed at Balmoral. The vastness of the grounds allowed him a chance to walk great distances alone—although John Maclean was never far behind him—without fear of someone jumping out of the bushes. It seemed he knew almost every foot of the estate and when stalking enjoyed plunging deeper and deeper into the moorland, never losing his way. He fished every morning and later would sit for hours on a heather-covered hill in the mist, reading or sketching if the light was good, or just deep in thought. Most evenings he and Diana dined at the castle. Charles liked being surrounded by his tightly knit family and sharing “in” jokes and small gossip. A contemplative man, not really a social creature, he was happiest in the country away from the prying public eye.
That might have been one reason why his affair with Camilla continued so long. Due to the clandestine nature of the relationship they were almost always alone, and his immediate staff were responsible for seeing that they enjoyed complete privacy. Camilla had not been born into the aristocracy but she had been exposed since childhood to the world of courtiers who served the Royal Family. She knew all the “in” stories, shared a frame of reference with Charles. They were the same age, had many mutual friends, and Camilla made certain she was available whenever Charles called. Even her marriage had not interfered with their liaison, to the extent that Andrew Parker Bowles had joked about being “a man willing to lay down his wife for his country.” In fact, the Parker Bowles marriage had not been happy for many years, and Andrew was known to be an obsessive womanizer, once dubbed “Old Roaming Hands” by a dinner partner.
Though older and more experienced than Diana, Camilla was not intellectual: she knew a lot about horses, but little about ecology, economics, international current events, politics or religion. But she was “good fun, comfortable, very adaptable and earthy,” a former schoolmate said. “Men liked her. I guess you would say she was sexy. But not because of her figure or beauty. Nor was she particularly feminine. That is coy, coquettish. But she let it be known when she was interested in someone and it didn’t take long for them to get the message.”
Charles had often given her literary novels to read, but in fact she leaned towards the same romantic fiction Diana enjoyed. She was as desperate to make Charles proud of her as was Diana. She looked up to him as an intellectual. “Andrew Parker Bowles was not only outrageously unfaithful,” one of her friends of this period recalls, “he was always telling her she was useless … She would constantly be saying things like, ‘I wouldn’t understand that, I’m too thick’ [strangely echoing Diana’s “I’m as thick as a plank.”]” She appeared, as she approached her mid-thirties and middle age, to be a “modest, good-egg Englishwoman but actually her self-esteem was dangerously depleted.” She joked that she looked like “an old witch of Wiltshire.” Charles liked her lack of glamour, her geisha-girl attentions to him that were in direct conflict with her raucous humour and love of the outdoors. Her friends said she was “a scream, with her fag and her drink, cracking jokes and telling very funny stories … in fruity language.”
Giving up Camilla had been, perhaps, the worst wrench in Charles’s life. But he had vowed to his father that he would do so, at least in the physical sense, and he had not yet gone back on his word. But he telephoned Camilla from Scotland—more than once, according to Stephen Barry. Diana suspected that he discussed her bulimia with Camilla. By 1 October she was so thin that her bones protruded.
Charles sought professional help. He accompanied Diana to London and over a fortnight doctors and psychiatrists made secret night-time visits to Buckingham Palace, where the Waleses were living until their apartment at Kensington Palace was ready for them. Diana was fed enormous doses of Valium to calm her nerves. Neither consultation nor medication worked. Then she found she was pregnant. She was sure that now everything would change: the Royal Family would open their arms to her, and Charles would became a loving husband and father.