Willy. Africa was his thing, he said.
Being royal, it turned out, wasn’t all that far from being onstage. Acting was acting, no matter the context.
He didn’t seem sad, just ready. You have to know when it’s time to go, Harry.
Also, the notorious Wallis Simpson. Also, her doubly notorious husband Edward, the former King and my great-great-uncle. After Edward gave up his throne for Wallis, after they fled Britain, both of them fretted about their ultimate return – both obsessed about being buried right here. The Queen, my grandmother, granted their plea. But she placed them at a distance from everyone else, beneath a stooped plane tree. One last finger wag, perhaps.
Adults called it the nursery. Willy had the larger half, with a double bed, a good-sized basin, a cupboard with mirrored doors, a beautiful window looking down on the courtyard, the fountain, the bronze statue of a roe deer buck. My half of the room was far smaller, less luxurious. I never asked why. I didn’t care. But I also didn’t need to ask. Two years older than me, Willy was the Heir, whereas I was the Spare.
He spoke to me with the quality one often encounters in truly wise people – forgiveness. He assured me that people do stupid things, say stupid things, but it doesn’t need to be their intrinsic nature.
Maybe she was omnipresent for the very same reason that she was indescribable – because she was light, pure and radiant light, and how can you really describe light? Even Einstein struggled with that one.
Even for an occasional practitioner of magical thinking like me, however, some realities just can’t be changed.
The public was horrified. If journalists could use the mighty powers vested in them for evil, then democracy was in sorry shape.
All my life I’d heard jokes about the links between royal misbehaviour and centuries of inbreeding, but it was then that I realized: Lack of genetic diversity was nothing compared to press gaslighting.
Yanks didn’t beat about the bush, didn’t fill the air with polite snorts and throat clearings before coming to the point. Whatever was on their mind, they’d spit it out, like a sneeze, and while that could be problematic at times, I usually found it preferable to the alternative: No one saying what they truly felt. No one wanting to hear how you felt.
As a confirmed bachelor I was an outsider, a nonperson within my own family. If I wanted that to change, I had to get hitched. That simple. All of which made my twenty-ninth birthday a complex milestone, and some days a complex migraine.
I’d traveled the world from top to bottom, literally. I’d hopscotched the continents. I’d met hundreds of thousands of people, I’d crossed paths with a ludicrously large cross-section of the planet’s seven billion residents. For thirty-two years I’d watched a conveyor-belt of faces pass by and only a handful ever made me look twice. This woman stopped the conveyer belt.
Icompleted my education at Eton in June 2003, thanks to hours of hard work and some extra tutoring arranged by Pa. No small feat for one so unscholarly, so limited, so distracted, and while I wasn’t proud of myself, exactly, because I didn’t know how to be proud of myself, I felt a distinct pause in my nonstop internal self-criticism.
Whatever the cause, my memory is my memory, it does what it does, gathers and curates as it sees fit, and there’s just as much truth in what I remember and how I remember it as there is in so-called objective facts. Things like chronology and cause-and-effect are often just fables we tell ourselves about the past. The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
And whenever I complained about it, privately or publicly, people just rolled their eyes. They said I was whingeing, said I only pretended to want privacy, said Meg was pretending as well. Oh, she’s getting chased, is she? Wah-wah, give us a break! She’ll be fine, she’s an actress, she’s used to paps, in fact, wants them. But no one wanted this. No one could ever get used to it. All those eye-rollers couldn’t take ten minutes of it.
You’ve got to give something back.
For the rest of my life, I knew, I’d be hearing some vestige of that sound; it would echo forever in some part of my being. I would also never forget, when the guns finally stopped, that immense silence.
Among all the different, riotous emotions coursing through my brother that afternoon, one really jumped out at me. He seemed aggrieved. He seemed put upon that I wasn’t meekly obeying him, that I was being so impertinent as to deny him, or defy him, to refute his knowledge, which came from his trusted aides. There was a script here and I had the audacity not to be following it. He was in full Heir mode, and couldn’t fathom why I wasn’t dutifully playing the role of the Spare.
In a lifetime of existential crises, this was a bugger. Who are you when you can no longer be the thing you’ve always been, the thing you’ve trained to be?