Chapter Twelve ‘Of Style, of Beauty’
Chapter Twelve
‘Of style, of beauty’
On those monthly weekends with my mother in London, in the sitting room of her and Peter’s flat, Diana and I would often play a board game that my mother had brought back as a gift for us from Australia.
It was that country’s version of Animal Lotto – a test of memory, with players seeking two identical images of the same animal from a pack of cards placed face down.
The winner was whoever matched the most pairs.
Diana’s favourites among the Australian creatures depicted on the cards were the black swans. They were exotic, mysterious and, with their long necks, dark feathers and red beaks, extraordinarily beautiful.
Early one morning in the days immediately after Diana’s death, when thinking how I could make her island resting place as perfect for her as possible, it suddenly occurred to me that I must track down some black swans.
I thought how lovely it would be to have some of these glorious creatures for the Round Oval, so they could glide in stately grace on the water around Diana’s grave – testimony to my sister’s exquisite taste, but also a nod from me to a connection from our shared past that nobody else knew about.
I walked across Althorp’s front lawn to the Stables for my morning catch-up with the estate’s senior management team. Before the meeting I went over to the office secretary, seated at her desk. ‘I’d be very grateful if you could please see if you can find me some black swans,’ I started.
I was about to explain the thinking behind my strange request when she replied: ‘Oh, they’re arriving tomorrow!’
‘Sorry – what?’
‘The four black swans – they’re arriving here tomorrow.’
I listened, incredulous, while she explained that a man I had never heard of had called the Estate Office to say he was sending a quartet of black swans to Althorp as a gift, his way of marking his respect for Diana, and his great sadness at her loss.
This generous stranger was ignorant of the Animal Lotto link – neither Diana nor I had ever mentioned it to anyone – but somehow, in this most extraordinary of weeks, that remarkable coincidence occurred.
Diana’s favourite childhood birds duly arrived and quickly settled into life on the Round Oval.
There was so much to address on a practical level, preparing for Diana’s return home.
I looked at how we could best access the island on the day of her burial.
The funeral party would clearly need to get across the water without the complication of boat rides.
I knew I did not want to have a permanent bridge constructed to Diana’s island because establishing such access would negate the natural defence of the encircling water.
I discussed the options with an old schoolfriend who was an officer in the Special Forces. He suggested a pontoon bridge. This would be up to whatever was needed on the day, and it could be removed immediately after serving its purpose.
He sounded out his seniors who commanded him to proceed with this plan, and army engineers soon appeared in force to assemble a sturdy metal pontoon bridge with speed and quiet efficiency.
This was typical of the way in which the logistics for Althorp’s part in the funeral day came together, thanks to the hard work and good will of so many who wanted to do their bit for Diana.
The young officer in charge of the military engineers at Althorp that day would, years later, apply for selection to the SAS.
During his interviews for a place in that crack regiment, he was asked what his proudest moment to date had been, in his army career.
‘Building the bridge for Princess Diana,’ he replied.
At this time of people showing themselves at their finest, I received a letter from Peter Carter-Ruck.
A London lawyer with a reputation for dishonesty – the Guardian termed him ‘a chancer, out for the maximum fee’, while his own business partner called him out for telling a high-profile client ‘a string of lies’ in order to con excess fees out of him.
Carter-Ruck wrote out of the blue, volunteering to act for me if I chose to sue in France over Diana’s death. He claimed to have successfully represented Sarah Ferguson in some French privacy claim. What Carter-Ruck failed to mention was that he had acted against Diana, two years earlier.
Carter-Ruck’s letter came to me via Buckingham Palace: ‘I am now writing to you,’ he said, ‘because it may be that [you] will wish to be represented.’ He commended a French colleague, Charles Libman, who had been quick off the mark, writing to Carter-Ruck a few hours after Diana’s death:
Deeply dismayed by the news of The Princess of Wales, I would like to express my willingness to be at your disposal, as well as that of the victim’s family, from this very moment, in order to take any necessary step in the criminal procedure following this accident.
A legal action on behalf of the children or any other member of the family might be considered.
If need be, I offer to settle an appointment at my offices here in Paris, or to reach London to meet you in the procedure which is going to take place in Paris.
I suppose it is just possible that these two lawyers’ intentions were well-meant, but their entreaties struck me in that moment as a particularly appalling example of ambulance chasing.
Besides, I could not see how on Earth a legal action could be of any use in remedying this unimaginable tragedy.
Diana could never be brought back, of course, and no penalty could adequately compensate for her loss.
I never replied to Mr Carter-Ruck.
*
On the Tuesday evening after Diana’s death and before her funeral, I finally sat down to start writing the eulogy.
I jotted down dozens of thoughts, along with a long list of incidents and memories that I thought I might perhaps include.
These formed in messy columns on a single page.
I was not sure which of them I would end up using, because at this stage I had yet to decide how personal I should make my speech.
Robin Leigh-Pemberton’s excellent eulogy at my father’s memorial service had been topped and tailed with a charming tale in which my father, who was two or three years older, checked in on the younger Robin soon after his arrival at Eton.
He had come to see how the new boy was settling in, even though at that time, in that school, it was not the ‘done’ thing for boys from separate years to socialize.
The story showed my father’s innate kindness – evidently a strong enough characteristic to trump convention.
Maybe I should try something similar – communicating a moment from the past that illustrated one of Diana’s greatest qualities.
I thought about my sister’s enormous bravery, and contemplated illustrating it with a particular tale from our shared childhood – a snapshot of an instinctive moment that, though small in itself, summed up so much about her.
A highlight when staying with my mother on the west coast of Scotland each summer holidays was going lobster-potting.
My mother, Diana and I would venture out together in a single-engine motorboat – a dory – and drop a dozen pots, baited with mackerel that we caught and salted, at promising spots around Ardencaple Bay.
Twice a day, when the tides were right, we would return and, while my mother kept the engine turning over in neutral (with a cigarette always on the go), Diana and I would take it in turns to haul up the pots.
It was thrilling to spot the blue-black shimmer of a lobster during the final pulls on the orange rope, in that cleanest of seas.
We might catch two on a good day. Once, we hauled in three that had managed to slide together into a single pot – a red-letter day.
Even when devoid of lobsters, the pots would bustle with sea life – mainly crabs and dogfish. These we would toss back into the Atlantic.
Just once, we were confronted by something much scarier: a lithe, black, muscular conger eel, which was around four feet long, and as thick as my arm.
As it writhed free from the pot and thrashed around, my mother and I pushed back to the outer edges of the small boat, trying to get out of the reach of this terrifying creature from the deep with its sharp, gnashing teeth.
But Diana reacted quite differently. She immediately stepped towards the danger, reached into the plastic bucket that contained boating odds and ends, grabbed the open-bladed penknife that lay within, and brought its point down hard behind the eel’s eyes.
Its tail writhed vigorously for some time, as if its brain had forgotten to tell the rest of it that life had ended at the moment of Diana’s pinpoint strike.
While this is one of my favourite early memories of Diana, evoking her warrior spirit, I recognized that it was too gory and complicated a tale to have a place in the global setting of her funeral.
I also wondered if I could work in how Paris – somewhere I would now always think about with a cold shudder – had once been a place of great happiness for Diana and me. We had spent a holiday there with my father, in the mid-1970s.
We had stayed in a fading grande dame of a hotel that my father liked the look of, and he carved up our time with him with great fairness. I therefore had to accompany Diana to a private fashion show at the designer Balmain, while she had the torture of traipsing round a military museum with me.
This was at a time of exchange control, when the left-wing Labour government restricted how much cash British people could take out of the country when abroad.
My father had miscalculated the cost of our trip, and on our final day he told Diana and me to scout the surrounding streets for somewhere inexpensive for the three of us to eat.
So it was that, that night, in one of the culinary capitals of the world, my father had his first taste of a burger – as served by the chain, the Great American Disaster.
I had to be less self-indulgent, I realized, and deal with themes and tales that would instantly resonate with those listening.
I opened the giant safe outside my study, where I kept letters and cards from Diana, and went through them, looking for inspiration for my speech.
One file reminded me of a time, just two years earlier, when Diana and I had both been conned, not by a tabloid but by the BBC.
As I flicked through what I had before me, I realized I had stumbled on a seminal moment in my sister’s life – not just for her, but for the world, and its perception of her.
I put this file to one side, eager to focus on happier moments, knowing I would have to return to it when writing the body of the eulogy.