Chapter Twenty ‘The Unique, the Complex, the Extraordinary and Irreplaceable…’ #2
Betty’s dishes were succulent English staples, and the first thing Diana and I would do on returning to Althorp at the start of our school holidays there was head for the larder with spoons in hand to rootle out one of Betty’s pies.
We would wolf this down in silent bliss.
The aroma of Betty’s pastry was the sensory highlight of Althorp.
Some members of staff left their mark on us in practical ways.
Marie, William the footman’s wife, taught us both to drive in the grounds – Diana in an ancient Triumph estate, which she learnt to park in tight spaces with astonishing precision, while I flew across the fields in a fibreglass Beach Buggy.
William and Marie were Irish, cheery and kind.
Next came Paul and Delia, another couple who we very much liked – quiet, decent and warm.
But even though the people working in the House adored my father, and seemed to enjoy his children, because of Raine they rarely lasted in their positions for long.
We hated our stepmother because of her constant crass rudeness to the staff. ‘Where is my fucking egg?’ she would bellow from the top of her staircase, when her breakfast in bed failed to appear on time.
She had a disregard for the house staff’s lives, for their privacy, and for their status – insisting on referring to them as ‘the servants’, a term that Mrs Pendry, proud and independent, told Diana and me was ‘disgusting’.
The house team were meant to have the hours from lunch till late afternoon to themselves, but often Raine would summon breakfast to her room at noon, and only appear for lunch around three p.m., so the cook, butler and footman had to wait around, with no inkling as to what time they were to be on hand, or off duty.
Raine would talk about the people who worked at Althorp as though they were not human – I remember sitting at dinner, crimson with embarrassment, as Raine laughed about one of the housekeepers coming to her to share problems she was having with her Fallopian tubes.
This most private of information Raine recounted in earshot of the poor woman’s colleagues as they served at table. It was agonizing.
Equally difficult for us was Raine’s insistence on taking all the guests attending her Sunday ‘gala’ lunch parties across to her gift shop in the Stables, after they had eaten.
She would wait, shamelessly, while they wandered around the noble interior of the 1730s Stables in something of a daze.
On a pair of ancient oak tables from the Old Servants’ Hall were laid out sparkling enamel sheets on which lay dozens of pieces of cheap imitation jewellery, from Tutankhamen-themed necklaces to knock-offs of Diana’s sapphire engagement ring.
Raine’s eyes were fixed expectantly on her visitors.
If they were to placate their hostess, they realized, they were required to buy some of these glittering offerings from her.
Seeing these bewildered, beaten guests repair to their cars, Althorp shop bags hanging limply by their sides, was excruciating.
The worst of Diana and Raine’s relationship took place long after childhood and tended to reach particularly low points around major family events.
On the day before my first marriage, in 1989, everyone involved in the wedding rehearsal was invited back to tea at Althorp. But as my mother entered the house, she was approached by an embarrassed member of staff who whispered in her ear before leading her off to sit by herself.
When Diana discovered this, she confronted Raine with incredulity. ‘This is Charles’s mother, Raine,’ she said, ‘and she has to be included with the rest of us – not sent to a separate room like some naughty child! Do you really have no idea how to behave?’
Raine replied coldly, ‘Diana, you simply do not understand how much pain your mother has caused your father…’
This drama between two women, both used to always getting their way, unfurled at the top of Althorp’s main staircase, in the central hallway known as ‘the Saloon’.
As it escalated, Raine suddenly went low: ‘I have always felt so very sorry for the Prince of Wales, marrying somebody quite as stupid as you.’
Diana paused for a second, surprised at the intensity of the spite. She then took a step forward, hooked a long leg round Raine’s calves before shoving her down the carpeted staircase.
Raine fortunately landed flush on her buttocks, rather than on bone, and got up, leaving the Saloon without a backwards glance.
Diana filled the void left by the absent hostess, and had my mother join the rest of the party for tea. Meanwhile my father, never one for a scene, said nothing about the incident then or later.
After my father’s sudden death, in March 1992, things with Raine again became especially fraught.
She said she wanted to get on with her life and complained loudly when I explained we could not arrange for my father’s funeral to take place any sooner than three days after his death.
She also shared with her staff at this time that she was determined to be married again within the year – an aim that she achieved.
What made it all worse was learning from a housekeeper loyal to my father how Raine had humiliated him in his last years, when he had been a semi-invalid.
The housekeeper said she had once witnessed my father being served a plate of sandwiches for lunch in the hallway of their London home while Raine entertained a gentleman admirer – he had no stately home but turned her head with his helicopter – upstairs.
Only much later would I discover that on the night after my father died, Raine had arranged with one of her disreputable associates in the art world for a large removal van to descend on Althorp in the middle of the night.
This she had loaded up with objects that she knew did not belong to her, including Spencer family silver, in the knowledge that my father’s will stipulated that anything under Raine’s roof at the time of his death should be inherited by her.
Still she was not satisfied. Raine claimed that just before he had died my father had been on the point of buying her an eighteenth-century equestrian portrait by John Boultbee, for several hundred thousand pounds.
Unable to offer proof of this, her request was turned down.
When told of the executors’ decision, she replied: ‘Oh, well, it was worth a try!’
My sisters and I stayed together at Althorp in the gloomy days that followed my father’s sudden death. At one point the four of us came across Raine’s most powerful maid brazenly leaving the house with two of my father’s favourite leather suitcases.
Diana told her to put them both down. She then furiously tore out their contents, putting my father’s things in one pile, and those that were clearly Raine’s in another, before castigating the maid for trying to steal our father’s possessions.
I have rarely seen Diana so furious as seventeen years of rage at Raine’s impact on our family exploded.
Yet my sister could be a complex soul, as her relationship with Raine showed. A day or two later, at my father’s funeral, with animosity between the parties at exactly the same pitch, Diana made a perverse gesture.
We four children were sitting in the front pew to one side of the church, with Raine and her family across the aisle from us.
As our two front rows began to exit at the end of the service, Diana suddenly strode across in front of the entire congregation, and clasped Raine’s left hand tightly in her right, so they could walk out of the church together, hand in hand.
I was upset and confused by this extraordinary development that had come out of nowhere.
Diana hated Raine even more than the rest of us, yet she seemed compelled to make a public act that would place her in a positive light, even if it lacked sincerity.
There was no place for bad manners at our father’s funeral, of course, but playing to the gallery at the cost of integrity struck me as equally unacceptable.
Towards the end of her life, Diana seems to have forged a genuine friendship with Raine.
They were seen lunching together in the sort of London restaurants where they were guaranteed to be spotted by the press.
This was particularly so during times when Diana had fallen out with our mother.
I suspect that Diana aimed to hurt her with these very public displays of fondness for a woman my mother always loathed.
It was through this late camaraderie that Raine engineered Diana’s introduction to Dodi Fayed.
She and my father knew Dodi’s father, Mohamed, then thought of as controversial, but now proven to have been a voracious sexual predator, and Raine had secured a senior role at Mohamed Fayed’s department store, Harrods, after my father’s death.
The cunning Fayed was always going to exact a price for this act of patronage.
She paid it in full when introducing Dodi to her world-famous stepdaughter.
Diana disliked Mohamed Fayed. She told me with revulsion how, early in her romance with Dodi, Mohamed had come up to her, dropped a hand onto her buttocks and squeezed them while saying in a leery, suggestive tone, ‘And in Egypt, father-in-law gets first go…’ She laughed when recounting the ghastliness of the episode, but she had been alerted to who Dodi’s father really was.
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From time to time, Diana and I were involved, in a supportive way, in each other’s romantic lives.
My youngest sister took a rather gloomy view of this side of things, once saying to me: ‘Carlos, we have to accept that we are the two in the family who are doomed never to find lasting happiness in our love lives.’ This was her interpretation of the impact that our parents’ divorce must have had on us both.
Her dating advice to me was old-fashioned: ‘If you really want to impress a girl, take her to the ballet or the opera – so much better than dinner in a restaurant!’