Diana (4 page)

She asked a friend, “Why does he care more about [Camilla] than he does about me? I’m the one he’s supposed to be marrying, for God’s sake.”

In November 1980, the
Sunday Mirror
ran a story alleging that Lady Diana had spent two secret nights with Charles aboard the royal train, which was used by members of the royal family for official business travel. Diana pleaded, “Please believe me. I’ve never been on that train. I have never even seen it.”

She denied telling a newspaper that she’d spent the nights of the alleged train incident because she had a hangover. “I never get hangovers.”

The pressures of such a public courtship took their toll. “I cried like a baby to the four walls. I just couldn’t cope with it.”

She begged her flatmates not to be shy after the wedding. “For God’s sake ring me up. I’m going to need you.”

On the last night she spent in her flat, on the eve of the official announcement of her engagement, Chief Inspector Paul Officer told her: “This is the last night of freedom in your life, so make the most of it.” She recalled: “Those words felt like a sword through my heart.”

“Will you be watching the wedding?” Diana asked one man at a garden party honoring the Year of the Disabled Person. “Yes,” he replied. And then, momentarily confused by the radiant princess-to-be, he asked, “Will you?” “No,” she said with a laugh. “I’m in it.”

As the impending wedding was clearly becoming one of the most spectacular ceremonies in British history, jitters set in. “I think I am realizing now what it all means,” Diana told a reporter just two weeks before the wedding, “and it’s making me more and more scared.”

Diana told her guests at a Buckingham Palace garden party: “I’m going to videotape it [the wedding]
so I’ll be able to run back over the best bits and rub out the part where I say ‘I will.’”

She was obsessed with losing weight before the wedding. “I’m not waddling up the aisle like a duck.”

Watching the prewedding coverage on TV, she grew quite nervous. “Do I really have to go out in front of all these people?” she asked her seamstress.

Raine’s mother, the eccentric romance novelist Dame Barbara Cartland, was not invited to the royal wedding. “Her false eyelashes look like two crows flying into the White Cliffs of Dover,” Diana once remarked.

To a blind well-wisher, a few days before the wedding: “Do you want to feel my engagement ring? I’d better not lose it before Wednesday, or they won’t know who I am.”