Diana (7 page)

At a private party, she broke away from a group, saying, “I must go and find my husband. As usual, he’s surrounded by women.”

“I would trade places with you anytime,” she told a humble homemaker.

“Just because I go out without my husband doesn’t mean my marriage is on the rocks.”

“When we first got married, we were everyone’s idea of the world’s most perfect couple. Now they say we’re leading separate lives. The next thing I’ll read in some newspaper is that I’ve got a black lover. No, to make matters worse, I’ll have a black Catholic lover.”

“The truth about our separate lives is very simple. My husband and I get around two thousand invitations to visit different places every six months. We couldn’t possibly get to do many if we did them all altogether so we decide to accept as many as we can separately. This means we get to twice as many places and twice as many people. I don’t get the vapors anymore. I think I’m coping much better now.”

“I know what is going on. I know what people are thinking. Inevitably we are going to be frequently apart. It’s the nature of the job. We both do lots of jobs in different directions, but our marriage is very good, thank you very much. We don’t see as much of each other as we should.”

As late as 1991, Diana was still involved in attempts to convince the world that her marriage was doing well. In a story that appeared in
Good Housekeeping,
Andrew Morton quoted Diana: “Don’t worry about me, my marriage is fine…. People jump to conclusions so easily. It is so easy for people to judge my marriage, but they don’t understand me or my husband. I am never going to get divorced and that’s that. Whatever people may think and say, I am very happy, thank you very much.”

Responding to tabloid newspaper stories about all the time she spent apart from Charles: “I sometimes
have my friends to lunch if my husband’s out. We have people to dinner whenever we can, but my husband goes out to dinners where the wives aren’t required, so we can’t always find a date to suit both of us.”

“There I was in floods of tears, just needing him. And I’m told I have to book an appointment—with my own husband.”

To Charles’s valet, Stephen Barry: “I don’t know what to do, I feel so unhappy here. Charles doesn’t understand me. He would prefer to be out shooting or stalking or riding or chatting with his mother rather than be with me. Can’t he understand that I need him to look after me? I feel he’s abandoned me. He just leaves me here all day. I hate it.”

When Charles left her for yet another meal with his mother, she asked, “Why do you do this to
me? Why can’t we just have a meal alone together for a change?”

Charles offered to throw a grand ball to celebrate Diana’s thirtieth birthday. “I would hope that my husband would know me well enough to know that I didn’t like that sort of thing.”