Diana's Nightmare - The Family (16 page)

The very first example concerned a young woman called Sarah Worthington, who was being treated for moods of depression during which she was tempted to commit suicide. During therapy, the nervous young woman suddenly started speaking in a completely different voice. 'When they (the psychiatrists) asked the woman what she wanted to do, she replied, "Help Sarah,"' wrote Wilson. 'She identified herself as Sarah's grandmother. According to the grandmother, she had "taken possession" of Sarah Worthington when her granddaughter was playing the piano - both of them loved music. She was able to give the psychiatrists invaluable information about Sarah's family background. And although Sarah was at first astonished to realise that her grandmother was speaking through her, she gradually learned to accept it, and began to achieve deeper insight into her problems. At the end of two months she was cured.'

Diana was an accomplished pianist who often sat for hours playing on a Broadwood grand piano at Kensington Palace. Moreover, she had been very close to Lady Spencer, whom she resembled not only in looks but also in personality. Lord Spencer had comforted her at a memorial service for her grandmother at the Chapel Royal with the prophetic words, 'The living and the dead are never quite separable'. Diana had believed in the afterlife ever since.

She was also consulting two astrologers, Penny Thornton and Debbie Frank, for guidance from the stars. Astrology, Ms Thornton explained to her royal client, was 'a spiritual path that can only lead to growth.' 'You are getting a panoramic vision of your own life instead of just looking one step at a time,' she said. 'Your canvas is spreading out so that you start to see more and more things. Your life is evolving, your awareness is expanding and your connection with your soul, your spiritual centre, is more and more acute.'

But none of the cards, crystal balls or zodiac charts proved infallible. No one, it seemed, warned Diana against making telephone calls to single male admirers on New Year's Eve.

WHEN Charles later surveyed the wreckage, exactly the same thing stood out as a symbol of his own downfall: a telephone. He had bought the portable phone to make private calls, but it became an instrument of his destruction.

At Highgrove, he took it with him on long walks to phone Camilla and Kanga. Sometimes he spoke to his forbidden friends from the privacy of his walled vegetable garden or from the middle of a field. Surrounded by organic greenery, he chatted freely with the two women who made him feel needed. But some of the calls were not so innocent. Diana told friends that she caught him one day, in his mahogany-sided bathtub, speaking softly into the receiver and telling Camilla: 'Whatever happens, I will always love you.' From that moment, the flimsy charade was over.

The first prop to go was Diana's
entente cordiale
with Kanga, who had made the peace by inviting the Princess to her Knightsbridge salon and lunching with her at San Lorenzo. Diana had been pleased enough to buy several outfits, which she wore for a time. But her suspicions were revived after she started to avoid going on holiday with Charles to Balmoral or Sandringham, or to watch polo at Windsor. 'Whenever Kanga went to Balmoral or Sandringham, she was spotted with Charles, but Diana knew that her husband Anthony was there as well,' said a friend. 'Diana suspected that Kanga was acting as a decoy for Camilla, who was keeping well out of camera range.'

In country rig of tweeds and green wellies, Kanga went deer stalking, shooting and fishing with Charles, sports that she genuinely loved. When concern was expressed about the Prince's health, she leapt to his defence. 'I see him all the time and he's as fit as a fiddle,' she said. 'His farming, skiing and polo make him one of the healthiest men in the country.' This only confirmed the impression, albeit misleading, that Kanga the old friend was the new woman in Charles's life. Diana wasn't present when Charles grabbed Kanga by both arms and she kissed his cheek after a polo match at Windsor, but she saw the picture in the papers.

The couple's separation stretched to five weeks during the autumn of 1987, the longest estrangement in their six-year marriage. Charles stayed at Balmoral Castle or Birkhall, the Queen Mother's residence on Deeside, while Diana moved between Kensington Palace and Highgrove.

'October is a busy time on the Scottish estates and in the absence of the Duke of Edinburgh, the Prince has had to take charge,' explained an aide at Balmoral. 'He also has many business meetings in connection with the Prince's Trust, the Duchy of Cornwall and other projects which do not receive publicity.' He had time to go deer stalking with Kanga, though, and the decibel level rose in the phone calls he received from Diana.

Kanga was back at Birkhall the following Easter when she fished with Charles on the Dee while Diana stayed with her sons at Highgrove. On all of these occasions, Lord Tryon and other friends of Charles, either married couples or well-connected singles, were house guests as well.

Diana's response in public was to play the incidents down. 'When we first got married, we were everyone's idea of the world's most ideal, perfect couple,' she said. 'Now they say we're leading separate lives. The next thing I know I'll read in some newspaper that I've got a black lover.'

IN Oxfordshire, a balding royalist called Cyril Reenan handed in his keys and left the Abingdon branch of the Trustee Savings Bank for the last time as manager. For thirty-two years, he had listened to people talk about overdrafts, interest rates and mortgage repayments. He had been a good listener.

In retirement, he visited a studio equipped with electronic monitoring devices and overheard a private telephone conversation. It concerned plans to redesign an aircraft. Cyril was intrigued. 'I couldn't believe how easy it was or how clear,' he said. 'But it was just innocent entertainment, nothing more than that.'

He bought a small radio scanner and he and his wife Phylis began to listen in to other people's phone calls from the breakfast room of their neat, red-brick Victorian home. He never dreamed that he would one day become notorious as Cyril, the Squidgy Squirrel - the man who would lead an unsuspecting world to believe that Diana had indeed taken a lover.

'Diana has suddenly realised what she's been missing'

Lucy Acland

DIANA always managed to conceal her anger from the world during her marriage. Although she was capable of shenanigans which raised eyebrows at private functions, she never completely lost her temper in a public place. It was only after the marriage had ended in separation that she finally cracked and, in a moment of madness, disclosed a side of her character that was all too familiar to Prince Charles.

Five days after their twelfth wedding anniversary in 1993, she took William and Harry to see
Jurassic Park,
the Steven Spielberg movie about dinosaurs. When photographer Keith Butler snapped her picture as she left the Empire cinema in Leicester Square, she dashed up to him and, standing on tiptoe to confront the six foot three inch tall cameraman, she screamed: 'You make my life hell.' Passerbys gazed in amazement at the sight of the Princess of Wales, in black blazer and silk trousers, brushing tears from her eyes as she stormed off down the street ahead of her sons and their detectives. The mask had slipped.

'I have never known anything like it — she raced across and put her nose right up to mine,' said Butler, one of the paparazzi's shrewder operators. 'A sign of her anger was that she had both fists tightly clenched. I thought she was going to punch me. She was clearly very stressed about something. I think I was the target of a deeper anger.'

The outburst had been building up ever since Diana had spent the previous weekend with an old friend, the merchant banker Willie van Straubenzee, at Floors Castle, the Scottish home of the Duke and Duchess of Roxburghe. Staubenzee had been spotted when he arrived at Heathrow airport for the flight north and Diana's dream of an idyllic break suddenly collapsed in ruins. Newsmen staked out the castle, famous as the scene of Andrew's proposal to Fergie, for the duration of her stay, even secretly photographing her playing tennis while 'Straubs' watched from a bench on the sidelines. The intrusion made Diana furious and reminded her that every one of her friendships with men, no matter how innocent, had been destroyed by the glare of publicity.

The problem had initially surfaced during a particularly turbulent stage of her marriage, damaging her standing in the eyes of the Queen. Her Majesty, Diana suspected, had reached quite the wrong conclusion about the innocent night she had spent at Gatley Park, the Midlands home of the Lord Lieutenant of Hereford and Worcester, Thomas Dunne and his wife Henrietta. True enough, the Dunnes had not been in residence on the occasion early in 1987 as they were away skiing in France. Diana had been there with their son, the darkly handsome Philip Dunne, a twenty-eight-year-old senior manager with a merchant bank. She had, by all accounts, invited herself. Dunne's sister Camilla was one of Diana's closest friends but if she was there on the night in question then she made no public declaration of it. The Prince of Wales was certainly not there. He had his reservations about Philip Dunne.

With Charles spending more and more time in the company of Camilla and Kanga, Diana was not merely turning to a group of young male friends for companionship. At this critical point in her life, she was living downright dangerously. Knowing that she was getting a reputation for being flirtatious - or 'a terrible tease' as one of her titled girlfriends put it - she even fuelled the gossips by disappearing from Highgrove for a mysterious weekend that winter after Charles had left for Africa to walk through the Kalahari desert with Sir Laurens van der Post. She turned up close to tears at Kensington Palace after being pursued in her Escort Turbo by a car filled with high spirited Arabs.

The year had not begun well. Diana had been accused of flirting her way through a tour of Portugal after Charles had embarrassed her by making a joke in public about keeping a mistress. They asked for, and were given, separate bedrooms during the tour throughout which she cold shouldered her husband. At a banquet in their honour she played the vamp by making eyes at the host country's good-looking Prime Minister, Cavaco Silva. He responded by inviting Diana to use his villa for a holiday with William and Harry.

But there was worse to come. In the wake of criticism that at official functions she paid particular attention to the men while ignoring their wives, she twanged the braces of Portugal's President, Mario Soares. He blushed the colour of the Royal Box's crimson decorations but Diana, looking ravishing in an off-the-shoulder dress, piled on the agony by asking him coquettishly: 'If I get cold will you warm me up?'

Harry Arnold offered a seasoned opinion of her behaviour: 'It was a tease in the old-fashioned sense,' he said. 'I think she took the view that while she could not be unfaithful to Charles and she had never had another guy, she nevertheless thought, "I wonder what it would be like with somebody else". She was also aware that her husband knew exactly what it was like with others.' 'Mobbing-up' was the term Diana and her friends had coined for flirting in their Sloane Ranger days, although one offered a different explanation: 'She only does it when she's insecure. It means she's had a row with Charles.'

The couple were showing signs of strain when they returned to London to prepare for an almost immediate departure for Switzerland. Along with Andrew and Fergie they were to spend a week skiing in Klosters with the brewery heir, Peter Greenall. Charles had stayed with Greenall, who was third in line to Lord Daresbury's title, on previous holidays.

The royal quartet were ensconced in a rented chalet at Wolfgang along with four detectives and equerry Richard Aylard. Philip Dunne was also a member of the party, but he flew home after just two days when rows erupted among the group. One of the banker's friends said: 'There was a terrible atmosphere there surrounding the party so Philip decided to get out quickly before it got even worse. He told me it had been a very bad-tempered trip and he just couldn't stick it out for a full week.'

Determined to have fun, Diana left Charles behind in the chalet and went disco dancing with Greenall and his wife Clare. Wearing a slinky white blouse and tight black leather trousers, she rocked for two late-night hours at the Casa Antica discotheque. Disc jockey Martin Melsome said she was dressed to kill and was easily the most attractive woman in the club. The DJ said that the Princess had asked him to play her favourite record, Diana Ross's
Chain Reaction,
adding: 'She didn't look lonely or sad that her husband wasn't with her. She drank red wine and did fantastic rock 'n roll solos to my records.'

Fearing that perhaps she had gone too far in the alpine resort, Diana took some short-term action through the media to reverse the damage. She went to some lengths to get a message to Harry Arnold asking him to make it known that 'just because I go out without my husband, it doesn't mean my marriage is on the rocks'. For his part Charles, while seemingly bemused by his wife's reckless behaviour, let it be known that he was becoming increasingly irritated by the way his marriage, his private life and his state of mind were being 'misrepresented by the Press'. A member of his entourage was instructed to convey this to a reporter from the Press Association after he had spent three days among the crofters on the Outer Hebridean island of Berneray, only to find a report of his mission in the
Sun
was headlined
A Loon Again.
Charles also sought the counsel of men more worldly than himself and turned up one evening at the home of comedian Spike Milligan for supper. Spike said: 'I had to insist that he should not wash up and he explained to me that he just wanted to be a normal person.'

Any hopes that Diana had learned to conform were dashed when she resumed her prince-teasing at the society wedding of 'Bunty', the Marquess of Worcester, to the actress Tracy Ward, a star of the
C.A.T.S. Eyes
television series. Other guests at Cornwell Manor in Oxfordshire were astonished at the intimate manner in which Diana danced with Philip Dunne while her husband looked on. They said she ran her fingers through the bespectacled Clark Kent lookalike's hair and planted a kiss on his cheek.