Diana's Nightmare - The Family (2 page)

The worst, it seemed, was not over yet for the Windsors, a view confirmed by one of their number. Shortly after he returned from a holiday on Mustique with Princess Margaret, Lord Linley had taken his new fiancée to a dinner party at the home of friends in West London. 'Let me tell you,' he said, meaningfully, 'something's going to come out that makes everything else look like nothing.' 'He wasn't joking,' said one privy to the secrets of that dining table. 'Everyone got excited but he wouldn't explain what he meant.' Royal scandal, once a taboo subject in polite society, was now both
aperitif
and
digestif
in even the smartest households.

Nor was he referring to a photograph of Serena, tights ripped and curled up on a floor, which was published on the front page of the
People
newspaper a short time later. The paper's graphic description of her affair with a former boyfriend was passed off as nothing more serious than the amorous adventures of any graduate of the figurative Sloane University. But for the real royals, any bad publicity was potentially dangerous now that the traditional screens of secrecy had been removed. More than their mystique, they had lost the unquestioning veneration that had protected them for generations. The party was almost over. To vary a favoured metaphor of the age, the royals were drinking in the Last Chance Salon. The caste system that typified British royalty might still be in place, but some of its members were like the targets in a fairground coconut shy.

'The decline is very serious in the sense that the ideological framework which has sustained them as the idealised family has basically been undercut,' said Andrew Morton. 'The royals themselves don't want the fairy-tale anymore. They have decided, Okay, the myth and the mystique have gone, let's just be ordinary people. We're paying our tax now and we are essentially private people and we have the same rights as private people. They will become really quite aggressive about invasions of privacy in the future. There won't be as many of them doing the job of being royal and they won't sacrifice themselves for the job in the way they have done in the past. They are retreating from their public personae and re-inventing themselves as private people.'

The Queen, however, carries on very much in the style to which she has grown accustomed. While the monarchy debate raged even on the fortieth anniversary of her coronation, she did what she enjoyed doing most. It was Derby Day and Her Majesty went to the races.

THE NIGHTMARE

'This may sound crazy, but I've lived before'

Diana, Princess of Wales

THERE was a mischievous spring in Princess Diana's step as she strode across the Knightsbridge pavement to lunch with her sons at San Lorenzo. Smartly dressed in jackets and ties, William and Harry entered their mother's favourite restaurant in this select part of London for a holiday treat. The schoolboy princes were due to fly to Scotland after the meal to join their father, Prince Charles, at Balmoral for what remained of the Easter holiday. But for the next hour at least, the boys were Diana's to show off in the one public place where she felt entirely safe.

San Lorenzo is situated at No 22, Beauchamp Place, a short thoroughfare of
bijou
shops which include two other stylish landmarks in the greatest royal scandal since the Abdication. Flanking the restaurant on one side is Kanga, the salon of Charles's friend Lady Tryon, and on the other the showroom of couturier Bruce Oldfield. For very good reason, Diana no longer wears clothes with the Kanga label, but Oldfield - creator of the 'Dynasty Di' look in a previous life - remains high on her list of approved designers. Many people in the royal circle found it either expedient or necessary to take sides once the Prince and Princess of Wales had set up rival courts at St James's and Kensington.

Inside San Lorenzo, Diana could relax, confident in the knowledge that the natives were friendly. Considering the knife-grinding at Buckingham Palace, this was a reassuring point. It was fair to say that she was now perceived as an enemy among those dogmatically loyal to the House of Windsor. At San Lorenzo, the Italian owners, Mara and Lorenzo Berni, made her feel nothing if not wanted, needed and loved. Besides, Diana had just seen the new photographs and they had boosted her confidence even more.

Dressed in a figure-hugging navy suit with a skirt short enough to be called eye-catching, the Princess clutched a son in each hand as she descended the nine stairs to the basement level. They were greeted by Mara, a motherly figure who, among other services, collected private mail for her most famous though often troubled friend. On her way to the familiar corner table beneath the giant potted palms, Diana made a point of stopping whenever she recognised a diner to exchange a greeting, giving the impression that the two princes, aged ten and eight, were the most important young men in her life. 'My small ones,' she called the Heir and the Spare. James Gilbey, her former escort on nocturnal visits to San Lorenzo, referred to them cutely as 'the Lovebugs'.

Four traumatic months had passed since the Prime Minister announced the official separation of the Prince and Princess of Wales and his suggestion that Diana could rule as queen had seemingly disappeared into the mists of antiquity. But Diana knew that, barring a divorce, there was still a possibility. Queenship, though, was something she had been prepared to sacrifice to gain her freedom from the nightmarish life she had lived as a royal.

'The extraordinary and ironic thing is that Charles did choose right,' said a well-placed royal observer. 'He chose the perfect future queen. The trouble is that, unlike other royal wives, she wouldn't look the other way while he two-timed her.'

Even before John Major had spoken, Diana had been made aware that the notorious Squidgy tape-recording of her intimate conversation with Gilbey had jeopardised her position. At first, she had found it difficult to come to terms with the likelihood that she would go down in history as the best queen Britain never had. But since that dreadful time, she had worked hard to build the image she presented this spring day: that of a winner, self-assured and as beguiling as she ever had been before Squidgy tarnished some of the lustre.

As she said, 'I'm just myself - and that was really something. But this, it seemed, wasn't enough to satisfy her once Squidgy had finally exploded the convenient myth of 'Shy Di'. Very deliberately, she was changing every facet which didn't comply with her confident new self-image. Even her old voice and its whining Squidgy accent, heard by millions on a play-back telephone line which the
Sun
had helpfully installed for its readers, was in the process of disappearing. For the past four weeks, she had been receiving speech therapy to help in the public speaking that was part of her new agenda. The new accent, a cross between
Howard's Way
and
Howard's End,
added a modern, composed touch to her outwardly calm exterior.

If 1993 turned out to be
Horribilis II
for Her Majesty, Diana was well-placed to survive whatever traumas might befall the Family. By sheer self-will, she had reclaimed her place as the unchallenged darling of her mother-in- law's kingdom and she was, indisputably, a force to be reckoned with. Since the Court Circular had been divided to separate the Waleses' engagements, Diana had attended only half as many functions as Charles, but easily drawn four times the crowds. More significant was the number of photographers' metal stepladders present on each occasion, a true indication of media interest in the royal combatants. The ratio stood at twelve-to-one in Diana's favour. In an age of cosmetic politics, she was a clear winner in the image war being fought between the rival courts. Diana had long been the patron saint of the paparazzi.

At a time of her choosing, her fans among the incalculable millions following every scene of the royal drama would see the new pictures. For now, the San Lorenzo diners made an adequate preview audience for yet another facet of her performance as a liberated woman.

'How are you today, Terry? Did you enjoy the motor racing?' she asked the photographer Terry O'Neill, who she had seen at Donington Park a few days earlier. Later, he could hardly remember how he had replied, but he had no difficulty recalling the stir Diana's entrance had caused. 'She took everyone's breath away,' he said. 'She looked so beautiful; she looked like a million dollars, she was radiant - and she knew it.'

As she passed Andy Warhol's portrait of Marilyn Monroe, one diner whom Diana did not recognise, or chose not to acknowledge, was her husband's one-time biographer Anthony Holden, who sat at a table directly in her path. San Lorenzo was
her
territory; her husband and his followers past and present had no place within its cool white walls.

The royal trio moved past hanging baskets of fern and tasteful water colours which added freshness to the interior's spot-lit ambience. Diana's favourite table was on a slightly higher level, where she sat with her back to a mural depicting a bus tootling along a Sardinian landscape. It had been painted to remind Mara of her childhood homeland. Under the watchful eye of her personal detective, Inspector Ken Wharfe, Diana, William and Harry ate a hearty lunch. The armed detective had been removed from Diana's side after the Squidgy tapes revealed that he was involved in setting up a secret rendezvous between her and Gilbey. He had been transferred to office duties until, at the Princess's insistence, he was reinstated, his name cleared.

According to friends, Diana was winning her battle against the eating disorder
bulimia nervosa,
which had plagued her teenage years and resurfaced in virulent form before her wedding. 'I've had bulimia for ten years,' she told a worker at Turning Point, the drug abuse and mental health charity, long before the break-up. Diana had been desperately sick throughout the worst decade of her life. The pictures would show the world how far she had moved along the road to recovery.

For their part, William and Harry were the perfect extras in this cameo of a woman re-emerging from the clamour of a marital break-up which had riveted the world as no other could. Charles and Diana were the biggest talking point from Belgravia to Boston and those who dined at San Lorenzo were networkers, just the right sort of people to spread the word that whatever else was wrong with the Royal Family, Diana was in sparkling form and her sons were with the one they really loved.

Directly below the restaurant's foundations runs the San Lorenzo Fault, an invisible flaw that stretches from Kensington Palace to the Throne Room at Buckingham Palace. Considering the tremors which were rocking the monarchy, it could be said to imperil the Crown itself. So serious did Prince Philip regard the threat that he had exchanged heated words with his daughter-in-law. But Diana had few regrets. She had learned the secrets of the Windsor dynasty with every painful year she had spent as its most valuable if not most valued asset. Rejecting the attitude that she should have been 'grateful for the goodies that came with her title', as one former Sloane Ranger friend put it, she had already lashed out once. It was no exaggeration to say that any further seismic activity on her part could be fatal to all involved. 'She struck the royals a blow from which they are going to find it hard to recover,' said one close to her entourage.

Not that her plan was to destroy the monarchy, although she had arguably done a great deal to damage it. Now that the ugly shadow of Squidgy had passed from her face, her primary concern was who should occupy the throne after Her Majesty's death: Charles III or William V. She had once hated Charles as only a woman scorned could and it was widely felt in her circle that she believed he was unsuited to rule. If she couldn't be queen, she saw William as the deserving heir apparent. 'She doesn't want to wreck any chance of being the power-behind-the-throne as far as William goes,' said a titled Chelsea lady who knows the royals well.

The Queen, fully briefed on the Diana Problem by her advisers, had seized upon a chance encounter to take some of the heat out of the situation. Spotting the estranged Princess outside a shop in Knightsbridge, Her Majesty instructed her chauffeur to blow his horn. 'The Princess was standing with her bodyguard when he noticed the Queen's Daimler approaching,' said eye-witness Jason Fraser, a royal photographer. 'He said something to her because she turned round and looked.' Her mother-in-law gave her a friendly wave through the window of her Rolls-Royce. Diana smiled, waved and blew a kiss back. 'I have the best mother-in-law in the world,' Diana had stated not so long ago. They were still on speaking terms even if they hardly ever spoke anymore.

The day before she lunched at San Lorenzo, the Princess had presented a very different face to the world in this operatic phase of her life. She took Wills and Harry to Thorpe Park, the adventure centre in Surrey to which she had introduced them two summers earlier as her shaky marriage continued its helter-skelter descent. In San Lorenzo, she was at her smartest. At the fun park, she was Daredevil Di, wet hair slicked back as she thundered down the rides in black trousers, leather jacket and suede ankle boots.

While other pleasure-seekers had been astonished to find the royal trio in their midst, the half-dozen freelance photographers and a television crew showed no such surprise. Nor were the newsmen restrained by the usually protective Inspector Wharfe as they filmed Diana and the boys, clad in jeans and bomber jackets, shooting down Thunder River and getting soaked in the process. As the boys clambered aboard the Hudson River Rafters for more excitement, the cameras clicked away unimpeded and it was the same when Diana and her sons rode the Flying Fish Roller Coaster and the twirling Giant Tea Cup before rounding off the day with a Super Soaker water-gun shootout. The Princes revelled in it, but the question remained: who tipped off the Press? 'I don't want to risk money-in-the-bank jobs like this by ratting on my source,' said one cameraman when the pictures had been plastered over acres of newsprint. 'Let's just say no one from Thorpe Park told me, and Diana wasn't surprised to see us.'