Spare (17 page)

I turned to Willy. He was sympathetic, but there wasn’t much to say. Then I phoned Pa. To my surprise he was serene. At first I was suspicious. I thought maybe he was seeing my crisis as another opportunity to bolster his PR. But he spoke to me with such tenderness, such genuine compassion, that I was disarmed. And grateful.

He didn’t gloss over the facts.
Darling boy, how could you be so foolish?
My cheeks burned.
I know, I know.
But he quickly went on to say that it was the foolishness of youth, that he remembered being publicly vilified for youthful sins, and it wasn’t fair, because youth is the time when you’re, by definition, unfinished. You’re still growing, still becoming, still learning, he said. He didn’t specifically cite any of his youthful humiliations, but I knew. His most intimate conversations had been leaked, his most ill-conceived remarks had been trumpeted. Past girlfriends had been interrogated, their rating of his lovemaking spread across tabloids, even books. He knew all about humiliation.

He promised that the fury about this would blow over, the shame would fade. I loved him for that promise, even though—or maybe because—I knew it to be false. The shame would never fade. Nor should it.

Day after day the scandal grew. I was excoriated in newspapers, on radio, on TV. Members of Parliament called for my head on a spike. One said I should be barred from entering Sandhurst.

The blowing-over, therefore, according to Pa’s staff, would need some help. I’d need to make some sort of public atonement.

Fine by me, I said. Sooner the better.

So Pa sent me to a holy man.

Bearded, bespectacled,
with a deeply lined face and dark, wise eyes, he was Chief Rabbi of Britain, that much I’d been told. But right away I could see he was much more. An eminent scholar, a religious philosopher, a prolific writer with more than two dozen books to his name, he’d spent many of his days staring out of windows and thinking about the root causes of sorrow, of evil, of hate.

He offered me a cup of tea, then dived straight in. He didn’t mince words.
He condemned my actions. He wasn’t unkind, but it had to be done. There was no way round it. He also placed my stupidity in historical context. He spoke about the six million, the annihilated. Jews, Poles, dissenters, intellectuals, homosexuals. Children, babies, old people, turned to ash and smoke.

A few short decades ago.

I’d arrived at his house feeling shame. I now felt something else, a bottomless self-loathing.

But that wasn’t the rabbi’s aim. That certainly wasn’t how he wanted me to leave him. He urged me not to be devastated by my mistake, but instead to be motivated. He spoke to me with the quality one often encounters in truly wise people—forgiveness. He assured me that people do stupid things, say stupid things, but it doesn’t need to be their intrinsic nature. I was showing my true nature, he said, by seeking to atone. Seeking absolution.

To the extent that he was able, and qualified, he absolved me. He gave me grace. He told me to lift my head, go forth, use this experience to make the world better. To become a teacher of this event. Henners, I thought, would’ve liked the sound of that. Henners with his love of teaching.

No matter what I did, the calls grew louder for me to be barred from the Army. The top brass, however, were holding fast. If Prince Harry had been in the Army when he dolled himself up as the Führer, they said, he’d have been disciplined.

But he’s not in the Army yet, they added.

So he’s perfectly free to be a thicko.

He was to be our new
private secretary: Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton was his name. But I don’t remember Willy and me referring to him as anything other than JLP.

We should’ve just called him Marko II. Or maybe Marko 2.0. He was meant to be Marko’s replacement, but also a more official, more detailed, more permanent version of our dear friend.

All the things Marko had been doing informally, the minding and guiding and advising, JLP would now do formally, we were told. In fact it was Marko who’d found JLP, and recommended him to Pa, and then trained him. So we already trusted the man, right from the start. He came with that all-important seal of approval. Marko said he was a good man.

Deeply calm, slightly stiff, JLP wore shiny gold cufflinks and a gold signet ring, symbols of his probity, constancy, and stalwart belief in a certain kind of steadfast style. You always got the sense that, even on the morning of Armageddon, JLP would button in these amulets before leaving the house.

Despite his spit and polish, however, his enameled exterior, JLP was a force, the product of Britain’s finest military training, which meant, among other things, that he didn’t deal in bullshit. He didn’t give it, didn’t take it, and everyone, far and wide, seemed to know. When British officials decided to launch a massive offensive against a Colombian drug cartel, they chose JLP to lead it. When the actor Ewan McGregor decided to take a three-month motorbike trip through Mongolia and Siberia and Ukraine, for which he’d require survival training, he turned to JLP.

To me, JLP’s finest trait was his reverence for truth, his expertise in truth. He was the opposite of so many people in government and working in the Palace. So, not long after he started working for Willy and me, I asked him to get me some truth—in the form of the secret police files on Mummy’s crash.

He looked down, looked away. Yes, he worked for Willy and me, but he cared about us too, and he cared about tradition, chain of command. My request seemed to jeopardize all three. He grimaced and furrowed his brow, an amorphous area, since JLP didn’t have a lot of hair. Finally, he smoothed back the charcoal bristles remaining on each side and said that, were he to procure said files, it would be very upsetting for me.
Very upsetting indeed, Harry.

Yes. I know. Sort of the point.

He nodded.
Ah. Hmm. I see.

A few days later he brought me into a tiny office up a back staircase in St. James’s Palace and handed me a brown Do Not Bend envelope. He said he’d decided against showing me
all
the police files. He’d gone through and removed the more…“challenging” ones.
For your sake.

I was frustrated. But I didn’t argue. If JLP didn’t think I could handle them, then I probably couldn’t.

I thanked him for protecting me.

He said he’d leave me to it, then walked out.

I took several breaths, opened the file.

Exterior photos. Outside the tunnel in which the crash occurred. Looking into the mouth of the tunnel.

Interior photos. A few feet inside the tunnel.

Deep interior photos. Well inside the tunnel. Looking down the tunnel, and out the other end.

Finally…close-ups of the smashed Mercedes, which was said to have entered the tunnel around midnight and never emerged in one piece.

All seemed to be police photos. But then I realized that many, if not most, were from paps and other photographers at the scene. The Paris police had seized their cameras. Some photos were taken moments after the crash, some much later. Some showed police officers walking about, others showed onlookers milling and gawping. All gave a sense of chaos, a disgraceful carnival atmosphere.

Now came more detailed photos, clearer, closer, inside the Mercedes. There was the lifeless body of Mummy’s friend, whom I now knew to be her boyfriend. There was her bodyguard, who’d survived the crash, though it left him with gruesome injuries. And there was the driver, slumped over the wheel. He was blamed by many for the crash, because there was allegedly alcohol in his blood, and because he was dead and couldn’t answer.

At last I came to the photos of Mummy. There were lights around her, auras, almost halos. How strange. The color of the lights was the same color as her hair—golden. I didn’t know what the lights were, I couldn’t imagine, though I came up with all sorts of supernatural explanations.

As I realized their true origin, my stomach clenched.

Flashes. They were flashes. And within some of the flashes were ghostly visages, and half visages, paps and reflected paps and refracted paps on all the smooth metal surfaces and glass windscreens. Those men who’d chased her…they’d never stopped shooting her while she lay between the seats, unconscious, or semiconscious, and in their frenzy they’d sometimes accidentally photographed each other. Not one of them was checking on her, offering her help, not even comforting her. They were just shooting, shooting, shooting.

I hadn’t known. I hadn’t dreamed. I’d been told that paps chased Mummy, that they’d hunted her like a pack of wild dogs, but I’d never dared to imagine that, like wild dogs, they’d also feasted on her defenseless body. I hadn’t been aware, before this moment, that the last thing Mummy saw on this earth was a flashbulb.

Unless…Now I looked much closer at Mummy: no visible injuries. She was slumped, out of it, but generally…fine. Better than fine. Her dark blazer, her glowing hair, her radiant skin—doctors at the hospital where she
was taken couldn’t stop remarking how beautiful she was. I stared, trying to make myself cry, but I couldn’t, because she was so lovely, and so alive.

Maybe the photos JLP held back were more definitive. Maybe they showed death in plainer terms. But I didn’t consider that possibility too closely. I slammed the folder shut and said:
She’s hiding.

I’d requested this file because I sought proof, and the file proved nothing, except that Mummy was in a car crash, after which she looked generally unharmed, while those who chased her continued to harass her. That was all. Rather than proof, I’d discovered more reasons for rage. In that little office, seated before that wretched Do Not Bend envelope, the red mist came down, and it wasn’t a mist, it was a torrent.

I carried a small
overnight bag containing a few personal items, plus one standard-size ironing board, slung jauntily under my arm like a surfboard. The Army had ordered me to bring it. From here on my shirts and trousers would need to be crease-free.

I knew as much about operating an ironing board as I did about operating a tank—less, actually. But that was now the Army’s problem. I was now the Army’s problem.

I wished them luck.

So did Pa. It was he who dropped me off in Camberley, Surrey, at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst.

May 2005.

He stood to one side and watched me put on my red name tag,
Wales
, then sign in. He told reporters how proud he was.

Then extended his hand.
Off you go, darling boy.

Photo op. Click.

I was assigned to a platoon of twenty-nine young men and women. Early the next day, after pulling on our new combats, we filed into an ancient room, hundreds of years old. You could smell the history—it seemed to come off the wood-paneled walls like steam. We recited an oath to the Queen.
I swear allegiance to Crown and country…
The lad beside me shot an elbow into my ribs.
Bet you say Granny rather than Queen!

That was the last time, for the next five weeks, that he or anyone else would venture a joke. There was nothing funny about boot camp.

Boot camp—such a benign name for what happened. We were pushed to our limits, physically, mentally, spiritually. We were taken—or dragged—to a place beyond our limits, and then a bit further, by a stolid group of lovable sadists called color sergeants. Large, loud, extremely masculine men—and yet they all had tiny little dogs. I’ve never heard or read an explanation for this, and I can’t venture one. I’ll only say that it was odd to see these testosterone-rich, mostly bald ogres cooing at their poodles, shih tzus and pugs.

I’d say they treated us like dogs, except they treated their dogs so much better. With us they never said:
There’s a good boy!
They got up in our faces, shouted at us through the clouds of their aftershave, and never, ever let up. They belittled us, harassed us, shrieked at us, and made no secret of their intent. They meant to break us.

If they couldn’t break us, brilliant. Welcome to the Army! If they could, even better. Better to know now. Better that
they
should break us than the enemy.

They used a variety of approaches. Physical duress, psychological intimidation—and humor? I remember one color sergeant pulling me aside.
Mr. Wales, I was on guard one day at Windsor Castle, wearing my bearskin, and along came a boy who kicked gravel on my boots! And that boy…was YOU!

He was joking, but I wasn’t sure I should laugh, and I wasn’t sure it was true. I didn’t recognize him, and I certainly didn’t remember kicking gravel on any guardsmen. But if it
was
true, I apologized and hoped we could put it behind us.

Within two weeks several cadets had tapped out. We woke to find their beds made, their stuff gone. No one thought less of them. This shit wasn’t for everybody. Some of my fellow cadets would confess, before lights out, that they feared being next.

I never did, however. I was, for the most part, fine. Boot camp was no picnic, but I never wavered in my belief that I was exactly where I was meant to be. They can’t break me, I thought. Is it, I wondered, because I’m already broken?

Also, no matter what they did to us, it was done away from the press, so for me every day was a kind of holiday. The training center was like Club H. No matter what the color sergeants dished out, there was always, always the compensatory bonus of no paps. Nothing could really hurt me in a place where the press couldn’t find me.

And then they found me. A reporter from
The
Sun
sneaked onto the
grounds and shambled around, holding a phony bomb, trying to prove—what? No one knew.
The Sun
said their reporter, this
faux flâneur
, was trying to expose the training center’s lax security, to prove that Prince Harry was in danger.

The truly scary part was that some readers actually believed their rubbish.

Every day, upon
waking at five
a.m.
, we were forced to down a huge bottle of water. The bottle was Army-issued, black plastic, a leftover from the Boer War. Any liquid inside tasted of first-generation plastic. And piss. Plus, it was piss warm. So, after the guzzling, moments before setting out on our morning run, some of us would fall to the ground and vomit the water straight back up.