Spare (47 page)

We’d fought it, filed a formal complaint, but thankfully the subject didn’t come up that night over dinner. We had happier things to discuss. Meg had just done a trip to India with World Vision, working on menstrual health management and education access for young girls, after which she’d taken Doria on a yoga retreat in Goa—a belated celebration of Doria’s sixtieth birthday. We were celebrating Doria, celebrating being together, and doing it all at our favorite place, Soho House at 76 Dean Street. On the subject of India: we laughed about the advice I’d given Meg before she’d left: Do
not
take a photo in front of the Taj Mahal. She’d asked why and I’d said:
My mum.

I’d explained that my mother had posed for a photo there, and it had become iconic, and I didn’t want anyone thinking Meg was trying to mimic my mother. Meg had never heard of this photo, and found the whole thing baffling, and I loved her for being baffled.

That dinner with Doria was wonderful, but I look back on it now as the end of the beginning. The next day, the pap photos appeared, and there was a new flood of stories, a new surge along the many channels of social media. Racism, misogyny, criminal stupidity—it all increased.

Not knowing where else to turn, I phoned Pa.

Don’t read it, darling boy.

It’s not that simple, I said angrily. I might lose this woman. She might either decide I’m not worth the bother, or the press might so poison the public that some idiot might do something bad, harm her in some way.

It was already happening in slow motion. Death threats. Her workplace on lockdown because someone, reacting to what they’d read, had made a credible threat. She’s isolated, I said, and afraid, she hasn’t raised the blinds in her house for months—and you’re telling me not to read it?

He said I was overreacting.
This is sadly just the way it is.

I appealed to his self-interest. Doing nothing was a terrible look for the monarchy.
People out there have strong feelings about what’s happening to her, Pa. They take it personally, you need to understand that.

He was unmoved.

The address was half
an hour from Nott Cott. Just a quick drive across the Thames, past the park…but it felt like one of my polar journeys.

Heart pounding, I took a deep breath, knocked at the door.

The woman opened it, welcomed me. She led me down a short corridor to her office.

First door on the left.

Small room. Windows with venetian blinds. Right on the busy street. You could hear cars, shoes clicking on the pavement. People talking, laughing.

She was fifteen years older than me, but youthful. She reminded me of Tiggy. It was shocking, really. Such a similar vibe.

She pointed me to a dark green sofa and took a chair across the room. The day was autumnal, yet I was sweating profusely. I apologized.
I overheat easily
.
Also, I’m a bit nervous
.

Say no more.

She jumped up, ran out. Moments later she returned with a little fan, which she aimed at me.

Ah, lovely. Thank you.

She waited for me to begin. But I didn’t know where to begin. So I began with my mum. I said I was afraid of losing her.

She gave me a long, searching look.

She knew, of course, that I’d already lost my mum. How surreal, to meet a therapist who already knows part of your life story, who’s possibly spent beach holidays reading whole books about you.

Yes
,
I’ve already lost my mum, of course, but I’m afraid that by talking about her, now, here, to a perfect stranger, and perhaps alleviating some of the pain of that loss, I’ll be losing her again. I’ll be losing that feeling, that presence of her—or what I’ve always felt as her presence.

The therapist squinted. I tried again.

You see…the pain…if that’s what it is…that’s all I have left of her. And the pain is also what drives me. Some days the pain is the only thing holding me together. And also, I suppose, without the pain, well, she might think…I’ve forgotten her.

That sounded silly. But, well, there it was.

Most memories of my mother, I explained, with sudden and overwhelming sorrow, were gone. On the other side of the Wall. I told her about the Wall. I told her I’d spoken to Willy about my lack of memories of our mother. He’d advised me to look through photo albums, which I’d promptly done. Nothing.

So, my mother wasn’t images, or impressions, she was mainly just a hole in my heart, and if I healed that hole, patched it up—what then?

I asked if all this sounded crazy.

No.

We were silent.

A long time.

She asked me what I needed.
Why are you here?

Look
, I said.
What I need…is to be rid of this heaviness in my chest.
I need…I need…

Yes?

To cry. Please. Help me cry.

The next session
I asked if it would be all right for me to lie down.

She smiled.
I was wondering when you’d ask.

I stretched out on the green sofa, tucked a pillow under my neck.

I spoke about the physical and emotional suffering. The panic, the anxiety. The sweats.

How long has this been going on?

Two or three years now. It used to be much worse.

I told her about the talk with Cress. During the skiing holiday. The top coming off the bottle, emotions fizzing all over the place. I’d cried a bit then…but it wasn’t enough. I needed to cry more. And I couldn’t.

I got around to talking about the deep rage, the ostensible trigger for seeking her out in the first place. I described the scene with Meg, in the kitchen.

I shook my head.

I vented about my family. Pa and Willy. Camilla. I frequently stopped myself, mid-sentence, at the sound of passersby outside the window. If they ever knew. Prince Harry in there yapping about his family. His problems. Oh, the papers would have a field day.

Which led us on to the subject of the press. Firmer ground. I let fly. My own countrymen and countrywomen, I said, showing such contempt, such vile disrespect, to the woman I loved. Sure, the press had been cruel to me through the years, but that was different. I was born into it. And sometimes I’d asked for it, brought it on myself.

But this woman has done nothing to deserve such cruelty.

And whenever I complained about it, privately or publicly, people just rolled their eyes. They said I was whingeing, said I only pretended to want privacy, said Meg was pretending as well.
Oh, she’s getting chased, is she? Wah-wah, give us a break! She’ll be fine, she’s an actress, she’s used to paps, in fact, wants them.

But no one wanted this. No one could ever get used to it. All those eye-rollers couldn’t take ten minutes of it. Meg was having panic attacks for the first time in her life. She’d recently received a text from a perfect stranger who knew her address in Toronto and promised to put a bullet into her head.

The therapist said I sounded angry.

Shit, yes, I was angry!

She said that, no matter how valid my complaints, I also sounded stuck. Granted, Meg and I were living through an ordeal, but the Harry who’d snapped at Meg with such anger wasn’t this Harry, the reasonable Harry, lying on this sofa and laying out his case. That was twelve-year-old Harry, traumatized Harry.

What you’re going through right now is reminiscent of 1997, Harry, but I also fear that part of you is trapped in 1997.

I didn’t like the sound of that. I felt a bit insulted.
Calling me a child? Seems a bit rude.

You say you want truth, you value truth above all—well, there’s the truth.

The session went over the allotted time. It lasted nearly two hours. When our time was up, we made a date to get together again soon. I asked if it would be all right if I gave her a hug.

Yes, of course
.

I embraced her lightly, thanked her.

Outside, on the street, my head was swimming. In each direction there was an amazing collection of restaurants and shops, and I’d have given anything to walk up and down, look in the windows, give myself time to process all I’d said and learned.

But, of course, impossible.

Didn’t want to cause a scene.

The therapist,
it so happened, had met Tiggy. Astounding coincidence. Smallest of all possible worlds. So in another session we talked about Tiggy, how she’d been a surrogate mum to me and Willy, how Willy and I had often turned women into surrogate mums. How often they’d eagerly cast themselves in that role.

Surrogate mums made me feel better, I admitted, and worse, because I felt guilty.
What would Mummy think?

We talked about guilt.

I mentioned Mummy’s experience with therapy, as I understood it. Didn’t help her. Might’ve made things worse, actually. So many people preyed on her, exploited her—including therapists.

We talked about Mummy’s parenting, how she could sometimes over-mother, then disappear for stretches. It seemed an important discussion, but also disloyal.

More guilt.

We talked about life inside the British bubble, inside the royal bubble. A bubble inside a bubble—impossible to describe to anyone who hasn’t actually experienced it. People simply didn’t realize: they heard the word “royal,” or “prince,” and lost all rationality.
Ah, a prince—you have no problems.

They assumed…no, they’d been taught…it was all a fairytale. We weren’t human.

A writer many Britons admired, a writer of thick historical novels that
racked up literary prizes, had penned an essay about my family, in which she said we were simply…pandas.

Our current royal family doesn’t have the difficulties in breeding that pandas do, but pandas and royal persons alike are expensive to conserve and ill-adapted to any modern environment. But aren’t they interesting? Aren’t they nice to look at?

I’ll never forget the highly respected essayist who wrote in Britain’s most highly respected literary publication that my mother’s “early death spared us all a lot of tedium.” (He referred in the same essay to “Diana’s tryst with the underpass.”) But this panda crack always struck me as both acutely perceptive and uniquely barbarous. We did live in a zoo, but by the same token I knew, as a soldier, that turning people into animals, into non-people, is the first step in mistreating them, in destroying them. If even a celebrated intellectual could dismiss us as animals, what hope for the man or woman on the street?

I gave the therapist an overview of how this dehumanization had played out in the first half of my life. But now, with the dehumanizing of Meg, there was so much more hate, more vitriol—plus racism. I told her what I’d seen, heard, witnessed, over the last few months. At one point I sat up on the couch, crooked my neck to see if she was listening. Her mouth was hanging open. A lifelong resident of Britain, she’d thought she knew.

She didn’t know.

At the end of the session I asked her professional opinion:

Is what I’m feeling…normal?

She laughed. What’s normal anyway?

But she conceded that one thing was abundantly clear: I found myself in highly unusual circumstances.

Do you think I have an addictive personality?

More accurately, what I wanted to know was, if I did have an addictive personality, where would I be right now?

Hard to say. Hypotheticals, you know.

She asked if I’d used drugs.

Yes.

I told her some wild stories.

Well, I am rather surprised you’re not a drug addict.

If there was one thing to which I did seem undeniably addicted, however, it was the press. Reading it, raging at it, she said, these were obvious compulsions.

I laughed.
True. But they’re such shit.

She laughed.
They are.

I always thought Cressida
had performed a miracle, opening me up, releasing suppressed emotions. But she’d only started the miracle, and now the therapist brought it to completion.

All my life I’d told people I couldn’t remember the past, couldn’t remember my mum, but I never gave anyone the full picture. My memory was dead. Now, through months of therapy, my memory twitched, kicked, sputtered.

It came to life.

Some days I’d open my eyes to find Mummy…standing before me.

A thousand images returned, some so bright and vivid that they were like holograms.

I remembered mornings in Mummy’s apartment at Kensington Palace, the nanny waking Willy and me, helping us down to Mummy’s bedroom. I remembered that she had a waterbed, and Willy and I would jump up and down on the mattress, screaming, laughing, our hair standing straight up. I remembered the breakfasts together, Mummy loving grapefruit and lychees, seldom drinking coffee or tea. I remembered that after breakfast we’d embark on the working day with her, sitting by her side during her first phone calls, auditing her business meetings.

I remembered Willy and me joining her for a chat with Christy Turlington, Claudia Schiffer, and Cindy Crawford. Very confusing. Especially for two shy boys, at or about the age of puberty.

I remembered bedtimes in Kensington Palace, saying goodnight at the foot of the stairs, kissing her soft neck, inhaling her perfume, then lying in bed, in the dark, feeling so far away, so alone, and longing to hear her voice just one more time. I remembered my bedroom being the farthest from hers, and in the dark, in the terrible silence, being unable to relax, unable to let go.

The therapist urged me to press on.
We’re breaking through
, she said.
Let’s not stop
. I brought to her office a bottle of Mummy’s favorite perfume. (I’d reached out to Mummy’s sister, asked for the name.) First, by Van Cleef & Arpels. At the start of our session I lifted the lid, took a deep sniff.

Like a tab of LSD.

I read somewhere that smell is our oldest sense, and that fitted with what I experienced in that moment, images rising from what felt like the most primal part of my brain.