The duchess, p.8
The Duchess, page 8
Camilla was not built for work in those days – she did the bare minimum she could get away with – but she was a good homemaker and an excellent mother. Like the kitchen, the rest of the house was dark inside because of the leaded windows and low ceilings, an effect intensified by the profusion of oak panelling, but she had a good eye for colour and brightened it up. She furnished it as her own childhood home had been furnished, with a mixture of antique and modern pieces, using pretty fabrics, plenty of table lamps and good rugs. There were books everywhere, and dozens of prints, paintings, cartoons and photographs on the walls, while silver boxes, framed photographs and other knick-knacks covered all available surfaces. Vases of fresh flowers and pot plants were a regular feature. Definitely shabby-chic rather than – to use her expression – ‘tickety boo’, it was a comfortable and happy home for her own children to grow up in.
What’s more, she made sure that Tom and his sister Laura Rose, born on 1 January 1978, had the security of living in one place. Most Army families move from pillar to post and live on military bases, uprooting their children from schools and friends every time they are transferred. But Camilla was not a regular Army wife. She refused either to live in married quarters or to move from one posting to another, which may not have done much for Andrew’s progression up the regimental ranks but did ensure that they all had a happy home life.
And to most outsiders, they did appear to be a very happy family. Everyone who knew them well was aware of Andrew’s serial unfaithfulness to Camilla, but it was passed off as a bit of a joke. One friend who sat next to him at dinner one night said, ‘I’m really hurt, Andrew. I’m the only one of Camilla’s friends you haven’t made a pass at. What’s wrong with me?’ Those friends he did make a play for showed scant loyalty, yet she never seemed to blame them or make great scenes with Andrew. He and she were competitive with one another but there was never a tense atmosphere in the house, no barbed comments or bitter exchanges. They teased each other, and seemed to outsiders to have a good, healthy rapport. Andrew’s affairs were just a fact of life and not something she often spoke about.
It was only those very closest to her who knew quite how standoffish and cold he could be towards her, and how deeply, bitterly hurt she was by his infidelity. She loved Andrew – for reasons that her family could never entirely fathom – and longed to be truly loved by him, and she didn’t feel she was. There was always someone prettier, wittier, sexier, waiting to take him away from her. And because he spent his weekdays in London, he was never short of the opportunity to do as he pleased. Today, looking back, he would admit there is truth in that. If blame was to be apportioned for the way the marriage ended, he would feel obliged to take a full 80 per cent of it. Love her though he does, he would also admit that Camilla was more in love with him than he was with her.
For some years, when they were both in the Army, he and his brother-in-law Nic Paravicini shared an office, and a flat too – the same flat off Ebury Street that Camilla had shared with Virginia Carington. Although they were both married, they led a bachelor existence, and had a code involving empty milk bottles. Arranged in a certain way outside the door, these meant ‘Do not disturb.’ Nic would say Andrew arranged the milk bottles more often than he did. And still, as often as not, the women Andrew was seeing were Camilla’s friends.
For all the hurt, it would never have occurred to her to divorce him. She had been brought up to believe that you stuck at things, you didn’t give up. And so she found ways of coping. Hunting was one way; galloping amongst a cavalcade of horses, any one of which might bite or kick or take a tumble, left no time for thinking. And in the summer when the hunting season came to an end, her escape was to bury herself in her garden. She saw friends and family, and there were the children to keep her busy as she took them to and from nursery and then school, to parties and the cinema, to see their grandparents in Plumpton or Annabel and her children, Ben, Alice and Catherine Elliot, in Dorset.
Bruce and Rosalind were tremendous grandparents and the cousins loved going to stay with them. The initials of each of them, crafted out of round stones, are cemented into the path in the vegetable garden at The Laines to this day. They went there at Christmas and Easter, and every summer Bruce and Rosalind paid for the entire family to spend a fortnight in the Grand Hotel Excelsior on Ischia, a tiny volcanic island south-west of Naples in Italy. Andrew was never keen on the sun and would spend his time, observed one of them cattily, inside writing postcards to duchesses and all his other titled friends. But the children loved it. Every day the routine was the same. They went down to the beach with their mothers for the morning, a doughnut for elevenses, back to the hotel to meet everyone for lunch, a general knowledge quiz, a siesta, a game of tennis on the clay courts, and back to find Bruce and Rosalind on their second Negroni. They did that every year until the children were in their teens.
Camilla never set out to be unfaithful to Andrew. She flirted for sure, because that was the way she was, a twinkly, sexy woman with a husky laugh that men adored. Everyone, indeed, adored her – men, women and children – because she was a life force and said outrageously funny things, but she no more wanted an open marriage than to fly to the moon. But as the years went by, she realised that Andrew would never change, would never love her and cherish her, never make her feel good about herself; and inevitably, the confidence that had been her hallmark throughout her childhood started to crumble. What had made her so strong as a child was the absolute certainty that her parents loved her and the absolute security that came from that certainty. She never, ever had that feeling with Andrew. She lived with a permanent knot of dread in her tummy, that one day he might leave her. It left her very vulnerable to the attentions of a suitor.
9
The Attentions of a Prince
Charles had been heartbroken when he lost Camilla, but however strong his feelings for her, life had to go on. He was a romantic, but he was not the first man to have been disappointed in love and not the first to have had to learn to live with it. He was young, he was attractive, he was eminently eligible and he took out a succession of pretty girls, some of them suitable, some not – and some too sensible to want a future under the spotlight. He proposed to Amanda Knatchbull. Mountbatten had been urging his granddaughter on Charles since she was a teenager, but they knew each other too well. She turned him down. He wasn’t surprised; he knew that any girl he married would have to make huge sacrifices. Even those he dated risked having their past raked over in the tabloids. The press were obsessed by his love life: they chronicled every sighting, every dinner date, every holiday companion, every girl who showed up to watch him play polo. One newspaper exclusively reported his engagement to Princess Marie Astrid of Luxembourg, whom he had never even met.
He hated it. He resented the intrusion and he despaired of ever finding someone. He knew she would have to meet the strict and increasingly rare criteria his position demanded. More than a decade after the advent of the contraceptive pill and the era of free love, the pool of unmarried, aristocratic Anglican virgins available was diminishing by the day. In 1975, he had said, ‘I’ve fallen in love with all sorts of girls and I fully intend to go on doing so, but I’ve made sure I haven’t married the first person I’ve fallen in love with. I think one’s got to be aware of the fact that falling madly in love with someone is not necessarily the starting point to getting married.’ But he had made the mistake of saying he thought thirty might be the right age to settle down. As he approached the magical age, the scrutiny and the madness and his despair intensified.
If he was seen with women married to his friends, however, or old girlfriends who were now married, no one seemed to turn a hair. Not unlike in Edwardian times, they slipped beneath the radar, and although the press had their suspicions about some and were certain about others, they never pursued them in the way they pursued single women. One of those was Dale (later Lady) Tryon, a vivacious Australian he’d met at a school dance at Timbertop in Australia when they were both seventeen. He’d nicknamed her Kanga. She was the daughter of a rough and ready Melbourne printing magnate, so she was rich but not marriage material. She moved to London and in 1973 married the merchant banker Anthony Tryon, one of the Prince’s oldest friends and sometime financial adviser. He was ten years older than Dale, a far more sober character who would become the 3rd Baron Tryon. His father had been Keeper of the Privy Purse, a key member of the royal household and, like Andrew Parker Bowles, a page boy at the Queen’s coronation. Charles became godfather to their elder son, also named Charles, born in 1976. They had another son and two daughters. As well as a house in London, they owned a 700-acre estate in Wiltshire and rented a fishing lodge in Iceland. Charles was a frequent visitor to all three. Dale called him the ‘Bonny Prince’ and whenever he telephoned to say he was on his way to see her, she cleared the house.
One year, Anthony had gone ahead to Iceland with a mutual friend, Timothy (later 5th Baron) Tollemache. Dale and the Prince flew separately in an Andover of the Queen’s flight and were so engrossed with each other in the private compartment, where they had asked to be left undisturbed, that they failed to notice the plane had landed at Reykjavik and that outside a red carpet and a civic reception awaited, complete with Icelandic military band. Kanga kept their affair secret from no one and had an open line to Nigel Dempster, the Daily Mail’s famous gossip columnist, who was a fellow Australian. She started up a fashion label in 1980, selling one-size-fits-all dresses, and constantly promoted them and herself by selling stories about her royal connections.
In the end this was her undoing. Charles started ignoring her, and she became almost demented with the pain of losing him – and she hated Camilla, whose star was in the ascendant. ‘Kanga adored him,’ says a close friend in the fashion industry who helped launch her brand. ‘Whenever he rang the office she would disappear. She was very funny and completely outrageous and unbelievably naughty sexually. When she was nice she was fantastic and when she was nasty she was horrendous. She was like a spoilt child, living on the edge, everything was extreme and there was always drink in the equation.’
Camilla was none of those things. Charles spent many a weekend with the Parker Bowles family. It was inevitable that they would continue to see one another. They had so many friends in common, and they went to so many of the same sporting and social gatherings. And, of course, there was polo. Charles and Andrew still played in the same team and were friends, and since a lot of the matches were held in the Wiltshire/Gloucestershire area, it was logical for Charles to stay the night at Bolehyde, when as often as not Camilla would get together a party of his friends for dinner. Because of Andrew’s royal links, there were often invitations from the Queen and the Queen Mother as well as from the Prince himself. The couple went to stay at Sandringham and Balmoral, they went racing at Ascot and Cheltenham, and they were always invited to the lavish parties the Queen Mother used to throw at Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park or to her Scottish homes, Birkhall and the Castle of Mey, way up in the north. Andrew was a great favourite of the Queen Mother, and she approved of his new wife. So did the Queen; Camilla got on famously with Elizabeth. Their mutual love of horses and dogs was a winning formula.
When Tom was born, Andrew and Camilla asked the Prince to be their son’s godfather, which further cemented the relationship between them all. The christening took place at the Guards Chapel, and they specially arranged the date to fit in with the Prince’s naval schedule so he could be there. Charles left the Navy in 1977 having commanded his own ship, HMS Bronington, hunting mines in the North Sea. It was the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, and the beginning of his full-time royal duties.
It was also the year he dated Diana’s eldest sister, the fiery, red-haired Lady Sarah Spencer. They had met at Windsor Castle, whither she’d been invited by the Queen for Royal Ascot. The Parker Bowles had also been invited – Camilla was pregnant with Laura for most of that year. And it was while Charles was shooting at Althorp, the Spencer family’s estate in Northamptonshire, in the autumn, that he first consciously met Diana, who was just sixteen and home from boarding school. She said later, ‘I kept out of the way. I remember being a fat, podgy, no make-up, unsmart lady but I made a lot of noise and he liked that and he came up to me after dinner and we had a big dance … for someone like that to show you any attention – I was just so sort of amazed. Why would anyone like him be interested in me? And it was interest.’
That was the moment when she first started to dream about marrying the Prince of Wales. Her sister’s relationship with Charles came to an abrupt end. ‘He is fabulous as a person,’ announced Sarah, ‘but I am not in love with him. He is a romantic who falls in love easily … Our relationship is totally platonic. I do not believe that Prince Charles wants to marry yet. He has still not met the person he wants to marry. I think of him as the big brother I never had … I wouldn’t marry anyone I didn’t love, whether it was the dustman or the King of England. If he asked me I would turn him down.’
Publicly bruising comments like that did nothing for the Prince’s fragile ego. And where better to seek solace for life’s knocks, setbacks and dilemmas than with Camilla, who might laugh and tease him but would do so gently and kindly, almost in a maternal way, and who was loyal to her bootstraps. He would speak to her on the phone for hours, pouring his heart out, or write her long expansive letters – all of them handwritten with a fountain pen in black ink. His head was always buzzing with ideas and torturous thoughts about life and his curiously ill-defined role in it. They always had plenty to talk about, as they always would; conversation came easily between them and they shared the same sense of the ridiculous. She didn’t falsely flatter him, she wasn’t angling for anything, and she was one of the few people who’d never been in awe of his status. She treated him like a normal person, as she had when they were together, and if ever he behaved badly, or was selfish or thoughtless, she wasn’t afraid to tell him so. She was a proper friend.
When they’d first known one another, Charles didn’t hunt, but in the intervening years he had discovered the sport and found it thrilling. The Queen never hunted – her interest, like her mother’s, was racing – but her father, King George VI, had been a great enthusiast, as was his father, and on back through the generations. Charles on the other hand had grown up playing his father’s game, polo. He absolutely loved it, but it is a summer sport; and so, encouraged by Lieutenant Colonel Sir John Miller, the Queen’s Crown Equerry, he wrote to the Duke of Beaufort in 1974, asking if he could join his famous hounds for a day.
The Duke of Beaufort’s foxhounds are one of the few remaining private packs of hounds in the country, although since the ban in 2004, they now set out to follow trails and not foxes. They are also the most prestigious. They live very luxuriously in kennels on the Badminton House estate, the Duke’s magnificent ancestral home in Gloucestershire, where hounds have been kennelled since 1640, and have pedigree records dating back fifty-four generations to the mid-1700s. They hunt over 760 square miles of south Gloucestershire and north Wiltshire, much of it owned by the Duke – and while they are deadly for a fox, they are some of the softest animals you will ever come across.
The 10th Duke laid on an extra meet with some friends specially for the Prince’s benefit. He found it ‘exciting’, ‘challenging’ and ‘dangerous’, an ‘extraordinary thrill’, and became passionate about it. The Queen’s advisers were anxious he would upset the anti-bloodsports lobby, but she thought him old enough to make up his own mind, and so Charles continued to hunt. After the ban in England and Wales, neither he nor Camilla, nor his sons, could be seen to break the law and none of them has hunted since. But for many years before that, he and Sir John travelled the country in search of the best packs to ride out with – always unannounced. He didn’t want to antagonise the saboteurs, so he seldom attended the meet. He would make arrangements with the Master to join the hunt five or ten minutes after they had moved off, and rather than jostle alongside the rest of the field, he would get special dispensation to ride up at the front with the huntsman.
The polo season was all over by September, when the polo ponies were turned out to grass for a well-earned rest, and the hunters that had spent the summer idly munching grass were trotted round the lanes to get them fit for the hunting season. This started with cub hunting in August, which allowed the huntsmen to train inexperienced young hounds to follow the scent. Proper hunting began in October and ran through the winter until March or April, leaving just a month before the polo season began again.
Hunting is a highly dangerous sport and because of that inspires great camaraderie, so that even if Camilla went hunting alone she would always be amongst friends, everyone looking out for one another. Horses are heavy, strong and unpredictable. A hundred and one things can go wrong, and it takes just one to consign a rider to a wheelchair for the rest of their days, or worse. It’s no wonder they start the day with a stirrup cup of sloe gin before moving off. And there is a social side to hunting that has nothing to do with horses; it includes an annual hunt ball, which is the highlight of the season and an opportunity for great drunkenness and for all the simmering sexual tension built up in the saddle to find an outlet.
Camilla is a highly competent horsewoman. She has no fear on a horse, she is completely at one with the animal and apart from once falling and breaking her collar bone, she has never had any serious accidents, but she’s never been a risk-taker. As in life, so in hunting. She would take the day at a gentle pace and never leap blindly over any obstacle that presented itself. She jumped if it was necessary, but if something looked dangerous and there was the option of an open gate instead, she would take it. And she only ever hunted one horse, so she would go home when her horse was tired, usually in the early afternoon.
