Shadows of a Princess. Patrick Jephson

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СКАЧАТЬ ‘Sex is OK, but sex with love is the best, isn’t it?’ That was quite a tough one to answer.

      Although these sources of consolation were safe, they were no real substitute for the pleasures and hazards of a passionate relationship. Instead she developed an ability to experience emotions vicariously, drawing on her existing skills as a shrewd people-watcher and a natural talent to be sympathetic. St Paul’s injunction to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep might have been written for her. Sadly, joy is not an easy emotion to experience at second hand and after an initial expression of pleasure at another’s good fortune, she often found that it left her feeling envious and dissatisfied. This always seemed to be most pronounced in maternity wards. It did not take a genius to work out why.

      In addition, she did find some consolation in well-documented liaisons with other men, most notably with James Hewitt, who already rode high in her affections when I joined her staff. He was a regular but discreet visitor to KP, although our paths seldom crossed. Sometimes when I was leaving the red-haired Captain would be arriving, emitting a palpable sense of unease and a nervous but winning smile.

      Later, the Princess closely involved me in her attempts – by then – to distance herself from him. I even carried discouraging messages to him at his barracks when he was planning a newspaper revelation about their relationship ‘to put the record straight’ (something, incidentally, which I have never thought possible on practically any subject). In 1989, however, the affair was just one more thing to be ignored, another sign of our unhappy times.

      Had I wanted to, I could have found out more and sometimes did, especially over a beer with a detective. I knew, however, that it was more important to be able to deny convincingly knowledge of anything that my boss might later wish she had not done. Being a royal conscience might be a wonderfully self-justifying job, but it would be a short one.

      She was paranoid that her affair would be discovered – but only because it would weaken her moral superiority over her husband. She only admitted the affair with Hewitt after it had become public knowledge. After his return from the Gulf War in 1991, the Princess often visited Hewitt at his family home in Devon. She was terrified of being found out and I even warned the police that they might have to lie to cover up for her. I was shocked to hear myself say it, but they just smiled indulgently.

      She wistfully imagined a house in the country – an idyllic domestic life for them both, full of children, dogs and horses – but when he became too besotted, she was embarrassed and realized he was a liability in the battle against her husband for public sympathy.

      Although I chose to be ignorant at the time, and naive too, it was sadly obvious even to me that these desperate, ill-starred affairs shared Jane Austen’s description of adultery as merely consuming the participants with ‘universal longing’. As I watched her struggle with this longing, but also with conscience, duty and an enduring loyalty to her husband, I sometimes found it hard not to recognize some truth in her generally low opinion of men.

      More than once I heard her reproduce a favourite and very second-hand phrase, picked up from TV, I guessed, but no less sincere for that: ‘All men are bastards!’ Sometimes, catching a flicker of reaction on my face, she might add, ‘Sorry, Patrick.’

      I began to watch closely how the Princess coped with the strains of her predicament. She was not good at relaxing, although she devoted increasing amounts of time and energy to finding the ‘peace of mind’ she often told me she was searching for. Her luggage was always well stocked with the latest in a seemingly endless catalogue of remedies – for stress, sleeplessness and various unspecified deficiencies, aches and pains. There were numerous varieties of homoeopathic pills, tinctures and oils, all accompanied by scrappy instructions which she would sometimes read aloud to me in search of guidance I could not give.

      Aromatherapy was a continuing fascination, which was not surprising given her love of perfumes, flowers and scented candles. Keen to share her belief in its revitalizing qualities, she once gave me some expensively prepared bath oil. It was a kind gesture, even if it did make the bath – and me – smell of Harpic to my uneducated nose.

      An army of practitioners went in and out of favour. Among the masseurs, Stephen Twigg was a favourite. She believed that his trademark deep-tissue technique helped to relieve her of conveniently unspecific aches and pains caused by stress.

      Colonic irrigation was another popular discovery, thanks to the Duchess of York. The semi-medical procedures and professional intimacy were highly attractive. So too was the skill and sympathy of the eminent Chrissie Fitzgerald, who so dexterously wielded the various tubes and solutions. The attraction, which survived for several years, waned abruptly as Chrissie’s treatment started to be accompanied by doses of robust common sense. Her crime, it appeared, was to be insufficiently sympathetic to the injustices of her royal client’s existence – perhaps because she had witnessed darker shades of the same misfortune further down the social scale. She also did not take kindly to the press attention which the Princess seemed powerless to stop bringing, literally, to her door. Chrissie was dropped abruptly, even brutally, soon afterwards. Others found it easier to keep to their script.

      Fitness trainers such as Carolan Brown remained in favour until the Princess’s death, as did relays of astrologers. Some, however, such as psychotherapist Susie Orbach or self-improvement guru Anthony Robbins, found their work less conducive to the quick fix that she craved.

      Sympathy and attention rather than reality were what the Princess sought. She paid no more than lip service to the alternative lifestyles on offer and did not embrace the complementary medicine philosophy in the way that her husband did. Nonetheless, if her exploration of her own health needs lacked conviction or direction, her attitude to her therapists did not. Their greatest value was in the attention they lavished on her.

      Some became highly influential and coloured her thinking, with unpredictable results. Called upon to speak publicly on health or social issues, she would sometimes show an alarming tendency to recycle advice she had imperfectly understood from one of these unofficial sources. Following the thoughts of a current favourite, she once spoke convincingly of children’s status as ‘miniature adults’ – to the consternation of the patronage involved, which preferred to think of them as anything but.

      Quite apart from the frustration it caused her official advisers, this hunger for guidance from dubious sources had a destructive effect on the Princess’s own judgement, a quality she did not lack when she applied herself. She sowed gossip and traded rumour with them and they in turn encouraged a sense of infallibility which undermined her innate sense of self-preservation. A blind belief in her own intuition increasingly became a substitute for balanced analysis, or even plain common sense.

      It also undermined her sense of the ridiculous. ‘Do you know,’ she said to me one day in June 1992, ‘my astrologer says my husband will never be king!’ That may have been exactly what she wanted to hear at the time, but it did not appear to alter her husband’s daily routine one jot. Yet she continued to heed her astrologers’ predictions, the more dire the better, particularly where the Prince was concerned. Sure enough, she was rewarded with regular forecasts of helicopter crashes, skiing accidents and other calamities that obstinately refused to befall him – much to her relief, I have no doubt.

      Ultimately she lost touch with reality in her restless desire for reassurance. In the last year of her life she was quoted in Le Monde as saying, ‘I don’t need to take advice from anyone. I trust my own instincts.’

      The truth was, she consumed advice insatiably and, depending on her mood, she would take it from anyone. Her credulity seemed directly proportional to the thrill factor of whatever prediction she was being invited to believe – which made her pretty much like the rest of us, I reluctantly concluded.

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