Shadows of a Princess. Patrick Jephson

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СКАЧАТЬ latest fad. My light-hearted attitude was intended to acknowledge the need for attention without conceding that she was anything other than physically fit as a fiddle. I never knew her to be genuinely ill for a single day. She kept her side of the pact by allowing – and maybe even welcoming – my theatrical disapproval as she swallowed the latest offerings from her army of alternative practitioners. As a reassuring contrast, I extolled the more traditional merits of hot whisky and a good book as aids to happy slumber. Perhaps sensibly, however, she avoided alcohol.

      The real problem was that she had no safe substitute for the wise, supportive and unpaid company which, in the end, was the only medicine she really needed. Underneath the light-heartedness I was worried about her growing tendency to find pseudo-medical excuses for attracting attention and sympathy. She became increasingly indiscriminate in her search for physical remedies for emotional disorders. Complementary cures were freely interspersed with more conventional sleeping pills and stimulants.

      The effect of these combinations was anybody’s guess, since no single doctor knew what she was dosing herself with, let alone controlled her intake. Deep-tissue massage and painful vitamin injections also became regular features of pre-tour preparations. Once, in a fit of hypochondria, she wangled an urgent MRI scan. Unsurprisingly, the scan confirmed my own less penetrating diagnosis: she was as fit as a fiddle.

      Reassurances and remedies were all to little effect in lonely hotels and guest residences, however. All the pills in the world did not seem able to help then, and she fell back into less esoteric habits. Too often, time spent in her room supposedly relaxing was spent in obsessive phone calls – gossip with girlfriends; gossip and flirting with admirers; gossip and intrigue with palace staff back home; and, on the plus side, laughter and light relief with her children, whom she missed acutely whenever she was abroad without them.

      Nothing she took seemed to dull her quick-wittedness, or her quick tongue. Depending on her mood, I found that she could be perceptive and thoughtful with her praise and encouragement, if a little inconsistent. Getting a pat on the back one day did not protect you from being kicked the day after for doing the same thing.

      When she was unhappy, her natural suspicion and deviousness took control. Then her verbal skills were employed to hurt and confuse. When roused, she used words like tomahawks and her aim seldom failed. She would know, with a cat’s cunning, when to let you feel the claw in her velvet paw. Like the predator she sometimes was, she would stalk her victim, waiting for his or her attention to be distracted before striking.

      Typically, we might be on a train about to arrive at our destination and my mind would be preoccupied with the practical demands of the next few minutes, when she would see her opportunity. Her voice would take on that tone of guileless inconsequentiality that always made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.

      ‘Patrick, you never told me I’d been invited to speak at the Sprained Wrist Association AGM. I know you wouldn’t understand, but people with sprained wrists are excluded by society. I think we ought to make a speech about it.’

      The opening volley was designed to saturate my defences. While still distractedly craning out of the window for a telltale sign of red carpet and a press posse, I would subconsciously assess the incoming missiles:

      - She has deliberately chosen a bad moment for me. This kind of premeditation always spells trouble. Look out for the second salvo. (My God, I hope she doesn’t know about that business with her new car…)

      - She is accusing me of deliberately concealing an invitation from her because I disapprove of it or because I am too lazy to research it. (Both true on occasions, as she probably knows.)

      - Why the Sprained Wrist Association, for goodness’ sake? Aha – cherchez a handsome radial osteopath. Extra trouble: she loves to pretend you are jealous.

      - Note that I am too insensitive to understand. This means I have missed a recent opportunity to be sympathetic, exacerbated by the fact that, unlike herself and people living with SWS (Sprained Wrist Syndrome), I have no idea what it is like to feel rejected.

      - And now ‘we’ have to make a speech. This means a heap of exploratory work with the Department of Health (again) and probably a ruined weekend while I draft the speech (again). The speech will then be rejected because take your pick – she has gone off the osteopath/the Daily Mail says SWS is all in the mind/the astrologer forbids speeches during the current transit of Pluto/the Prince is patron of the Sprained Knee Association and we are making a show of not competing at the moment.

      - Worst of all, somebody has snitched on me. How else did she find out about the invitation? Surely not one of the girls in the office … somebody looking through my papers … maybe the butler … the driver … Oh no! So she must know about—

      ‘Patrick! And when were you going to tell me you’d ruined my new car?’ [CURTAIN]

      Of course it helped, always having the last word.

      As time passed and I travelled with her more and more, I observed a phenomenon more usually associated with declining politicians and rock stars. The Princess found foreign tours stressful, both physically and mentally, yet she needed the buzz only they could provide. Tours also put her under unusually intense press scrutiny, because the travelling pack had no distractions other than her and the hotel bar, yet she delighted in the unmatched range of exotic and heart-tugging photo opportunities they provided. This persisted even when, as sometimes happened, the resulting press coverage back home was infuriatingly inaccurate and slanted.

      When I challenged one of the travelling correspondents with a particularly misleading front-page story bearing his by-line, he genuinely seemed to share my outrage. ‘It’s the editors,’ he protested. ‘They rewrite my stuff to conform with their current line on the War of the Waleses.’

      This last remark came back to me later. The Princess’s relations with the media were becoming a subject of growing interest to me, and to the public at large. I had already noticed that both she and her media pursuers had almost made a game out of satisfying their mutual requirement for each other (with truth as the first piece to leave the board), even though at times she would show flashes of resentment at press attention.

      It was also dawning on me that there was something in her character which was attracted to this love-hate relationship. It was echoed elsewhere in her life. I often saw it in her attitude to her husband, or his family, or the public duties she did so well, and on each occasion it was the love half of the equation that seemed hardest for her to feel. Time and again, like an untrusting child, she doubted the dependability of the love she was shown. Small wonder, then, that she protected any affection she felt able to give – except to her children – with a portcullis of preconditions.

      On a day-to-day basis, our job was to design her programme in such a way that the press had the best possible chance to report her routine public duties favourably, without inconveniencing the organizations she was visiting. If those organizations benefited in the process – and some did in spectacular fashion – then so much the better. On a deeper level, however, a dangerous mutual dependence was certainly growing. The media stimulated the Princess’s appetite for attention, but never satisfied her true requirement for love and security.

      This produced some confusing results. You might not readily associate media phobia with the star of Panorama, but it became a daily reality for me. A distressed Princess is famously remembered to have asked, ‘What have the tabloids ever done for me?’ To this plaintively rhetorical question tabloid editors gave rather less rhetorical replies along the lines of, ‘We made you, darlin’!’ And so, in a sense, they had.

      Unfortunately, it was not in a sense that gave her any feeling СКАЧАТЬ