Spare

It was. Mrs. R was giving a trim to one of her sons, shaking out the sheet in which she’d collected the clippings. The real problem, however, was that my three windows were open and it was a breezy day. Gusts of fine hair blew into the flat. My mate and I coughed, laughed, picked strands off our tongues.

What didn’t come into the flat landed like summer rain on the shared garden, which just then was blooming with mint and rosemary.

For days I went around composing a harsh note to Mrs. R in my head. I never sent it. I knew I was being unfair: she didn’t know she was hairing me out. More, she didn’t know the real source of my antipathy towards her. She was guilty of an even more egregious vehicular crime than her husband. Every day Mrs. R parked her car in Mummy’s old spot.

I can still see her gliding into that space, right where my mother’s green BMW used to be. It was wrong of me, and I knew it was wrong, but on some level I condemned Mrs. R for it.

64.

I was an uncle. Willy and Kate had welcomed their first child, George, and he was beautiful. I couldn’t wait to teach him about rugby and Rorke’s Drift, flying and corridor cricket—and maybe give him a few pointers about how to survive life in the fishbowl.

Reporters, however, used this joyous occasion as an opportunity to ask me…if I was miserable.

What?

The baby had moved me one link down the chain of succession, making me fourth from the throne instead of third. So reporters said, Bad luck, eh?

You must be joking.

There must be some misgivings.

Couldn’t be happier.

A half-truth.

I was delighted for Willy and Kate, and I was indifferent to my place in the order of succession.

But nothing to do with either thing, I wasn’t anywhere close to happy.

65.

Angola. I traveled to that war-torn country, an official visit, and went specifically to several places where daily life had been poisoned by land mines, including one town believed to be the most heavily mined place in all of Africa.

August 2013.

I wore the same protective gear my mother had worn when she visited Angola on her historic trip. I even worked with the same charity that had invited her: Halo Trust. I was deeply frustrated to learn from the charity’s executives and fieldworkers that the job she’d spotlighted, indeed the entire global crusade my mother had helped launch, was now stalled. Lack of resources, lack of resolve.

This had been Mummy’s most passionate cause at the end. (She’d gone to Bosnia three weeks before she’d gone to Paris in August 1997.) Many could still remember her walking alone into a live minefield, detonating a mine via remote control, announcing bravely: “One down, seventeen million to go.” Her vision of a world rid of land mines seemed within reach back then. Now the world was going backwards.

Taking up her cause, detonating a land mine myself, made me feel closer to her, and gave me strength, and hope. For a brief moment. But overall I felt that I was walking each day through a psychological, emotional minefield. I never knew when the next explosion of panic might be.

Upon returning to Britain, I did another dive into the research. I was desperate to find a cause, a treatment. I even spoke to Pa, took him into my confidence. Pa, I’m really struggling with panic attacks and anxiety. He sent me to a doctor, which was kind of him, but the doctor was a general practitioner with no knowledge or new ideas. He wanted to give me pills.

I didn’t want to take pills.

Not until I’d exhausted other remedies, including homeopathic ones. In my research I came across many people recommending magnesium, which was said to have a calming effect. True, it did. But in large quantities it also had unpleasant side effects—loosens the bowels—which I learned the hard way at a mate’s wedding.

Over dinner one night at Highgrove, Pa and I spoke at some length about what I’d been suffering. I gave him the particulars, told him story after story. Towards the end of the meal he looked down at his plate and said softly: I suppose it’s my fault. I should’ve got you the help you needed years ago.

I assured him that it wasn’t his fault. But I appreciated the apology.

As autumn neared my anxiety was heightened, I think, by my impending birthday, the last of my twenties. Dregs of my youth, I thought. I was beset by all the traditional doubts and fears, asked myself all the basic questions people ask when they get older. Who am I? Where am I going? Normal, I told myself, except that the press was abnormally echoing my self-questioning.

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