Spare

I listened over and over to my go-to soothing CD: Sounds of the Okavango. Forty tracks: Crickets. Baboons. Rainstorm. Thunder. Birds. Lions and hyenas scrapping over a kill. At night, shutting off the lights, I’d hit play. My room sounded like a tributary of the Okavango. It was the only way I could sleep.

After a few days the meeting with Marko receded from consciousness. It began to feel like a nightmare.

But then I woke to the actual nightmare.

A blaring front-page headline: Harry’s Drugs Shame.

January 2002.

Spread over seven pages inside the newspaper were all the lies Marko had presented to me, and many more. The story not only had me down as a habitual drug user, it had me recently going to rehab. Rehab! The editor had got her mitts on some photos of Marko and me paying a visit to a suburban rehab center, months earlier, a typical part of my princely charitable work, and she’d repurposed the photos, made them visual aids for her libelous fiction.

I gazed at the photos and read the story in shock. I felt sickened, horrified. I imagined everyone, all my countrymen and countrywomen, reading these things, believing them. I could hear people all across the Commonwealth gossiping about me.

Crikey, the boy’s a disgrace.

His poor dad—after all he’s been through?

More, I felt heartbroken at the idea that this had been partly the work of my own family, my own father and future stepmother. They’d abetted this nonsense. For what? To make their own lives a bit easier?

I phoned Willy. I couldn’t speak. He couldn’t either. He was sympathetic, and more. (Raw deal, Harold.) At moments he was even angrier about the whole thing than I was, because he was privy to more details about the spin doctor and the backroom dealings that had led to this public sacrifice of the Spare.

And yet, in the same breath, he assured me that there was nothing to be done. This was Pa. This was Camilla. This was royal life.

This was our life.

I phoned Marko. He too offered sympathy.

I asked him to remind me, What was this editor’s name? He said it, and I committed it to memory, but in the years since then I’ve avoided speaking it, and I don’t wish to repeat it here. Spare the reader, but also myself. Besides, can it possibly be a coincidence that the name of the woman who pretended I went to rehab is a perfect anagram for…Rehabber Kooks? Is the universe not saying something there?

Who am I not to listen?

Over several weeks, newspapers continued to rehash the Rehabber Kooks libels, along with various new and equally fabricated accounts of goings-on in Club H. Our fairly innocent teenage clubhouse was made to sound like Caligula’s bedchamber.

Around this time one of Pa’s dearest friends came to Highgrove. She was with her husband. Pa asked me to give them a tour. I walked them around the gardens, but they didn’t care about Pa’s lavender and honeysuckle.

The woman asked eagerly: Where’s Club H?

An avid reader of all the papers.

I led her to the door, opened it. I pointed down the dark steps.

She breathed in deeply, smiled. Oh, it even smells of weed!

It didn’t, though. It smelt of damp earth, stone and moss. It smelt of cut flowers, clean dirt—and maybe a hint of beer. Lovely smell, totally organic, but the power of suggestion had taken hold of this woman. Even when I swore to her that there was no weed, that we’d never once done drugs down there, she gave me a wink.

I thought she was going to ask me to sell her a bag.

35.

Our family was no longer getting larger. There were no new spouses on the horizon, no new babies. My aunts and uncles, Sophie and Edward, Fergie and Andrew, had stopped growing their families. Pa, too, of course. An era of stasis had set in.

But now, in 2002, it dawned on me, dawned on all of us, that the family wasn’t static after all. We were about to get smaller.

Princess Margaret and Gan-Gan were both unwell.

I didn’t know Princess Margaret, whom I called Aunt Margo. She was my great-aunt, yes, we shared 12.5 percent of our DNA, we spent the bigger holidays together, and yet she was almost a total stranger. Like most Britons, I mainly knew of her. I was conversant with the general contours of her sad life. Great loves thwarted by the Palace. Exuberant streaks of self-destruction splashed across the tabloids. One hasty marriage, which looked doomed at the outset and ended up being worse than expected. Her husband leaving poisonous notes around the house, scalding lists of things wrong with her. Twenty-four reasons why I hate you!