Spare

Two months later, a Sunday morning—just before Christmas 2002. The news must have come in the form of a phone call, though I only dimly recall holding the phone, hearing the words. Henners and another boy, leaving a party near Ludgrove, drove into a tree. Though the call’s a blur, I vividly remember my reaction. Same as when Pa told me about Mummy. Right…so Henners was in an accident. But he’s in hospital, right? He’s going to be OK?

No, he wasn’t.

And the other boy, the driver, had been critically injured.

Willy and I went to the funeral. A little parish church down the road from where Henners grew up. I remember hundreds of people squeezing into creaky wooden pews. I remember, after the service, queueing up to hug Henners’s parents, Alex and Claire, and his brothers, Thomas and Charlie.

I think, while we waited, I overheard whispered discussions of the crash.

It was foggy, you know…

They weren’t going far…

But where were they going?

And at that time of night?

They were at a party and the sound system was knackered!

So they ran off to get another.

No!

They went to borrow a CD player from a friend. Short distance, you know…

So they didn’t bother with seatbelts…

Just like Mummy.

And yet, unlike Mummy, there was no way to spin this as a disappearance. This was death, no two ways about it.

Also, unlike Mummy, Henners wasn’t going that fast.

Because he wasn’t being chased.

Twenty miles an hour, tops, everyone said.

And yet the car went straight into an old tree.

Old ones, someone explained, are much harder than young ones.

39.

They wouldn’t let me out of Eton until I acted. That was what they said: I needed to take part in one of their formal dramas before they’d punch my ticket and release me into the wild.

It sounded ridiculous, but theater was deadly serious at Eton. The drama department staged several productions each year, and the year-end production was always the most major of them all.

In the late spring of 2003 it was Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.

I was cast as Conrade. Minor character. He was, perhaps, a drinker, perhaps a drunkard, which gave the press all sorts of clever openings for calling me a drunkard too.

What’s this? Bit of typecasting, is it?

Stories wrote themselves.

Eton’s drama teacher said nothing about typecasting when he gave me the role. He just told me I was Conrade—Have fun with it, Harry—and I didn’t question his motives. I wouldn’t have questioned them even if I’d suspected he was taking the piss, because I wanted to get out of Eton, and to get out of Eton you had to act.

Among other things, I learned from studying the play that it was wrongheaded, and reductive, to focus on Conrade’s alcohol consumption. He was a fascinating guy, really. Loyal, but also immoral. Full of advice, but essentially a follower. Above all, he was a henchman, a sidekick, whose main function, seemingly, was to give the audience a laugh or two. I found it easy to throw myself into such a role, and discovered during dress rehearsals that I had a hidden talent. Being royal, it turned out, wasn’t all that far from being onstage. Acting was acting, no matter the context.

Opening night, my father sat dead center in a packed Farrer Theatre and no one had a better time. Here it was, his dream come true, a son performing Shakespeare, and he was getting his money’s worth. He roared, he howled, he applauded. But, inexplicably, at all the wrong moments. His timing was bizarrely off. He sat mute when everyone else was laughing. He laughed when everyone else was silent. More than noticeable, it was bloody distracting. The audience thought Pa was a plant, part of the performance. Who’s that over there, laughing at nothing? Oh—is that the Prince of Wales?

Later, backstage, Pa was all compliments. You were wonderful, darling boy.

But I couldn’t help looking cross.

What’s the matter, darling boy?

Pa, you laughed at all the wrong times!

He was baffled. I was too. How could he have no idea what I was talking about?