Spare

Slowly it became clear. He’d told me once that, when he was my age, acting in his own school performance of Shakespeare, Grandpa turned up and did exactly the same thing. Laughed at all the wrong times. Made a complete spectacle. Was Pa modeling his own father? Because he knew no other way to parent? Or was it more subliminal, some recessive gene expressing itself? Is each generation doomed to unwittingly repeat the sins of the last? I wanted to know, and I might’ve asked, but that wasn’t the sort of thing you could ever raise with Pa. Or Grandpa. So I put it out of my mind and tried to focus on the good.

Pa is here, I told myself, and he’s proud, and that’s not nothing.

That was more than a lot of kids had.

I thanked him for coming, gave him a kiss on each cheek.

As Conrade says: Can you make no use of your discontent?

40.

I completed my education at Eton in June 2003, thanks to hours of hard work and some extra tutoring arranged by Pa. No small feat for one so unscholarly, so limited, so distracted, and while I wasn’t proud of myself, exactly, because I didn’t know how to be proud of myself, I felt a distinct pause in my nonstop internal self-criticism.

And then I was accused of cheating.

An art teacher came forward with evidence of cheating, which turned out not to be evidence of cheating. It turned out to be nothing at all, and I was later cleared by the exam board. But the damage was done. The accusation stuck.

Brokenhearted, I wanted to release a statement, hold a press conference, tell the world: I did the work! I didn’t cheat!

The Palace wouldn’t let me. In this, as in most things, the Palace stuck fast to the family motto: Never complain, never explain. Especially if the complainer was an eighteen-year-old boy.

Thus I was forced to sit by and say nothing while the papers called me a cheat and a dummy every day. (Because of an art project! I mean, how do you “cheat” on an art project?) This was the official start of that dreaded title: Prince Thicko. Just as I was cast as Conrade without my consultation or consent, I was now cast in this role. The difference was, we did Much Ado About Nothing for three nights. This had the look of a role that would last a lifetime.

Prince Harry? Oh, yeah, not too bright.

Can’t pass a simple test without cheating, that’s what I read!

I talked to Pa about it. I was near despair.

He said what he always said.

Darling boy, just don’t read it.

He never read it. He read everything else, from Shakespeare to white papers on climate change, but never the news. (He did watch the BBC, but he’d often end up throwing the controller at the TV.) The problem was, everyone else read it. Everyone in my family claimed not to, just like Pa, but even as they were making this claim to your face, liveried footmen were bustling around them, fanning every British newspaper across silver platters, as neatly as the scones and marmalades.

41.

The farm was called Tooloombilla. The people who owned it were the Hills.

Noel and Annie. They’d been friends of Mummy. (Annie had been Mummy’s flatmate when she first started dating Pa.) Marko helped me find them, and somehow persuaded them to let me be their unpaid summer jackaroo.

The Hills had three children. Nikki, Eustie, and George. The eldest, George, was exactly my age, though he looked much older, perhaps due to years and years of toil under the boiling Australian sun. Upon arriving I learned that George would be my mentor, my boss—my headmaster, in a way. Though Tooloombilla was nothing like Eton.

In fact it was like no place I’d ever been.

I came from a green place. The Hills’ farm was an ode to brown. I came from a place where every move was monitored, catalogued, and subjected to judgment. The Hills’ farm was so vast and remote that no one would see me for most of each day but George. And the odd wallaby.

Above all, I came from a place that was temperate, rainy, cool. The Hills’ farm was hot.

I wasn’t sure I could endure this kind of hot. The Australian Outback had a climate I didn’t understand and which my body couldn’t seem to accept. Like Pa, I wilted at the mere mention of heat: how was I supposed to put up with an oven inside a blast furnace inside a nuclear reactor set on top of an active volcano?

Bad spot for me, but worse for my bodyguards. Those poor lads—of all the assignments. Plus, their lodging was extra spartan, an outbuilding on the edge of the farm. I rarely saw them and often imagined them out there, sitting in their briefs before a noisy electric fan, grumpily polishing their CVs.