Spare

But Pa and my aunts came back first. Their return was reported by every TV channel. The world watched as they stepped onto the tarmac at RAF Northolt. One channel even added music to the arrival: someone mournfully singing a psalm. Willy and I were kept from the TV, but I think we heard that.

The next few days passed in a vacuum, no one saying anything. We all remained ensconced inside the castle. It was like being inside a crypt, except a crypt where everyone’s wearing trews and keeping to normal routines and schedules. If anyone talked about anything, I didn’t hear them. The only voice I heard was the one droning in my head, arguing with itself.

She’s gone.

No, she’s hiding.

She’s dead.

No, she’s playing dead.

Then, one morning, it was time. Back to London. I remember nothing about the trip. Did we drive? Did we fly on the Royal Flight? I can see the reunion with Pa, and the aunts, and the pivotal encounter with Aunt Sarah, though it’s wreathed in fog and might be slightly out of sequence. At times my memory places it right there, in those horrid first days of September. But at other times memory casts it forward, to many years later.

Whenever it happened, it happened like this:

William? Harry? Aunt Sarah has something for you, boys.

She stepped forward, holding two tiny blue boxes. What’s this?

Open it.

I lifted off the top of my blue box. Inside was…a moth?

No.

A mustache?

No.

What’s…?

Her hair, Harry.

Aunt Sarah explained that, while in Paris, she’d clipped two locks from Mummy’s head.

So there it was. Proof. She’s really gone.

But then immediately came the reassuring doubt, the lifesaving uncertainty: No, this could be anybody’s hair. Mummy, her beautiful blond hair intact, was out there somewhere.

I’d know if she weren’t. My body would know. My heart would know. And neither knows any such thing.

Both were just as full of love for her as ever.

6.

Willy and I walked up and down the crowds outside Kensington Palace, smiling, shaking hands. As if we were running for office. Hundreds and hundreds of hands were thrust continually into our faces, the fingers often wet.

From what? I wondered.

Tears, I realized.

I disliked how those hands felt. More, I hated how they made me feel. Guilty. Why were all these people crying when I wasn’t—and hadn’t?

I wanted to cry, and I’d tried to, because Mummy’s life had been so sad that she’d felt the need to disappear, to invent this massive charade. But I couldn’t squeeze out one drop. Maybe I’d learned too well, absorbed too deeply, the ethos of the family, that crying wasn’t an option—ever.

I remember the mounds of flowers all around us. I remember feeling unspeakable sorrow and yet being unfailingly polite. I remember old ladies saying: Oh, my, how polite, the poor boy! I remember muttering thanks, over and over, thank you for coming, thank you for saying that, thank you for camping out here for several days. I remember consoling several folks who were prostrate, overcome, as if they knew Mummy, but also thinking: You didn’t, though. You act as if you did…but you didn’t know her.

That is…you don’t know her. Present tense.

After offering ourselves up to the crowds, we went inside Kensington Palace. We entered through two big black doors, into Mummy’s apartment, went down a long corridor and into a room off the left. There stood a large coffin. Dark brown, English oak. Am I remembering or imagining that it was draped in…a Union Jack?

That flag mesmerized me. Maybe because of my boyish war games. Maybe because of my precocious patriotism. Or maybe because I’d been hearing rumblings for days about the flag, the flag, the flag. That was all anyone could talk about. People were up in arms because the flag hadn’t been lowered to half-mast over Buckingham Palace. They didn’t care that the Royal Standard never flew at half-mast, no matter what, that it flew when Granny was in residence, and didn’t fly when she was away, full stop. They cared only about seeing some official show of mourning, and they were enraged by its absence. That is, they were whipped into rage by the British papers, which were trying to deflect attention from their role in Mummy’s disappearance. I recall one headline, addressed pointedly at Granny: Show Us You Care. How rich, coming from the same fiends who “cared” so much about Mummy that they chased her into a tunnel from which she never emerged.

By now I’d overheard this “official” version of events: Paps chased Mummy through the streets of Paris, then into a tunnel, where her Mercedes crashed into a wall or cement pillar, killing her, her friend, and the driver.