Spare

I recall wondering, right before the tea, if she’d be mean to me. If she’d be like all the wicked stepmothers in storybooks. But she wasn’t. Like Willy, I did feel real gratitude for that.

At last, with these strained Camilla summits behind us, there was a final conference with Pa.

So, what do you boys think?

We thought he should be happy. Yes, Camilla had played a pivotal role in the unraveling of our parents’ marriage, and yes, that meant she’d played a role in our mother’s disappearance, but we understood that she’d been trapped like everyone else in the riptide of events. We didn’t blame her, and in fact we’d gladly forgive her if she could make Pa happy. We could see that, like us, he wasn’t. We recognized the vacant looks, the empty sighs, the frustration always visible on his face. We couldn’t be absolutely sure, because Pa didn’t talk about his feelings, but we’d pieced together, through the years, a fairly accurate portrait of him, based on little things he’d let slip.

For instance, Pa confessed around this time that he’d been “persecuted” as a boy. Granny and Grandpa, to toughen him up, had shipped him off to Gordonstoun, a boarding school, where he was horrendously bullied. The most likely victims of Gordonstoun bullies, he said, were creative types, sensitive types, bookish types—in other words, Pa. His finest qualities were bait for the toughs. I remember him murmuring ominously: I nearly didn’t survive. How had he? Head down, clutching his teddy bear, which he still owned years later. Teddy went everywhere with Pa. It was a pitiful object, with broken arms and dangly threads, holes patched up here and there. It looked, I imagined, like Pa might have after the bullies had finished with him. Teddy expressed eloquently, better than Pa ever could, the essential loneliness of his childhood.

Willy and I agreed that Pa deserved better. Apologies to Teddy, Pa deserved a proper companion. That was why, when asked, Willy and I promised Pa that we’d welcome Camilla into the family.

The only thing we asked in return was that he not marry her. You don’t need to remarry, we pleaded. A wedding would cause controversy. It would incite the press. It would make the whole country, the whole world, talk about Mummy, compare Mummy and Camilla, and nobody wanted that. Least of all Camilla.

We support you, we said. We endorse Camilla, we said. Just please don’t marry her. Just be together, Pa.

He didn’t answer.

But she answered. Straightaway. Shortly after our private summits with her, she began to play the long game, a campaign aimed at marriage and eventually the Crown. (With Pa’s blessing, we presumed.) Stories began to appear everywhere, in all the papers, about her private conversation with Willy, stories that contained pinpoint accurate details, none of which had come from Willy, of course.

They could only have been leaked by the one other person present.

And the leaking had obviously been abetted by the new spin doctor Camilla had talked Pa into hiring.

16.

In the early autumn of 1998, having completed my education at Ludgrove the previous spring, I entered Eton.

A profound shock.

The finest school in the world for boys, Eton was meant to be a shock, I think. Shock must’ve been part of its original charter, even perhaps a part of the instructions given to its first architects by the school’s founder, my ancestor Henry VI. He deemed Eton some sort of holy shrine, a sacred temple, and to that end he wanted it to overwhelm the senses, so visitors would feel like meek, abased pilgrims.

In my case, mission accomplished.

(Henry even vested the school with priceless religious artifacts, including part of Jesus’s Crown of Thorns. One great poet called the place “Henry’s holy shade.”)

Over the centuries Eton’s mission had become somewhat less pious, but the curriculum had become more shockingly rigorous. There was a reason Eton now referred to itself not as a school but simply as…School. For those in the know, there simply was no other choice. Eighteen prime ministers had been molded in Eton’s classrooms, plus thirty-seven winners of the Victoria Cross. Heaven for brilliant boys, it could thus only be purgatory for one very unbrilliant boy.

The situation became undeniably obvious during my very first French lesson. I was astounded to hear the teacher conducting the entire class in rapid, nonstop French. He assumed, for some reason, that we were all fluent.

Maybe everyone else was. But me? Fluent? Because I did passably well on the entrance exam? Au contraire, mon ami!

Afterwards I went up to him, explained that there’d been a dreadful mistake and I was in the wrong class. He told me to relax, assured me I’d be up to speed in no time. He didn’t get it; he had faith in me. So I went to my housemaster, begged him to put me with the slower talkers, the more glacial learners, boys exactement comme moi.