The Prince also turned towards her, looking as if he was seeing her for the first time, ruefully indulgent, patronizing. There was an expectant hush. Before she could reply, he said with studied innocence, ‘Shopping, isn’t it, darling?’
The words dropped into the marble stillness like bricks into plate glass. The Princess coloured, mumbled something inaudible and lapsed into silence. There was an awkward pause, broken by the Prince pointedly resuming his conversation with a host whose aquiline features now registered a politer version of the disbelief I felt.
When we were outside again I cornered John Riddell. ‘Did I see what I thought I saw in there?’ I asked him.
He looked at me pityingly. ‘Oh yes, Patrick. Indeed you did. That is the world we have to live in.’
Approaching Lyneham at the end of our flight home, I perched in the spacious cockpit of the VC-10 and watched the lights of Wiltshire villages slip under the plane’s nose. The Captain, a giant of a man, blocked much of the view as he sat hunched over the instrument panel. The controls seemed like toys in his huge hands as he gently followed directions from a radar controller on the ground.
The Navigator was timing our arrival to the second, giving a running countdown to the magical ‘Doors open’ order that I had heard repeated half a dozen times in the Gulf. I was always impressed by the RAF’s mastery of such precision. This time it was different, though. The doors would open not on to blazing tarmac and a red carpet but on to a patch of drizzly British concrete. There would be no sheikhs in flowing robes and no guard of honour. Instead there would be an anxious-looking RAF duty officer and the familiar Jaguar for the short drive to Highgrove. The contrast amused me. I wondered if it would amuse Him.
We landed exactly on time. Leaving the cockpit, I felt a sudden blast of damp English air as I passed the crewmen opening the door. After nearly two weeks of air conditioning and hot desert dust, it smelt delicious. As I entered the royal compartment the Prince was peering out of the porthole. He looked up and I fell into the familiar routine for arrival at a tour destination.
‘This is Lyneham, Sir, in England. The outside temperature is 5°. The ruler is not waiting at the foot of the steps. There is no guard of honour to inspect and the band will not play the anthems. There is no press position on either the left or the right of the red carpet. In fact, there is no carpet. But there is your car, Sir, and it will take you home.’
The Prince’s mouth twitched in what I hoped was fulsome approval of my uproarious joke. Well, it had been worth a try. With a brief word of thanks he headed for the door. The ever-present valet held out an overcoat and I silently saluted the planning that had brought it magically to hand after 10 days in the desert. Then he was gone into the night. Gone to Highgrove and the familiarity of house and garden, of dogs and books and pictures, and a welcome we all knew would not be his wife’s.
I returned home exhausted and several pounds lighter, not least thanks to an energetic desert stomach bug. The Princess welcomed me back like a wandering stray and wrote me a typically generous note of appreciation. For a day or two I recuperated in the knowledge that I had survived my first tour, which had been generally recognized as a pretty challenging initiation.
Media coverage of the tour had been extensive. Still a novice, I took an immature pride in the glossy magazine stories and the TV special that followed in the days after our return. Somehow, I felt, it would not have been possible without me – which may have been true, but only to a very limited extent.
Not featured in the glossies but of growing interest to tabloid commen-tators was the state of The Marriage. I had seen some of its internal stresses while on tour – however careful the Prince and Princess were to keep their troubles to themselves, being ‘on the road’ always accentuated differences that could be smoothed over more easily at home – and already the media sharks had scented blood in the water. They would not remain hungry for long.
To compensate for the lack of united leadership at the top, the Wales support organization had for some time been making its own arrangements to adapt to the unpalatable truth. Huge amounts of energy were diverted into concealing the real state of the marriage, and still more were expended on structuring our bosses’ public lives to minimize friction between them. It is a tempting but pointless exercise to imagine what more could have been achieved if this energy had been available to support the global influence of a Prince and Princess who were able to work as a team.
My introduction to these realities had occurred during a visit by the Prince and Princess to the Glasgow Garden Festival in my early days in office in May 1988. Not unusually, Their Royal Highnesses had been apart in the days preceding the engagement but obviously had to appear as a couple, if not happily, then at least willingly united when they arrived at the Festival. They therefore made their ways in separate aircraft to what, fortunately, turned out to be a simultaneous rendezvous at Glasgow airport. Logistically this was no mean feat, but, as I came to realize, the Queen’s Flight, the police and the respective staffs were not short of practice in this manoeuvre.
On the flight to Scotland I had been conscious of a heightened tension, but in my happy lack of awareness had ascribed it only to the prospect of an exciting day in the sunshine in front of what were sure to be huge crowds. Later, I came to recognize the nervous giggles interspersed with brooding introversion as characteristic of the Princess’s agitation at the prospect of working with her husband. Also, it was only later that I realized the significance of her frequent trips to the royal loo. ‘Bulimia’ was a word I did not even know how to spell in 1988.
John Riddell was in charge of the engagement. As ever, his charm and studied absent-mindedness produced the intended mood of amused tolerance in the Princess as we arrived in Glasgow. Inside, he must have felt he was defusing a ticking time bomb. In this he was like many senior courtiers who lacked the benefit of regular contact with her – their understandable inclination was to treat her like a beautifully wrapped parcel of unstable Semtex. His only acknowledgement of the unspoken matrimonial drama which waited on the tarmac was to smile reassuringly at her as we left the plane and say, ‘Let’s hope we all reach the end of the day in the same happy mood we started it in!’
In bright sunshine the Prince and Princess met by their aircraft, brushed cheeks for a fraction of a second and climbed into their car. The day was a success. The beautiful weather, happy crowds and grand scale of the event perfectly set off their own professionalism.
They were an unbeatable double act who could anticipate each other’s moves, instinctively work a crowd and betray by neither a word nor a gesture the fact that they would jump back in their separate planes as soon as duty released them. In the brief moments of semi-privacy, however, away from all but the familiar company of their staffs, they might have been on separate engagements. Not a word or a glance passed between them.
Only the atmosphere of relief on the homeward journey, and the veiled references to disaster averted, alerted my novice’s consciousness to the fact that we were playing a game. There was only one rule: nothing must be said to disturb the myth of permanence that was now the marriage’s only certainty.
Competition between the stars of our show was never far below the surface, and set-piece joint events usually brought it into the open. A garden party at Buckingham Palace was the perfect opportunity for some rather pointed sparring. For those of us who saw beyond the myth this was entertaining too, in a painful way.
It was the sort of obligatory event that went into the Princess’s