Small wonder if Princess Margaret felt unnerved by these creamily intrusive reminiscences: Payne slips into a room as stealthily as a cat-burglar, prowling around, gathering everything up for future use, always the observer, never the observed.
‘I was one of the very few servants who ever saw the Princess’s bedroom,’ he boasted. ‘She would often send me up to get a jewel case or some item she particularly wanted to take with her on a trip … Once the Princess and myself were used to each other, she had no second thoughts about sending me up on such errands to her innermost sanctuary.’
Throughout his time in her service, Payne seems to have been sizing up his mistress, her family and friends with the watchfulness of a boa constrictor. As Fowles suggested, the reader grows complicit with this particular Collector, perching voyeuristically on his shoulder as he slithers around the Princess’s private domain.
Imagine, now, that you are with me as we walk up the main staircase and into the bedroom. It is deserted now, of course, but has been prepared for the Princess to retire. We tread the thick carpet of the corridor silently, with only the occasional creak of a floorboard to tell we are there … The 5-foot tall Princess has chosen a 6-foot, 4 inch bed topped by a foam-rubber mattress, firm but yielding gently to the touch … And just to complete the picture, Mrs Gordon has already laid out one of the Princess’s flimsy, full-length nylon nighties.
And why stop there?
Let us take a closer look. We can see a collection of nail files, jars of face cream, tubes of lipstick, and a brush set comprising two green bone-backed brushes edged in gold, and a hand mirror in the same material. Next to them Margaret has thrown an ordinary comb. Also lying there is a half-filled packet of tissues which she uses for removing her make-up at night. In the morning there will be half a dozen of them smeared with lipstick and powder tossed on the dressing table.
Our tour continues into her bathroom, with its fitted carpet in oyster pink, its loo in the far left-hand corner, its white porcelain bath with two chromium-plated taps. Resting across the bath is a tray with compartments containing coloured scented soaps and a long-handled loofah. ‘There is no shower as such, but in one of the lockers of the bathroom there is a rubber tubing hand shower which can be plugged into the taps.’ Hitchcock’s film Psycho was released while Payne was still in service at Clarence House, Fowles’s book The Collector soon after he left.
Back in the bedroom, Payne leers long and hard at the Princess’s bedside table, with its light-brown pigskin photograph case. ‘It is on the table near the lamp. Look closer and you will see that the case contains three small head-and-shoulders portraits of a man. You may recognize him. And you will not be surprised when I say that to me, they constitute one of the most significant things I encountered during my service with Princess Margaret. But more of that later …’
Those three bedside photographs are all, it emerges, of Group Captain Peter Townsend.
Ah! The Group Captain! The rest of us are allowed to forget a youthful passion, but the world defined Princess Margaret by hers, bringing it up at the slightest opportunity. The two of them – the Group Captain and the Princess – had called it a day four years before, when she was twenty-five years old, but when you are royal, nothing is allowed to be forgotten. That is the price to pay for being part of history.
Those who think of Princess Margaret’s life as a tragedy see the Group Captain as its unfortunate hero. He was the dashing air ace, she the fairy-tale Princess, the two of them torn apart by the cold-hearted Establishment. For these people, their broken romance was the source of all her later discontent. But how true is the myth?
Peter Townsend entered the scene in February 1944, when he took up his three-month appointment as the King’s Extra Equerry. At this time he was twenty-nine years old, with a wife and a small son. Princess Margaret was thirteen, and a keen Girl Guide.
The King took to him immediately; some say he came to regard him as a son. Three months turned into three years, at which point Townsend was made a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order; after a further three years he was promoted to Deputy Master of the Household. Following the death of the King in 1952 he moved to Clarence House, as comptroller to the newly widowed Queen Mother.
When, precisely, did Townsend start taking a shine to the young Princess? For all the fuss surrounding him, it is a question rarely asked. In his autobiography Time and Chance, published in 1978, when he was sixty-four, he fails to set a date on it, insisting that when he first set eyes on the two Princesses, he thought of them purely as ‘two rather adorable and quite unsophisticated girls’.
But by the time of Margaret’s fifteenth birthday in August 1945, he was already thinking of her in more affectionate terms. Describing a typical dinner party at Balmoral shortly after the end of the war, he writes that the gentlemen would join the ladies for ‘crazy games, or canasta, or, most enchanting of all, Princess Margaret singing and playing at the piano’. By now, he was clearly quite smitten:
Her repertoire was varied; she was brilliant as she swung, in her rich, supple voice, into American musical hits, like ‘Buttons and Bows’, ‘I’m as corny as Kansas in August …’ droll when, in a very false falsetto, she bounced between the stool and the keyboard in ‘I’m looking over a four-leaf clover, which I’d overlooked before …’, and lovable when she lisped some lilting old ballad: ‘I gave my love a cherry, it had no stone.’
He accompanied the Royal Family on their 1947 tour of South Africa; by now the Princess was sixteen, and Townsend exactly twice her age. ‘Throughout the daily round of civic ceremonies,’ he recalls, ‘that pretty and highly personable young princess held her own.’ Margaret herself was more open, telling a friend, in later life, ‘We rode together every morning in that wonderful country, in marvellous weather. That’s when I really fell in love with him.’
The tour ended in April 1947. In his autobiography, Townsend insists that he returned home ‘eager to see my wife and family’. But, as it happened, ‘within moments’ he sensed that ‘something had come between Rosemary and me’. He now takes a break in his narrative to detail the difficulties within his marriage.
Townsend had married Rosemary Pawle in 1941. He paints it as a marriage made in the most tremendous haste. ‘I had stepped out of my cockpit, succumbed to the charms of the first pretty girl I met and, within a few weeks married her.’
At this point, Townsend launches into one of the most curious parts of the book, a rambling homily against the perils of sexual attraction. ‘I cannot help feeling that the sex urge is a rather unfair device employed by God,’ it begins. ‘He needs children and counts on us to beget them. But while He has incorporated in our make-up an insatiable capacity for the pleasures which flow from love, He seems to have forgotten to build a monitoring device, to warn us of the unseen snags which may be lurking further on.
‘Sex,’ he continues, ‘is an enemy of the head, an ally of the heart. Boys and girls, madly in love, generally do not act intelligently. The sex-trap is baited and set and the boys and girls go rushing headlong into it. They live on love and kisses, until there are no more left. Then they look desperately for a way of escape.’
One of the anomalies of this passage is that, when Townsend rushed into this particular sex-trap, he was rather more than a boy. In fact, he was a distinguished Battle of Britain fighter pilot of twenty-six, the recipient of the DSO and the DFC and bar.
His marriage, he says, ‘began to founder’ on his return from South Africa. The couple’s problems were ‘intrinsic and personal’, principal among them his yearning to go back to South Africa and ‘Rosemary’s fierce opposition to my ravings about South Africa and my longing for horizons beyond the narrow life at home’. He argues that while ‘Rosemary preferred to remain ensconced in her world