It was only those very closest to her who knew quite how standoffish and cold he could be towards her, and how deeply, bitterly hurt she was by his infidelity. She loved Andrew – for reasons that her family could never entirely fathom – and longed to be truly loved by him, and she didn’t feel she was. There was always someone prettier, wittier, sexier, waiting to take him away from her. And because he spent his weekdays in London, he was never short of the opportunity to do as he pleased. Today, looking back, he would admit there is truth in that. If blame was to be apportioned for the way the marriage ended, he would feel obliged to take a full 80 per cent of it. Love her though he does, he would also admit that Camilla was more in love with him than he was with her.
For some years, when they were both in the Army, he and his brother-in-law Nic Paravicini shared an office, and a flat too – the same flat off Ebury Street that Camilla had shared with Virginia Carington. Although they were both married, they led a bachelor existence, and had a code involving empty milk bottles. Arranged in a certain way outside the door, these meant ‘Do not disturb.’ Nic would say Andrew arranged the milk bottles more often than he did. And still, as often as not, the women Andrew was seeing were Camilla’s friends.
For all the hurt, it would never have occurred to her to divorce him. She had been brought up to believe that you stuck at things, you didn’t give up. And so she found ways of coping. Hunting was one way; galloping amongst a cavalcade of horses, any one of which might bite or kick or take a tumble, left no time for thinking. And in the summer when the hunting season came to an end, her escape was to bury herself in her garden. She saw friends and family, and there were the children to keep her busy as she took them to and from nursery and then school, to parties and the cinema, to see their grandparents in Plumpton or Annabel and her children, Ben, Alice and Catherine Elliot, in Dorset.
Bruce and Rosalind were tremendous grandparents and the cousins loved going to stay with them. The initials of each of them, crafted out of round stones, are cemented into the path in the vegetable garden at The Laines to this day. They went there at Christmas and Easter, and every summer Bruce and Rosalind paid for the entire family to spend a fortnight in the Grand Hotel Excelsior on Ischia, a tiny volcanic island south-west of Naples in Italy. Andrew was never keen on the sun and would spend his time, observed one of them cattily, inside writing postcards to duchesses and all his other titled friends. But the children loved it. Every day the routine was the same. They went down to the beach with their mothers for the morning, a doughnut for elevenses, back to the hotel to meet everyone for lunch, a general knowledge quiz, a siesta, a game of tennis on the clay courts, and back to find Bruce and Rosalind on their second Negroni. They did that every year until the children were in their teens.
Camilla never set out to be unfaithful to Andrew. She flirted for sure, because that was the way she was, a twinkly, sexy woman with a husky laugh that men adored. Everyone, indeed, adored her – men, women and children – because she was a life force and said outrageously funny things, but she no more wanted an open marriage than to fly to the moon. But as the years went by, she realised that Andrew would never change, would never love her and cherish her, never make her feel good about herself; and inevitably, the confidence that had been her hallmark throughout her childhood started to crumble. What had made her so strong as a child was the absolute certainty that her parents loved her and the absolute security that came from that certainty. She never, ever had that feeling with Andrew. She lived with a permanent knot of dread in her tummy, that one day he might leave her. It left her very vulnerable to the attentions of a suitor.
9
Charles had been heartbroken when he lost Camilla, but however strong his feelings for her, life had to go on. He was a romantic, but he was not the first man to have been disappointed in love and not the first to have had to learn to live with it. He was young, he was attractive, he was eminently eligible and he took out a succession of pretty girls, some of them suitable, some not – and some too sensible to want a future under the spotlight. He proposed to Amanda Knatchbull. Mountbatten had been urging his granddaughter on Charles since she was a teenager, but they knew each other too well. She turned him down. He wasn’t surprised; he knew that any girl he married would have to make huge sacrifices. Even those he dated risked having their past raked over in the tabloids. The press were obsessed by his love life: they chronicled every sighting, every dinner date, every holiday companion, every girl who showed up to watch him play polo. One newspaper exclusively reported his engagement to Princess Marie Astrid of Luxembourg, whom he had never even met.
He hated it. He resented the intrusion and he despaired of ever finding someone. He knew she would have to meet the strict and increasingly rare criteria his position demanded. More than a decade after the advent of the contraceptive pill and the era of free love, the pool of unmarried, aristocratic Anglican virgins available was diminishing by the day. In 1975, he had said, ‘I’ve fallen in love with all sorts of girls and I fully intend to go on doing so, but I’ve made sure I haven’t married the first person I’ve fallen in love with. I think one’s got to be aware of the fact that falling madly in love with someone is not necessarily the starting point to getting married.’ But he had made the mistake of saying he thought thirty might be the right age to settle down. As he approached the magical age, the scrutiny and the madness and his despair intensified.
If he was seen with women married to his friends, however, or old girlfriends who were now married, no one seemed to turn a hair. Not unlike in Edwardian times, they slipped beneath the radar, and although the press had their suspicions about some and were certain about others, they never pursued them in the way they pursued single women. One of those was Dale (later Lady) Tryon, a vivacious Australian he’d met at a school dance at Timbertop in Australia when they were both seventeen. He’d nicknamed her Kanga. She was the daughter of a rough and ready Melbourne printing magnate, so she was rich but not marriage material. She moved to London and in 1973 married the merchant banker Anthony Tryon, one of the Prince’s oldest friends and sometime financial adviser. He was ten years older than Dale, a far more sober character who would become the 3rd Baron Tryon. His father had been Keeper of the Privy Purse, a key member of the royal household and, like Andrew Parker Bowles, a page boy at the Queen’s coronation. Charles became godfather to their elder son, also named Charles, born in 1976. They had another son and two daughters. As well as a house in London, they owned a 700-acre estate in Wiltshire and rented a fishing lodge in Iceland. Charles was a frequent visitor to all three. Dale called him the ‘Bonny Prince’ and whenever he telephoned to say he was on his way to see her, she cleared the house.
One year, Anthony had gone ahead to Iceland with a mutual friend, Timothy (later 5th Baron) Tollemache. Dale and the Prince flew separately in an Andover of the Queen’s Flight and were so engrossed with each other in the private compartment, where they had asked to be left undisturbed, that they failed to notice the plane had landed at Reykjavik and that outside a red carpet and a civic reception awaited, complete with Icelandic military band. Kanga kept their affair secret from no one and had an open line to Nigel Dempster, the Daily Mail’s famous gossip columnist, who was a fellow Australian. She started up a fashion label in 1980, selling one-size-fits-all dresses, and constantly promoted them and herself by selling stories about her royal connections.
In the end this was her undoing. Charles started ignoring her, and she became almost demented with the pain of losing him – and she hated Camilla, whose star was in the ascendant. ‘Kanga adored him,’ says a close friend in the fashion industry who helped launch her brand. ‘Whenever he rang the office she would disappear. She was very funny and completely outrageous and unbelievably naughty sexually. When she was nice she was fantastic and when she was nasty she was horrendous. She was like a spoilt child, living on the edge, everything was extreme and there was always drink in the equation.’
Camilla was none of