Hours after Grandpa’s funeral.
I’d been walking with Willy and Pa for about half an hour, but it felt like one of those days-long marches the Army put me through when I was a new soldier. I was beat.
We’d reached an impasse. And we’d reached the Gothic ruin. After a circuitous route we’d arrived back where we’d begun.
Pa and Willy were still claiming not to know why I’d fled Britain, still claiming not to know anything, and I was getting ready to walk away.
Then one of them brought up the press. They asked about my hacking lawsuit.
They still hadn’t asked about Meg, but they were keen to know how my lawsuit was going, because that directly affected them.
Still ongoing.
Suicide mission, Pa mumbled.
Maybe. But it’s worth it.
I’d soon prove that the press were more than liars, I said. That they were lawbreakers. I was going to see some of them thrown into jail. That was why they were attacking me so viciously: they knew I had hard evidence.
It wasn’t about me, it was a matter of public interest.
Shaking his head, Pa allowed that journalists were the scum of the earth. His phrase. But…
I snorted. There was always a but with him when it came to the press, because he hated their hate, but oh how he loved their love. One could make the argument that therein lay the seeds of the whole problem, indeed all problems, going back decades. Deprived of love as a boy, bullied by schoolmates, he was dangerously, compulsively drawn to the elixir they offered him.
He cited Grandpa as a sterling example of why the press wasn’t anything to get too vexed about. Poor Grandpa had been abused by the papers for most of his life, but now look. He was a national treasure! The papers couldn’t say enough good things about the man.
So that’s it, then? Just wait till we’re dead and all will be sorted?
If you could just endure it, darling boy, for a little while, in a funny way they’d respect you for it.
I laughed.
All I’m saying is, don’t take it personally.
Speaking of taking things personally, I told them I might learn to endure the press, and even forgive their abuse, I might, but my own family’s complicity— that was going to take longer to get over. Pa’s office, Willy’s office, enabling these fiends, if not outright collaborating?
Meg was apparently a bully—that was the latest vicious campaign they’d helped orchestrate. It was so shocking, so egregious, that even after Meg and I demolished their lie with a twenty-five-page, evidence-filled report to Human Resources, I was going to have trouble simply shrugging that one off.
Pa stepped back. Willy shook his head. They began talking over each other. We’ve been down this road a hundred times, they said. You’re delusional, Harry.
But they were the delusional ones.
Even if, for the sake of argument, I accepted that Pa and Willy and their staff had never done one overt thing against me or my wife—their silence was an undeniable fact. And that silence was damning. And continuing. And heartrending.
Pa said: You must understand, darling boy, the Institution can’t just tell the media what to do!
Again, I yelped with laughter. It was like Pa saying he couldn’t just tell his valet what to do.
Willy said I was a fine one to talk about cooperating with the press. What about my chat with Oprah?
A month earlier Meg and I had done an interview with Oprah Winfrey. (Days before it aired, those Meg-is-a-bully stories started popping up in the papers— what a coincidence!) Since leaving Britain, the attacks on us had been increasing exponentially. We had to try something to make it stop. Being silent wasn’t working. It was only making it worse. We felt we had no choice.
Several close mates and beloved figures in my life, including one of Hugh and Emilie’s sons, Emilie herself, and even Tiggy, had chastised me for Oprah. How could you reveal such things? About your family? I told them that I failed to see how speaking to Oprah was any different from what my family and their staffs, had done for decades—briefing the press on the sly, planting stories. And what about the endless books on which they’d cooperated, starting with Pa’s 1994 crypto-autobiography with Jonathan Dimbleby? Or Camilla’s collaborations with the editor Geordie Greig? The only difference was that Meg and I were upfront about it. We chose an interviewer who was above reproach, and we didn’t once hide behind phrases like “Palace sources,” we let people see the words coming out of our mouths.
I looked at the Gothic ruin. What’s the point? I thought. Pa and Willy weren’t hearing me and I wasn’t hearing them. They’d never had a satisfactory explanation for their actions and inactions, and never would, because there was no explanation. I started to say goodbye, good luck, take care, but Willy was
really steaming, shouting that if things were as bad as I made out, then it was my fault for never asking for help.
You never came to us! You never came to me!
Since boyhood that had been Willy’s position on everything. I must come to him. Pointedly, directly, formally—bend the knee. Otherwise, no aid from the Heir. I wondered why I should have to ask my brother to help when my wife and I were in peril.
If we were being mauled by a bear, and he saw, would he wait for us to ask for help?
I mentioned the Sandringham Agreement. I’d asked for his help about that, when the agreement was violated, shredded, when we were stripped of everything, and he hadn’t lifted a finger.
That was Granny! Take it up with Granny!
I waved a hand, disgusted, but he lunged, grabbed my shirt. Listen to me, Harold.
I pulled away, refused to meet his gaze. He forced me to look into his eyes.
Listen to me, Harold, listen! I love you, Harold! I want you to be happy.
The words flew out of my mouth: I love you too…but your stubbornness…is extraordinary!
And yours isn’t?
I pulled away again.
He grabbed me again, twisting me to maintain eye contact.
Harold, you must listen to me! I just want you to be happy, Harold. I swear….I swear on Mummy’s life.
He stopped. I stopped. Pa stopped. He’d gone there.
He’d used the secret code, the universal password. Ever since we were boys those three words were to be used only in times of extreme crisis. On Mummy’s life. For nearly twenty-five years we’d reserved that soul-crushing vow for times when one of us needed to be heard, to be believed, quickly. For times when nothing else would do.
It stopped me cold, as it was meant to. Not because he’d used it, but because it didn’t work. I simply didn’t believe him, didn’t fully trust him. And vice
versa. He saw it too. He saw that we were in a place of such hurt and doubt that even those sacred words couldn’t set us free.
How lost we are, I thought. How far we’ve strayed. How much damage has been done to our love, our bond, and why? All because a dreadful mob of dweebs and crones and cut-rate criminals and clinically diagnosable sadists along Fleet Street feel the need to get their jollies and plump their profits—and work out their personal issues—by tormenting one very large, very ancient, very dysfunctional family.
Willy wasn’t quite ready to accept defeat. I’ve felt properly sick and ill after everything that’s happened and—and…I swear to you now on Mummy’s life that I just want you to be happy.
My voice broke as I told him softly: I really don’t think you do.
My mind suddenly flooded with memories of our relationship. But one in particular was crystalline. Willy and I, years before in Spain. A beautiful valley, the air glittery with that uncommonly clear Mediterranean light, the two of us kneeling behind a green canvas wall as the first hunting horns sounded. Lowering our flat caps as the first partridges burst towards us, bang bang, a few falling, handing our guns to the loaders, who handed us new ones, bang bang, more falling, passing our guns back, our shirts darkening with sweat, the ground filling with birds that would feed nearby villages for weeks, bang, one last shot, neither of us able to miss, then standing at last, drenched, starved, happy, because we were young and together and this was our place, our one true space, away from Them and close to Nature. It was such a transcendent moment that we turned and did that rarest of things—we hugged. Really hugged.
But now I saw that even our finest moments, and my best memories, somehow involved death. Our lives were built on death, our brightest days shadowed by it. Looking back, I didn’t see spots of time, but dances with death. I saw how we steeped ourselves in it. We christened and crowned, graduated and married, passed out and passed over our beloveds’ bones. Windsor Castle itself was a tomb, the walls filled with ancestors. The Tower of London was held together with the blood of animals, used by the original builders a thousand years ago to temper the mortar between the bricks. Outsiders called us a cult, but maybe we were a death cult, and wasn’t that a little bit more depraved? Even after laying Grandpa to rest, had we not had our fill? Why were we here,
lurking along the edge of that “undiscover’d country, from whose bourn no traveller returns”?
Though maybe that’s a more apt description of America.
Willy was still talking, Pa was talking over him, and I could no longer hear a word they said. I was already gone, already on my way to California, a voice in my head saying: Enough death—enough.
When is someone in this family going to break free and live?
