OUR FAMILY WAS NO longer getting larger. There were no new spouses on the horizon, no new babies. My aunts and uncles, Sophie and Edward, Fergie
and Andrew, had stopped growing their families. Pa, too, of course. An era of stasis had set in.
But now, in 2002, it dawned on me, dawned on all of us, that the family wasn’t static after all. We were about to get smaller.
Princess Margaret and Gan-Gan were both unwell.
I didn’t know Princess Margaret, whom I called Aunt Margo. She was my great-aunt, yes, we shared 12.5 percent of our DNA, we spent the bigger holidays together, and yet she was almost a total stranger. Like most Britons, I mainly knew of her. I was conversant with the general contours of her sad life. Great loves thwarted by the Palace. Exuberant streaks of self-destruction splashed across the tabloids. One hasty marriage, which looked doomed at the outset and ended up being worse than expected. Her husband leaving poisonous notes around the house, scalding lists of things wrong with her. Twenty-four reasons why I hate you! Growing up, I felt nothing for her, except a bit of pity and a lot of jumpiness.
She could kill a houseplant with one scowl. Mostly, whenever she was around, I kept my distance. On those rarer-than-rare occasions when our paths crossed, when she deigned to take notice of me, to speak to me, I’d wonder if she had any
opinion of me. It seemed that she didn’t. Or else, given her tone, her coldness, the opinion wasn’t much.
Then one Christmas she cleared up the mystery. The whole family gathered to open gifts on Christmas Eve, as always, a German tradition that survived the anglicizing of the family surname from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor. We were at Sandringham in a big room with a long table covered with white cloth and white name cards. By custom, at the start of the night, each of us located our place, stood before our mound of presents. Then suddenly, everyone began opening at the same time. A free-for-all, with scores of family members talking at once and pulling at bows and tearing at wrapping paper.
Standing before my pile, I chose to open the smallest present first. The tag said:
From Aunt Margo.
I looked over, called out: Thank you, Aunt Margo! I do hope you like it, Harry.
I tore off the paper. It was… A biro?
I said: Oh. A biro. Wow.
She said: Yes. A biro.
I said: Thank you so much.
But it wasn’t just any biro, she pointed out. It had a tiny rubber fish wrapped around it.
I said: Oh. A fish biro! OK.
I told myself: That is cold-blooded.
Now and then, as I grew older, it struck me that Aunt Margo and I should’ve been friends. We had so much in common. Two Spares. Her relationship with Granny wasn’t an exact analog of mine with Willy, but pretty close. The simmering rivalry, the intense competition (driven largely by the older sibling), it all looked familiar. Aunt Margo also wasn’t that dissimilar from Mummy. Both rebels, both labeled as sirens. (Pablo Picasso was among the many men obsessed with Margo.) So my first thought when I learned in early 2002 that she’d been taken ill was to wish there’d been more time to get to know her. But we were well past that. She was unable to care for herself. After badly burning her feet in a bath, she was confined to a wheelchair, and said to be swiftly declining.
When she died, February 9, 2002, my first thought was that this would be a heavy blow to Gan-Gan, who was also in decline.
Granny tried to talk Gan-Gan out of attending the funeral. But Gan-Gan dragged herself out of her sickbed, and shortly after that day took a bad fall.
It was Pa who told me she’d been confined to her bed at Royal Lodge, the sprawling country house in which she’d lived part-time for the last fifty years, when she wasn’t at her main residence, Clarence House. Royal Lodge was three miles south of Windsor Castle, still in Windsor Great Park, still part of the Crown Estate, but like the castle it had one foot in another world. Dizzyingly high ceilings. Pebbled driveway winding serenely through vivid gardens.
Built not long after the death of Cromwell.
I felt comforted to hear that Gan-Gan was there, a place I knew she loved. She was in her own bed, Pa said, and not suffering.
Granny was often with her.
Days later, at Eton, while studying, I took the call. I wish I could remember whose voice was at the other end; a courtier, I believe. I recall that it was just before Easter, the weather bright and warm, light slanting through my window, filled with vivid colors.
Your Royal Highness, the Queen Mother has died.
Cut to Willy and me, days later. Dark suits, downcast faces, eyes filled with déjà vu. We walked slowly behind the gun carriage, bagpipes playing, hundreds of them. The sound threw me back in time.
I began shaking.
Once again we made that hideous trek to Westminster Abbey. Then we stepped into a car, joined the cortège—from the center of town, along Whitehall, out to the Mall, on to St. George’s Chapel.
Throughout that morning my eye kept going to the top of Gan-Gan’s coffin, where they’d set the crown. Its three thousand diamonds and jeweled cross winked in the spring sunlight. At the center of the cross was a diamond the size of a cricket ball. Not just a diamond, actually; the Great Diamond of the World, a 105-karat monster called the Koh-i-Noor. Largest diamond ever seen by human eyes. “Acquired” by the British Empire at its zenith. Stolen, some thought. I’d heard it was mesmerizing, and I’d heard it was cursed. Men fought for it, died for it, and thus the curse was said to be masculine.
Only women were permitted to wear it.
