nearly five million inhabitants of the metropolitan area, so it wasn’t too difficult.
I’d bought clothes for her, and the other essentials of life, toiletries and so on. At first when we were devising our “little plan” she would say, “Oh, Lawrence, you will bring at least one photo album, won’t you?” Or, “The two things I absolutely must have you take are the little wood carving from the drawing room and the painting in the blue frame on the mantelpiece. Masterpieces, both!” I had to work quite hard to persuade her that it was not wise to have anything go missing (even the children’s artistic “masterpieces”) at the time of her disappearance. I’m not so sure about that now. The whereabouts of numerous of her personal effects is presently quite unknown within the royal household, or at least known only to individual members of staff who may have spirited them away for “safekeeping.”
Could I have worked more strenuously to persuade her that her schemes for seeing the children again were neither feasible nor advisable? I did try. But I couldn’t bear to press the point too hard.
I did take one thing that she had asked for, an audiotape made by her former voice coach (how she used to dread giving speeches), one among many, which had never been cataloged or noted in any way. He filmed her during their sessions. I was present once or twice. I remember her sitting on the couch, she was wearing black capri trousers and a black polo neck above which her blond crop looked beautifully boyish, and she had her legs tucked up, and her feet in a pair of those flat ballet-style pumps that she favors, and he was pretending to interview her like a television presenter. He said, “You are well known for your charity work. What is it that draws you to do so much work for charity?” And she gave what may only be described as an impish grin and said, “It’s because I’ve got nothing else to do.” She fell about. She can giggle with great abandon.
How long will it be, I wonder, before one of those videotapes turns up on television, sold to the highest bidder? She can be remarkably, naively, trusting, as she was with that man, allowing him to keep the films of her talking so candidly. And she can take suspicion to the level of paranoid derangement. Just one of her many contradictions.
25 January 1998
It wasn’t true, of course, what she said about having nothing else to do. Perhaps there was an element of that—not wanting to be simply a clotheshorse. But she is fantastic, sometimes, at putting herself down. One of her favorite lines to repeat is, “Oh, I wouldn’t know about that, I never learned terribly much at school—the only prize I ever won was for Best-Kept Guinea Pig.” But she was brilliant at the work that she did, and I think the key was that she was never merely fulfilling her public function, her allotted official role; she truly gave of herself and people sensed it, and that gave her something in return. Her husband resented that—the fact she got real pleasure from what he regarded as the dreary rounds of duty and destiny.
The voice coach had prepared an audiotape that he advised would help her “connect” more with the public by taking the edge off her cut-glass accent. She gave that short shrift. Public speaking was never her strong suit, but she is perceptive enough to know that it wasn’t a question of the class divide, and that it is better to be posh than phony. Despite its aristocratic pedigree, and despite the work she put in with her coach, her voice remained really rather undistinguished and relatively unknown. That is an advantage now, but she won’t believe it and is, or at least was when I saw her, wearing out that tape, determinedly chiseling away at the upper-crust diphthongs and pure vowels. I thought to tell her that nature would take its course and that they would fade over time but I refrained, because now she really does not have anything else to do.
I had
I’d bought clothes for her, and the other essentials of life, toiletries and so on. At first when we were devising our “little plan” she would say, “Oh, Lawrence, you will bring at least one photo album, won’t you?” Or, “The two things I absolutely must have you take are the little wood carving from the drawing room and the painting in the blue frame on the mantelpiece. Masterpieces, both!” I had to work quite hard to persuade her that it was not wise to have anything go missing (even the children’s artistic “masterpieces”) at the time of her disappearance. I’m not so sure about that now. The whereabouts of numerous of her personal effects is presently quite unknown within the royal household, or at least known only to individual members of staff who may have spirited them away for “safekeeping.”
Could I have worked more strenuously to persuade her that her schemes for seeing the children again were neither feasible nor advisable? I did try. But I couldn’t bear to press the point too hard.
I did take one thing that she had asked for, an audiotape made by her former voice coach (how she used to dread giving speeches), one among many, which had never been cataloged or noted in any way. He filmed her during their sessions. I was present once or twice. I remember her sitting on the couch, she was wearing black capri trousers and a black polo neck above which her blond crop looked beautifully boyish, and she had her legs tucked up, and her feet in a pair of those flat ballet-style pumps that she favors, and he was pretending to interview her like a television presenter. He said, “You are well known for your charity work. What is it that draws you to do so much work for charity?” And she gave what may only be described as an impish grin and said, “It’s because I’ve got nothing else to do.” She fell about. She can giggle with great abandon.
How long will it be, I wonder, before one of those videotapes turns up on television, sold to the highest bidder? She can be remarkably, naively, trusting, as she was with that man, allowing him to keep the films of her talking so candidly. And she can take suspicion to the level of paranoid derangement. Just one of her many contradictions.
25 January 1998
It wasn’t true, of course, what she said about having nothing else to do. Perhaps there was an element of that—not wanting to be simply a clotheshorse. But she is fantastic, sometimes, at putting herself down. One of her favorite lines to repeat is, “Oh, I wouldn’t know about that, I never learned terribly much at school—the only prize I ever won was for Best-Kept Guinea Pig.” But she was brilliant at the work that she did, and I think the key was that she was never merely fulfilling her public function, her allotted official role; she truly gave of herself and people sensed it, and that gave her something in return. Her husband resented that—the fact she got real pleasure from what he regarded as the dreary rounds of duty and destiny.
The voice coach had prepared an audiotape that he advised would help her “connect” more with the public by taking the edge off her cut-glass accent. She gave that short shrift. Public speaking was never her strong suit, but she is perceptive enough to know that it wasn’t a question of the class divide, and that it is better to be posh than phony. Despite its aristocratic pedigree, and despite the work she put in with her coach, her voice remained really rather undistinguished and relatively unknown. That is an advantage now, but she won’t believe it and is, or at least was when I saw her, wearing out that tape, determinedly chiseling away at the upper-crust diphthongs and pure vowels. I thought to tell her that nature would take its course and that they would fade over time but I refrained, because now she really does not have anything else to do.
I had
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