She let the word sit there for a moment, let Camilla feel it. “You think this was about the room?” she said. A pause. “You’re right that children shouldn’t carry their parents’ feelings.” Camilla blinked. This was not the response she had prepared for. “That’s why I’ve never told them about any of this,” Diana said. A pause. She held Camilla’s gaze.
“Have you?” Silence. Camilla opened her mouth, closed it. The question had no answer that worked. Both of them knew it. Diana let the silence do its work. She smiled, warm, controlled, just enough to end the conversation. “I didn’t think so,” she said. She turned and walked back toward the room. The gala continued.
People circulated. Drinks were refreshed. The particular orchestra of an official evening played on. Diana reentered the room and was immediately drawn into a conversation near the far end, a woman she had been wanting to speak to, something about a hospital project she was supporting. She was fully present, fully attentive, giving the conversation everything it needed.
She did not look for Camilla. She did not look for Charles. She was simply there, in the room, being who she was. Charles found her. He appeared at her shoulder between conversations, not seeking her out exactly, just the inevitable geometry of two people at the same event eventually occupying the same space. He had a glass in his hand.
He didn’t look at her when he said it. “Are you all right?” low, underneath the noise, his eyes still on the room. Diana looked at him for a moment longer than necessary. “I’m quite all right,” she said. “It’s been a very instructive evening.” He glanced at her then, just briefly. Then he stood there for a moment, as if he might say something else. He didn’t.
Instead, he glanced across the room. Diana followed his gaze. Camilla was standing near the far end, speaking to someone, a glass in her hand. When Diana looked back, Charles was already moving, not in a hurry, just in that direction. A member of staff who was standing near the entrance to the corridor said later that she saw Camilla return to the gala perhaps 2 minutes after Diana.
Camilla was smiling. She was composed. She moved through the room exactly as she had before. But the staff member looked at her face, just for a moment, and something was different. “She wasn’t quite herself,” the woman said. A pause. Just for a moment, then she was fine again. Diana turned back to the room.
A few minutes later, Diana was deep in conversation with the woman near the far end, a hospital project, a funding gap, a ward that needed refurbishment. She was fully present, giving the conversation everything it needed. It was the kind of thing she was good at. She was mid-sentence when she felt something press against her leg.
She looked down. Harry had escaped. He had located her across the room and crossed it with the focused determination of a 7-year-old who has decided where he needs to be. His knee had been cleaned, his jacket straightened, his face composed back into something approaching the official version of himself. Almost. There was still the slight redness around his eyes.
There was still, somewhere in his expression, the residue of the earlier fall, not the pain, which had passed, but the memory of it. He looked up at her. “Are you sad, Mummy?” he said. The simplicity of it, the complete, unguarded directness of a child who had been on the other side of the room and had still been watching her, who had noticed something in her face when she came back from wherever she had been, and had come to ask about it.
Diana looked at him. She hesitated, just for a second. She was aware of the woman standing beside her, of the room around them, of the entire evening and everything it had contained, the marble floor, the corridor, the word that Camilla had placed in the air and then tried to walk back from.
Charles and his glass and his eyes on the room. All of it. She crouched down right there in the middle of the gala in her dress on the floor of a room full of people who had opinions about the appropriate behavior of a princess at an official event. Eye level with her son. “No.” She said, “I’m very happy.” He looked at her face with the careful seriousness of a child running a check.
She meant it. In that moment with his face in front of her, the evening behind her, everything Camilla had said about performance sitting somewhere she would deal with later. She meant it entirely and without complication. He nodded. Satisfied. Then he held out his hand, the small matter-of-fact gesture of a child who has decided the check is complete and it’s time to go.
She took it. They stood up together. The woman she had been speaking with watched this. After a moment she said quietly, “He’s wonderful.” “He is.” Diana said simply without anything added to it and meant every word. The evening ended as these evenings ended, the gradual dispersal, the polite goodbyes, the cars arriving in sequence.
Diana left with the boys. Charles left separately. >> [music] >> He always did by then. The car moved through the London evening, the particular quiet of a city at night, lights through the windows, the world carrying on outside the glass. Harry talked. He had seen a painting on the wall of the entrance hall, large, formal, hung above the main staircase.
He had decided it was a horse. William had told him it was a dog. Harry remained certain that William was wrong and was presenting his case with the thoroughness of someone who considered the matter >> [music] >> not yet closed. “The ears were wrong for a dog.” Harry said. “Ears can be any shape.” William said with the patience of someone who has been having this conversation for 40 minutes.
“Not those ears.” Diana listened without taking sides. [music] Harry turned to her. “Mummy, horse or dog?” “A I didn’t see it.” “You must have seen it. It was enormous.” “I was looking at other things.” “You have to pick one.” Harry said. Diana considered this. “Horse.” She said. “Thank you.
” Harry said with great satisfaction. “That’s not William began. “I might be [music] wrong.” Diana said. But Harry asked, “So I’m picking horse.” William looked out the window, the expression of someone who has been wronged and is choosing to rise above it, which [music] is a different thing from accepting it. Harry settled back into his seat with the contentment of a verdict delivered.
