The Murder of Princess Diana Read Online Free PDF Page B

and come to terms with the dramatically altered direction her life was about to take.
    When, after a week of not hearing from him, and in desperation to speak to the man she thought loved her, Diana called Buckingham Palace, she was told he couldn’t be found. He briefly returned her call the following day.
    On her return to England she was welcomed home not by Charles but by one of his aides bearing flowers. She was left pretty much to her own devices until February 28, 1981, the day of the formal announcement of the engagement.
    Their awkwardness, almost shyness, as they stood together before the TV cameras and the press for the first time could be best explained not by nerves but by the fact that they were each, publicly, making a lifetime’s commitment to an almost complete stranger with whom they had virtually nothing in common. When the Prince of Wales was asked “Are you in love?,” he could only manage a stammered, “Whatever ‘in love’ means” in reply. The feeble answer returned a thousand times or more to torment Diana during the next few months, and for the whole of her marriage.
    After the press conference, Diana found herself bundled off to Clarence House, the Queen Mother’s residence a few hundred yards from Buckingham Palace, where a suite of rooms had been made available for her. No member of the royal family, nor any of her friends, was there to offer support or reassurance; she had only learned of the move herself that morning. There was, however, one letter waiting for her, which had been written days earlier. It was from Camilla, who had known, well in advance, exactly where she would be staying, and it contained an invitation to lunch. If Diana had thought public recognition of her engagement to Charles would cool the ardor of the lovers and force an end to Camilla’s participation in both their lives, she realized then that she was very much mistaken.
    Shortly after this, Charles flew to Australia for a five-week royal tour. His farewell to Diana at Heathrow Airport was short and lacking in intimacy on his part, though she shed some tears. It was in marked contrast to the display of passion Charles had exhibited in Buckingham Palace a few hours earlier when Camilla had called to say goodbye. Diana had been with him in his office when the call came in, and had been forced to endure a gushingly sentimental farewell to his mistress which the prince had made no effort to disguise. It had left her angry, humiliated and tearful—and no doubt provided the real reason for those tears at the airport. It was a foretaste, Diana feared, of what life with Charles was going to become. It ripped apart her confidence and made her seriously question his real feelings for her.
    Between then and the wedding very little happened to make her think differently. In the weeks after Charles returned from Australia he probably saw more of Camilla than he did of his fiancée—and the effect of this on Diana was punitive. The first real and visible manifestation of this newly created stress was the onset of bulimia. She had, by this time, moved into Buckingham Palace, with rooms close to the old nursery kitchen. There, several times a day, and often at night, she would have gorging sessions, wolfing down huge portions of rich food. These would be immediately followed by vomiting bouts in her private lavatory.
    The servants who witnessed her binges and cleaned up her mess said nothing, and, as nobody in the palace apart from them knew what was happening to the desperately unhappy teenager, neither did anyone else.
    The only two people having any doubts at all about the wisdom of what they were doing were the couple themselves. Both were having serious misgivings about the wisdom of going through with the marriage. Charles admitted to himself, only at this very late stage, that he shared not a single interest with this very young, very naive girl—and that at times he could barely tolerate being with her.
    For her