Diana: In Pursuit of Love (13 page)

Unfinished Business

T
HE HANDWRITTEN NOTE
slipped under the door of a suite at the Ritz Hotel in Paris was friendly, warm and totally unexpected. As Countess Spencer looked at the distinctive, rounded hand, she could barely contain her astonishment. The letter was from her stepdaughter, the Princess of Wales, whom she had not seen or heard from since the funeral of Diana’s father, her beloved husband Johnnie, Earl Spencer, in March 1992. Now, in May 1993, more than a year later, came an invitation to renew their relationship. ‘Sorry we couldn’t meet up in Paris. Perhaps we could have lunch when you return to London,’ wrote Diana, still exultant after managing to achieve one of her long-cherished ambitions – to spend a weekend in Paris as a ‘normal’ person. It had been a huge success – shopping, eating and sightseeing along the boulevards of France’s capital city with her friends Lucia Flecha de Lima and Hayat Palumbo, wife of the billionaire property tycoon Lord Palumbo. A chance meeting in a restaurant with the film star Gérard Depardieu was the icing on the cake. For a few fleeting hours all seemed right with the world at a time when Diana was determined to put her own world to rights.

As Raine Spencer read the letter, she had no clue what lay behind Diana’s decision to resume contact with her. While it was clear that Diana wanted a rapprochement, her stepmother was not at all certain she wanted to reawaken painful memories. ‘I was
frankly uneasy to go back to the past,’ she admitted. ‘I can’t say why she suddenly wrote. I don’t know.’

One of life’s great survivors, Countess Spencer, now seventy-four, is from a generation and class where personal traumas and tragedies are not for public consumption, preferring always to look forward rather than harking back. She is fond of quoting the words of the nineteenth-century American writer Ella Wheeler Wilcox: ‘Laugh and the world laughs with you, weep and you weep alone.’

Not long after she received Diana’s note, Raine Spencer was to get engaged to the French aristocrat who would become her third husband, Jean-François, Comte de Chambrun. ‘After John died I got on with my life,’ she said. ‘I don’t think about the past; it’s horrid enough being a widow. I live totally in the present and the future. I don’t need people from a past life – what’s finished is finished.’

So while it was unthinkable to decline an invitation from the Princess, she was, to say the least, apprehensive. For the bad blood that existed between the Spencer family and the woman they called ‘Acid Raine’ had continued even after Earl Spencer’s death. Diana’s brother Charles, who took over the title and the running of the family estate of Althorp in Northamptonshire, publicly accused his stepmother of the indiscriminate sale of family heirlooms as well as tasteless redecoration of the main house. Indeed, such was the rancour that existed between Raine Spencer and her stepchildren that, following their father’s death, Diana and her brother had unceremoniously bundled up her belongings in bin liners and thrown them out of the back door at Althorp. A weaker woman would have been mortally offended. But Raine was made of sterner stuff, resolutely closing that chapter in her life and moving on. While she maintained a dignified silence, her brother, the publisher Ian McCorquodale, sprang to her defence. ‘She is unfairly typecast as the wicked stepmother,’ he had said to the
Evening Standard
in July 1992. ‘The stepmother always gets the stick.’

Inevitably, therefore, there was an initial wariness when Countess Spencer, accompanied by de Chambrun, eventually met the Princess for lunch at Kensington Palace. It was towards the end of a ‘very jolly’ lunch that Diana expressed what had been on
her mind. ‘Raine,’ she said, ‘thank you for looking after my father. I know you loved him.’ The two women got up and hugged, a touching scene that left the trio gulping back tears. It was Diana’s way of saying sorry for the hurt, distress and misunderstandings of the past. That meeting began an unlikely friendship that lasted until her death.

‘I’ve always thought,’ the Countess later said, ‘that one of the reasons she wanted to be friends was because she and I were the only people who could talk about Johnnie together. She very generously and endlessly thanked me for what I had done for John when he was so terribly ill. It was very sweet but basically we had fun, and she wanted and needed that as well.’

Behind the jovial banter and the generosity she saw a deeply troubled young woman, a woman striving to come to terms with who she was and where she was going. ‘She was incredibly lonely and depressed, and obviously I tried to help as much as I could. I wish I had been able to do more.’

After that first meeting, Diana and her stepmother regularly met for lunch at Kensington Palace or the Connaught Hotel, or Diana would visit Lady Spencer’s house in Farm Street, Mayfair, near the American Embassy, for afternoon tea. She would sit happily on the sofa, feet curled under her, chatting about everything from the trivial to the confidential. She always brought the ‘most marvellous’ presents, which reminded the Countess that when Diana was at school she was always being praised for her thoughtful behaviour, particularly towards younger children. One ‘present’ Lady Spencer will always treasure was bestowed at a particularly difficult time in her life. When her marriage to Comte de Chambrun collapsed in 1996, she was left adrift and feeling sorry for herself. Recognizing that the Countess needed some sort of work to occupy her time, Diana asked Mohamed Fayed, who had come to one of her lunches with the Countess, if he would be able to give her stepmother a job. Not long after, he offered the Countess a directorship of Harrods International. ‘It changed my life, and Diana really had a great part in it,’ the Countess said.

For a young woman who lived by the unforgiving creed, ‘once gone, always gone’, Diana’s friendship with her stepmother was a
genuine sea change. As she reminded her mother, Frances Shand Kydd, who had commented with some annoyance on her daughter’s meetings with the Countess, she, Diana, had been the one who had disliked Raine the most; if
she
could forgive and forget, so should the rest of the family. At her brother’s wedding in 1989 Diana had taken a perverse delight in confronting her stepmother and telling her how much pain she had caused her and her family. ‘I’ve never known such anger in me,’ the Princess admitted later, telling friends that she herself had been shocked by the intensity of her feelings especially as, at the time, Lady Spencer had done nothing to provoke her. But at the time Diana was going through her ‘dark days’ and her stepmother seemed to present a valid target for her fury.

The subsequent death of Lord Spencer and the tumult in Diana’s own life as well as a considered reassessment of her stepmother’s role in her father’s life – perhaps the understanding gained from her own work with the sick and dying had made her realize that her stepmother’s iron resolve in nursing her father when he had his first major stroke in September 1978 had saved and prolonged his life – all combined to bring about this volte-face.

Admittedly, the timing (the spring of 1993) coincided with Charles Spencer being much out of favour with his sister for having taken back his offer of the Garden House – but there was certainly much more to the reunion between the two women than simply family point-scoring. At the time, Diana, who was beginning regular visits to the psychotherapist Susie Orbach, and to the astrologer Debbie Frank, frequently discussed the connection between her childhood experiences and her adult personality. As a therapist, Orbach would have encouraged her to confront and explore the demons from her past, revisiting the country of her childhood to make sense of her present world. And in that country lived ‘Acid Raine’ – ‘We hated her so much,’ as Diana once said.

‘After that first lunch with Raine she came bounding into the room high as a kite because she was aware that she had done something valuable,’ recollected Stephen Twigg. ‘She realized that she now had sufficient self-confidence and self-esteem to go and say “I’m sorry for what I did because I didn’t understand you sufficiently then.”’

The reunion with Raine Spencer was part of the process of clearing the emotional decks as the Princess began the serious task of understanding who she really was. Far from being a woman who was, as one feminist commentator claimed in a
Sunday Times
article of 31 August 1997, ‘locked into her old life as morbidly as Miss Havisham’, she was struggling to come to terms with her past in order to build a more satisfying and complete future. It was an exploration yielding imperfect results that lasted the rest of her life.

The Spencer family, already surprised and not a little alarmed by the renewal of Diana’s relationship with Raine, were further taken aback when she made an appointment to see her maternal grandmother, Ruth, Lady Fermoy at her home in Eaton Square in central London. The meeting, in June 1993, was as awkward as it was symbolic. For it is no exaggeration to say that, but for Lady Fermoy, Diana’s early life would have been quite different. When Diana’s mother, Frances, then Viscountess Althorp, and Johnnie Spencer, Viscount Althorp, separated, it was Lady Fermoy’s decision to testify against her daughter at the custody hearing that proved critical. It altered for ever the way Diana viewed her mother. A constant and compelling refrain in the narrative of Diana’s life was her feelings of abandonment and loss brought about by her mother’s departure from the family home when Diana was just six years old. ‘The biggest disruption was when Mummy decided to leg it. That’s the vivid memory we have – the four of us,’ she remembered.

Debbie Frank was also to observe that ‘The enduring trauma of her life was her sense of abandonment.’

Far from ‘bolting’ from her children, however, Frances Shand Kydd in fact fought two unsuccessful and bitter battles with her estranged husband to gain custody of her children. Lady Fermoy’s intervention in the court hearing bore considerable weight, especially as she was siding against her own daughter. Diana’s mother had fully anticipated bringing up her children and she never truly recovered her equilibrium after the case went against her. ‘You can imagine how much it hurt,’ she said years later.

Diana must certainly have seen her mother’s grief in the bitter tears she shed each time she had to say goodbye to her children
after their all too brief reunions, but the picture held in young Diana’s mind’s eye was of her mother leaving Park House, the family home, in 1967. For Diana that incident served as a convenient image to distil the years of insecurity, pain, anxiety and anger surrounding her unhappy home life. With her elder sisters, Jane and Sarah, away at boarding school and her brother Charles only a three-year-old toddler, it was Diana, then a highly intuitive and sensitive six-year-old, who felt most deeply the tensions, tears and tantrums. A former member of the Spencer staff later talked about violent rows between Johnnie and Frances, fights that clearly horrified their watching daughter. ‘I remember seeing my father slap my mother across the face, and I was hiding behind the door and she was crying,’ Diana told James Colthurst.

Such was the distress she experienced, not only from witnessing that painful incident but also the emotional turmoil surrounding her parents’ break-up that Diana later admitted that for a time she was literally struck dumb. At a critical time in a child’s development, when she was learning to read and write, Diana became an elective mute. According to her own account she could not remember exactly how long or with whom she deliberately decided to remain silent. Her own memory placed the period as lasting between three and eighteen months – a remarkably long time by any standards, all the more so for a child at an age when an hour can feel like an eternity.

It is a curious story, especially as it is uncommon for a child as old as six to withdraw from speech; at this age they generally find it difficult to refrain from talking. Children who suffer from this behavioural difficulty, which is commonly linked to a traumatic shock at school or in the home, are very strong-willed and determined characters – usually of the type that will also be prone to eating disorders, like Diana was in later life. According to child psychologist Lyn Fry, an expert on elective mutes, there are no long-term effects on either speech or mental health, and in fact more often than not such children choose to remain silent only in certain situations. ‘Even elective mutes usually talk to someone. At home they may ignore their parents and speak to their siblings, at school they will chat to their classmates whilst remaining silent with
the teacher.’ It was likely that Diana followed this pattern, for example refusing to speak when she was around her family but not at school. A classmate from Diana’s first school of Silfield in Norfolk, now a television producer, Delissa Needham, remembered a little girl who was painfully shy and quiet, but very watchful: ‘Certainly she was insecure, but she was always quite sparky.’

That a young child should withdraw into silence, even if only for a few months and not all of the time, was testimony to her deep unhappiness. ‘She never felt good enough as a child, blaming herself for her mother’s leaving and subsequently living with a stark sense that those she loved would abandon her,’ declared Debbie Frank.

‘I hated myself so much I didn’t think I was good enough . . . I mean, doubts as long as your leg,’ the Princess said. As mentioned earlier, in her speech of spring 1993 at a conference on eating disorders, she told her audience how from childhood she had suffered from feelings of ‘guilt, self-revulsion and low personal esteem’. She saw her natural needs, for love, attention and comfort, as greedy, creating the complex dynamic that is at the heart of bulimia nervosa.

With such turbulence in her life, Diana sought to make order out of chaos; as a child this was expressed in the tidy zoo of stuffed animals lined up on her bed, as an adult it was in the systematic way she arranged her wardrobe and her shoes. ‘If Diana was in a safe and secure environment, she was fine,’ as her former headmistress, Ruth Rudge, observed.

Remembering, and now beginning to understand, how decisive was her grandmother’s intervention on her father’s behalf – and its consequence on her own childhood – Diana was very concerned to voice her disappointment at the way Lady Fermoy had behaved during her separation from Prince Charles. Just as the old lady had taken the part of the Norfolk aristocracy rather than her own flesh and blood during her daughter’s separation, so she had shown the same loyalty to the Crown, siding with Prince Charles rather than with her granddaughter. Diana could not, perhaps, have expected anything else. Ruth, Lady Fermoy – a close friend of and lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother – was a courtier
down to the very ends of her elegant fingertips, personifying, in the words of Diana’s private secretary, ‘an attitude which was anathema to the Princess’. As Diana recalled, ‘My mother and grandmother never got on. They clashed violently. My grandmother tries to lacerate me in any way she can. She feeds the royal family with hideous comment about my mother running and leaving the children. Whenever I mention Mother’s name in the royal family, which I rarely do, they come down on me like a ton of bricks.’ Indeed, Prince Charles refused even to speak to Diana’s mother. ‘They are convinced she behaved badly and poor Johnnie had a very rough time,’ the Princess told James Colthurst. ‘I now know it takes two to get into that situation. Mummy’s come across very badly because Grandmother has done a real hatchet job.’