Read Online The Murder of Princess Diana by Noel Botham - Free Book Online Page B

convinced that the couple had slept together.
    Pausing only to collect Camilla, Charles headed for Balmoral on September 22 and began a separation from Diana which would end in questions being asked in parliament. Thirty-seven days went by, during which time the prince avoided all contact with his wife and sons. A brief get-together for a visit to Dyfed in Wales, which had been the victim of appalling floods, failed to convince the press that their marriage was in anything but dire straits. After six hours, during which they barely spoke a word to each other, Diana returned to London and Charles went back to Balmoral—and Camilla.
    By February 1989, Diana was feeling sufficiently strong to have her first, and only, confrontation with Camilla. Treatment from Guy’s Hospital eating-disorders specialist Doctor Maurice Lipsedge had enabled her to bring the bulimia under control and, feeling more confident than she had done in years, Diana decided it was time to take Camilla Parker Bowles head on. She chose a party at Sir James Goldsmith’s home in Ormley Lodge, Richmond Park, to celebrate the fortieth birthday of Camilla’s sister, Annabel Elliott, as her battleground.
    Charles, according to Diana’s personal protection officer Ken Wharfe, had not expected her to attend, and until the last moment—in the car taking them to the event—tried to dissuade her. But she coolly insisted, and caused surprise and even consternation among the other guests when she walked in with the prince. After dinner, Diana realized that Charles and Camilla had gone off together; summoning Ken Wharfe, she went downstairs in search of them, though a number of the guests tried to persuade her not to.
    They found Charles and Camilla sitting in a softly lit children’s den, deep in conversation. At this point Ken Wharfe—not wanting to be part of a marital row—excused himself and waited by the basement steps outside the room. Minutes later, Diana appeared. She told him that she had confronted Camilla about her relationship with Charles. “It wasn’t a fight,” she said. “Calm, deathly calm, I said to Camilla, ‘I’m sorry I’m in the way. I obviously am in the way and it must be hell for both of you, but I do know what is going on. Don’t treat me like an idiot.’ ” Diana then returned to the party with her head held high, ignoring the fact that her confrontation with Camilla was the talk of the room. Charles and his mistress returned shortly afterward, looking shaken, and spent the rest of the evening circulating separately.
    On the journey home, Diana could only repeat over and over to a silent Prince Charles, “How could you have done this to me? It was so humiliating. How could you?” Wharfe believed that what tore the princess in two, wrecking her emotionally, was their readiness to humble her publicly without apparent remorse. From that night on she only ever referred to Camilla by her new nickname: the Rottweiler.
    The tension within the household became so unbearable that Wendy Berry’s son, James, quit as a valet. He told her, “I’ve got to the stage where I just can’t respect the prince or the princess any more. Their unhappy lives are destroying my own, and I don’t want to be caught in the crossfire.”
    At that time, Charles had more than forty silver-framed photographs adorning various surfaces in his private study at Highgrove. There were photographs of the royal family and his sons, and various pictures of his favorite horses and dogs. But there was not a single picture of his wife—ironically the world’s most photographed woman.
    In a sad little memoir Andrew Jacques, the local police constable who had guarded Highgrove for four years, wrote that the only times Charles and Diana met was at meal times, which very often ended in a blazing row for all to hear. “They never smile, laugh, or do anything together. In four years I only ever saw him kiss her goodbye once, and that was a peck on the cheek.”
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