The princess myth: Hilary Mantel on Diana
It takes a lot a
lot of know-how and
behind-the-scenes sweat to transform Cinderella from dust-maid to belle.
Fairytales do not describe the day after the wedding, when the young wife lost
in the corridors of the palace sees her reflection splinter, and turns in panicked
circles looking for a mirror that recognises her. Prince Charles’s attitude of
anxious perplexity seems to have concealed an obtuseness about what the
marriage meant to his bride. The usual young woman of the era had a job, sexual
experience, friends who stayed within her circle – her wedding was simply a big
party, and she probably didn’t even move house. But Diana’s experience as
daughter of a landed family did not prepare her for Buckingham Palace, any more
than Schönbrunn prepared the teenage Marie Antoinette for Versailles. It was
Diana’s complaint that no one helped her or saw her need. Fermoy had expressed
doubts before the marriage. “Darling, you must understand that their sense of
humour and their lifestyle are different …” The bathos is superb. “Mind how you
go,” say the elders, as they tip off the dragon and chain the virgin to the
mossy rock.
What would have
happened to Diana if she had made the sort of marriage her friends made? You
can picture her stabled in the shires with a husband untroubled by brains:
furnishing a cold house with good pieces, skiing annually, hosting shoots,
stuffing the children off to board: spending more on replenishing the ancestral
linen cupboard than on her own back. With not too much face-paint, jacket
sleeves too short for her long arms, vital organs shielded by a stout bag
bought at a country show, she would have ossified into convention; no
one would have suspected her of being a beauty. Like many women in
mid-life, she would have lived in a mist of discontent, struggling to define
something owing, something that had eluded her. But in her case the “something”
would have been the throne.
Even in childhood
photos Diana seems to pose, as if watching her own show. Her gaze flits
sideways, as if to check everyone is looking at her. One “friend” told a TV
crew that as a teenager, “whenever you saw her alone she would have picked up
some trashy romantic novel”. Leave aside the casual denigration of women’s
taste: if Diana imagined herself – the least and youngest daughter – as
magnificent, all-conquering, a queen, she had a means of turning her daydream
into fact. Diana claimed that she and the prince met only 13 times before their
wedding. Did she keep a note? She lacked self-awareness, but had strong
instincts. It must have been child’s play – because she was anxious to please,
or because she was crafty – to seem to share his
visions and concerns. An earnest look, a shy silence, job done. Chaste maids
were not too plentiful in the 1980s. The prince took advice: snap her up, sir…
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