The royals - Kitty Kelley [132]
Diana blushed, lowered her eyes, and looked down at her long legs. “I’m just taller now,” she joked. “I’ve stretched the puppy fat.”
Amused by her self-deprecating humor, Charles laughed and sat down to talk. They chatted about her sister, Sarah, who recently had married Neil McCorquodale, a former officer of the Coldstream Guards. Charles mused about how pleased he was to get away from his royal duties and be with friends. (The “never-ending bloody” burden of being Prince of Wales would become a constant refrain in the next few months, as Charles complained about his workload.) Diana listened sympathetically and told him how wonderfully he performed his duties. She mentioned how touched she had been watching him on television at Mountbatten’s funeral.
“You looked so sad when you walked up the aisle at the funeral. It was the most tragic thing I’ve ever seen. My heart bled for you when I watched it. I thought: It’s wrong. You are lonely. You should be with somebody to look after you.”
She later recounted this conversation to her roommates and said that she had talked to the Prince as if he were one of her nursery school charges. She added that he drew close to her, just like the little children she looked after at the Young England kindergarten. Charles, leaving early, asked her to drive back to London with him, but she demurred, saying it might be impolite to her hosts.
“That was a good move on her part,” said one of her roommates. “She didn’t want to appear ill-bred, and she certainly couldn’t look too eager.”
For Diana, the courtship had begun. She was excited to be noticed by the Prince of Wales and told her roommates that if she had a chance with him, she would not treat him as dismissively as her sister, Sarah, had when she’d talked to the press. “I think of the Prince as the big brother I never had,” Sarah had told a reporter. “I really enjoy being with him, but I’m not in love with him. And I wouldn’t marry a man I didn’t love, whether it was a dustman or the King of England. If he asked me, I would turn him down.” Diana, who read the romance novels of Barbara Cartland, had fantasized about marrying a prince. She would never turn him down.
Diana confided her fantasies to her roommates, who started ransacking their closets to find the right clothes for her to wear on her royal dates. They never saw the future King of England because he never visited Diana’s apartment. Nor did he pick her up when they went out. “There weren’t many presents, either,” recalled one roommate. “A book at Christmas, a watercolor he had painted at Balmoral, one bouquet after they got engaged that was delivered by his valet but without a card, and a little green plastic frog, which Diana kept on the dashboard of her car. She had teased Charles about not having to kiss any more frogs because she’d finally found her prince. I guess he agreed.”
During their six-month courtship, Charles rarely telephoned Diana, and he relied on an equerry to issue his last-minute invitations. She was expected to provide her own transportation to wherever he might be. “We referred to him as ‘sir,’ ” said one roommate, “because that’s what Diana had to call him in the beginning…. We helped her plot her strategy. It was great fun, and a bit of a game.”
The young women, whom Charles referred to as Diana’s “silly flatmates,” shared an apartment at No. 60 Coleherne Court in London, near Harrods department store. Diana had bought the three-bedroom apartment with money she had inherited from her great-grandmother. “It was my coming-of-age present,” she said. Like her two older sisters, she had received the money ($75,000) on her eighteenth birthday. Her mother advised her to invest in London real estate, so Diana bought the apartment. To meet