Untold Story (5 page)

The last time I saw her was in November. When I left her in September she had been manic, hysterical with grief and fear, and one of the few things that calmed her was when I begged her forgiveness for what I had done, for what I had helped her to do. She sat without speaking until the tears dried on her face. “No,” she said, quietly and clearly, “I couldn’t go on. We both know that.” And indeed I had feared for her sanity the previous few months, when she had lost “the love of her life,” when her behavior had become so erratic it caused a tabloid furore, when she seemed to drift through too many of our conversations as if in a semifugue. Time after time, over the years, she had come out of the darkness (of her husband’s betrayal, of her bulimia, of numerous scandals) and dazzled the world. The deeper the darkness, the brighter she shone. Impossible to sustain indefinitely, and I had seen her teetering, finally, at the edge of the abyss.

I said, and what about now? Now can you go on? And although moments before she had sobbed until she retched, choking on the impossibility of it all, she smiled that smile that she has, pure sex, and completely chaste, and said, “Oh, do give me a little credit, please.”

But when I returned her mood was black. Two months of living in an unremarkable Brazilian suburb, working on her tan and roughing up her accent had perhaps already given her too much of the “normality” she thought she craved.

That’s not a fair thing to say.

She is not the first person on this planet to walk out of her life and “start over” as they say in her adopted homeland. She is not the first mother to leave her children behind. These things do happen, though they shock us when we hear of them.

But her circumstances are extreme. What a dry formulation that is. Would that I could write of it, of her, with poetry and passion instead of my journeyman lettering. Were I able I would write not prose but an aria.

So, yes, the circumstances are extreme and her depression, her bleakness, is natural and inevitable. We talked of it before as a stage that she would go through. Though, given the delicate state of her mind, she perhaps didn’t fully comprehend the finality of her actions, hadn’t accepted the loss of her boys as permanent. No, she couldn’t go on. But I didn’t doubt, I still don’t, that she will survive her losses. She is a survivor. She’s the toughest woman I ever met.

“Real life,” though, must have come as something of a shock. She always wanted it, or so she imagined. She fantasized about riding on a double-decker bus the way others dream about riding in a horse-drawn coach. When we were making our little plan (that’s how she referred to it; she is often droll though princesses are seldom credited with a funny bone) she would remind me how many times she had walked down a London street “and got away with it.” There weren’t so many times, we could count them, because usually a photographer, or several, blew her cover. The cover being that it couldn’t be the Princess of Wales in jeans and a sweatshirt browsing at the magazine stand. Other times she’d go out in disguise, a wig, dark glasses, once a policewoman’s uniform, something she’d done once or twice in the early days, high jinks with her sister-in-law, and later, in desperation, to make pay phone calls to some undeserving object of her love. Disguise, she already knew, could work.

But the unrelenting day-in-day-out of shopping and cooking and cleaning and washing, despite her retention through the years of a touch of the Cinderella complex, has definitely been a bore. She hadn’t hired a cleaner when I saw her. By the end of November she’d had over two months fending for herself. It’s a point of pride on which she will eventually give way.

She’s wearing a wig and dyeing her hair as well; never one to do things by halves. Her tan is deeper than I’ve ever seen it. Her eyes are dark brown and she complains that the lenses are a pain to take in and out.

Back in September, when we went to have the “filler” put in her lips, a local clinic in Belo Horizonte (the town where she was holed away), she could hardly breathe all the way there in the car. She had spent the previous two weeks hiding in the house, curtains drawn, rationing out the food that I’d bought. “Oh my God,” she kept saying on the drive. “Oh my God.”

I said, Might I venture a couple of observations, ma’am? First that we will be in and out of the clinic within forty minutes and that you can keep your sunglasses on if that would make you more comfortable. Secondly that truly nobody is looking for you. You are being hunted no longer, that is over, it’s gone.

She pulled herself together then and commandeered the rearview mirror to reassure herself that she was a dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty now. She said, “Will you please stop calling me ma’am?”

Her lips are fuller and I think she was pleased with the result, when the swelling went down and it was apparent she wasn’t going to be left with a permanent pout. “They’re quite sexy, aren’t they, Lawrence?” Even in the midst of anguish she can flirt.

In November she went through with the nose job in Rio, although I didn’t think she needed it. But when you have been the world’s most photographed woman it is difficult to believe that you are safe from discovery. And by the time I left her in North Carolina three weeks later (I had the house all arranged in advance of course) I could see that it had been done with artistry. Also that she was absolutely right to have had it done. Adding a new nose to the new mouth, the difference seemed not incremental but exponential, as it appeared to alter, as perhaps indeed it did, the very proportions of her face.

21 January 1998

God knows what she is doing with herself now. I try to imagine it and I can’t. She imagined it so many times, a “normal” life, but always with a man, the one who would take her away from it all. That was never going to happen and even she could see that in the end.

I gave her some books,
Vanity Fair, Pride and Prejudice, Madame Bovary, Crime and Punishment.
She said, “It’s terribly sweet of you, Lawrence, pretending I’m clever enough for this stuff.”

What will she be doing now? What does her morning look like? Perhaps she’s taken up gardening. Maybe she has a library card.

It is too difficult to imagine her living life on a human scale, and I don’t know whether to put that down to exalting her too highly or patronizing her too much. When she wasn’t out in public, she was frequently alone in a room with a sofa, an embroidered cushion, a television set.

She did love watching the soap operas, but there never was a drama to match the drama of her life. However difficult that was (again, the dryness) she must miss it, and when I was with her last she seemed almost to resent the fact that she could go about her business with ease. When, for instance, I took her to the hospital for the rhinoplasty, she did not gasp all the way there as she had on the previous trip to the clinic, although she would, according to the brochure, be under “close observation” during the stay. This time she was sullen, almost silent, and when I asked her if she was worried she said, “Why should I be? I’m just one amongst dozens.”

That was true enough. Rio is probably the plastic surgery capital of the world. Buying a new nose was as simple as buying a new dress from a catalog; you can pick the style you prefer from a batch of photographs.

I blanched, though, when we went into the reception room and saw her picture gracing the cover of many of the magazines they had there. She, however, was a step ahead of me. She picked one up and told me to hold on to it. At the “consultation” with the surgeon, a pretheater chat when she was already in a hospital gown, sitting up on a gurney, I had the magazine facedown on my lap and I felt it burning my knees. She was makeup-free with just a few strands of dark hair escaping from the plastic cap. After the preliminaries, the surgeon, a suave fellow, a lounge lizard in scrubs, began to scrutinize her profile. Two months since she was assumed to have drowned. Her portrait still plastered the press. As unremarkable as she looked in her gown and cap, was there any possibility of him recognizing her? I held my breath.

“Darling,” she said, “pass me the magazine. Wasn’t she beautiful? I’d like you to make me look more like her. Can it be done?”

The surgeon barely looked at the magazine. He said, “Such a tragedy. Such a beautiful woman. Now what I’d suggest for you, if I may, is that we streamline a little here, and here, and take the nostrils to there. I think you’re going to love the result.”

She acquiesced by little more than a murmur and he began marking her face with his pen. I sat by her side, in the role of husband, I suppose. The surgeon must see them every week. A husband taking his wife on a nip-and-tuck holiday in Brazil, a couple of weeks on the beach thrown in to recover, before returning home remarkably “refreshed.”

Still, I was nervous, I must admit, in a way that I had not been since she was officially deceased. When I returned to visit her in the morning I stood for a full five minutes on the hospital steps holding myself up on a railing while my legs did their best to let me down. I am ashamed to recall that my fear was as much for myself as for her, and that as I trembled at the prospect of discovery I had in mind my own inevitable disgrace perhaps more than anything else.

I pulled myself together. For an instant I wished I could be felled right there and then, a sudden blood clot in the brain to trump the tumor, no more tightening and loosening of the hangman’s noose, no more service to him, to her, to anything, anyone. And then I pulled myself together, called upon my birthright as an Englishman, a stiffening of the upper lip drafted in like the Household Guards to quell an uprising of the emotions.

I nearly laughed when I saw her, sitting on the bed, painting her toenails. With two black eyes, a bandaged nose, and swollen face I could barely recognize her myself. “I’m a mess,” she said. “And the nurses think I’m just some rich spoiled wife who has nothing better to do than chop a perfectly good nose around.” She sounded petulant.

I took her home two days later. The drive was long and, again, silent. I made some dinner, or rather, heated two plastic trays in the microwave, while she lay on the sofa beneath a blanket, only the crown of her head and two punched-up eyes revealed. For the next few days her mood was as somber as I have ever witnessed. Not distraught, not hysterical, and not punctuated by those rays of light with which she pierced even the blackest of her moods. She was absorbing, I think, the realization that she will not be recognized, not by the neighbors, the shopkeepers, the nurses, or anyone else. When she goes out now she may take all the precautions she pleases, in the way she dresses, the way she speaks, what she says, but the drama will be limited to the scenarios playing out in her mind. Her outings will not be adrenaline-filled. The curtain has fallen. The soap opera has been axed. And so here starts the rest of her life.

Chapter Five

Although she wasn’t supposed to work the weekends Lydia liked to drop in on Saturday mornings because Saturdays were when families came to look for a new pet, meaning there were fewer staff available to exercise and care for the dogs. She pulled up in front of the prefabricated office and opened the passenger door to let Rufus bounce down ahead of her.

Esther was in the clinic with the Kerry blue terrier puppy they’d taken in a few days earlier. “This one,” she said, “will not take his worming pills. Eric’s been mixing them in his food but he finds them and spits them out.”

“He’s a smart cookie,” said Lydia.

“With a sore backside to prove it.”

Lydia stroked the puppy’s wavy black coat. It wouldn’t turn that lovely slate blue for another few months yet. She ran her hand over his little beard. “I’ll crush a tablet,” she said, “mix it with some peanut butter. That usually does the trick.”

“I’ll leave him to you,” said Esther. “Got a family coming by in a minute and if I can get them to take one of the older dogs while this smart cookie is out of sight, all the better and amen.”

Lydia took Tyson, Zeus, and Topper for a walk in the woods, along with Rufus, who proudly led the way. They were old dogs who had been at the shelter for years and would probably never be rehomed. Tyson dragged a back leg and Zeus and Topper grizzled at each other like the old bad-tempered men they were. She took them because the others would have more chances, were cute enough to find families who would throw sticks and rubber balls while Zeus and Topper chewed on their kennel’s wire netting and Tyson curled up and chewed on his leg.

Last night Carson had come over and she had made chicken parmigiana and when the dishes were cleared he said, “Living by yourself is great. No one else to please.”

She’d waited.

“But isn’t it a little bit lonely? Sometimes?”

Lydia knew about lonely.

“Nothing’s ever perfect,” she said.

“Don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining. Just wondering if there might be another way. It crosses my mind.”

“Don’t turn all romantic on me,” said Lydia.

Was there anything she didn’t know about loneliness? She had tasted it so many ways.

“Now you know there’s no danger of that.” He rubbed the back of his neck.

“Phew,” said Lydia. “I’m relieved.”

“Being with other people doesn’t stop you being lonely,” said Carson. “Not necessarily. And living alone doesn’t make you lonely. But if you’re not spending enough time with the people you want to spend time with, that’s when maybe it starts to get hard.”

“Carson,” said Lydia, “we’ve only been dating four months.”