Читать книгу Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret - Craig Brown, Craig Brown - Страница 28

The book in question had been banned in Britain after the Queen Mother gained an injunction against it. The judge agreed that Princess Margaret’s former footman, David John Payne, had signed an agreement preventing him from writing about his time in the royal household. But no such restriction existed in the US, where Payne’s work was serialised in Good Housekeeping magazine, and had now been published in book form.

In 1959, while in service to Lord Rothermere, Payne heard of a vacancy for a footman at Clarence House.

He passed the interview. ‘You are tall, smart, and seem to have the bearing required to carry out your duties,’ said the comptroller, Lord Gordon, hiring Payne at a basic wage of five pounds ten shillings a week. Gordon then introduced him to Jack Kemp, steward to the household, who in turn presented him to HRH the Princess Margaret. Payne’s first impression was of ‘a tiny figure, beautiful in a pink and white cotton dress, her dark hair brushed into a bouffant style and a shining double row of pearls round her throat … She extended her small white hand – I had time to see the smoothness of the skin and the care which had gone into the manicure of her nails – and we shook hands … Margaret at twenty-nine was a beautiful woman. Her face, not too heavily powdered, had been made up by an expert – herself, as it later turned out. Her eyebrows had been pencilled in and her lipstick smoothly formed in a delightful cupid’s bow. But her most striking, almost mesmeric features were her enormous deep blue eyes.’

From the start there is, as Fowles suggests, something voyeuristic, even fetishistic, about Payne’s memories of the Princess. And creepy, too: My Life with Princess Margaret is a strange, unsettling mixture of idolatry and loathing, suggesting they are two sides of the same coin. Payne is a forerunner of the Kathy Bates character in the film Misery, hero-worship turning, without warning, into almost passionate resentment, then back again, and all in the flicker of an eyelid.

A few months later, now part of the furniture, Payne entered the Princess’s sitting room while she was

lying full-length on the settee, her head pillowed on two pink brocade cushions and her dark hair spread out around her face. Her eyes were closed and she was concentrating on the music … She looked her very loveliest lying there in a midnight blue sequined cocktail dress with a tight bodice and flared skirt. She was lightly made up, her powder and lipstick applied with the delicate touch of an expert. Her shoulders above the low-cut neckline shone silkily in the soft lights. On the table by her side stood a half-glass of whisky and water and in the ashtray there were two or three inch-long stubs. She lay perfectly still, lost in the atmosphere of the romantic music, her eyes closed, her face serene. I stood there for a few seconds, inwardly moved by the sight of the lovely sleeping beauty.

Small wonder if Princess Margaret felt unnerved by these creamily intrusive reminiscences: Payne slips into a room as stealthily as a cat-burglar, prowling around, gathering everything up for future use, always the observer, never the observed.

‘I was one of the very few servants who ever saw the Princess’s bedroom,’ he boasted. ‘She would often send me up to get a jewel case or some item she particularly wanted to take with her on a trip … Once the Princess and myself were used to each other, she had no second thoughts about sending me up on such errands to her innermost sanctuary.’

Throughout his time in her service, Payne seems to have been sizing up his mistress, her family and friends with the watchfulness of a boa constrictor. As Fowles suggested, the reader grows complicit with this particular Collector, perching voyeuristically on his shoulder as he slithers around the Princess’s private domain.

Imagine, now, that you are with me as we walk up the main staircase and into the bedroom. It is deserted now, of course, but has been prepared for the Princess to retire. We tread the thick carpet of the corridor silently, with only the occasional creak of a floorboard to tell we are there … The 5-foot tall Princess has chosen a 6-foot, 4 inch bed topped by a foam-rubber mattress, firm but yielding gently to the touch … And just to complete the picture, Mrs Gordon has already laid out one of the Princess’s flimsy, full-length nylon nighties.

And why stop there?

Let us take a closer look. We can see a collection of nail files, jars of face cream, tubes of lipstick, and a brush set comprising two green bone-backed brushes edged in gold, and a hand mirror in the same material. Next to them Margaret has thrown an ordinary comb. Also lying there is a half-filled packet of tissues which she uses for removing her make-up at night. In the morning there will be half a dozen of them smeared with lipstick and powder tossed on the dressing table.

Our tour continues into her bathroom, with its fitted carpet in oyster pink, its loo in the far left-hand corner, its white porcelain bath with two chromium-plated taps. Resting across the bath is a tray with compartments containing coloured scented soaps and a long-handled loofah. ‘There is no shower as such, but in one of the lockers of the bathroom there is a rubber tubing hand shower which can be plugged into the taps.’ Hitchcock’s film Psycho was released while Payne was still in service at Clarence House, Fowles’s book The Collector soon after he left.

Back in the bedroom, Payne leers long and hard at the Princess’s bedside table, with its light-brown pigskin photograph case. ‘It is on the table near the lamp. Look closer and you will see that the case contains three small head-and-shoulders portraits of a man. You may recognize him. And you will not be surprised when I say that to me, they constitute one of the most significant things I encountered during my service with Princess Margaret. But more of that later …’

Those three bedside photographs are all, it emerges, of Group Captain Peter Townsend.