Читать книгу The Duchess: The Untold Story – the explosive biography, as seen in the Daily Mail - Penny Junor - Страница 18

Camilla married Major Andrew Parker Bowles on 4 July 1973, shortly before her twenty-sixth birthday. The summer had been cooler than usual but 4 July was one of the hottest days of the month, with temperatures reaching 27 degrees Celsius. The big, lavish society wedding, with a guard of honour and trumpeters, was held at the Guards Chapel, where her parents had been married, and afterwards at St James’s Palace. The guest list included the most illustrious names in the country, amongst them Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, Princess Margaret – the Queen’s sister – and Princess Anne. Camilla looked glorious in a traditional long white dress, with a ten-foot train, by Bellville Sassoon, one of her favourite designers. Many of the evening dresses that had passed between her and Lucia Santa Cruz at Stack House were by Bellville Sassoon. Her bridesmaids wore mini-versions of the bridal gown, while the page boys were in nineteenth-century Blues uniforms. The groom wore a morning suit. He had had a punishing stag party at White’s a few nights earlier, which resulted in so much breakage the club couldn’t serve lunch the following day.

Camilla and her family had dined and spent the night before the wedding at the Berkeley Hotel in Knightsbridge. And it was from there that she and her father made their way to the chapel the next morning. Bruce was fond of Andrew and made him a director of his wine business, but Rosalind had her reservations. She thought him a snob – he enjoyed his association with the Royal Family a little too much for her taste, and his friends all seemed to have double-barrelled names or titles or baronetcies somewhere in the family. Rosalind was no great lover of royalty – the tales she’d heard from her mother about her own childhood with Alice Keppel and the King were enough to put her off all things upper class and royal for life.

The Prince of Wales was invited to the wedding but didn’t come. He was still in the Caribbean and that day he had a commitment in Nassau, representing the Queen at celebrations marking the end of British rule in the Bahamas. He denied it, but it has long been assumed that he stayed away because he couldn’t bear to watch the person he loved walk down the aisle with someone else.

In the summer of 1973, Camilla’s heart belonged to Andrew, the man so many women had wanted but whom she had successfully bagged. She thought he was everything she looked for in a man and he would give her everything she had dreamed of. He was thirty-three, an alpha male, sophisticated and experienced. She liked the fact that he was a cavalry officer, as her father had been, and that like her father he was brave. He hadn’t fought Rommel’s tanks, but in 1969 she’d watched him ride in the 129th Grand National, on a horse called The Fossa. It is one of the most dangerous and challenging races over jumps in the world, and out of a field of thirty that year, only fourteen finished. He was eleventh. By comparison, Charles at twenty-four was still a work in progress and would never match Andrew’s confidence or his masculinity. It is no surprise that at the time she found him the more appealing.

The newlyweds left for the South of France that afternoon and by way of a short honeymoon spent several idyllic days at Cap d’Ail, staying at La Capponcina, a villa owned by Andrew’s uncle, Sir Max Aitken, chairman of Beaverbook newspapers. Afterwards they settled down to married life and a routine of weekdays mostly apart, with Andrew in London, and weekends normally together. Their first house, which they rented for a year while Camilla hunted for something suitable to buy, was near Newbury in Berkshire, not far from Andrew’s parents who had recently downsized to White Oak House at Highclere.

After seven years of courtship, Camilla knew the whole family well. She was particularly fond of Andrew’s father, Derek Parker Bowles, a former soldier with the Royal Horse Guards, a landowner, Justice of the Peace and High Sheriff of Berkshire. Derek was great-grandson of the 6th Earl of Macclesfield, and a thoroughly likeable man, charm personified. The same could not be said of his wife. Dame Ann was Commissioner of the Commonwealth Girl Guides Association, and was nicknamed ‘Rhino’, for obvious reasons; she kept Pekingese dogs, and in the early Seventies, Camilla had a relative of one of them called Chang that she loved dearly. Dame Ann was the daughter of the millionaire racehorse owner Sir Humphrey de Trafford, 4th Baronet, and descended from an old English Roman Catholic family. She was a difficult woman who displayed no great love for her eldest son. Andrew nevertheless inherited from her side of the family his passion for horse racing, which has been a lifelong fascination, as a jockey, breeder and spectator – and he took her religion.

Donnington Castle House, where Andrew grew up and the family were living when Camilla first knew him, was an imposing seventeenth-century brick house with a beautiful garden, built as the lodge to a now-ruined fourteenth-century castle. Newbury racecourse was on the doorstep, with more racing at Ascot, polo at Windsor, Goodwood and Cowdray Park, and rowing at Henley – all the traditional upper-class sporting playgrounds an easy distance away – as well as local pheasant shoots. At weekends, the house was invariably filled with Parker Bowles children and their friends, and great fun was always had by all. Derek was a brilliant cook and had two kitchens, one for himself to use and the other for the cook they employed, but the meals everyone remembers were those created by Derek himself. He was also a very good gardener and was a nephew of the great horticulturalist, plantsman and writer, E. A. Bowles. Sadly, Parker Bowles senior had suffered badly from tuberculosis in earlier life and had only half of one lung, and he died in 1977 at the age of sixty-one. Dame Ann lived on for another ten years.

Andrew was the eldest of four; next was his brother, Simon, who also went into the Army and then the wine trade, before founding Green’s, the well-known restaurant and oyster bar in St James’s. The only girl, Mary Ann, married Nic Paravicini, who after the Army became a merchant banker and dabbled in the property business with Andrew. Their son is the blind, autistic musical genius, Derek Paravicini. Rick, the youngest, was a bloodstock agent and great character but sadly became an alcoholic, and died in 2010 at the age of sixty-three.

Camilla and Nic both loved Derek Parker Bowles and got on with him famously, but neither of them could cope with their mother-in-law, and it became a running joke about which of them was more in favour. Camilla would say, ‘You’re leading at the moment, I’m right at the bottom.’ But the next time they saw each other their status would be reversed. She would laugh her deep laugh about it and pull faces; laughter is her way of coping with every difficulty.

Camilla found a house to buy near Chippenham in Wiltshire, about an hour west from Newbury, and she and Andrew moved there in 1974, when Camilla was pregnant with their first child. Tom Henry Charles was born on 18 December 1974. Bolehyde Manor was a big medieval property in the village of Allington, just south of the M4 motorway. It was ideal for Andrew, with London less than two hours away by car and a fast, mainline station nearby. There were good schools in the locality, and they had friends in the area. But a big attraction for Camilla was that it was just inside Beaufort country, the oldest and biggest fox hunt in England. Andrew hunted occasionally but he didn’t find it particularly interesting – his enthusiasm was for racing and polo – but Camilla had hunted since she was a little girl with her father. And like her father, if she wasn’t curled up with a good book, she wanted to be on a horse.

Bruce had learnt to ride at Rugby but his hunting career began as a young cavalry officer, in the pre-war years when there was a good railway network and people travelled all over the country in pursuit of sport – even more than they do today. Strong friendships were forged at Sandhurst, and in soldiering generally – and the upper classes at that time still had large country houses and sporting estates, where friends congregated for weekends. Bruce frequently found himself at Dauntsey Park, in north Wiltshire, where his friends Hugh and Joyce Brassey lived. Brassey was a fellow officer and hunting enthusiast and the house was in the heart of the Duke of Beaufort’s hunting estates. After the war, in 1949, they had moved from the big house, but were still living in north Wiltshire and the friendship and the visits continued. When Camilla and Andrew moved to Bolehyde, her father no longer needed the Brasseys’ as a base – he stayed and hunted with his daughter instead – but they often came to dinner with her father afterwards.

Camilla gave great dinner parties – her time in Switzerland had not been wasted. A house filled with friends, good food and good wine was what she had grown up with and what she loved, and Andrew was the same. Initially they started off rather grandly with a Portuguese couple doing the work, but after a year they decided it was a waste of money. Unless it was a big dinner party, when she would bring in a cook who lived in the neighbouring village of Tockenham, Camilla thereafter did the cooking. She was good at it – her roast chicken is legendary. But she sticks to what she knows, which is mostly plain English fare with lots of home-grown vegetables. And there was a big, productive vegetable garden at Bolehyde to raid, as well as an enviable fruit garden.

Bolehyde was centuries old, with a resident ghost. Camilla was typically unfazed. She would joke about how she’d be sitting on the sofa watching television, and the ghost would come and sit beside her and would change the channels. She never saw it, but she could feel it next to her, and she would laugh about how she and the ghost always wanted to watch different programmes.

The house was Grade II* listed, which meant it was of significant historic value, originally dating back to the early fourteenth century. There had been later additions but none were much later than the seventeenth century, so it’s not surprising the ghost felt proprietorial. For a house of its size and importance, the approach to it was insignificant – the driveway was no more than 20 yards long, and the front of the house was clearly visible from the lane. But it was an imposing house nevertheless, built of Cotswold stone with three front gables, mullioned windows and a distinctive square stone porch with a stone balustrade above it. There were four reception rooms, each with stone-flagged floors and big open fireplaces, but the kitchen – designed, like that of The Laines, for staff to work in – was tucked away at the back with no view. Upstairs there were eight bedrooms – with a further three bedrooms in an annexe where, after Tom was born, a nanny lived. She was the only live-in help they had after the Portuguese couple left. The first nanny, Georgina, didn’t last, but Mary, who replaced her, was with them for years and is still a good friend. She comes to the party Camilla gives at Clarence House every June for her grandchildren and the children and grandchildren of friends.

The house had 200 acres of land, stables, a big distinctive garden, a swimming pool, a tennis court, a seventeenth-century stone dovecot, outhouses and two stone summerhouses that flanked the original driveway. It was a magnificent place to live, steeped in history, but it was big and expensive to run, constantly in need of maintenance and repair – and the listing meant that nothing either inside or outside could be altered without planning permission. The garden was a great feature of the property – beyond the formal gardens and stone-slabbed pathways there were sculpted yew hedges, statuary, and expanses of manicured lawn leading to lovely views over open countryside – but it was divided up by a patchwork of stone walls, which couldn’t be moved because of the planning restrictions, so there was very little scope for change and, like the house itself, it took a great deal of maintenance.

Camilla didn’t have the gardening bug when she was growing up but, when they moved to Bolehyde, it became her therapy. Andrew was already a gardening enthusiast and he prided himself on his greenhouse and the houseplants he cultivated. He would say Camilla didn’t do much more than dead-head the roses – and only then because, when he went off to London for the week, he would leave her lists of things to do in his absence. She and her friends used to laugh about the lists – most of which she ignored.

Camilla was not built for work in those days – she did the bare minimum she could get away with – but she was a good homemaker and an excellent mother. Like the kitchen, the rest of the house was dark inside because of the leaded windows and low ceilings, an effect intensified by the profusion of oak panelling, but she had a good eye for colour and brightened it up. She furnished it as her own childhood home had been furnished, with a mixture of antique and modern pieces, using pretty fabrics, plenty of table lamps and good rugs. There were books everywhere, and dozens of prints, paintings, cartoons and photographs on the walls, while silver boxes, framed photographs and other knick-knacks covered all available surfaces. Vases of fresh flowers and pot plants were a regular feature. Definitely shabby-chic rather than – to use her expression – ‘tickety boo’, it was a comfortable and happy home for her own children to grow up in.

What’s more, she made sure that Tom and his sister Laura Rose, born on 1 January 1978, had the security of living in one place. Most Army families move from pillar to post and live on military bases, uprooting their children from schools and friends every time they are transferred. But Camilla was not a regular Army wife. She refused either to live in married quarters or to move from one posting to another, which may not have done much for Andrew’s progression up the regimental ranks but did ensure that they all had a happy home life.

And to most outsiders, they did appear to be a very happy family. Everyone who knew them well was aware of Andrew’s serial unfaithfulness to Camilla, but it was passed off as a bit of a joke. One friend who sat next to him at dinner one night said, ‘I’m really hurt, Andrew. I’m the only one of Camilla’s friends you haven’t made a pass at. What’s wrong with me?’ Those friends he did make a play for showed scant loyalty, yet she never seemed to blame them or make great scenes with Andrew. He and she were competitive with one another but there was never a tense atmosphere in the house, no barbed comments or bitter exchanges. They teased each other, and seemed to outsiders to have a good, healthy rapport. Andrew’s affairs were just a fact of life and not something she often spoke about.

It was only those very closest to her who knew quite how standoffish and cold he could be towards her, and how deeply, bitterly hurt she was by his infidelity. She loved Andrew – for reasons that her family could never entirely fathom – and longed to be truly loved by him, and she didn’t feel she was. There was always someone prettier, wittier, sexier, waiting to take him away from her. And because he spent his weekdays in London, he was never short of the opportunity to do as he pleased. Today, looking back, he would admit there is truth in that. If blame was to be apportioned for the way the marriage ended, he would feel obliged to take a full 80 per cent of it. Love her though he does, he would also admit that Camilla was more in love with him than he was with her.

For some years, when they were both in the Army, he and his brother-in-law Nic Paravicini shared an office, and a flat too – the same flat off Ebury Street that Camilla had shared with Virginia Carington. Although they were both married, they led a bachelor existence, and had a code involving empty milk bottles. Arranged in a certain way outside the door, these meant ‘Do not disturb.’ Nic would say Andrew arranged the milk bottles more often than he did. And still, as often as not, the women Andrew was seeing were Camilla’s friends.

For all the hurt, it would never have occurred to her to divorce him. She had been brought up to believe that you stuck at things, you didn’t give up. And so she found ways of coping. Hunting was one way; galloping amongst a cavalcade of horses, any one of which might bite or kick or take a tumble, left no time for thinking. And in the summer when the hunting season came to an end, her escape was to bury herself in her garden. She saw friends and family, and there were the children to keep her busy as she took them to and from nursery and then school, to parties and the cinema, to see their grandparents in Plumpton or Annabel and her children, Ben, Alice and Catherine Elliot, in Dorset.

Bruce and Rosalind were tremendous grandparents and the cousins loved going to stay with them. The initials of each of them, crafted out of round stones, are cemented into the path in the vegetable garden at The Laines to this day. They went there at Christmas and Easter, and every summer Bruce and Rosalind paid for the entire family to spend a fortnight in the Grand Hotel Excelsior on Ischia, a tiny volcanic island south-west of Naples in Italy. Andrew was never keen on the sun and would spend his time, observed one of them cattily, inside writing postcards to duchesses and all his other titled friends. But the children loved it. Every day the routine was the same. They went down to the beach with their mothers for the morning, a doughnut for elevenses, back to the hotel to meet everyone for lunch, a general knowledge quiz, a siesta, a game of tennis on the clay courts, and back to find Bruce and Rosalind on their second Negroni. They did that every year until the children were in their teens.

Camilla never set out to be unfaithful to Andrew. She flirted for sure, because that was the way she was, a twinkly, sexy woman with a husky laugh that men adored. Everyone, indeed, adored her – men, women and children – because she was a life force and said outrageously funny things, but she no more wanted an open marriage than to fly to the moon. But as the years went by, she realised that Andrew would never change, would never love her and cherish her, never make her feel good about herself; and inevitably, the confidence that had been her hallmark throughout her childhood started to crumble. What had made her so strong as a child was the absolute certainty that her parents loved her and the absolute security that came from that certainty. She never, ever had that feeling with Andrew. She lived with a permanent knot of dread in her tummy, that one day he might leave her. It left her very vulnerable to the attentions of a suitor.