‘I don’t think I really noticed anything until the summer when I was about fourteen. My father was off attending the petroleum conferences, and my mother... Meal times were the worst. Watching her shuffle food that she had no stomach for around a plate. The sound of cutlery scratching against china still sends shivers through me.
‘I tried to find things for us to do together, but she wasn’t really in a fit state during the day. She’d spend a lot of time in her bed. At first I thought she was ill. But then, when she was high, she’d be overly bright...false and forced laughter would echo through the halls. But through that cracked, jangly exuberance would be a thread of neediness, a constant search for reassurance that...’ she shook her head in shame ‘...that I despised. That I was embarrassed by.’
Shame and guilt warred within Eloise. She hated herself for that. For sharing emotion with her father and feeling embarrassed about her mother. Hated to think that she was anything like him.
‘I went back to the UK for university and plunged myself into my studies. I thought I was being a good student, but in reality I was just hiding. In Zurich, working at the medical centre, I learned of the psychological effects both before and after addiction had taken hold. I began to see why my mother had turned to pills, given her life with her husband, given my father... I began to wonder if there was something I could have done if I’d been present...if I’d been allowed to be.’
The helplessness in her voice took hold of something deep within Odir. It echoed within a bruised heart he would have denied to any other living soul.
Slowly things began to fall into place in Odir’s mind. Those painful dinner conversations at the palace, when her mother’s pale, drawn face and her almost constant silence had been so at odds with her daughter’s desperate attempts to take the focus from her, to fill the silence, to be the plaster over a wound so deep and infected with hatred.
‘When I came to Farrehed after university I confronted my father about it—about why he didn’t force her to get help. He said she was beyond help. I threatened to take her away, and that’s when he showed me the videos. He’d recorded them on his camera. Times that even I hadn’t seen her. Erratic, horrible, slurring... She was...she was like a wounded animal. Begging my father for pills, screaming at housekeepers. Raving at imaginary slights from strangers.’
Images rushed through Eloise’s mind—blurry, jerky images placed there by numerous videos, captured for posterity by a father who would blackmail his own child. Hatred and despair warred within her.
‘He threatened to cut her off, to go to the press and publicly denounce his “druggy wife”. He said that he’d sever her financial support under the guise of cutting off her access to drugs, but that he would really just leave her to the mercy of the health service.
‘I didn’t think he’d do it. Ruin his own reputation just to get what he wanted. But he insisted that he’d ride the tidal wave of public opinion as the poor, put-upon husband who had tried to protect his wife’s shame. He would be seen as a man who had done all he could to help his wife, but who couldn’t take the heartbreak of it any more. He was convincing. I’ll give him that.
‘I still said no. I went to see my mother. To beg her to leave my father. To come with me, away from it all. I knew that I could provide for us when I got my trust fund, that we just had a few years before then. But she wouldn’t leave him.
‘She begged me. Begged me to keep her secret. Begged me to marry you.’
Her mother’s hysteria that day had been terrible. She had been wailing, begging, pleading, all of it edged with a very real fear of being cut off from the one thing she loved more than herself, more than her daughter. Drugs.
‘So I agreed. And I agreed to the gagging order that would prevent me from talking about my mother’s dirty little secret. To keep my mother happy. To get my father what he wanted.’
Odir took it all in, repositioning this new information over the family who had attended state dinners, shared private meals with his own family. This background information was filling in questions he hadn’t realised he’d asked himself about the tension, the slightly odd behaviour of his mother-in-law. Her father had been relocated to Kuwait after their marriage, and Odir realised that the wedding was the last time he’d seen her father and mother.
‘So you wanted to use your trust fund...?’
‘Not for my mother. No, she’s still with my father. After I left Farrehed I went to stay with a university friend. She had always been so understanding about my mother. About my family. I hadn’t realised why at the time, but when I arrived in Switzerland I saw she had her own addiction troubles. Her family had cut her off, and to be honest she was in a much worse place than I was.
‘I wanted to get her help—the kind of help that my mother had refused—but to do so I needed money. Zurich has an amazing medical centre, specialising in addiction. But by the time Natalia was admitted the damage was done. She needs a kidney transplant, but because of her addictions she’s very low down on the transplant list. In the time I spent at the facility I got to know the staff, and when they were looking for an assistant to the Chief Financial Officer I applied and got the job.’
Eloise smiled ruefully.
‘Yes, your very royal wife has been working as a secretary for the last six
