But every single one of those reports said the same thing: The stroke had left the Queen in what the royal doctors called a minimally conscious state, so as to sound slightly more optimistic. The truth was a shade more dire: She had not shown any awareness, so even though six weeks hence she was still with us, they were no closer to knowing when or if she would come out of it. The longer Eleanor remained not dead, but neither wholly alive, the more everyone had been forced to ponder what a different world it would be without her. The country was littered with items that would need rebranding (for lack of a better word) when Richard took the throne for real, from cash to the postboxes with ER insignias on them to the pile of mail that arrived every day from well-wishers, covered in stamps bearing Eleanor’s profile.
“I’m not remotely ready to be Prince of Wales for real,” Nick confessed to me. “I thought we had years to go at our current level. I’d like to just worry about my grandmother, full stop, rather than boning up on all the logistics of what happens when she’s gone. It’s sickening.”
He seemed to have thrown off the hurt feelings that had begun to boil over at The Shard, in favor of devoting himself to whatever duties the new family order demanded of him. Prince Dick’s coronation was becoming less theoretical with every passing day, and he was out to remind everyone that Eleanor’s direct descendants—all of them, no matter what mind games he’d been putting Nick through before—were solid. It was undoubtedly easier to build Nick back up in this regard if the woman who had allegedly cuckolded him receded from view, so Richard immediately put me on the back burner. As we got deeper into October, the Daily Mail wrote a piece complimenting Nick’s stepped-up work schedule, and when I did the math, I realized he had caught up to Freddie’s pace from earlier in the summer. This felt too specific on Nick’s part to be coincidental, and as Freddie responded in kind, his stated resolve to introduce us to his new girlfriend had eroded. We had gotten nowhere. Sometimes in bed at night, Nick’s words ran through my head on a loop: Is there any coming back from this?
But during the day, I shoved those thoughts aside and tried to focus on what I could control. Nick and I had made a decent dent in our house’s clutter, but the overall vibe was still more Grey Gardens than I would have liked. The royal designer sent over plans and mood boards and swatches for the interior makeover, and when I couldn’t take any more rugs and L-shaped sofas and chevron accent pillows, I wandered over to the backlog of Georgina articles that I’d bookmarked to try to understand why there was, at heart, so little out there to understand about her later years. I’d tracked down some detailed royal forums dedicated to everyone in The Firm, no matter how obscure. (I was particularly grateful to a librarian in Maryland called Roberta, who had digitized a lot of old newspaper articles during her downtime.) In the early ’70s there was an outcry over Georgina’s profligate travel spending, complete with photos of her in sunglasses and head scarves, laughing carelessly, like some that I’d seen in her living room. Hermès even named a handbag after her in 1980. But by the end of that decade, it had all just…stopped. She’d pop onto the balcony at royal occasions, always in the back, looking like someone else’s edict demanded she be there. Some pieces speculated that Georgina’s élan was snuffed out by heartbreak—she’d once caused a stir by telling a reporter at Spy, “Men are like the monarchy itself, aren’t they? Splendid to look at, occasionally fun to have around, but cruel and pointless to the end”—but no one could agree whether it was the French politician, the dashing matador, the heart surgeon from Canada, or the Welsh toy boy she’d taken to Capri. Nobody, not even Roberta, could connect the dots between the lively life of the party and the lonely lady of the manor. One article even mentioned “quietude and spiritual reflection,” as if The Firm had fed reporters that line directly. It reflected the way Nick’s mother’s condition had been recast as mere reclusiveness, with no further questions asked. But there was no evidence of any buried mental illness here; Georgina’s eventual liver cancer did lend credence to the supposition that she’d retreated because her wild life had worn her out and then turned on her, but that theory rang a little hollow to me. Better answers had to be in Apartment 1A somewhere.
I longed to discuss this with Nick, but if he wasn’t out glad-handing people for photo ops, he was in endless meetings planning the next few. It was the worst of times, yet The Firm had closed ranks and left me on the outside; our home life was in stasis with no end in sight, and I was loath to speak up in case this was construed as making the Queen’s ill health about me. But I couldn’t even escape to blow off steam with my friends without it turning into a whole security production. My boredom burgeoned until one day I did get so fed up that I yanked on a floppy hat and sunglasses and snuck out the back gate onto the high street, just to do it. My blood was fizzing from the adrenaline. But then a busload of camera-clicking tourists near Royal Albert Hall spooked me, and I’d ducked into the gardens and hidden in a shrub, calling Cilla in a panic to rescue me. I felt ridiculous and embarrassed and trapped.
“Ugh, I’m sorry I pulled you away from your job for this,”
