Worse followed during the wedding breakfast. Another girl told Meghan how much she admired her, and how wonderful she thought it was that she and Harry were married, and how well she thought she was doing. She told her she was rooting for them, and wished them well. Meghan’s response? She looked her up and down, turned away without saying a word, and froze her out for the rest of the wedding breakfast.
‘She was beautifully turned out,’ one of the guests told me. ‘I was surprised at how small she is. But she is undeniably good looking. She was really well dressed, but more for a town wedding than one in the country. She had on high, high heels while everyone else was in espadrilles. I mean, the wedding was in a field. You don’t wear high heels to a wedding that you know is going to be in a field. You could see she wasn’t comfortable around us. It was your typical English wedding. Everyone knew everyone else and everyone was bright and bouncy. Maybe she felt like a fish out of water. Harry was the best man, but when he wasn’t performing his best man duties, he and Meghan kept themselves to themselves.’ Someone else told me Meghan actually walked off and went to sit on her own on more than one occasion, and that Harry joined her every time he noticed that she was missing. This has the ring of truth. I was told by many different sources that Meghan has a habit of walking off from big groups. If she doesn’t feel comfortable, she doesn’t make any effort to fit in. She removes herself from the scene. However, she only does this when she is with a man or when there is a man around on whom she has her eye. He then has a choice. He either leaves her to stew on her own, or he goes and joins her. ‘That way, she detaches him from the group and has him to herself,’ a Canadian who has observed her over the years explained. ‘She is very good at getting men to dance to her tune.’ This technique is one that Meghan has been using since childhood. She used to withdraw from Nikki Priddy whenever things weren’t going the way she wanted them to. As Nikki observed, she is stubborn, she would not relent, and if you didn’t go to her, she’d never come to you.
By this time, Meghan’s various techniques had worked so well with Harry that he was happily, willingly, and entirely in her thrall. While his friends were pleased to see him happy, they were perplexed as to how anyone could have undergone such a complete change of identity that he was now virtually a new individual. Putting aside the leaden quality that had crept into the newly serious, world-changing Harry’s behaviour, there was a new and disturbing dimension that worried his friends. He and Meghan had begun to behave as if they functioned in a bubble, with no thought or care for how their actions impacted upon their associates. Although they could be perfectly charming when they wanted to be, they often crossed a line where the traditional modes of behaviour with which most of his friends conducted themselves. This was nowhere more apparent than when they attended dinner parties. Their public displays of affection were so ostentatious that onlookers found their conduct embarrassing.
Firstly, they would huddle together, putting up an invisible barrier between themselves and everyone else, as if they were the only couple who had ever been in love, and that everyone present was of such insignificance that they had no time for them. Rather than partake of the occasion by fitting in with the group, they would be completely absorbed in each other, whispering into each other’s ears as if they were the only two people who existed. Whispering is bad manners; it excludes others, but Harry and Meghan seemed to have no awareness of the offence they were causing as they froze everyone out from their hallowed communion. While this was going on, they would be pawing each other and, if that wasn’t enough of a display of how much they desired each other, they would periodically kiss like teenagers on a fifth date.
Distasteful as such displays were to people who had been reared from childhood with the injunction No PDAs (No Public Displays of Affection), what catapulted their conduct into insupportability was the havoc they created when it came time to be seated for dinner. The custom has always been that married couples are never seated beside each other. Engaged couples yes, but married couples, no. There are sound reasons for this. Aside from the fact that people who live together will ordinarily have less to say to each other than to those they see less frequently, the main purpose of a dinner party is for people to mix, have good conversations and a good time. This is not possible unless couples are dispersed around a dinner table. Hostesses take seating arrangements seriously because place à table is not only important in terms of creating good interchange, but also for other reasons. The most honoured man is placed at the right hand of the hostess, the next at her left, while the rule is reversed for the host and women.
Harry and Meghan ruined several dinner parties by refusing to be separated. Someone who witnessed them in action told me,
