The naked injustice of this, and the good-humoured fortitude with which his friend had picked himself up and moved forward, had endeared Pelly to Prince William still further. There was – and is – a case for saying that Guy Pelly is the oldest and closest male friend of our future king. Never underestimate a man who is wise enough to play the fool. When Pelly went into the nightclub business in his twenties, both William and Harry would make a point of visiting their mate’s boîtes regularly until they all got established. And in 2018 William would invite his friend Guy to be a godfather to his and Kate’s third child, Prince Louis.
It did take some time, but Catherine’s acceptance of Pelly’s godparenting showed how she had moved on from the all-male cruise suggestion that she certainly had not welcomed in the summer of 2004.
‘At the time I wasn’t very happy about it,’ she admitted to ITV’s Tom Bradby in 2010. ‘But actually it made me a stronger person. You find out things about yourself that maybe you hadn’t realised.’
‘In that particular instance, we did split up for a bit,’ agreed Prince William. ‘We were both very young. It was at university. We were both finding ourselves as such and being different characters and stuff. It was very much trying to find our own way, and we were growing up. It was a bit of space and a bit of things like that, and it worked out for the better.’
Catherine found her own space that summer on some French leave with a group of St Andrews friends staying at Fergus Boyd’s parents’ house in the Dordogne, plus some quality time with the ever-supportive Middletons. She and William had committed to go back to Balgove House again for their fourth and final year, so the end of September 2004 found them reunited – and actually stronger, on reflection, for the time spent apart.
Now William’s joke about living in a mini Highgrove came to pass again as the reunited couple moved back in to Balgove and hit their stride for their concluding terms at St Andrews – they had final exams the following summer to cram for. Both were committed and serious students, and Balgove’s relative isolation gave them the chance to get their swotting done.
But that did not stop them entertaining in some style. The couple’s occasional dinner parties in their dining room with its rustic open fireplace and long mahogany table that seated no fewer than seventeen became sought-after invitations. Kate had organised some bright red and white gingham curtains, while William’s contribution was a glass-fronted champagne fridge and a large oil painting of his royal grandmother who presided solemnly – though surely with a mild touch of satire – over the festive gatherings.
In the summer of 2005 William and Kate certainly graduated from St Andrews with a first-class degree in memorable entertaining – and they had performed well academically. Each had earned a distinguished upper second-class degree – a 2:1, that token of hard-working intelligence without the eccentricity of genius.
‘You will have made lifelong friends,’ declared Vice-Chancellor Brian Lang in his farewell address. ‘You may have met your husband or wife. Our title as the top match-making university in Britain signifies so much that is good about St Andrews, so we rely on you to go forth and multiply.’
18
Kate’s Not!
‘You go through the good times. You go through the bad times – both personally and within a relationship as well.’
(Kate Middleton, 17 November 2010)
Camilla had confided to Kate the secret of hanging on to a busy prince: fit your timetable – well, basically your whole life – around his. But after St Andrews University, William’s timetable was proving rather un-fit-roundable. His next destination was the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, where he was due to spend the best part of 2006 training to be an army officer – the start of his plan to do stints in all three military services whose commander-in-chief he would become as king. Marriage had not been included in that schedule.
In the meantime, the prince, now twenty-three, undertook his first solo royal tour abroad when he flew to New Zealand to represent the Queen at the sixtieth anniversary of Allied victory in the Second World War. Happily, the British Lions rugby team were touring the islands at the same time, which made for a lively ten days of engagements – rendered all the livelier by screaming crowds of hysterical young women. Kate followed her boyfriend’s progress – and the screaming – via the evening TV news bulletins at home.
While Kate’s medium-to-long-term objective was quite simple – to lead William in handcuffs to the altar – for the time being she had to devise her own independent career path as camouflage. This was a matter of both personal and public tactics. In neither respect would it help Ms Middleton to appear the slightest bit needy – and of course there was the ultimate and unthinkable possibility that she might end up getting dumped! In that event, the woman who would be known for the rest of her life as the girl-that-Wills-let-go would unquestionably need a plausible career to provide clear shape to the rebuilding of her non-royal identity.
Party Pieces provided the model. With the help of her parents, Kate set about trying to create her own company that would design and sell high-quality but reasonably priced children’s clothes online. She would try her hand as a businesswoman. The would-be fashion executive toured Britain looking at samples and flew to Milan to check out possible manufacturers. At the same time, her parents set her up in her own Chelsea flat within safe range of Sloane Square – one never wants to live too far from Peter Jones.
April 2005: Marriage of Prince Charles to Camilla
That September 2005 William started his own domestic royal duties when he became the patron of Centrepoint, Britain’s
