Like millions of other people around the world, I was glued to the television last Friday. We held a mini-‘watching party’ at home and my mother, my sisters and my nieces came along with cupcakes decorated with ‘William and Catherine’ pins, champagne and Love Hearts. The men took shelter at the office, except for one of my sons, still here on holiday, who was woken by the cacophony and then found himself with no choice but to get involved, wearing an air of patience as we dissected The Dress (perfect), the relationship (fingers crossed), the legs of the mother of the bride (fabulous at any age, let alone 56), Victoria Beckham’s mourning-wear (tsk tsk) and Princess Beatrice’s hat (unfortunate choice), while reminiscing about the incomparable beauty of the bride at that other royal wedding in 1981, which we watched (oh, days of deprivation) on the colour television owned by our next-door neighbours, West German diplomats .
Throughout it all was the underlying feeling of wonder at the unpredictability of life. Would Carole and Michael Middleton – a pilot and an air hostess at the time – ever have imagined as they watched the 1981 spectacle that the daughter they had yet to have would grow up to marry the son that the ‘fairytale couple’ had yet to have too? That is the happy side of unpredictability, the lucky-strike side of things, where the good fortune of some does not have its flipside in the misfortune or tragedy of others. But sometimes, events can be seen as erratic, devoid of meaning, unfair and frightening in their intimation of unholy chaos, when what we would prefer to know is that there is some grand plan. Worse still, they can sometimes seem as deliberately vicious and cruel, strings pulled by some heartless monster dicing with human lives for amusement, which leaves us unsurprised that this is exactly how the ancient Greeks saw it. It is from that – the desire to avoid confrontation with what we fear might well be the stark reality of the randomness of life and death – that most religious faith springs.
Parallel with the fairytale good fortune of Catherine Middleton, which is not built on the misery of others, runs the story of the astonishing luck of her stepmother-in-law, great good luck which was the immense bad luck of another woman, eliminated from the equation by a wholly unexpected twist, and whose sons have had to bear the burden since. Death having eliminated the main obstacle from her path, Camilla Parker Bowles as the Duchess of Cornwall was able to slip smoothly into her present life in a way that would have been impossible had her rival – not in love, for she was always going to be the winner there, but certainly in public life and in the life of the dead woman’s sons - still been alive.
The complete victory of the Duchess of Cornwall, who has now taken over completely what should have been the life of another woman, dead these last 14 years, falls into the category of inexplicable menace, of those situations which cause us to ask disturbing questions about the strange cruelty of life because though things clearly did turn out for the best there, they only turned out for the best for the individuals we think least deserved it. For the others, it was a worst-case nightmare scenario. This upsets our sense of justice, and our childlike need to believe that everything that happens does so for a reason, and the reason is a good and just one which does not involve rewarding bad behaviour.
The sight of the Duchess of Cornwall replacing her rival so completely and utterly, playing the role that the mother of the groom should have played, cast a pall over the spectacle for many of us. It was the sad centre of the spectacle.
While Diana is long dead, deprived of the joy and pride of watching her son get married in such a wonderful way, the woman she hated and feared more than anything was there instead of her, sitting where she should have sat in the cathedral, playing a starring role, giving advice to her son’s bride, having her little grand-daughter inserted into the entourage as a bridesmaid, and waving from the palace balcony. On Friday, two women were clearly triumphant. The other one was the Duchess of Cornwall.
Though broadcasters were careful to avoid mentioning the obvious while talking through the day, the spectre of Diana must have floated through the mind of everyone old enough to remember her. You couldn’t help but think how she must have felt if, in some misty and half-imagined afterlife, she were able to see the rest of the story unfold. The awkwardness for the groom was that, because of the presence of his stepmother in the celebrations, and the awfulness of how she got to be his stepmother, he could make no official reference to his own mother, could not pay tribute to her in any way or include her memory in the proceedings. He could not even say something informal – that he hoped that in some way his mother was there in spirit or that she was watching the greatest day of his life – because he must have in fact hoped for the opposite, that she had no way of knowing, no way of seeing. What he must have truly wanted – if we can hazard a guess based on normal human desires – will remain unvoiced except in private moments with nobody other than his new wife and his brother, certainly not his much-loved father: that he wished his mother were there instead of the Duchess of Cornwall.
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