The Royal We (17 page)

A certain sense of déjà vu crawled over me. “You mean, is it good on its own, or is it just good by default,” I translated.

I saw how stuck he felt, and it tore at me. This was also the most monumental confidence he’d ever shared, and I wanted to choose my next words carefully.

“I think,” I said slowly, “that you can’t change what you were born into, or what your life has been up to now, but you
can
control what it’s like going forward. Listen, you are who you are. Richard is your father, and one day, you are going to inherit the throne. That’s just the reality. But you are not a job, Nick. You’re not a title. You’re
you
. And there has to be a way for you to make this into a life you want to live. You’re still in charge of yourself. That has to be the key, don’t you think? That’s the touchstone.”

He poked me in the leg with his pole. “You’re the only touchstone I need,” he said, his voice blazing with feeling.

Looking back at this conversation, I want to hug both of us. We really did think we could handle anything as long as we had each other.

“You know that if I weren’t…the person I am…it would be totally different, right?” he whispered, urgently. “I would be going up to strangers in the street and telling them about you. The last thing I want to do is pretend we’re just friends.”

“I know,” I said, and I blew him the tiniest, most imperceptible peck, then looped my ski poles over my wrists, planted them in the snow, and heaved myself to my feet gracelessly.

“And now you’ve seen our seedy underbelly,” Nick said. “The press, the leaks, the squabbling, Julian drunk before noon. And Nigel. I wouldn’t blame you if you walked away.”

“You’ll have to do a lot worse than Nigel to spook me,” I told him. “Now, quit stalling. Unless you’re afraid to race me. Ready?”

He rose and studied me intently.

“I’m ready,” he said, leaning over and kissing me, briefly, tenderly, perfectly, not for more than five seconds.

We never even saw the flash.

“Well,” Bea said, drumming her fingers on a folded copy of the
Daily Mail
that sat on my dining table. “The good news is, they think you’re unemployed.”

“If that’s good news, then I’m in trouble,” I said, accepting a mug of cocoa from Cilla.

“Don’t drink that. It’s going to ruin your skin.” Bea snatched it and handed it to a brooding Pudge, whose face presumably was sacrificial. “And it
is
good news, because at least nobody is making fun of your ridiculous job yet, although it’s only a matter of time.”

The paparazzi snaps had hit the Internet the night they were taken. Nick was so upset that he put us on a charter straight back to England—where it turned out photographers were already lying in wait at Kensington. So he had PPO Furrow take us to my flat instead, refusing to spend New Year’s Eve apart; by the time we woke up the next morning, though, the press had found and surrounded my hovel in Shepherd’s Bush, forcing us to hole up there for several more days. It was us against the world, except for the occasional moments where Nick’s mood would char and I’d lose him to the wilds of whatever was whipping through his brain.

Once Nick had safely escaped, Cilla called an emergency summit at my flat with Joss and Bea (with a typically bleak Pudge in tow; so far she’d kept her New Year’s resolution of sobriety, but there was no cold turkey plan for rage). Lady Bollocks may not have been my biggest fan, but she is never intimidated by a crisis and she loves telling people what to do.

“Right. You’ll need basic dresses, nothing too short, and no blouses you can’t wear with a bra,” Bea said, starting to check off her list items on her finger.

“Oh, I’ve got some frocks,” Joss piped up. “Made a few at school the other day that got the attention of an investor, actually.”

“Don’t be batty. She can’t go all experimental and psychotic now,” Bea said, then turned back to me. “Get some skinny jeans, not those wretched things you had on the other day. I don’t know where you even got those. Cilla, write this down.”

I expected a protest, but Cilla was already looking for a pen.

“Map out three alternate routes to work and vary them every day,” Bea continued. “Also find a shortcut branching off from each one, as an escape valve, if you need it. Carry the number of a car service. Don’t let Nick pay for it. Link it to your credit card.”

“He won’t like that,” I said.

“I don’t care,” Bea said.

“He can’t be seen paying your way,” Cilla said, scribbling furiously on a notepad.

“They’ll start going through your rubbish, Bex, so take it out in the wee hours and change up the bins you use,” Bea went on. “And for God’s sake, shred anything interesting and divide the pieces into separate bags: credit card bills, prescriptions, receipts. If Nick is in the habit of writing you love letters, burn them. Or bury them, I suppose.”

“Fucking
eat
them,” Pudge said.

“Am I not allowed to
keep
them?” I wondered, archly.

“Certainly, if you want a ticking time bomb,” Bea retorted. “Have you ever read a tabloid? They’ll use anything they can get their hands on, however they can get their hands on it. Do not get comfortable with any reporters and do not wave at the paparazzi, even if they seem sympathetic. If you engage, they draw you in, and then suddenly you’re on the front page looking like you want to whack one of them with your umbrella.”

“Like Britney Spears,” I said.

“No,” Cilla said. “Like Bea.”

“Fuck it,” Pudge said, sitting up from her slouch on my sofa. “Fuck it all. They want your soul. Don’t let them take it. They’ll eat you alive.”

She then slumped back, as if someone had hit the “off” switch. Bea rubbed her temples and stared out the window. Outside, the clouds had whipped themselves into fat, dark puffs, promising something cold and wet that might at least give the paparazzi pause about continuing to camp out on my doorstep.

“Pudge’s second trip to rehab was right after my eighteenth birthday party,” Bea finally said. “She rode a horse into the living room. Paparazzi were on our family for days because Prince Richard had been at the party, and…” She looked again at her sister. “Well, don’t talk back. We’ve all done it and we’ve all regretted it.”

I’d seen paparazzi coverage of other celebrity couples; I wasn’t naïve about the news cycle. But when the lenses turn on
you
, at first it’s hard to reconcile the thoroughly regular person you are with the person everyone else suddenly finds extraordinary. I was still a half beat behind, so while Bea’s advice was intense, I was also grateful for such a proactive to-do list. My mother, on the other hand, had been so excited by the photo’s appearance in
People
(under the headline
A STAR-SPANGLED PRINCESS?
) that she’d turned a recent dinner party into an English tea, to the great surprise of the guests who’d come over expecting a barbeque.

“Don’t come home for a while,” Dad teased on the phone. “She’s got it bad. If you turned up now, she’d make you walk around with a book on your head.”

Mom’s voice came down the line: “Bex, that’s a good point, actually,” she said. “You’ve got to stand up straight if you’re going to—”

“Lay off, Mom,” Lacey hissed, and I could picture her wresting the phone from both of them. I felt a rush of affection until she added, “Let her deal with her eyebrows first. They do need a little work, Bex. You’re going to be a public figure now.” I heard a puff of contentment come down the line. “It’s all moving forward.
Finally.
”

But if Lacey could have seen Nick’s face every time he looked at the paper, she wouldn’t have been celebrating, and ultimately, neither was I. We’d lost control, and we were now reacting instead of acting. In retrospect, the Palace should’ve been the one giving me the practical and psychological tools to deal with the aftermath of being discovered. Instead, there was a lot of criticism, but not a whole lot of help. Richard, in fact, gave us the silent treatment for two full weeks. When we were eventually summoned to his private meeting room at Clarence House, the mighty Prince of Wales spent ten minutes glowering before slamming the article on the table and spitting that he wasn’t sure if he was madder at the photographer or at Nick.

“I can’t believe that’s even a question,” Nick had said. He looked exhausted. His insomnia was at full strength; he probably got three hours of sleep a night.

“You were stupid,” Richard accused. “You got careless.”

“It’s Klosters; it’s supposed to be safe!” Nick said. “And it’s not like I was having an orgy. I was kissing my girlfriend.”

“We’ve all wanted to kiss our girlfriends,” Richard snapped. “You’re the only idiot who got himself photographed.”

Nick flinched at
our girlfriends
, and I bumped on it, too, but I kept myself from acknowledging it. It was seriously not the right time.

“So now what happens?” I ventured.

Richard’s eyes bored into me. “We can’t lie,” he said. “But we don’t have to tell the truth, either. A
no comment
will do.”

“We cannot go public until your relationship is stable,” Barnes informed us.

“I didn’t realize it was unstable,” I said before I caught myself. Under the table, Nick took my hand.

“There can be no ups and downs,” Richard hissed. “Once you are out, you are happy. Period.”

It sounded like a threat. And two hours later, Marj added an ultimatum to the pile.

“Her Majesty would prefer if you and Nicholas refrained from any more overnights in royal residences, even in separate bedrooms,” she relayed to me by phone, in the imperious tone she uses when she’s working from Eleanor’s script. “Premarital coitus cannot be tacitly sanctioned by the Crown.”

“I…right,” I said, unable to deny that one even for sport. “So…does that mean Nick is allowed to sleep here now? Or…are you asking us to…?”

“We’re not
that
old, Rebecca,” Marj said in her regular voice. “No one wants to stop you from having a shag altogether.” She cleared her throat. “But, er, Her Majesty wishes to convey that if His Royal Highness insists on spending the night, your current situation is undesirable.”

I felt backed into a corner. The Palace could not be perceived as setting up Nick’s good-time girl in a fancy flat, and nor did I want that to happen, but as a lowly greeting-card artist I couldn’t afford to satisfy the decree on my own. However, this gave my dad the leverage he’d been waiting for, because he’d been itching to move me somewhere nicer for ages, and I’d refused to accept his financial help. So on what remained of Lacey’s winter break, he sent her over with a budget and a mandate, and together we found a gorgeous place in Chelsea: the top floor of a smart redbrick building in a mews just off Old Church Street, with a cloistered back entrance and a petite front garden that set it slightly back from the road. We signed the lease and I spent the year taking gentle teasing from my father that he was spending my entire dowry but was relieved he didn’t have to give up any livestock. Lacey was so taken with my reality inching closer to her England fantasy that she insisted I needed her, and by April, she’d convinced my parents and, somehow, NYU, that she should take a short leave of absence because my unusual circumstance required her moral and emotional support. It would be our first time living together since before I went to Oxford, and I was happy about it, even if it was only for an extended summer. Everything was changing so quickly; maybe having Lacey back in my life would help things feel the same.

It was an impossible wish. That one unguarded second in Klosters marked a sea change in Nick. He stopped drinking or dancing, and started getting frustrated if he felt any of us was imbibing too much, reveling too loudly, lowering our guards. When Lacey returned for the summer and rekindled her dalliance with Freddie, Nick fretted about how careless they might be, what media stoning Lacey or I would receive—or, almost worse, what admonishments would come from Eleanor or Richard. The clouds over his head rivaled anything the British climate could conjure.

“Pipe down and untwist, Knickers,” Freddie would say, handing him a drink that would go untouched. “You’re not the king
yet
.”

“But this is how it starts,” Nick insisted. “You think no one is watching, so you stop being vigilant. And then they pounce.”

It bothered me that Nick was so daunted. Before, it had been easy to live like we’d begun everything together, like nothing of consequence happened to either of us before that rainy day at Pembroke. But Nick’s almost pathological fear of the headlines, larger than the headlines themselves, reminded me that there had been twenty or so mile markers before me, and I knew surprisingly little about the journey between them.

The paparazzi wasted no time finding my new flat, and furthermore became my regular greeting and salutation anytime I entered or exited Greetings & Salutations. The pictures landed on blogs and message boards that dissected my nose (natural?), my boobs (too small?), my taste (emphatically too boring), and even though Lacey meticulously helped track what I’d worn each week so that I didn’t look like I was living in my own laundry pile, the occasional comment would pop up from within G&S walls with precise details about how often I repeated my shirts. By June, the colleagues who were once disinterested in anything but their own professional frustrations started guiltily closing papers whenever I passed, and I couldn’t grab a Diet Coke from the fridge without hearing whispers about my clothes, or which columnist had spied Ceres at Nick’s favorite club, India at Clarence House, or Gemma Sands at Heathrow. Even the woman who read
The Economist
every day had swapped it for
Hello!

One especially sweltering summer afternoon, the heat outside causing the industrial carpet in our office to reek even more strongly of chemicals, I was plugging away on a new line of sympathy cards with the meaningless directive “The Modern Condolence.” Two of my coworkers loudly discussed how my gray suede kicks had sold out online since being featured in
heat
, and even the usual din from Piccadilly Circus—a constant soundtrack of roaring buses and honking horns—wasn’t drowning them out. I couldn’t focus. I had ten cards to illustrate and no inkling whatsoever about which blossoms conveyed a hipper sense of sadness than usual. Frustrated, I pushed my chair backward to stretch my legs, and crashed into something human.

“Dangerous as ever, Killer,” a familiar voice said.

“Freddie!”

I leapt up and hugged him, as everyone within gaping or gasping distance did one or both of those things. Freddie seemed unperturbed by their curiosity, perching rakishly on my desk, a fluorescent light flickering its way to death just over his lavishly cute head. Two extremely unlikely worlds were colliding. The office grapevine would never recover.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Just passing through,” he said blithely. “Piccadilly Circus is wonderful for quiet reflection.” He caught the eye of Pandora Millstone, the old battle-ax who sat in the cube next to mine and wore an endless rotation of olive cardigans. “How are you supposed to have juicy, private conversations if everyone is out in the open, listening to each other?”