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“So your secret perversions are crosswords and coffee,” I said, settling in beside him and taking the steaming cup. “Truly depraved.” “My father would agree with you.” But that time he wasn’t smiling. “My dad and I once had a fight because I refuse to put ketchup on my hot dogs,” I said. “That’s possibly the most American sentence I’ve ever heard.”
Nick’s great-grandmother, Marta, the Queen Mum, once asked me if I was nervous about—and I quote—losing my maidenhead on our wedding night. I snickered before I could catch myself, and she playfully wiggled the scotch in her hand and said, “Too right. A woman can’t bloody well pick her signature drink without sampling the whole bar.”
“I don’t think anyone ever really wants to end up with a bloke they call ‘lovely,’” Cilla added. “My great-great-aunt married one, and the man made her so potty that eventually she poisoned him, and to get revenge his spirit possessed a garden rabbit that stared at her through the bedroom window for years.”
“You have no idea how hard it is to live out a great romance.” —Wallis Simpson
I remember once waiting for the Tube and thinking, as its oncoming headlights gleamed brighter in the tunnel, I could just jump. Not because I wanted to die, but because sometimes your mind dangles the worst-case behavior in front of you specifically so that you can be aware that you’re choosing to resist it.
And so Emma married her broken bird, and then became one.
“Have you ever asked them to come clean?” “No, Bex. I can’t.” “Why not? Wouldn’t it be easier on everyone, not having to explain away her absence?” “People would see the liars, not the lie,” he said.
I remember understanding what a brutal thing it is to be the bearer of truly bad news—to break off a piece of that misery and hand it to other people, one by one, and then have to comfort them; to put their grief on your shoulders on top of all your own; to be the calm one in the face of their shock and tears. And then learning that relative weight of grief is immaterial. Being smothered a little is no different than being smothered a lot. Either way, you can’t breathe.
SHE WASN’T EVEN QUEEN OF HER PROM, shrieked Xandra Deane, as worked up about our impending matrimony as if I’d been dispatched specifically to seduce Nick and then take down the monarchy as the final and very delayed parting blow of the American Revolution.
“One condition,” Cilla sniffled through a joyful smile. “We are not naming our child after any of your grandfather’s fonts.” “I wouldn’t dream of it,” Gaz said. “The only other one that crackpot invented was called the Serif of Nottingham.”
One of the interns buzzing around Clarence House politely asked me in passing how it was going, and I’d cracked, “I’m leaning toward something in British racing green.” When it made the papers the next day, the poor trembling girl was dispatched to purgatory (Edwin’s offices) and I was instructed to respond to all queries, even from insiders, with the antiseptic, “It’ll be lovely.”
Gaz started weeping the moment she came out, and did not stop—not when the officiant asked if anyone objected and Freddie raised his hand, not even when they got to the bit Gaz himself put in the vows as a joke (“in sickness and in health, in serif and in sans”).
