The Men in her Life

slightly gawky girl almost exactly the same age. Over the years there were times when she had felt that Diana could have done with a mother like her to look after her a bit.
    With hindsight, that first interview with Prince Charles had given it all away when he couldn’t bring himself to say that he loved her.
    ‘ “Whatever that means?” ’ she remembered repeating his words to Holly as they watched it, ‘well what’s that supposed to mean? Most people who’ve just announced their engagement do know what love means...’
    ‘He’s an emotionally repressed in-bred, royal git,’ Holly told her, lolling on the sofa in jeans and a T-shirt with the name of a band on it, ‘what do you expect?’
    She had thought Holly a bit disrespectful at the time, but she had come to see that she was right. The Royal Family were out of another age. They were so blinkered they couldn’t even see that they’d had a real piece of luck with Diana. She had made royalty modem, glamorous and caring and she’d produced two lovely boys. What more did they want? Mo couldn’t see the point of them any more.
    The edges of the Mall were six feet deep in flowers and candles. People had tied bouquets and pictures to the trees, somebody had even left his football shirt with a message written on it in felt-tip. Mo felt empty-handed. She would have liked to have lit a candle, although she worried a bit about the fire risk with all these people around and all that cellophane wrapping. She had laid a little spray of freesias outside Kensington Palace after work on the Monday. There were already flowers there then, but it was nothing like the huge shrine it had become later in the week. She wasn’t quite sure why she’d done it, but she had felt better afterwards, although it had made her sad as the week went on, when she imagined her fragile flowers wilting and the fragrant floral carpet beginning to rot and smell.
    Mo was wearing black. The Jaeger suit had been in the sale the year before, and she’d got staff discount on it. She’d thought it would come in useful. You couldn’t really go wrong with black and a good cut, although she’d never envisaged that she’d wear it in mourning twice within the space of a year. This morning she’d put a pale pink blouse on underneath, because black next to her face did nothing for her, and checking her appearance in the mirror before she’d left, she’d felt a bit guilty for her vanity, but she didn’t think the Princess would have minded. Most people around her were wearing jeans and T-shirts. Some of them had slept out all night, and looked like it. It shocked Mo at first, but then she thought how fitting that was. The Princess’s life had all been about informality, so why not her funeral too?
    Mo wished she were taller. There were so many people. She didn’t think she’d be able to see when the coffin went past, even if she stood on tiptoe which seemed a bit undignified, more like a voyeur than a mourner. She decided to make her way up to the big screen in Hyde Park . She cut up beside St James’s Palace where the princes were going to join the funeral cortege.
    Behind the palace there were dozens of huge trucks with satellite dishes on their roofs, waiting to broadcast the procession all round the world. As Mo hurried on towards Piccadilly, she wondered whether Holly was watching it on television in Cornwall . It must be strange for her to be so far away when all this was happening just yards from her flat. She had thought about her so much this week, seeing the newsreel clips of the Princess’s life, and remembering what Holly had been like at all the different stages. It wasn’t that she had ever wanted Holly to be like Diana, although she had wished her daughter would do something about her hair, but there had been significant moments, rites of passage, when she hadn’t been able to stop herself comparing the two of them.
    Holly had still been living at home at the time of The Wedding. Mo had been all for going to St Paul ’s to watch the carriages arrive since it was only just down the road, but Holly had been disparaging.
    ‘Watch the virgin being offered up for sacrifice? No way!’ She had been in one of her black phases, where her mood seemed to match the colour of her ragged jeans and the kohl round her eyes.
    When William was born, Mo remembered thinking that Diana looked very mumsy compared to Holly, who was by then sharing a flat with several other secretaries and