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  “20 years after Diana's death, a happier ending imagined”

  The New York Times

  “One of the best books about Princess Diana”

  People.com

  “This is the first book about Diana that presents her as a real woman. Fascinating and well-written.”

  Erica Jong

  IMAGINING DIANA

  Copyright © 2017 by Diane Clehane.

  All rights reserved.

  Made in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  METABOOK® is a registered US Trademark of Metabook Inc.

  Illustrations by Ileana Hunter

  For information:

  Metabook Inc.

  375 Greenwich Street

  New York, New York 10013

  www.metabook.com

  ISBN 978-0-9992119-0-8

  This alternative history is a work of fiction. All incidents, dialogue and references to the Royal Family, except for some well-known events, are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not intended to depict actual events or dialogue.

  Contents

  August 31, 1997

  Part One: The Aftermath

  September 1, 1997

  October 31, 1997

  November 3, 1997

  November 18, 1997

  December 10, 1997

  Part Two: Starting Over

  June 23, 2000

  April 5, 2002

  June 14, 2006

  Part Three: The Homecoming

  December 15, 2006

  April 30, 2007

  September 27, 2010

  March 1, 2011

  April 29, 2011

  July 1, 2017

  Author’s Note

  Source Notes

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  For Madeline

  Another princess who needs no royal title

  to generate her particular brand of magic

  August 31, 1997

  h

  As they sped away from the back entrance of the Ritz, she hoped they had eluded the paparazzi who had been harassing them since they arrived in Paris that afternoon. It’s all gone too far, she thought.

  What had started out as a blissful holiday full of possibilities had dissolved into a frenetic game of cat-and-mouse with a growing horde of photographers. He was trying to outsmart them. She knew that only made them more intent on capturing their prey.

  Their romantic evening ruined, there was a vast distance in the silence between them. He leaned forward to talk to the driver. She sank back into the seat on the rear passenger side and gazed out her window into the darkness as their car sped through the city’s nearly empty streets.

  When the Mercedes lurched to a stop at a traffic light, three motorbikes pulled up alongside them. There were two men on each bike; the ones in the back leaned over and pointed their cameras into the car. They called out her name as they took pictures. She barely heard them over the revving of the engines, but she knew what they were after. She didn’t want them to see the fear in her eyes. She covered her face with her hand to shield herself from the blinding flashes of light. When the car started to move again, she looked behind her and saw there were more of them barreling toward the car like a swarm of bees. The man’s voice commanded the driver to go faster. She felt a growing sense of panic and quickly buckled her seat belt. She closed her eyes and silently prayed for this night to be over. She wanted to go home.

  The car accelerated as it descended into the mouth of the tunnel. It all happened in a matter of seconds. The driver swerved to avoid colliding with a white Fiat and lost control of the car, sending it careening toward a concrete pillar in the median. The crash was so intense that the Mercedes spun completely around and ricocheted across two lanes. The twisted wreck of metal spiraled to a stop when it smashed into the opposite tunnel wall. Witnesses later told the police the violent bang of the crash was deafening; they thought it was an explosion.

  She was semiconscious. Her breathing was labored as she tried to take in the cramped, smoky air. She was aware of the coppery taste of blood in her mouth and a sticky wetness on her face. Lying crumpled between the compressed front and back seats of the car and its collapsed roof, she was unable to speak. All she could hear was the car’s horn blaring. She was unaware that the driver lay dead across the steering wheel. The man who had been sitting next to her just minutes ago had been flung through the car’s windshield and was also dead. Their bodyguard, the only other passenger wearing a seat belt, was bloodied, barely alive and pinned against the dashboard.

  A tangle of muffled voices directly above her echoed as if they were a mile away.

  They were taking pictures.

  She wanted to scream, “I need to get home. I need to see my boys,” but she couldn’t make herself form the words.

  Finally, two emergency workers lifted her out of the wreckage.

  “She’s alive,” said one to the other. “It’s Diana. She’s alive.”

  September 1, 1997

  h

  Sir Robin Janvrin had the unenviable task of walking up to Balmoral to tell the Queen that Diana had been critically injured in a car accident in Paris. He’d been staying at another house on the estate in Scotland and been awakened in the middle of the night by a phone call from the British Embassy.

  When the Queen’s deputy private secretary informed her of what had happened to the princess, the Queen was at first incredulous and then alarmed. “What in the world was she doing in Paris?” said the Queen as she pulled her robe around her. “Is Prince Charles awake? We must tell him.”

  For the next several hours, Sir Robin relayed updates from the embassy while the Queen and Prince Charles sat in her sitting room awaiting word on Diana’s condition. CNN was showing pictures of the ghastly scene inside the tunnel. The images of the wreckage were so shocking that it was hard to believe anyone would survive, thought Charles, who felt sick to his stomach. He had left the room briefly to telephone Camilla to tell her what had happened.

  “I’m afraid it’s very grave, Ma’am,” said Sir Robin just after receiving the latest update at four o’clock in the morning. “The Princess is in a coma. Dodi Fayed and the driver of the car are dead. Their bodyguard is also in a coma.”

  Charles decided he wouldn’t wake his sons to tell them about their mother’s accident. Let them have a few more hours of sleep, he thought, just in case the worst happens.

  The Queen wondered: If there had been a bodyguard, why had he allowed the driver to enter into a high-speed chase with photographers? “Why didn’t she tell the British Embassy she was in Paris?” She thought, but did not say, that if Diana had kept her royal protection officers none of this would have happened. Instead, she asked, “Whatever was she doing with Dodi Fayed?”

  “That doesn’t matter now,” said Charles, as he desperately tried to quell his rising sense of dread about Diana’s condition. How could he tell his sons that their mother could die? What if she were brain dead? “All we can do now is pray she comes out of this alive.”

  The entire staff at Balmoral was on alert and made sure that all the televisions and radios were removed from the sitting rooms and that there were no newspapers in sight come morning. As they waited for hourly updates, the royal family was paralyzed by indecision over how to handle the situation. With the news that Diana hovered near death, Charles wanted to fly to Paris i
mmediately, while the Queen disagreed, saying it should be the Spencer family at their daughter’s side. Sir Robert Fellowes, the Queen’s private secretary, who was married to Diana’s older sister Jane, agreed. He was quick to point out that the Princess of Wales was no longer a member of the royal family, so there was no need for any special privileges.

  “Diana is the mother of the future king!” bellowed Charles, who was infuriated that his mother’s staff was not grasping the seriousness of the situation.

  In the meantime, William and Harry, who were sleeping in the room next door to their father’s, woke up when they heard the adults arguing.

  “What’s happened, Papa?” asked William when Charles came into the boys’ bedroom and flipped on the light.

  Both boys were startled by their father’s distressed appearance. They didn’t know Charles had spent an hour alone walking around the grounds of Balmoral before dawn, but they could tell from his swollen and red-rimmed eyes that he had been crying.

  “Your mother has been in a car accident,” said Charles softly as Harry got out of his own bed and wedged himself between his father and his brother on the edge of William’s bed.

  “Is she going to be alright?” asked Harry. He looked so frightened.

  “I don’t know,” said Charles. “We are waiting to hear from the embassy in Paris.”

  “She was in Paris? With who?” asked William.

  “Yes, she was in Paris having dinner with Dodi Fayed.”

  William’s face darkened. “I thought she was going back to London. That must have been his idea. He must have changed their plans.”

  Charles did not tell William and Harry that Dodi and the driver had been killed, and they didn’t ask. He knew they were focused only on Diana.

  “When can we see Mummy?” asked Harry.

  “I am going to Paris as soon as possible. You boys need to stay here and Granny will look after you.”

  “Please tell Mummy we love her,” said Harry. “We want her to come home.”

  h

  Just before dawn, Diana’s staff was making inquiries into having her airlifted to King Edward VII’s Hospital, while Charles continued to argue with the Queen and Prince Philip about taking a plane from the Queen’s Flight to Paris. In the end, Charles won out when he threatened to call Richard Branson to request a special flight through Virgin Atlantic. “Perhaps we can fly her back in coach!”

  The Sunday morning news programs were blanketing the airwaves with coverage of the crash. Every friend of Diana’s was desperately trying to get information about her condition. The world, it seemed, was holding its breath awaiting word on whether she would live. There was no statement about Diana’s accident from the royals, while Prime Minister Tony Blair, on the way to church with his family, paused to tell reporters, “The prayers of our family along with those of this nation and, indeed, the world are with Diana, Princess of Wales, who is truly The People’s Princess and a beacon of hope for so many people.”

  French President Jacques Chirac and the British ambassador to France were waiting at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital when Charles arrived and escorted him to the intensive care unit where Diana was being treated. While waiting for the doctor to come out and talk to him, Charles happened to glance over at the television by the nurses’ station across the hall and saw Tony Blair speaking about Diana. Thank God someone knows the right thing to do, he thought.

  Charles was gripped both by concern for his sons and a consuming sadness over what could have, indeed should have, been. He worried that if Diana died, the public would blame him. Just hours after the crash, television commentators had already been discussing how Diana had been stripped of the title “Her Royal Highness” after the divorce. The inference being drawn was clear: Motivated by pettiness and spite, the royal family had cast Diana out and left her to her own devices.

  Charles also knew that that was only partially true. Diana had pushed them to the point of no return with the Panorama interview in which she told Martin Bashir she did not believe Charles was cut out for “the top job.” That had been the last straw for the Queen. Somehow, even though Diana seemed to have struck the deathblow to her marriage with that explosive interview, she was shocked when the Queen wrote to her and Charles and told them a divorce was the only way to end the public feuding, which she found so distasteful and, worse, a threat to the future of the monarchy.

  Diana, who had become so masterful at manipulating the media, had overplayed her hand this time, and she knew it almost immediately. She was not prepared for the torrent of negative publicity unleashed on her after the broadcast and hated that most people in Britain came away with the impression that she was some scorned woman in an emotionally fragile state. Diana was, however, heartened to learn that the impression Americans had when the interview had been rebroadcast and hosted by Barbara Walters was that she was not going down without a fight. “I won’t go quietly” and her infamous line “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded” struck her millions of stateside fans right in the heart. William even suggested that perhaps she might want to consider moving to America to escape the constant hounding of the British press. “I just want you to be happy, Mummy,” he told her.

  Still, even with all the bitterness that came with the very public breakup of their marriage, Charles found himself anguished by the prospect of never seeing his former wife alive again. When he closed his eyes, he could picture the shy, pretty nineteen-year-old girl who blushed easily and seemed so game to embrace royal life. He remembered how beautiful she had looked at his side that first morning on their honeymoon at Balmoral when she glowed with happiness as she told the photographers lined up on the banks of the River Dee that she “highly recommended” married life.

  Charles thought back to those happy early days, recalling what a doting young mother she’d been to William and Harry and how both parents loved to crawl around on the floor together with their sons in the first years of parenthood.

  Charles was torn from the start of the marriage. He thought he would come to love Diana but was never able to let go of Camilla Parker Bowles. But Diana had grown into a stunning woman whom he had, over time, come to respect for her wicked sense of humor, devotion to their sons and commitment to her charitable work—even if he found her emotional volatility maddening.

  In a way, Charles and Diana were victims of ‘the Establishment’; he had been pressured into marrying a ‘suitable’ young woman (a virginal aristocrat), because it had been decided that he’d waited far too long to select a bride, and she had been given no guidance on how to deal with a life so removed from anything she’d ever experienced. Post-divorce, both Diana and Charles had slowly come to this realization. Ironically, it brought them closer together.

  In the year since their divorce, a surprising new friendship had begun to develop between Diana and Charles. Perhaps, he thought, because they were finally free to be themselves. There had been hints of occasional tenderness between them, such as when she comforted him after his mentor Laurens van der Post died, and they talked several times a week about their sons. “At least we did one thing right,” Diana had told Charles on their last phone call before she left for St. Tropez when they discussed the boys’ upcoming school year.

  Even with Diana’s televised admissions about her own affairs, Charles knew the public had largely forgiven her. A few years into their marriage, when he’d given up on her, she’d begun to seek consolation elsewhere beginning with James Hewitt. At the time, Charles had thought his wife’s indiscretions would actually make things easier for their marriage. But Diana’s insecurities and self-doubt made it difficult for her to sustain a relationship or fully trust any man who was the object of her affection. She had never really gotten over her parents’ divorce and painted a rather bleak picture when recalling to friends how, at age six, she sat at the bottom of the staircase at Park House and listened to her moth
er’s car drive away when she left the family to live with another man. Young Diana would return to that staircase many times over the years, close her eyes and pray to hear her mother returning home.

  Diana’s fear of abandonment and her need for constant reassurance and physical contact in her romantic relationships were often what led to their demise. Charles did love her, in his own compartmentalized way. He never had any intention of breaking up their family. That just wasn’t done. Charles never understood how such a desirable woman was wracked with so much insecurity.

  Lost in thought, Charles hadn’t noticed that the doctor who’d been monitoring Diana’s condition was now talking to her sisters a few feet away. He walked over to join them.

  “The Princess has sustained serious internal injuries,” said the doctor. “We are monitoring her carefully. She’s very weak. The next twenty-four hours are critical.”

  He lowered his voice.

  “Her face was cut very badly. We have had the finest plastic surgeon in Paris do what he could to minimize the damage, and the Princess may wish to consult her own doctors at some point. But you should know that if she lives, she may not ever look exactly the same again.”

  October 31, 1997

  h

  All Diana had wanted to do since she walked through the doors of her apartment at Kensington Palace was sit out in her garden and feel the sun on her face, even if summer had long since ended. It was an unusually warm and bright fall day, so rare in England. She was going stir crazy cooped up in that hospital for a month after she’d come out of the coma.

  She still felt weak, but her doctors had been impressed enough with her progress to let her go home. Diana longed to sit in her private sanctuary among the roses that, when in full bloom, nearly reached the top of the ten-foot high walls that kept out the rest of the world. The palace was her fortress.