Diana: In Pursuit of Love Read Free Page B

apartment in Coleherne Court during her short but jolly time as a bachelor girl. From time to time she cooked him dinner, they danced together at the Hurlingham Ball and on occasion she visited his flat in Pimlico, usually accompanied by her friend Philippa Coker. ‘She was good fun and good company, it was as simple as that,’ Colthurst later recalled. ‘There was never any suggestion of a romance; she isn’t my type, nor I hers.’ Indeed, during her courtship with Prince Charles in the autumn of 1980, James Colthurst got an idea of the way the wind was blowing when he arrived at her apartment one evening for dinner. Diana, who was busy getting ready for her royal date, had forgotten all about her dinner guest. She rushed out to the corner store, bought some food and ordered her flatmates to rustle up a meal for him. When she returned from Buckingham Palace at about midnight she was dewy-eyed and her main topic of conversation was Prince Charles’s wellbeing. ‘It’s appalling the way they push him around,’ she said, referring to his commitments and his demanding staff.
    With her elevation to the role of Princess of Wales in 1981, the easy familiarity that had characterized Diana’s bachelor life was lost, and for several years there was an inevitable distance between herself and her ‘Coleherne Court’. She did, however, attend theoccasional get-together with James Colthurst, now working in various hospitals in the Home Counties, and a handful of other old friends, including Colthurst’s fellow old Etonian Adam Russell and her schoolfriend Carolyn Bartholomew, who became godmother to Prince William. Even so, it was not until after Diana’s formal visit to St Thomas’ Hospital in 1986 that she and Colthurst began again to see each other more frequently.
    They enjoyed a number of jolly lunches at Italian or Chinese restaurants in their old Fulham stamping grounds and it was at these meetings that Colthurst noticed how she would bolt down her food and then go to the ladies – a classic feature of the binge-and-purge symptom that characterizes the so-called slimmers’ disease, bulimia nervosa. At first he didn’t think too much of her behaviour as she had always had a hearty appetite as a teenager. But some time later Carolyn Bartholomew expressed to him her concern about Diana’s eating habits and they discussed the illness and its dire long-term effects. It was after this conversation that Carolyn Bartholomew decided to make her famous threat – that if Diana did not get help she would go to the media and tell them about the Princess’s eating disorder.
    By degrees Colthurst began to catch glimpses into the true nature of the life Diana was trying to come to terms with. Her marriage had failed, and her husband was having an affair with Camilla Parker Bowles, the wife of his army officer friend Andrew, but she was expected to keep up the appearances required by the royal family, and live a life of pretence. At Kensington Palace she felt she was controlled by courtiers who preferred her to be seen – looking quiescently attractive – and not heard. It was a claustrophobic life, made worse in that everyone, from the Queen downwards, was in some way, knowingly or unknowingly, colluding in the duplicity. In Dianaland conspiracies were not theories but a daily reality.
    Everyone felt the strain of this deception. When Dickie Arbiter first began working for the Waleses as a press officer in July 1988 he found himself in an ‘impossible’ position, maintaining to the world the illusion of happy royal families while turning a blind eye to the private distance between them. At the end of an engagementin London, for example, the Prince and Princess would leave together – but they would only travel together as far as Friary Court at St James’s Palace before one of them would get into a second car. ‘She would return to Kensington Palace and he would go off and make, ahem, late-night visits to museums and art