Or
August 31st, 1997. Diana, Princess of Wales, and her boyfriend Dodi are about to leave for his apartment, located across town. Downstairs, paparazzis are getting ready. The driver, Henri Paul, will soon be calling, telling Di and Dodi to get ready.
“Do you suppose they’re gone?” she asks.
They are. In their blue-black leather outfits, buzzing like horseflies at the entrance of the hotel, cameras in hand, motorcycles revved up and ready to go, cell-phone-toting informants posted at the rear in case the prey tries to escape that way, they have seen the decoys — two hotel employees dressed and vaguely looking like the Princess and her boyfriend — get in the Mercedes 600 and speed away. The reporters have shrugged at the familiar ploy and turned back to watch the hotel entrance until a buzz on their cell phones warns them that the real couple is coming out — through the rear exit, as expected. They yell and jostle and shove each other as they jump on their bikes then blast round the block. Before they get there, though, the woman, a tall blonde, her hair tucked under a cap, the man with short frizzy hair, both with collars turned up and wearing dark sunglasses despite the deep night, both walking fast, running almost, get into another waiting car, another Mercedes, an S-280 this one. The roaring motorcycles arrive Rue Cambon just in time to see the tail lights of the speeding car and they too pick up speed for the chase.
There’s no one left in front of the hotel.
The hiding couple — the actual princess and her lover — waits, sharing a love seat in the bedroom of the imperial suite at the Ritz — she shaking her head in anger and he with his arms around her, trying to make her calm down. They hear a knock at the door of the suite, the voice of the guard talking to someone in the corridor, then the door closing and the sounds of his footsteps coming toward them. He knocks.
“Come in,” Dodi says
“They’re gone,” he says in English, though he’s Egyptian like his boss. “Let’s give them half an hour.”
“You’re sure no one knows we’re here?”
“No one except the manager,” the guard says.
They go back to the living room and the guard to the small foyer. Diana sits on the couch, pulling her legs up and wrapping her arms around them, her head resting on her knees. She mumbles something.
“I didn’t hear,” Dodi says. “What did you say?”
Hardly lifting her head, she glances up at him. “I said this can’t go on. “Am I being punished for something?”
He sits down next to her, pushing her legs to the side to make room for himself. Taking a strand of her thick short blond hair, he runs it between two fingers.
“I don’t know,” he says. “It’s beyond imagination.”
She smiles, a brief, pinched smile. ““Are you having second thoughts, then?”
He shrugs. “You think I’m afraid of a couple of photographers?”
“You’ll see. This is no life.” She cries out, “They’re ferocious, and they‘re out there all the time.”
They both turn to look at the guard who is sitting in the foyer, reading a magazine, pretending not to hear. Dodi goes to the living room door and closes it.
“It’s so bad,” she says. “Actually painful. “As if I had a scab and it keeps coming off, like a wound that never heals. What do they want from me? Do I have to die so they’ll leave me alone?”
“You’re being dramatic.” He takes her hand. “I know it’s been bad today.” He glances at his watch. “They’ve been after us for nine hours, ever since we arrived in Paris.”
He gets up and rubs his hands together, energetically. “So. Let’s do something. Do you want to watch a movie?”
“Oh, no, I couldn’t.”
“Diana, you have to take your mind off this. Do you want some champagne? No, you’re tired. Shall I get you a sleeping pill and we can sleep right here?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t want a bloody sleeping pill. But you’re right. Maybe we should spend the night here and see what happens tomorrow.” She bursts out laughing. “What a scene! Someone should make a movie of my life and call it ‘The Chase.’”
“There’s already a movie called that. Maybe several movies.”
“Another one, then,” and she giggles.
“I’ll order some tea,” he says but the phone rings before he can pick up the receiver.
He picks it up now and listens, then murmurs something she doesn’t hear. She looks at his averted eyes, at his knuckles on which the skin looks tight and pale, and is instantly afraid.
“Okay, let me know,” he says and puts the receiver down.
“What? What? Will you tell me?” she says.
“There’s been an accident.”
She blanches. To her, any accident can only involve her children. “Oh God, will you tell me what’s happened?”
“The decoys.”
“The decoys?” she repeats, disbelieving. “The decoys? You mean Sara and Faiz? How bad an accident? How bad?”
Avoiding her eyes as if somehow responsible for having caused the accident, he sits down next to her. “Faiz is dead,” he says. “So’s the driver. They’ve taken Sara to the hospital. They don’t know if she’ll live.”
How to stop her chin and mouth from shaking, the tremor from spreading through her body? She pushes the back of her hand against her mouth then removes it.
“When did it happen?” she asks.
“A while ago. Maybe a half-hour.”
She points her chin at the phone. “Who was that?”
“Brossard.”
“Who?” she says, too distraught to remember that she has met the hotel manager on several occasions. Dodi tells her it’s the manager.
She shakes her head. “But they just left, didn’t they? When did they leave?”
He looks at his watch. “Less than an hour ago.”
“It can’t be,” she says, and repeats, “they only just left.” She jumps up. “We have to go to the hospital. “At least, now we’ll be able to get out of the hotel.”
He stands up too and grabs her forearms. “You can’t go. Every reporter in Paris will be there, every photographer.”
Flinching, she lets her shoulders droop and lowers her head, looking up at him. “Why? What do they expect? Do they think I’ll be going there?”
It would be pointless — and tasteless — to remind her that the accident is terrible in itself, not only because a fake Diana was involved. He is somehow adjusting to her supreme self-centeredness. “And why shouldn’t she be self-centered? The accident is newsworthy only because of her. He himself is newsworthy only because of her. He has lived his first forty-one years in obscurity. People have heard of his existence only in the last few weeks. “No,” he says. “They don’t know about Sara, They think it’s you.”
That stops her cold. Her eyes stare at him, their porcelain blue, their bright Delft blue catching the light and reflecting it like the eyes of a princess in a Disney movie. Very different from the eyes of his Egyptian or Saudi relatives and his friends or former girlfriends from whatever part of the globe. Never, before meeting her, had he fallen into such deep blue pools.
“I don’t understand,” she says.
“Everybody thinks she’s you. They think you were in the car that crashed.”
She gives a quick laugh, more like a snort. “But that’s absurd,” and lets herself sink back.
He goes to the bar and picks up a heavy crystal goblet that he waves at her questioningly but she shakes her head. He pours himself a drink and gulps it down, then pours a larger one and comes back to sit with her. “Well, God knows she tried hard enough to look like you so those reporters would be fooled.”
“No,” Diana says. “it doesn’t work like that. To fool photographers, from a distance, at night, that’s one thing. But the police, the hospital? I don’t believe it.” She gets up. “We have to go. We have to go now.”
“Didn’t you hear what I said? The whole press will be there.”
“But Sara’s alive. I have to go to her.”
“Darling, she’s unconscious. She won’t know you’re there!”
Once again, she sits down. “But this happened because of me. I’m the one who should have had the accident.”
Reaching for the remote control, he says, “It’s on TV.”
The flames of information lit in Paris have hissed like a wick connected to a powder keg and exploded throughout the world. The Princess of Wales watches, fascinated, the newscasts reporting the crash. She gestures to Dodi to zap faster so she can catch every channel, then she tugs the remote control from his hand and starts channel-surfing herself. She cries all the time, adding rumpled tissues to the pile already on the floor. Her fair skin is blotched with red spots, her nose swollen and red. She moans and covers her face with her hands when she hears about the motorcycles of the paparazzi surrounding the Mercedes under the tunnel.
“Oh, those bastards. Those ferocious bastards,” she cries out again and again, hitting her thigh with her closed fist.
They watch on the screen the area around the Alma tunnel that the police has cordoned off, a scene of pure pandemonium with more gawkers arriving by the minute, and journalists, television crews, officials from various government services, all running around in the small hours before Paris wakes up to a lovely day and hears about the crash. At the hospital, a spokesman, his face somber, releases the news that Princess Diana has not survived. Reports are that the Prince of Wales is coming to take her body back to England.
“Oh, poor Sara,” she cries. “She died for me, oh my God, I can’t forgive myself. She was getting married next month.”
She weeps as he holds her. When she calms down, he goes to the bathroom and returns to find her in the bedroom, putting on the coat and boots — her escape costume — that she had taken off earlier.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“I have to go to the hospital. This isn’t right.”
“But you can’t. I’ve already told you. Listen, listen my darling. Come sit down with me.”
They go back to the living room. “I know you for a stronger person than this,” he says. “Don’t break down on me. We have things to do.”
“I don’t understand,” she says, tearing a tissue to pieces. “I don’t understand why you won’t let me go to the hospital, why you won’t let me tell people I’m alive.”
“Diana, I can’t force you. You know that. You’ll do what you have to do. But listen to this: she’s dead.”
“Yes,” she says. “And any minute now, they’ll know it’s not me. What happens then?”
“Wait. We’ll see. Maybe they won’t.”
“What do you mean, they won’t? They have a hundred ways of identifying her. The hospital will check. You heard what they just said, Charles is on his way. He will know, everyone will know. And Faiz,” she adds as an afterthought. “Your father is bound to come. You think he won’t recognize that Faiz is not his son?”
“I’ll talk to my father.”
“That’s super. I mean, first you say we don’t tell anyone, then you. . . I’m telling you, it’s simply not something we can pull off. And anyway, I don’t see the point. We pretend we’re dead, then what?”
He takes her by the hand. “Listen to me. Listen. . . Oh, I’m not thinking straight. “
She wants to stand up but he doesn’t let her go and says, “If everybody thinks Sara and Faiz are really you and me, think what that means.”
“I can’t think what that means,” she says, pulling her hand away.
“It means that you’ll be free.”
“Free to do what? And where will Sara’s boyfriend think she is? Where will Faiz’s parents think he is? Would you let them be buried under our names? This is stupid. I don’t think you realize how stupid it is.”
“We’ll see. It will cause problems, certainly.”
“Problems?” she cries out. “What about my sons? They’ll think I’m dead. And I might as well be if I can’t see them again.”
“All I ask is that we wait a while. Let’s see what happens.”
“I’ll tell you what will happen,” she says. “Once they’ve done the proper identification at the hospital, they’ll know this charade for what it is, they’ll see us as sick people. The whole world will turn against us. What possible explanation can we give?”
“Please, Diana,” he says, holding a hand up. “I haven’t thought this out. We’ll think of something. We’d passed out or we were drunk or we were somewhere no one could reach us. We didn’t know.”
“That’s absurd. No one will accept that, absolutely no one.” Her voice trails off, exhausted.
“I don’t know, then,” he says. “Let’s wait. Let’s just wait. . . . Do you want to sleep?”
With her chin dropping on her chest, she has closed her eyes. Now she opens them, tears stuck on her lashes. “Are you serious?” she asks.
“I thought you might want to lie down.”
She raises her voice. “No. I don’t want to lie down and I don’t want to sleep. I want to know what is happening.”
They watch TV, mostly in silence. Then Dodi is on the phone again, talking to the hotel manager. In the foyer, behind the closed door, the guard sits, motionless. Turning to Diana, Dodi sees that despite her protests, she has dozed off, her head at an awkward angle. Out of nowhere, he remembers a photograph of her years ago at a Parliament session, fallen asleep with her head at the same angle, a pink and blond young woman bored by political debate.
Meanwhile, she dreams a dream she has had since adolescence. In that dream, she climbs up a rocky mountainside until she reaches the entrance of a cave and looks in, but she can’t see anything because of a thick blanket of fog. Though afraid of losing her footing and hurtling down, she hovers there, scared that if she goes in, the fog will surround her, physically touch her. She winces and tries to withdraw inside her body, make it small, offering as little surface as possible. The swirling fog prevents her from seeing anything ahead. She won’t go in. It’s not that walking inside would be difficult — despite the fog — but that she somehow knows the journey would last forever.
She twitches and wakes with a start. “Oh, my God,” she gasps, “Oh, how perfectly dreadful.”
“A dream?” Dodi asks, still standing irresolute by the phone.
“Oh, a dreadful dream. I’ve had it before. Dreadful. . . but also some sort of release. It’s…” She looks up. “Oh, never mind. Dodi, why do you want me to do this?”
“I’m not making you do it. It’s not like I’m forcing you.”
She doesn’t respond to that, but instead says, “It can’t work. Don’t you see? It can’t possibly work.”
“Well, I think it can. . . Why don’t you get some rest, instead both of us going round in circles? You look so tired.”
The weariness in her body is like nothing she has ever known, as if the fog she has just seen in her dream is numbing her limbs, slowing her down. She stands up. “All right, I will. But you have to come too.”
They slip into the bed, both with their clothes on, she with her head in the curve of his neck and he with one arm around her. She falls asleep instantly. After a while, her head weighs a ton on his shoulder but he can’t bring himself to move away. At last, he too falls asleep.
She mumbles in her sleep and that wakes him, then she sits up, her eyes wide open. “We can’t do this. Think of my sons, of your father. You can’t hurt people like this, it’s not right.”
“You have given sixteen years of your life. The rest should be yours.”
She shakes her head, slowly, to one side then the other. “But what kind of a life would that be? Do you think no one will recognize me because I’m supposed to be dead? So that if people say they’ve seen me, it will be like one of those horrid Elvis sightings and no one will believe them?” She bursts out laughing, then covers her face with her hands.
“We’ll have to hide for a while,” he says.
“Then what? Do you want me to change my face? Do you want me to change my hair? I don’t want to be somebody else. I don’t want to live somebody else’s life. I want my own.”
She goes to the bathroom, then returns to the living room. He follows her, watches her as she lets herself fall on the couch once more, her legs curled under her.
“You’ve always told me how much you hated all this,” he says. “Don’t you? Is it maybe that you actually enjoy it?”
“Oh,” she cries out. “What a cruel thing to say!”
“Don’t tell me you mind it that much.”
Her head down, she throws him a sideways glance.
“If you had a choice,” he says, coaxing her.
She still doesn’t say anything. He sighs. “You like to be famous, but on your own terms.”
“Oh, bother, yes, I suppose so. Isn’t that only natural?” She puts a hand to her forehead. “I am so tired. . . Should we have some dessert sent up? I wouldn’t mind something sweet.” Then she shakes her head. “No, I want to go back to bed. Come with me, come lie next to me.”
Once again, undressing this time, they slip between the sheets. She is too tightly wound up to be able to stretch out as she wants to, and instead remains curled up by his side, her breathing shallow as if her lungs can’t draw in enough air. Dodi puts one arm across her but she pushes it away.
“Don’t,” she says. “I can’t breathe as it is.”
He rolls on his back, staring at the high ceiling. The light from outside filters in through the drapes that aren’t quite drawn.
“Whatever you say,” he says.
“Well, it isn’t whatever I say now, is it? You’re deciding, you’re the one who’s making me do this.”
He turns around to look at her. “You have argued against it, you have brought up reasons, but you haven’t said, ‘No, I don’t want to do this.’”
“That’s unfair,” she cries out. “What more must I do to tell you that I don’t agree?”
“You must pick up the phone and let people know.”
“I tried to, you wouldn’t let me.”
“Did you really want to?” he asks.
“They won’t hear me,” she says.
“What? What did you say?”
She rolls on her back too.
“Is that window open?” she says.
“I think so.”
“Would you check?” she says again. “Perhaps open the curtains a little more to let in some air.”
He does as she asks and comes back to bed.
“You know this is incredibly selfish,” she says. “Even if we get away with it.”
“I’m not sure it’s selfish and I do think we can get away with it. We have so far.”
“But tell me why you would want to do this,” she says. “Are you already irritated by photographers and reporters? It can also be fun, you know, if it’s not simply all the time. Don’t you enjoy seeing your picture everywhere?”
“I don’t really mind,” he says, laughing a little now.
“You were one half of a famous couple. What happens now?”
“Now, I’m one half of an infamous couple.”
She giggles and punches him in the arm. “Why infamous?”
“Oh, okay. Un-famous.”
Still laughing somewhat, she says, “Do you actually care about me? Or do you just care because I am who I am?”
He looks at her, wondering. “What can I say, Diana? You are this: a very famous person. “A former almost queen. Look at it this way: I’m Dodi, okay? Would you like me shorter, or taller, or with blond hair, or belonging to a different country, or with less money? No, right? You want me to be who I am. Listen to this: one of my cousins recently got divorced and she hates her ex but she loves her two daughters, so she’s always saying ‘It’s still a good thing I was married to him because otherwise I wouldn’t have Nini and Sissi’ — they’re called Nahilah and Samiah. I was kidding her the other day, pointing out the flaw in her logic. I said, ‘You would have had other children by someone else. They wouldn’t have been Nini and Sissi but they would be your children and you would have loved them just as much.’ You know, she got really angry with me. She said, ‘But I wouldn’t have loved them as much. How could I?’”
Diana laughs in the room that is quite light now. Her face is still swollen by her crying but her eyes have recovered some of their sparkle.
“It’s the same here,” he says. “I might have loved someone else. But it’s you I love. So how can I tell?”
“All right, then, let me ask you this. If we decide to go on with this and if nobody finds out, will you mind our being . . . un-famous? If I’m nobody, I mean?”
“You’ll never be nobody,” he says. “And I don’t matter anyway. From the day I met you, I didn’t matter. You shine, I’m your shadow.”
“I don’t want to hear you say that,” she says. She takes his hand and plays with it, pushing the tips of her fingers against his nails. Then she presses her palm against his, smoothing it, turns his hand, bending each finger in turn.
“I used to do exactly that with my mother’s hands when I was little,” he says.
“Did you?”
“I would play with her hands for hours. That, and combing her hair. She had thick black hair, so shiny. I could comb her hair for hours.”
“So did I,” she says. “I also used to smell my parents’ pillows. Before they were divorced, I mean — till I was about six. I’d go to their bedroom when they’d gone out to a party or something and I’d lie on their bed and smell their pillows. I could recognize their smell, my daddy’s smell and my mummy’s smell.”
She doesn’t notice that Dodi has fallen asleep by her side. Her own voice grows fainter and stops as she falls asleep too. About an hour later, her eyes snap wide open. The clock shows seven.
“Dodi,” she says, shaking him. He sits up instantly and, picking up the remote control on the nightstand, turns on the set in the bedroom. They watch as the newscaster announces the arrival in Paris of Diana’s sisters and of Charles. He also grimly informs viewers that Charles woke up his sons to tell them what had happened. Diana starts crying again.
“Oh, this is not true,” she says. “It has to be a bad dream. I couldn’t be doing this. No mother could inflict such pain on her children.”
Again she cries while he holds her. After a while, spent, she says that she wants to take a shower and brush her teeth.
“I’ll ask for toothbrushes,” he says. “And coffee. You want coffee?”
“Yes, please.”
“And something to eat?”
Her head down, sobbing again, she waves no.
He calls Brossard directly to order toothbrushes, coffee and croissants, and newspapers. They shower together and dress back in the same clothes.
In their hotel suite, they are as well-informed as everyone else in the world as to what has taken place. The only people who had known more were the occupants of the Mercedes and three of those are dead. The fourth, a bodyguard, is still unconscious.
“What happens when he comes to?” she asks. “He’ll talk, you know he will. He’ll tell them it wasn’t us at all in the car.”
“Let’s see what happens,” Dodi answers, his standard response now.
A jeweler comes forward to tell his story about the ring he has sold Dodi.
“Oh, my God.” Diana says. “I’d forgotten about the ring. Why ever did I let Sara wear it? Why ever did she ask? So unlike her. How she insisted, remember? How she said, ‘Just until you get back to the flat’?”
“And of course it helped identify her as you. You see? Maybe it was meant to be.”
Later, there’s more about the ring. On CNN, someone talks about the box in which it was found after the crash, how the fact that it was still in the box casts doubt on whether Diana had accepted Dodi’s proposal, if he had indeed proposed.
She turns to him. “I don’t understand. How could it be in a box? Wasn’t Sara wearing it, then?”
Throughout the day, she swings from fury at the press to sorrow for her sons and the English people and then the people of the world who unite in what is turning out to be an incredible outpouring of public grief. She watches, stony-faced, as Charles and her own sisters arrive to take Sara’s body back with them. “Poor Charles,” she says. “‘I must say he does look rather devastated. Though I suppose he is also thinking that he can now marry the Rottweiler.”
Later, she says, “Do you suppose we could sneak out and go back to the flat?”
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“I think we should stay here,” he says. “We’re safe, we don’t have to send for anything from outside. At my flat, there’s bound to be some traffic, for food and things. Khalil and Ahmed will have to go back and forth. Someone will get curious.”
“Those are the two guards?”
“Yes.”
“How can you be sure that they won’t talk?”
“Oh, they won’t say anything, I am sure. Believe me, I know these people. Same with the manager.”
“What about the driver?” Diana asks. “The one who was going to take us back to your flat?”
“Oh, don’t worry about him. He thinks we were in the other car. Everyone does, you know.”
“I don’t see how. Do you suppose? . . . Oh, never mind.”
She is fascinated by the images of the public response around the world. Reading the papers and watching television, she keeps calling out to Dodi, “Listen to this. Oh, did you hear what she just said?”
A woman interviewed in the street in New York says, “It’s like I have this vein cut somewhere inside and it never stops bleeding. She’s in my thoughts all the time.”
“Imagine,” Diana says. “Imagine. . . Isn’t it the most extraordinary thing? Someone named Laetitia Brewer who lives in New York feels that she’s bleeding inside because of my death.”
Channel-surfing during newscasts, she keeps exclaiming, “Can you believe this? Can you believe this? Is this for me? Can this be for me?”
“What else?” he says. “Of course it’s for you.”
The media are going crazy, trying to discuss every aspect of any information, even remotely relevant. One of the papers has written up a history of the Ritz hotel. Diana exclaims as she reads it and looks wide-eyed at Dodi.
“Didn’t you say the manager’s name is Brossard?”
“Yes, why?”
“They give his name as something else here. Apparently, Brossard was manager fifty years ago.” She starts shaking. “What does this mean?”
“I have no idea,” he says. “It must be a mistake.”
On the sofa, she drifts off several times during the day, once half wakes up, so tired that she drags herself to bed, everything going on in the world regarding her own death suddenly quite devoid of interest. She falls asleep and finds herself climbing that vertical wall again, her bare feet searching for a ledge, a hold, anything at all on the slick rock so she can pull herself up with her arms. She sees herself as if from a distance, pinned to that flat wall, inching her way up, so far from the ground, barely getting closer to the entrance of the mist-filled cave. Then she’s back on the wall, turns her head to look down, then slowly, slowly, moves her hand toward the entrance of the cave and finally manages to grasp it. It has never been so hard before. The other times she has had that dream of climbing up, of finding the entrance to the cave, it was much smoother going. A voice in her — or near her — repeats in a flat metallic tone, “But we’ll be ghosts. We’ll be nothing but ghosts.”
Her own whimpering wakes her. She looks toward the closed door and hears Dodi’s murmur on the phone in the other room. Who can he be talking to all the time, this man who is supposed to be dead? She has a vile taste in her mouth. Picking up a pear from the fruit basket, she bites into it and finds it tasting terrible. She makes a face and puts it back on the table, then goes to the next room, to start watching the incredible show again.
Dodi’s still on the phone, speaking in Arabic. He glances at her but raises his hand for her to wait. When he’s done, he asks her if she managed to get some sleep.
“A bit,” she says. “Then I had that bad dream again and I looked for you but you weren’t there. . . Who was that on the phone?” she asks.
“No one you know.”
“But who was it? Isn’t this dangerous?”
“No. It’s someone I trust. I had to ask him to take care of a few things.”
“Won’t he tell your father that you’re alive?”
“No, he won’t.”
“How you can trust people so. . . .” she sighs. “I’ve never been able to be sure I could trust anyone.”
“That’s sad. You should always have a few people you can trust.”
On Friday evening, the holy Calcutta nun who had lived for others only, Mother Teresa, dies. Diana has another sobbing fit. “Oh,” she cries. “Oh, this is just too much. I can’t bear this! All these days. . . I’m torn… I can’t tell you, this is worse than anything. It’s like… Oh, I don’t know what it’s like. I’ve sometimes been wretched — I mean, looking back, it seems that I’ve mostly been wretched, but this, these last few days. . .”
“But doesn’t all this make you happy too, in a way? To see how people love you, I mean.”
“Happy? No, not at all. I’m overwhelmed. I can’t believe that this is all for me. Isn’t this what all these commentators say? They say all this grief must have some other meaning. They’re discussing it as they would a weird phenomenon, aren’t they? Something quite unnatural? I couldn’t possibly deserve all this. That’s what they mean, isn’t it?”
She comes back to this after a few hours. “But it’s got to be for me, it’s got to. I just know it. It touches me. Terribly, terribly so. It’s amazing.” She laughs a little, then stops. “They’re right, you know. I don’t deserve this.”
“I’m sure you do. You represent so much for so many people.”
“No. It must be touching people somewhere deep inside. They must be releasing a lot of pent-up feelings. Other feelings.”
“You see a lot of this in Muslim societies,” Dodi says. “People cry all the time. But they often cry for themselves. It’s like a deep well of past grief they draw from. That’s why they can cry like that at funerals. The keening, you know. It’s a kind of catharsis.”
“Catharsis,” she repeats. Then she cries out, “Oh, do let us stop. It isn’t important where the grief comes from. It’s there and I’m the one causing it. To think that I could just come out and say that I’m alive and everything would stop. The funeral arrangements, the grief, everything. But I feel as though I’d be ruining somebody’s party, isn’t it stupid?”
She gets up and stands at the window, peering at the Place Vendôme through the drapes. “Do you think it would be safe for me to stand on the balcony for a minute? No one can see me.”
He pulls her back. “I don’t think so. Imagine, if. . .” The consequences are beyond imagining.
Diana carefully follows all the preparations for the funeral. She approves of the longer route that is decided on to accommodate the crowds of grieving onlookers, she approves of the outfit they picked for her, though she wonders that Sara can wear it as they are not at all the same size. Someone mentions that the Princess of Wales’ face has hardly been touched in the crash.
She turns to Dodi in shock. “I don’t understand. I thought Sara’s face must have been unrecognizable. I thought they had identified her as me because of that. But if her face is untouched, how can they. . . ?”
“I don’t know what to say.”
On the Saturday, Diana cries throughout her funeral. She becomes almost hysterical when her sons join the procession. “Oh, my God,” she cries out. “My sweet little boys. What am I doing? What do I think I’m doing? This is unforgivable.”
She stares intently at the guests who arrive at the cathedral, at her mother, at her sisters. During the service, she says several times, “Thank God they’re not allowed to show the royal family. I couldn’t bear to see William and Harry.”
She cries during her brother’s speech, during Elton John’s singing. She cries when the cameras show the grieving crowds not only in London but throughout the world. Between fits of tears, she sometimes laughs. “I can’t believe this,” she exclaims. “I simply can’t.”
And again she says, “What am I doing?” Turning to her boyfriend who watches, sitting next to her, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand from time to time, she now says, “What have you done, Dodi?”
“Don’t look at me. I didn’t do this by myself.”
“I think you did, and I think the reason you’re keeping me from going forward is that now I’ll have only you in the world. Isn’t that it? So you won’t have to share me?”
His eyes on her are cold. “I think you need some rest.”
She is downcast. “No. Don’t say that. You’re right. I shouldn’t accuse you. It’s my fault. I’m the one who should do something. But I’ve always been so indecisive. I’ve always let myself be carried by circumstances.”
“Oh, come on,” Dodi said. “I find you a very determined lady.”
“Oh Lord, no! I’m not determined. Strong, maybe. Yes, I’m fairly strong. But when things matter…” She stops. “No one should have to face this kind of ordeal, no one. . . People have sometimes said I don’t have what it takes — morally. I suppose they’re right, they must be. Otherwise, how could I have done this?”
“Don’t torture yourself,” Dodi says. “Who knows what’s right?”
“I know what’s right. We can’t only do what’s best for us and never worry about consequences, can we? About what our actions may mean to other people’s lives? What kind of world would that be?”
He looks down. “I guess it would be a world made of people like me.”
“No, no.” She puts a hand on his neck and draws him to her. “No, that’s not what I meant at all. Oh, I don’t know what I meant. . . that we should give ourselves up.”
She hits her mouth with the back of her hand. “Did you hear what I just said? I’m beginning to see myself as a criminal. Do you think we’ve broken a law?”
He laughs. “I have no idea.”
“How can you laugh?” she says.
“Because it’s funny. This whole situation.”
“You think so?” She indicates the television screen, the ocean of flowers against the gates of Kensington Palace. “Do you think that’s funny?” she asks.
“No,” he says, still laughing. “That’s not funny,” and then he grabs his head with his hands, his shoulders shaking hard with the laughter that he tries to repress. She repeats, shaking her head disbelievingly, “You really think it is.”
He can’t stop laughing. She starts to smile, then explodes into laughter herself. One encouraging the other, they are soon convulsed with hilarity. She keeps wiping her eyes and hitting his arm, bending from the waist, down and up again, shrieking, trying to talk between bouts of laughter, until they both begin to calm down and at last fall silent and stare at each other.
“This is simply too much,” she says. “Talk about catharsis.”
He pulls her into the bedroom where they make love and still remain half-sated. Beyond lusting for each other, their bodies carry a pain that doesn’t go away.
“Remember the first time we made love after we met again?” he says. “Remember the Arabic word I taught you?”
“Maktoub,” she says immediately. “It is written.”
“Exactly. It is written. Maybe this accident too was written. So that we might live in peace.”
“What if I don’t want to?”
He turns and looks at her, then touches her once more.
Later, she is reading again, compulsively, everything related to the accident. “Listen to this,” she says. “Someone else saying that I’m getting too much space and Mother Teresa not enough. “The real funeral will be in Calcutta. Na-na-na. . . tells a lot about our society that would hysterically mourn a bulimic, adulterous star of the media and disregard the passing away of a saint. . . na-na-na.’ And all these others,” she hits the papers. “My collusion’ with the media, my manipulation’. . .” She lets the paper drop to the floor. “Is that all I was, then? Is that how people are going to remember me?”
He stays where he is, at the table, his legs stretched out. “You know you’re more than that. Aren’t all these people crying for you? Can they all be wrong ?”
“I don’t know. . . I may have been a star of the media but I was certainly outshined by every other star. I always have to justify everything, I have to insist that I’m someone. Even now, even in death. Poor wonderful Mother Teresa had to die so that everyone could compare me, the slut, with her, the saint. I keep having to say I’m sorry. Sorry for ever being born, sorry for being me, sorry for dying so inconveniently, when all eyes should be turned on Mother Teresa.”
Dodi goes to her and wipes the tears once more flowing from her eyes. “She didn’t die to hurt you,” he says.
“No, of course not. You know how I admired her. It’s not that. It’s the way things happen so I will always be shown up for this . . . For someone who has done nothing useful with her life where others have such tremendous achievements.”
Later, he looks up from something he is reading. “Listen to this. ‘The death in old age of someone who has led a life of selflessness and accomplishment brings sadness. But from the most ancient times, the death of a beautiful princess cut in the bloom of youth has struck inexpressible sorrow in people’s hearts. The gods weep and the world with them when beauty and youth are extinguished before their time. One death is natural, the other is not. One causes sadness, the other sadness and shock. For there is a time to die. Children prepare for the death of their parents. Parents can never accept the death of a child.’”
“Yes,” Diana says. “Some people will come out and say things like that. But most people think that my life didn’t matter and my death doesn’t either.”
“What about all this public grieving?”
“What about it? All the serious people dismiss it as mass hysteria for someone who didn’t deserve any of it.”
“Do you think you did?” he asks.
She sits up and pushes from her lap the magazine that she has been reading. It falls on the pile on the floor. “Do I deserve to be mourned like this?” She bends her head, her eyes looking up at him. “I don’t know,” she says. “I didn’t think anyone could be mourned like this. I’m astonished. . . Beside this catharsis that you and everybody keeps mentioning, I suppose people must see in me something that nobody saw before. Perhaps I do deserve it, if they think I do. You know how I’ve always felt useless and hopeless and failed in every direction.”
“But this queen of hearts also has a big ego,” he observes.
“Perhaps so. But perhaps I only think I do. Most of the time, I’m just fed up with myself.”
She studies him quietly, then says, “You’re all I have left, now.” Then she smiles her brilliant smile and says, “That’s okay. You know, I find you rather full of surprises. I find you wise. I found you attractive, but wise is the last thing I’d have expected you to be. Is this the famed wisdom of the East?”
“I don’t know about that,” he says. “Do you find the East wise? I mean, look at the politics in most of our countries.”
A writer whose name they don’t catch is being interviewed. Her composed face belying her emotional response, the woman says, “Even though I wasn’t a Diana fan, I’m surprised myself at the strength of my sorrow. Only this morning, I was comparing my feelings with the way you feel when someone horrible dies, the ayatollah or that cannibal serial killer. You know the relief you feel, like the world becomes a cleaner place. With Diana’s death, I feel just the opposite. Like a light has gone out, in a very physical way, and the world is a darker place.”
Diana turns the set off. “Imagine,” she says again, marveling. “Imagine. . .”
“If we’re going to go through with this,” she says the next day while they’re eating, “And it looks as though we are, we have to be practical. . . . I suppose we should start thinking about a disguise.” She takes another bite. “I should wear a wig perhaps. What else? Let’s see. . .”
Dodi eats ravenously, as he has all the past days — where she has hardly eaten at all. Today, they’re lunching on cold roastbeef slices, salad, buttered rolls, cheese. He wipes his mouth, empties his wineglass, wipes his mouth again. “How about colored lenses to hide your eyes?”
“That’s a good idea.”
“And no jewelry.”
“No jewelry,” she agrees as he pours more wine for the two of them.
“Still,” she muses. “Someone’s bound to recognize me. Over the years, I’ve tried a number of things. Nothing seems to work.”
“It’s not the same now,” he says. “They were after Diana and they expected her to pull tricks. But there is no more Diana.”
“You’re right,” she says. “Not a happy thought. All right, what about you?”
“I don’t know. Listen, why don’t we get Brossard up here? He’s the one who’s going to have to go out and get things anyway.”
When Brossard comes up, Dodi tells him that he expects him to arrange things so that they can go back to the apartment in the Rue Arsène-Houssaye.
“If anything goes wrong,” he adds, “you’re fired.”
The manager shrugs. “Monsieur Fayed, your father will fire me anyway when he finds out that I’ve hidden this from him.”
“I promise you he won’t. He’ll give you a medal when I tell him how you helped.” Brossard’s smile is tight. “I’m not too sure.”
“Okay,” Dodi says, rubbing his hands together. “We have work to do. Do you have money?”
“Yes, monsieur. How much do you need?”
“I don’t know, someone has to go shopping. Let’s sit down and make a list. My father will reimburse you.”
They draw chairs to the table and sit down, Diana watching them from the couch with remote control in hand, piles of magazines and newspapers surrounding her.
“You’re married, right?” Dodi asks Brossard. “Can you ask your wife to do the shopping?”
“Yes.”
“You can make up a story about one of the guests. She mustn’t suspect.”
“I wouldn’t lie to you, Monsieur Fayed. She already knows.”
Dodi turns to Diana and asks her to turn the volume of the television down. Then he turns round and stares at Brossard.
“You told her that the Princess and I are here? Alive?”
“Yes, Monsieur.” Brossard nods slowly. “My wife and I are very close and she’s discreet. We’ve been married eighteen years and I always share everything with her. The stories she could tell about this hotel, for instance. Some would make your hair stand on end.”
“More than this one?” Dodi asks.
The manager shakes his head and smiles, less tightly this time.. “No. Nothing like this one.”
“But you’re sure she won’t talk.”
“Yes, Monsieur Fayed. Absolutely. We have talked about this together. Let me tell you, Chantal has been staying here with me since… the accident. She worried too much at home, and also, I need to sleep and she stays with me so she can wake me up when you call.”
Diana who has been listening quietly now asks, “What does she think about this? About what we’re doing?”
The manager, a thickset, short Mediterranean type, purses his fleshy lips and nods several times, thoughtfully. “She thinks it’s a terrible thing.”
Diana gets up and walks barefoot to the table. Brossard pulls up a chair for her and she sits down, then throws him a sideway glance. “What do you think?” she asks.
“I think it’s terrible too. The whole world is so sad at this loss and you are sitting here and I am hiding you.”
He looks down. “I’m sorry to have to say this, but I am ashamed. . . “ He adds, “But I understand.”
“Do you?” she says forcefully. “Do you?”
Her boyfriend looks at her, a bit amused, though the circumstances are far from amusing. She has caught the ball and is running with it. She is the one now defending a position she called indefensible.
“Do you know,” she goes on, “that what happened in that tunnel could have happened a thousand times before? I’m abused, I’m harassed, I can’t have a normal life.”
“Madame,” Brossard says. “You are beautiful and you are famous. Why would there not be a price to pay? Do you think God gives something for nothing?”
“You don’t know,” she says, her head down. “I’ve always paid a heavy price. Always.”
“I know, Madame,” he bows his head respectfully. “All the world knows that you’ve had many troubles.”
She stands up, her anger feeding itself. She makes a fist with her right hand and hits the palm of her left hand with it, several times. “Do you resent what I have? Do you think I should have paid with my life? Is that what you think?”
“No, no, Madame. I just said that I understand what you’re doing. I know paparazzi, believe me. As the manager of this hotel, I often have to deal with them. They’re terrible, simply terrible. They should be punished. I wouldn’t cry if they were pendus haut et court.”
“What does that mean?”
Brossard puts a hand to his throat and with the other one shows an imaginary rope. “The gallows, you know.”
“Hanged,” Diana says.
“Exactly. Hanged. But the fact is, you’re not punishing the paparazzi. You’re punishing people who love you.”
“I know, I know,” she says, her anger spent, and starts crying. “That is my cross to bear, my responsibility.”
Dodi gets up and puts an arm around her, takes her back to the couch, and returns to sit down with Brossard. He says sharply, “We don’t need your opinion.”
“Madame asked.”
“Okay,” Dodi says, “Practical things. We need to get out of here, go back to the flat, and contact some people.”
They discuss decisions: that Brossard and his wife would make sure that there will be food and everything else that may be needed back at the flat, that the concierge at Dodi’s building would be told that they are getting things in readiness for Monsieur Fayed the father arriving soon and then that the Princess and her boyfriend would return in disguise to the flat, in separate cabs. Madame Brossard will stay with them permanently, along with the two Egyptian guards, until the next step is decided upon.
The manager’s wife is then called in. A small, slender woman, of typical Parisian elegance, she looks up at the Princess when Diana comes in from the bedroom where she had gone to lie down and she bursts into tears. Diana takes in her arms the Frenchwoman who barely reaches her shoulder.
“I am so sorry, Madame,” the manager’s wife says between sobs. “these days, they have been so strange. First, I cried when I heard about the accident, I was so shocked. . . And then my husband told me this that you were here. I thought he was joking, yes? But he wasn’t. It was true. And now I cry because you’re alive. This is ridicule, non?”
“Chantal,” her husband says. “I don’t think the Princess has time for this.”
“Oh, no, no,” Diana intervenes. “Of course we have time. We have all the time in the world. Does it look as though we have a very busy schedule?”
She smiles wryly and turns to Chantal again, while Dodi and the hotel manager exchange glances. They are seeing the Princess at work: compassionate, soothing, and very royal.
“I don’t know what more to say,” the manager’s wife goes on. “I’ve cried so much this week. All the time, I think, the world is beautiful like this, everyone united, everyone so close, in a common pain. And all the time, I pinch myself, remembering that the Princess is alive, up here with her boyfriend, Monsieur Fayed, and this funeral, this procession, everything. . . And I find myself catched. . . is that just?”
“Caught? Is that what you mean?”
Chantal laughs. “Ah, I had forgotten you were a teacher, a maîtresse d’école.”
“Not quite,” Diana says. “A kindergarten teacher, rather.”
“Chantal,” her husband says again.
“Yes, yes,” she says, still looking at the Princess. “I had to say this, to say how strange these days have been, with everyone crying outside, and you in here. . . but of course, anything I can do to help.”
“Thank you,” Diana says. “This has not been easy, you know. With Sara’s death. . .”
“Sara?” the manager’s wife asks.
“My friend, you know. The one who died in the crash.”
“Oh.” She nods, looking puzzled.
They go over possible disguises. “You sound like such an expert,” Diana says, listening to Chantal outline her ideas.
“Oh, not an expert. But at my children’s school, we have a theater group. I work with them. We’re doing L’avare this year. Do you know it?”
Diana shakes her head.
They stand in front of the mirror in the bedroom. Dodi with a goatee, a salt-and-pepper ponytail caught in an elastic, wearing jeans and a shiny maroon and gold Washington Redskins sports jacket, black Nike sneakers.
He says, “Wait,” picks up from the bed a backpack that Chantal has filled with odds and ends and slings it on one shoulder. “Now,” he says. “How do I look?”
Diana nods. She herself is wearing a short auburn wig with bangs on her forehead, brown lenses, no makeup, a longish grandma dress in a flowered pattern that Chantal has bought for 200 francs in a discount store in the Rue Saint-Placide, a small gold cross on a chain around her neck and a plain wedding band. Her feet are bare in brown leather tongs. They stare at their reflection in eerie silence before Diana says, “My God. We could just walk down the Champs-Elysées. I don’t think anyone could possibly recognize us.”
“It helps that people think you’re dead.”
“I might as well be,” she says, still staring at her reflection. “I don’t know who this person is and I have to be her forever.”
He puts his arm around her waist. He is sometimes surprised, at odd moments, by her height and her bulk. Not that she is heavy, but the tall women he has known were always wispy, almost immaterial models. Not her. She is solid, all strong limbs and muscles.
“It won’t be forever,” he says. “You’ll grow old, my darling. In fifteen, twenty years, you’ll look very different. People will always remember you the way you were when you died, but live long enough and no one will recognize you.”
She pulls away. “What a perfectly dreadful thought”
Dodi kisses her cheek and says, “I’ll see you back at the flat.”
“Right,” she nods.
Chantal is waiting for her in the living room. The two women walk to the elevator. Chantal talks nonstop in French. “Alors tu comprends, je lui ai dit que ça ne se passerait pas comme ça. Elle était furieuse…”
The princess nods, says, “Oui, oui,” absentmindedly, her eyes catching through an open door a maid cleaning up a room. They ride down with a man who doesn’t even look at them. She is detached from her surroundings, walking slowly as in a dream where putting one foot before the other takes place in slow motion. Chantal, prattling away, throws her a nervous look, slips a hand under her arm to steady her. It’s only mid-morning, there is hardly anyone in the lobby. Diana sees that steep cliffside, hears the wind whistling around the rocks. She concentrates on her breathing, intermittently hearing Chantal’s voice as they walk toward the exit where Brossard has a cab waiting. The doorman is all smiles for the manager’s wife. He holds the glass door open, “Le taxi vous attend, Madame Brossard,” he says, hardly glancing at her nondescript companion.
The cave entrance is welcoming to Diana as she steps in, caught in the mist that wraps itself around her, hiding her from view. Oh, she thinks as she leans back, resting her head, her eyes closed, it doesn’t even hurt. I had thought it might.
