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44.

Lesotho was beautiful. But also one of the grimmest places on earth. It was the epicenter of theglobal AIDS pandemic, and in 2004 the government had just declared a medical disaster. Tens ofthousands had fallen to the disease, and the nation was turning into one vast orphanage. Here andthere, you’d glimpse young children running about, lost looks on their faces.

Where’s Daddy? Where’s Mummy?

George and I signed up to help at several charities and schools. We were both bowled over bythe lovely people we met, their resilience, their grace, their courage and good cheer in the face ofso much suffering. We worked as hard as we’d worked on his farm, gladly and eagerly. We builtschools. We repaired schools. We mixed gravel, poured cement, whatever was needed.

In this same spirit of service, I agreed one day to perform a task that might otherwise havebeen unthinkable—an interview. If I truly wanted to shine a light on conditions here, I had nochoice: I’d have to cooperate with the dreaded press.

But this was more than cooperating. This would be my first-ever solo session with a reporter.

We met on a grassy hillside, early one morning. He started by asking: Why this place? Of allplaces?

I said that children in Lesotho were in trouble, and I loved children, understood children, sonaturally I wanted to help.

He pressed. Why did I love children?

I gave my best guess: My incredible immaturity?

I was being glib, but the reporter chuckled and moved on to his next question. The subject ofchildren had opened the door to the subject of my childhood, and that was the gateway to the onlysubject he, or anyone, really wanted to ask me about.

Do you think about…her…a lot through something like this?

I looked off, down the hillside, responded with a series of disjointed words: Unfortunately it’sbeen a long time now, um, not for me but for most people, it’s been a long time since she’s died,but the stuff that’s come out has been bad, all the stuff that’s come out, all these tapes…I was referring to recordings my mother had made before her death, a kind of quasi-confessional, which had just been leaked to the press, to coincide with release of the butler’smemoir. Seven years after being hounded into hiding my mother was still being hounded, andlibeled—it didn’t make sense. In 1997 there’d been a nationwide reckoning, a period of collectiveremorse and reflection among all Britons. Everyone had agreed that the press was a pack ofmonsters, but consumers accepted blame as well. We all needed to do better, most people said.

Now, many years later, all was forgotten. History was repeating itself daily, and I told the reporterit was “a shame.”

Not a momentous declaration. But it represented the first time that either Willy or I had everspoken publicly about Mummy. I was amazed to be the one going first. Willy always went first, inall things, and I wondered how this would go over—with him, with the world, but especially withPa. (Not well, Marko told me later. Pa was dead-set against me addressing that topic; he didn’twant either of his sons speaking about Mummy, for fear it would cause a stir, distract from hiswork, and perhaps shine an unflattering light on Camilla.)Finally, with a completely false air of bravado, I shrugged and said to the reporter: Bad newssells. Simple as that.

Speaking of bad news…the reporter now referenced my most recent scandal.

The page-three girl, of course.

He mentioned that some were wondering if I’d really learned anything from my visit to therehab clinic. Had I truly “converted”? I don’t remember if he used that word, converted, but atleast one paper had.

Did Harry need to be converted?

Harry the Heretic?

I could barely make out the reporter through the sudden red mist. How are we even talkingabout this? I blurted something about not being normal, which caused the reporter’s mouth to fallopen. Here we go. He was getting his headline, his news fix. Were his eyes rolling up into hishead?

And I was supposed to be the addict?

I explained what I meant by normal. I didn’t lead a normal life, because I couldn’t lead one.

Even my father reminds me that unfortunately Willy and I can’t be normal. I told the reporter thatno one but Willy understood what it was like to live in this surreal fishbowl, in which normalevents were treated as abnormal, and the abnormal was routinely normalized.

That was what I was trying to say, starting to say, but then I took another look down thehillside. Poverty, disease, orphans—death. It rendered everything else rubbish. In Lesotho, nomatter what you were going through, you were well- off compared to others. I suddenly feltashamed, and wondered if the journalist had sense enough to be ashamed too. Sitting here aboveall this misery and talking about page-three girls? Come on.

After the interview I went and found George and we drank beer. A lot of beer. Gallons of beer.

I believe that was also the night I smoked an entire shopping bag of weed.

I don’t recommend it.

Then again, it might have been another night. Hard to be precise when it comes to a shoppingbag full of weed.