abolished or not? He was never in the country anyway.
It went round the wires in seconds. The next day a journalist turned up in Cambridge, asking about Finn’s behaviour when he was an undergraduate there. Someone found an incendiary article he had written as a student coming back from Paris, praising the French événements of 1968. A man he had fallen out with badly on his Pamirs expedition sold a highly coloured account of Finn’s alleged anarchist ravings while they were in the mountains together.
The headlines were grim. ‘Prince Woos Revolutionary’s Daughter’ was the mildest of them. ‘Trotskyist Totty in the Palace’ screamed the Daily Despatch.
Julian Madoc rang Bella and asked her for a list of all the clubs and societies she had ever joined, particularly any political ones. He was, he said in a smug voice, commanded by the King to ask. Lady Pansy said it was most unfortunate and that Bella should issue a statement, distancing herself from her father.
‘Can’t do that,’ said Lottie the guru. ‘Turns you into a sneaky little traitor, letting your dad down.’
‘I wasn’t going to do it,’ said Bella, more bewildered than anything else.
Richard was furious. A television interviewer stuck a microphone in his face at a Christmas Fair and he lost his cool. ‘I am a great admirer of Finn Greenwood’s work,’ he told a reporter icily. ‘I have read all his books. It will be a privilege to meet him.’
‘Prince Turns Anarchist’ trumpeted the Daily Despatch.
‘Oh, dear,’ said Lady Pansy, worried. ‘Maybe you ought not to see each other. Just for a bit, you know. Until all this dies down.’
But Bella was starting to get annoyed too. ‘The trouble is, people who buy the Despatch can’t read. They probably thought it said Anti-Christ,’ she said tartly.
And somehow that got out into the Press too. There were rumblings that the First Girlfriend was too big for her boots. Not being Royal or even aristocratic and sneering at the reading abilities of good working people.
‘Now I’m not only a Trot, I’m toffee-nosed,’ she told Richard, trying to make a joke of it. But it was starting to hurt.
She did not go to any official functions with him, and when they went to the same parties they arrived and left separately. It seemed to her that now they had acknowledged that they were seeing each other, they saw less of each other than they had when it was only in snatched, secret moments.
‘I know,’ said Richard. They were in his flat again, curled up together on the huge sofa after a long walk and a lazy evening with a DVD. ‘It’s like there’s a conspiracy to keep us apart.’
Bella propped herself up on one elbow. ‘Do you think …?’ But at once they both shook their heads. ‘Nah. Why would anyone bother?’
‘If I have the choice between cock-up and conspiracy, I go for cock-up every time,’ said Richard. ‘We need to spend time together, private time, that everyone knows about. I can’t get away for Christmas, but I could do the Saturday after next if your mother invited me. And you could come to Scotland for the New Year.’
‘Do you think that’s wise? Lady Pansy said maybe we should cool it.’
‘Pansy’s an old worryguts,’ said Richard disrespectfully. ‘I’m not feeling like cooling anything.’
He kissed Bella long and pleasurably to illustrate his point. After a long, complicated interlude, she could only agree with him.
‘Right,’ he said later, lying half-naked and wholly relaxed on his priceless Chinese carpet. ‘That’s agreed then. You square your parents. I’ll tell mine.’
Thirty-six hours entertaining the Prince of Wales on her own territory was all Janet Bray had ever dreamed of. She paraded him round the Golf Club and he behaved, as Bella told him later with heartfelt appreciation, like a complete star. He laughed at all their golf stories, even producing a couple of his own. He admired their charitable fund-raising, expressed interest in the club’s upcoming centenary – and spent long cold hours on the fairway playing a round with Kevin and smiling for the local paper, the curious, and children who came along hoping that the Prince of Wales would be in armour, or at least have a sword. His smile never faltered. Nobody would ever have guessed that he wasn’t riveted by golf and golfers or delighted with his day’s entertainment.
‘You’re really good at this, aren’t you?’ Bella said, walking beside him back to the clubhouse, her gloved hand tucked into the crook of his arm.