Queen for a New Day

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Such statements may lack any hard political sense, but they do not want for a certain lofty finesse. Charles has it in spades. His courtship of Lady Diana was a model of decorum and broken field running. The pair had been seeing each other "on and off," according to a source close to the palace, ever since they were re-introduced in 1977. They met at a pheasant shoot on the grounds of Althrop, the Spencer's overwhelming (15,000 acres) and overweening home that also doubles, when there are no visiting royals about, as a thriving tourist attraction. (For £1 sterling, a visitor gets a tour and a how-do-you-do from the Earl and his second wife Raine.) The press did not get onto the romance until an item appeared in mid-August in the News of the World. By the end of September, the Daily Mail's hard-burrowing gossip writer, Nigel Dempster, had devoted his entire column to Lady Diana ("I'm told she's ideal"), and a photograph of her weekending at Balmoral was given prominent space.

As the Prince made his play, and the press closed in around Lady Diana's flat and the kindergarten in Pimlico where she spent three days a week tending well-to-do tots, there was a dizzying sense of suspense. Now that matters are settled, tension has given way to speculation about the emotional temperature of the engagement, as if Charles and Diana conducted themselves like Adam Fenwick-Symes and Nina Blount in Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies: "Darling, I am glad about our getting married." "So am I. But don't let's get intense about it."

Intensity, like color, is not highly prized in a monarchical marriage. "This falling in love at first sight," said Mountbatten, "is not the way that royal marriages are made." But watching Lady Diana in tears at the airport as her fiancé headed off on his Austral wanderings, one wonders if she might not modify that standard as well. As for Charles, he speaks publicly about his philosophical uncertainties. ("In love?" asked an interviewer. "Of course," said she. "Whatever 'in love' means," said he.) But it is heartening to learn that he has placed frequent phone calls from Down Under to the girl he left behind.

As bulletins on the romance are issued like hourly weather forecasts, preparations for the royal wedding on July 29 proceed amid a storm of activity. Elizabeth and David Emanuel, who ran up Lady Diana's black taffeta number, are working on the bridal dress in penumbral secrecy at their Mayfair salon. Reveals Elizabeth: "We keep the shades drawn, because I've heard that people with telescopes can peer through windows." On the home front, Barbara Cartland, mother of Diana's stepmother and author of 305 widely consumed but ultimately unbearable novels, will be receiving tour groups—"twelve women, I believe. Those rich American widows" —and doing a little entertaining. "I shall give them tea, chocolate cake and meringues," she announced. "You know Americans have never seen meringues." The tours, in fact, were arranged long before the royal engagement, and the palace has not tried to stop them.