| Charles Spencer was in Cape Town with his four young children
when he learnt his sister had been in a car crash in Paris. A few
sleepless hours later, he got a phone call confirming the worst. He
braced himself to deliver the news to his children.
"I said, 'I've got some dreadful news'," Spencer recounts. "
'I'm afraid Aunt Diana's been killed.' They looked at me,
absolutely incredulous, and then Eliza, who's the elder of my
twins, said, 'But not in real life, Daddy?' "
The reaction of Eliza Spencer, then 5, was the same as many upon
hearing reports that the Princess of Wales was dead. It didn't
quite feel like real life.
Ten years on, Spencer is still pained by the death of his
sister. Maybe the family spokesman, whose personal life has been
picked over almost as eagerly as his big sister's, still can't
believe it.
He changes the channel every time Diana appears on the
television in the private living room of Althorp, the ancestral
home he inherited with his title, an earldom. He has led the
Herald here after a tour of the grand main house, which,
with its enormous grounds, is open to visitors for a few months
each year.
Before meeting the earl, we wait in the Grand Tapestry Room,
"chaperoned" by a kindly old lady, one of the many staff who work
at Althorp. She seems to be there to ensure we keep our hands off
the silverware, which looks ancient, and the tapestries, which look
priceless.
The only new thing in the room, darkened to protect the
tapestries, is today's copy of The Guardian. I had thought
earls were supposed to read Tatler and The Times
but Spencer later tells me he prefers papers that rarely mention
the royals or his sister. He's out of luck today, because even the
high-brow Guardian is gearing up for the 10th anniversary
of his sister's death and has a picture of her on its front
page.
When Spencer appears he is tall, energetic and very, very posh.
He is dressed down in the effortless way that is the true signature
of an aristocrat - rumpled chinos, open-necked blue shirt that
brings out his Diana-esque eyes and expensive casual shoes.
He switches on the television quickly, to check cricket scores,
before settling down under a framed modernist painting that has
nothing in common with the inherited canvases (of hounds, men with
hounds, hounds with horses, men with hounds and horses) hanging
dolefully in the rest of the house.
Source of information: http://wn.com
| 
