flattered and enchanted

I shall only get married when I am sure I am in love, so I can never be divorced.

Diana said, when she was a little child.
And that Sounds Like A Plan.

Sometimes when I think about quote-end-quote "relationships" between women and men, I think "Nothing works."

Then other times I think otherwise.

--------{excerpt, The Diana Chronicles}:
The amazing thing about the Parker Bowleses' twenty-two-year marriage is how faithless it was right from the start -- and not even primarily on Camilla's side. Andrew had had affairs throughout their courtship, and he didn't stop after the wedding.

[soufflé]

...In the early years of Camilla's marriage, when her husband was off during the week playing around in London, it was doubtless an agreeable boost for [her]...that the Prince of Wales telephoned her so often and continued to confide in her about his ongoing bachelor affairs. A fomer member of the Queen's staff says that throughout Camilla's marriage to Parker Bowles, it was Charles's intensity of feeling that drove the sustained romantic friendship.

Camilla took the Prince's devotion for granted, at the same time making sure no newcomer usurped her. A friend of Camilla's believes the bond would have lapsed on Camilla's side if Charles had not been the Prince of Wales.

On weekends, the Prince often showed up in the Parker Bowleses' kitchen in need of tea and sympathy. In return, Camilla could share her rueful stories of Andrew's wandering eye. One of her earlier flames, Rupert Hambro, remembered the masochistic glee Camilla took in telling him about the tricky situations Andrew's love life sometimes caused. "She often saw the funny side of things afterwards," said Hambro.

Or pretended she did.

...Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Parker Bowles left for Rhodesia with Lord Soames, the last British Governor. Parker Bowles was away for four months helping oversee the transition to independence, leaving Camilla behind with their two children in Wiltshire. When word reached her via the grapevine that the rampant Lieutenant Colonel was now developing a warm friendship with Soames's daughter Charlotte, she knew how she could console herself.

You have to hand it to Camilla that she always knew how to stage her sexual reprisals. Or, as a male friend remarked, "Only Camilla Parker Bowles could find a way to reheat a soufflé."

...Whoomph. The sparks between Charles and Camilla blew into the open at the Cirencester Polo Club ball at Stowell Park at the end of June 1980. The Prince was there with his latest girlfriend, the beautiful twenty-five-year-old blond spitfire Anna Wallace, a Scottish landowner's daughter. Charles was for a time deeply infatuated with Wallace and had even been rumored to have proposed.
[A risqué photo of Anna was discovered to be in possession of journalists...]

Anna might have been tarnished as a bride, but she could still supplant Camilla as premier mistress. Anna was nicknamed "Whiplash Wallace" for her prowess on the hunting field, and Camilla knew exactly what that meant. The Prince's long-term lover needed to demonstrate, in public as well as in private, that she had the power to get the Prince of Wales back at her pleasure, and make that point to her philandering husband.

When Charles asked Camilla to dance, the two of them were lip-locked half the night....
Even Camilla's mother, who was present at the ball, was perturbed at the effect of such a display of flagrantly adulterous feeling, especially with Andrew present. But that was at least half the point, presumably -- that Andrew was there, pretending, in the couple's endless marital games, to be impervious to his wife's making out in front of him with the heir to the throne. "HRH is very fond of my wife...And she appears to be very fond of him," Andrew drawled to a guest as he watched Camilla's performance with the Prince.

... Charles was now thirty-one, past the age he always promised he would marry. A bride must be found, and fast. But who? They were running out of names of single girls plausibly intacta. Any woman near Charles's own age who was still a virgin could only be found in a sitcom. With very few exceptions, the younger ones had proved even more woefully experimental. "This was always part of Diana's logic," her friend Simon Berry said. "Who else was he going to marry?"

...The Queen's guests were as charmed as Prince Charles. Lord Charteris, Elizabeth II's former private secretary, was intrigued by what he saw as Diana's "wonderful instincts" that week at Balmoral. "...She kept herself in his line of vision as much as possible. Always looking pretty and being decorous. Always being jolly. She was canny by nature and understood that few men can resist a pretty girl who openly adores them, especially one who has a ready laugh and a witty retort . . . [and was] available and sent out very clear messages of worship. The Prince was flattered and enchanted."

[rear maneuver]

...A trio of Royal watchers alert for any new royal liaison were in wait that weekend for the photo ops afforded by the Braemar Games....In hopes of catching Prince Charles in dalliance with a new blonde, they staked out HRH's favorite fishing spot on the River Dee. They were quickly rewarded with a glimpse of a tall girl in fishing gear on the banks.

But she spotted the ambush, dodged behind a tree without showing her face, and for a youthful novice performed an expert maneuver: she pulled out a compact mirror, watched the trio watching her without letting them see her face, and then bolted for the Prince's nearby car.

All the lensman Lennox got were pictures of her rear.

Whitaker was impressed by her cunning. "This one," he said, "is clearly going to give us trouble."

--------------{end excerpts}
[The Diana Chronicles. Tina Brown.
2007. Random House. New York.]

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