I love rings: gold, silver, "ethnic", and often worn by others before me. Because we are frail and mortal, we long for things that are not.
My mother didn't really wear jewellery, just a war-time austerity wedding ring, partly because she was young during the 1940s and the bleak postwar 1950s, between which decades I appeared. Small wonder that I desired sparkly things and, as a teenager, bought myself rings from Woolworths and the new 1960s boutiques: big "glass" diamonds on base metal that dirtied and snapped within months. I did not see how clearly the wearing of such rings announced a lack: of taste, clearly; but also of inherited jewellery; money and/or a serious boyfriend to buy me a proper one. Those first rings did not last, and, not understanding, I did not mind.
In all my life I have only made one promise meant to last as long as I did, and that is when I said, somewhere on the edge between tears and laughter, "til death us do part". In our case the pledge was sealed with an Irish fede or "friendship" ring we bought together literally an hour before the wedding. I liked it not because it was very valuable (it was not) but because it had a design of two joined hands, something human turned into gold. It was one of the first "real" rings I had owned, as opposed to "fun" baubles with backs that opened and closed. Very quickly I grew to feel naked without it, and my new husband, who told me before we married that he had "never worn a ring and wouldn't start now", changed his mind and, touching me deeply, said he wanted to wear a wedding ring too.
I saw Eternity the other night
Like a great ring of pure and endless
light,
All calm, as it was bright …
These beautiful lines by the 17th-century Welsh poet Henry Vaughan tell us how deeply the image of the ring is embedded in human consciousness. It is round like the sun, like the spheres of perfection: it is "all calm", a smooth form without snags or breaks, and it circles back like the year, from light to darkness and back again. It symbolises the eternal, evading death by always starting anew. The debate over whether Prince William was "right" or "wrong" to give Kate Middleton a ring that was owned by his mother – was it "personal" enough? was it a "heavy responsibility"? – has been curiously detached from this older question of why human beings love rings.
No wedding or engagement ring, however famous or valuable, can weigh as heavy as the momentous question every proposing lover asks: stay with me until death. Many are mad enough to ask; the remarkable thing is that about half of those extraordinary promises are kept. The ring becomes a way of both protecting the beloved and holding her or him fast. Rings encircle the fingers that are the narrowest and most vulnerable parts of our human flesh, deft stem-like extensions with which we touch and stroke, hold the hands of children, gesture our feelings more truly than we know as we speak, wave goodbye.
The ring-giver is saying, "Never say goodbye to me, or only if you will close the circle again by coming back to me." It is a private symbol to lovers but a public sign to the world: our fingers, the only parts of our bodies that are, like our faces, habitually exposed, are just as easily read. Paparazzi are quick to snap the donning and doffing of rings and journalists swift to assess their monetary value. Into this public hand-reading Prince William has introduced a ring publicly remembered as the possession of a 20th-century princess.
But of course that is not who Princess Diana is to him. She was his, and his brother's, mother, and they lost her at an age that made most of the country wish them well in the growing up she would not see. One of the most admired things about Diana was her way of being a mother: open-hearted, laughing, demonstrative. She never got the chance to say to her boys what my mother, on her deathbed, said to my daughter, knowing she would miss her growing up – "I will always love you, Rosa" – but perhaps they knew without being told. That both princes have been able to sustain long relationships with women in adulthood suggests that Diana loved them enough in her lifetime for that love to survive her death, a store from which they can give back.
Sexual love and the everyday love of parents for very small children share more than is often acknowledged: extreme tenderness, playfulness, focus. When young adults first have sex with someone they love, the nearest analogue is probably the way their parents kissed and stroked them when they were babies. If that first skin-on-skin contact went well, the later sexual kind has a better chance. As Christopher Reid's touching early poem asserted, lovers "are each other's parents", as well as everything else. With the gift of his mother's ring William is saying "Love me as my mother did, and I will love you as I loved her."
When he explained in his ITV interview that he wanted to make sure his mother "was not left out of the excitement", it was a light way of conveying this blend of love and sorrow. If Princess Diana had never entered the hellish underworld of a dark Parisian tunnel, like a modern-day Persephone, 13 years ago, I doubt if this ring would ever have been given to Middleton: there would have been nothing to make right.
The ring completes a circle that was broken on that black night; it circles back to calmness; it brings back the young mother from random pain and chaos into the light. Precisely because it first belonged to someone else, the gift is deeply personal. Vaughan's poem ends:
This ring the Bridegroom did for none
provide
But for his bride.