Princess Daisy (21 page)

After one day Masha knocked on his door.

“Prince, little Daisy won’t eat.”

“She must be sick. I’ll call the doctor.”

“There’s nothing wrong with her body.”

“Then what is wrong? Come on, Masha, stop giving me that disapproving look of yours … it hasn’t had any bloody effect on me since I was seven.”

“She won’t eat until she can visit Dani.”

“Ridiculous. I’m not going to be dictated to by a six-year-old child. I’ve decided what’s best for her. Now, go and tell her it didn’t work. She’ll eat when she gets hungry.”

Masha left the room silently. She didn’t return. Another day passed, and Stash sought her out.

“Well?”

“She still won’t eat. I warned you. You just don’t know Daisy.” Masha looked at him grimly until he looked away, still resolute.

It took still another day of the hunger strike before Daisy brought her father to terms. Not one bit of food entered her mouth until she had his sworn promise that
she could visit Danielle every Sunday afternoon. Stash had learned, once and for all, not to thwart her in anything to do with Danielle.

For several months after Francesca’s death, Stash had received letters from Matty Firestone, asking about the children and how they were settling down in London. This was a complication that Stash decided to put behind him. He could not contemplate the possibility of a continued correspondence with the agent and his wife, whom he regarded as his sworn enemies. Eventually he composed a letter in which he demanded to be spared any further inquiries into his private affairs, a letter that was so curt, so profoundly unpleasant, so thoroughly nasty and peremptory, that both Matty and Margo decided that there was no further reason to write Valensky. Daisy and Danielle were his children, he had every legal right to them and, as Margo asked Matty sadly, realistically, what could they do about it? It was best to forget now; forget Francesca, forget the twins, put the whole tragic chapter in their lives behind them. It was over, gone, lost and they had done the best they could. Now it should be left alone.

“You mean
try
to forget,” Matty said bitterly.

“Exactly. The only alternative is to sue for custody and you know we’d never get it.”

“But those little girls—they were
family
, Margo.”

“For me too, darling, but not legally. And that’s what counts.”

The Firestones stopped writing, and Daisy, in London, continued to visit Dani every Sunday. Stash never took her to Queen Anne’s School himself. Rather than risk having to see the other, he sent Daisy, accompanied by Masha, on the hour-long trip, by train and cab.

During the summer months of the following years, when Daisy was on vacation from school, Stash took her with him to the house in Normandy,
La Marée
, that he had bought as a gift for Anabel soon after she had come into his life. However, every two weeks Daisy insisted that she must go back to England for the weekend so that she could visit Dani. His lips pressed together in an unwilling line, Stash saw his daughter and Masha off at the Deauville airport on a Saturday morning and returned on Sunday evening to greet them, never asking any questions about the time they had been away.

Stash received monthly reports on Danielle from Queen Anne’s School, reports which he often left lying about for weeks before he brought himself to open them. They would all be the same, he told himself, and indeed they were. She was well, she was happy and well-behaved. She had learned to do a few simple things, she enjoyed music and played with some of the other children and she was particularly attached to several of the teachers. She knew a few new words and communicated with the teachers she liked, but it was only with her sister that she seemed to have any sort of conversation.

Curiously, Daisy never spoke to Stash about her twin, after she had forced him to capitulate in the matter of the visits. There was no one in her life except Masha with whom she had the slightest impulse to discuss Dani. She never spoke of her to Anabel although she knew that Anabel was aware of Dani’s existence. Nor did she ever try to tell any of her school friends that she had a twin sister. She did not dare. It was a prohibition so strong that it had nothing to do with an ordinary secret It was taboo in the most primordial sense.
Her father did not want it
. In some mysterious way Daisy was convinced that her
survival—
and Dani’s too—depended on her silence. It defied her comprehension but she
knew
. She could not risk losing her father’s love, that love that had been given and then withdrawn so inexplicably for the first years of her life. He was wrong about Dani, but Daisy was aware of the limits of her powers. She could tease Stash about some things, she could act the playful tyrant, but only within certain well-defined borders. Motherless, she had to cling to her father and accept the way he felt about her sister without discussion, or be totally orphaned.

The compromise they had reached in that first week, that enabled Daisy to visit Danielle, slowly became more and more acceptable to her as her sister’s pliable nature adjusted happily to the teachers and the other children at Queen Anne’s School. Daisy couldn’t help but realize that she couldn’t go to Dani’s school and Dani certainly couldn’t go to Lady Alden’s.

The five years of seclusion in Big Sur grew ever more remote and far away as her new life in London unfolded itself, a life she found constantly less possible to even attempt to explain to Dani Their conversations were limited to Dani’s small circle of comprehension and, every year, Daisy felt more like an adult talking to a child, than
one child talking to another. Daisy often drew pictures for Dani, until the walls of her room were almost papered with them.

“Do pony” was one of Dani’s constant requests, because of the old horses that grazed in a meadow near Queen Anne’s School. At a time when Daisy’s peers at Lady Alden’s were struggling to draw presentable apples and bananas, Daisy was already able to do a lively sketch of one of the most difficult of all objects to draw well, a horse.

When Daisy had first appeared in London, Ram had been a precociously alert thirteen. He had always rejected the existence of this half-sister, a product of a marriage made after his own birth. He did not accept the fact that this usurper had any rights. She was nonvalid. Worse, far worse, she was a
rival
.

Ram was preoccupied, even more than most of his friends, all upper-class, public-school boys, by the importance of being an “heir.”

At Eton, enormously important distinctions concerning inheritance had been made since the school was founded by Henry VI in 1442. In 1750 the lists of pupils at Eton still appearing in order of rank, with dukes’ sons coming first. Titled boys wore special clothes, had special seats and special privileges of all kinds. In the supposedly democratic 1950s and 1960s, certain of these out-of-date marks of a rigid caste system had been abolished, but the orderly passage of property and titles from one generation to another was deeply ingrained in the collective unconsciousness of Eton and the other great schools of Britain. They were as much in the air as the importance of cricket or the bad form of “showing off.”

Ram couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t looked forward to inheriting Stash’s property,
all of it
. He didn’t consciously wish his father dead, he didn’t even consciously realize that only his father’s death could make that property his, he simply lusted after it without any of the complications of guilt. He believed, in his heart of hearts, that the acid feelings of injustice from which he suffered—and which he never recognized were envy of happiness—would disappear when he was the possessor, the undisputed owner,
the
Prince Valensky.

The fact of Daisy meant that he would never have it
all
. No matter how many times he reassured himself that even
if she got something, there was more than enough for both of them, still she had destroyed the splendid fullness of his prospects. However, he was too crafty and too wise to ever allow any of these feelings to surface and reveal themselves to grown-up eyes.

As for Daisy, from the first moment she saw Ram, he filled a great place in her imagination. He was like the young heroes in the tales that her mother used to read to her, someone who could leap across dangerous rivers and tame the wildest horses, climb up sheer mountains of glass, ride on the wind and battle with giants. To the little girl who had lived for as long as she could remember in the solitude of far-off Big Sur, this straight, tall, darkly handsome boy with his slim, stern face, his dark eyebrows and haughty Etonian air, was the most fascinating person in her new life, particularly since he had an offhand manner with her which lacked the indulgence she received from everyone else.

She could never have imagined the worm of obsessive envy that ate at Ram. At Christmas, while they were each opening their presents, he watched, behind lowered eyes, and saw that although both he and Daisy received equally expensive presents, Stash’s eyes were only on Daisy as she opened the gifts, waiting to drink in
her
pleasure. Immediately Ram’s own presents lost all meaning for him. When he received Daisy’s letters at Eton, and she innocently wrote describing a Sunday Connaught lunch, Ram thought bitterly that the only times Stash had taken him to the Connaught had been on his birthday or to celebrate a school holiday. Twice, at Christmas, his mother insisted that he come home to that cold, drafty castle near Edinburgh instead of staying with his father, and those were the two times that Stash chose to take Daisy away to Barbados for a month of sun … a deliberate choice, without doubt, Ram told himself, feeling the pain of being left out burn deep, although he never said anything to anyone.

As Daisy grew older, every time he went to London he hoped to find that she had finally broken out in adolescent pimples or started to get fat. He received the admiring looks she gave him without any flattery and when she asked him questions about his life at school, he answered as briefly as possible. He watched, missing nothing, as she stole all the attention that should have been his, took the
place by his father’s side that was Ram’s by right. And all the while, Daisy, who never had any idea of how he felt, was impelled by his manner to continue to try to form a connection with him, inspired by a deeply feminine impulse that was so strong it positively tugged at its moorings in search of his love. She drew his face so often that Dani began to say, “Do Ram” although she hadn’t the glimmer of an idea who Ram might be.

Stash had bought a house that was not typical of London houses, the finest of which tend to have those identical classic exteriors which are the cause of the remarkable architectural unity of London’s squares and crescents. He had discovered a house in Wilton Row, a small cul-de-sac off Wilton Crescent, a street within a short distance of Hyde Park on the left and the gardens of Buckingham Palace on the right, that, nevertheless, had a quality of remoteness, an almost secret existence.

In that sedate, supremely aristocratic part of London, with its concentration of imposing foreign embassies, Stash had managed to find an exceptionally large house, low and rather wide, painted a pale yellow with gray shutters. It had a distinctly foreign look about it, this house that might have fit easily into many parts of the European countryside. The three sides of Wilton Row surrounded a cobbled space with a pale blue lamppost at its center, where no cars were allowed to park unless they belonged to the other homeowners, all of whom had painted their houses in pastel, altogether un-British colors.

There were bow windows on the ground floor of Stash Valensky’s home and the rooms inside had fine proportions. He had filled them with the contents of the Lausanne villa; those rare and valuable French rugs, furniture, paintings and jeweled bibelots which had once made the journey from St. Petersburg to Davos with his parents. It never occurred to Stash to decorate his home in any way but the one he had been used to as a child.

The noise of London was extinguished in Wilton Row, and an air of rustic peace prevailed. At the corner, where Wilton Row joined a tiny alley called Old Barrack Yard, stood a pub, the Grenadier, bravely painted in red and gold, with benches in front, sheltered by a twisted, venerable wisteria vine. A sign announced that only customers who had entered Wilton Row by taxi or on foot were
allowed to be served. All in all, there was scarcely a more private dwelling place in all that great, gray city than the Valensky home.

For many years Stash and Daisy spent a large part of Saturday in Kent, where he owned stables in which he kept many of his horses. It was after one of their companionable rides through the country, on a day when Daisy was almost twelve, that father and daughter spied two gypsy caravans. They were parked close to Stash’s property and, mistrustfully, he eyed the wagons with their painted canvas tops stretched over hooped ribs. They hadn’t been there last week. Stash went over to investigate.

“Daisy,” he ordered, “you go back to the stable. I’ll just be a minute.”

“Oh, Father, you wouldn’t deprive me of seeing gypsies?!” she cried in dismay.

“They’re just tinkers, Daisy, but I don’t want them around my ponies. They can always use an extra horse or two or five.”

“Please, Father,” she said longingly.

“All right,” he sighed, not in the mood for discipline. “Just don’t let anyone tell your fortune—I detest that.”

The gypsies were friendly, overfriendly, thought Stash, and easy about answering his questions in their accented English.

They would move on if he liked but they were only planning to stay another day or two anyway. Just the time to do a bit of tinkering in the local village.

Not really reassured, but not able to order them off a field he didn’t own, Stash turned to leave, but Daisy was no longer at his side. She was on her knees in front of a box crooning a love song and both hands were full of a puppy which looked to Stash like a beanbag. The puppy’s bottom and hind legs drooped down from one of Daisy’s hands, his head and front legs flopped from the other. In the center of Daisy’s palms he rested his bulging belly. The puppy’s color was at one and the same time gray, brown and blue, with white paws and white ears. He looked as if he could be any kind of dog at all except some recognizable breed.