Princess Daisy (25 page)

Dear Maman
,

I had a discussion with Ram last night which makes it impossible for me to remain here one minute more. I’ll be back in Paris by this afternoon. I have a key to the apartment so don’t worry. Please make my apologies to Anabel and thank her for the time I’ve spent here. I’d rather not explain any further, but I couldn’t stay. Don’t be upset
.

Love
,
Jean-Marc            

Astonished, Isabelle took the note to Anabel.

“
Ma chérie
, does this make the slightest bit of sense to you?”

“Ram? I don’t understand it at all. What on earth could Ram have had to do with it? If he’d had a fight with Daisy I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if poor Jean-Marc disappeared—but Ram?”

“I’m going to ask him,” said Isabelle, with serious maternal irritation. She and Anabel began to search the house.

Before lunch that day, Daisy had taken her sketch pad and gone to one of her favorite, secret places in the woods, a sweet-smelling eucalyptus grove thickly carpeted with aromatic leaves, from which there was a clear view of a small farmhouse. She often spent long hours drawing there, listening to the faint sounds of the barnyard far below, completely hidden from the world. Her triumph of the night before had left her languid, too lazy to get down
to work, and she had stretched out on the leaves and slept for hours. She woke to hear footsteps crashing through the wooded trails. Curious, she peered out from her hiding place and saw Ram walking at a fast pace.

“Ram, I’m here,” she called, sleepily.

Ram entered the grove and stood directly in front of her, without a greeting. Daisy looked up at him and laughed. “If you’ve come to see my view, you happen to be blocking it.”

He threw himself down at her side, on the leaves, and roughly, silently, knocked the sketch book out of her hands. Then he took all her precious pencils and broke them in two and threw the pieces away furiously. Daisy watched him, speechless, incredulous.

“I’ve gotten rid of Jean-Marc so you needn’t bother to go dangling yourself in front of him like a slut anymore!” he burst out in a strangled voice. “That exhibition last night was the last straw—I’ve never seen anything so disgusting, so degrading in my life—the way you slobbered over every sailor, every fisherman, every damned farmer—they must be calling you the cock tease of Honfleur!”

“What?”
Daisy didn’t know what he was talking about.

“Don’t pretend that you don’t understand exactly what I mean—all dressed up, pressing yourself against the local idiots—everything for everybody! And as for your love, your precious Jean-Marc, I told him that maybe it’s done in France to come to visit and seduce the daughter of the house, but only a filthy, rotten swine would be such a shit.”

“
Seduce?
But you’re insane. Oh, Ram, I only let him kiss me on the cheek—he’s fun, that’s all, I swear it. How could he be my love? You’ve got it all wrong,” Daisy said, gazing indignantly at Ram, her voice ringing with truth and surprise. He kept his eyes fixed on the ground, stubbornly holding on to his jealous anger, his face set in disbelief. “Ram, look at me,” Daisy commanded. “Do I look as if I’m lying to you?” She put out her hand and tried to turn his head toward her, but, at her touch, he flinched away, making an animal sound of protest. “No, no, Ram, that’s just not fair!” Daisy cried out. And innocently, out of her lack of sophistication, moved by an impulse to heal the hurt she saw on his beloved, sullen face, with fatal simplicity, she kissed him full on his stern mouth.

The gesture obliterated sanity for Ram. Groaning, he
took her into his arms and buried his face in her hair. He kissed her hair over and over again, shaking in every limb with repressed emotion, half-rage, half-desire. He tried, for one brief moment, not to kiss her lips but a red wind of passion drew him to them.

He gave up the struggle and devoured her lips with his own, kissing her as if he were dying of thirst and her mouth were a moist fruit. Daisy, amazed, innocently and awkwardly returned his kisses giving herself up to the joy of realizing that Ram, whom she had never stopped loving since she first saw him, Ram who had always been the secret hero of her dreams, Ram from whom she had hopelessly begged a smile or even a mere word, was holding her tight, being kind to her, good to her, kissing her.

She abandoned herself to the comfort of this fulfillment of years of yearning, all thoughts blotted out. Daisy, who had never been kissed on the lips before, made the discovery of the mouth of another, of the roughness of his shaven cheeks, of the hardness of teeth, the wetness of his tongue. She kissed him back as if each kiss could bring back the life she had carelessly romped and reveled in, bring back happiness, kiss it into returning.

Daisy gave herself so completely to the happiness of being—after so many years—held and kissed by Ram, that she didn’t realize that he had opened the buttons of her thin shirt until she felt his mouth move down to the nipples of her breasts. The feeling was the most exquisite she’d ever known—his beloved mouth tugging on the tender, sensitive buds—a feeling too new, so rapturously new and good that tears stung her eyes. In a flash Daisy felt all the intimations of physical passion she had never localized before, this girl to whom a gallop on a bright morning had been the height of pleasure of the body. Her pale, pale pink nipples grew firm and pinker as he kissed them, holding her breasts in each of his hands, and her head fell back on her willing neck as she surrendered to his lips and his fingers, feeling his hair against her shoulder, unhearing, unthinking, a creature of feeling only. She was dazed, almost paralyzed by the electric flashes of desire which were whipping through her body, when suddenly she returned to reality. Ram was fumbling at the waistband of her shorts, trying to take them off. She pushed him away as hard as she could, but he used all his strength against her sudden panic, her belated realization.
She struggled with him, her mind a jungle of confusion. What had happened? How had it happened? What was going to happen? Soon, in spite of all her efforts, she was naked, her brown and white body revealed in all its terrified beauty.

“No! No!” she panted, “please, no!” But Ram was deaf to her pleas, deaf to her sobs. His face was as inhuman as a spear as he bent over her body. Nothing, no one could stop him now. In an ecstasy of lust he pried open her thighs and quickly, pouncing, found the opening he had to find, and drove himself into her, pounding brutally through the tender flesh because she was a virgin and he had to have her or die of anger and need.

Daisy’s mind stopped working. Spangles of red and white and black exploded in her brain like the fireworks of the night before. Even as she groaned, even as she grunted in violent protest, she clung to his plunging body because, more than anything, she was desperate for reassurance that this cruel stranger was Ram, her Ram—only that knowledge would prevent her from being annihilated.

Afterward it was the man who sobbed and the girl who held and comforted him, kissing his dark hair and whispering, “It’s all right, it’s all right,” clinging to him like the survivor of a vast tempest, eucalyptus leaves sticking to her back, the mingled smell of sweat and sperm rising to her nostrils for the first time in her life, her thighs stained with blood which she blotted away with pages of the broken sketch pad. When Daisy looked at Ram, his head hidden in her arms, prodigal flares of dark light came from her eyes. Although, instinctively, she tried to reassure him, she was herself drowning in a murky pool of feelings, totally foreign in a life in which she had always seen her way clearly and cleanly. Daisy was filled with her awakened knowledge of physical desire but it was mixed with a kind of shame she had never known before. Her whole mind and body ached with acute conflict and resentment. She wanted to bite, to kick, to shriek to high heaven, to faint, to run away. She wanted to go back to where she had been only an hour ago, but she knew already that there was no return. Deep within her something sounded, as if the string of a great cello had been plucked, a note of remote, mysterious but unmistakable warning.

When they finally returned to the house, the sunset was so brilliant that it partially blinded the eyes of anyone
looking toward the woods which lay between the house and the horizon. The rest of the de Luciny family, having been unable to find Ram or come to any satisfactory explanation of the mystery of Jean-Marc’s departure, had hastily packed and left for Paris. Anabel was in the salon, as Ram and Daisy materialized out of the woods, several feet separating them from each other. Daisy turned quickly and disappeared, entering the house, almost running, but Anabel was able to collar Ram before he started up the stairs.

“Ram! We’ve been looking everywhere for you. For God’s sake, what happened with Jean-Marc?” she demanded.

“It’s not something I want to talk about.”

“What nerve—you drove him away somehow—you’d better have a good reason.”

“Anabel, I’m telling you that it’s best left alone.”

She stood up, moved to unusual anger. “Now, just what the hell happened?”

“Since you insist—Jean-Marc made some disgustingly improper remarks about Daisy and I told him he wasn’t a gentleman-”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Ram, you sound like something out of the eighteenth century. Improper remarks? What on earth are you talking about? Just what did he say?”

“Look, I refuse to have Daisy insulted, that’s all. Jean-Marc apparently thinks English girls are pretty hot stuff, Daisy in particular.”

“He never said that!” Anabel cried.

“You weren’t there. You would have been as revolted with him as I was,” Ram insisted coldly.

“Oh, what a total mess! He probably didn’t mean what you thought at all. And since when have you been Daisy’s champion? And now they’ve all gone off three days before they were supposed to leave and there’s been
such
an unnecessary scene. I do wish, Ram, that you’d try to develop a sense of humor,” Anabel said with unaccustomed asperity.

“The fact that he ran off with his tail between his legs speaks for itself,” Ram answered, obdurate.

Anabel looked at her watch and was startled. “Ram, don’t you realize that we still have a houseful of guests and that it’s time for drinks? At least make yourself useful and run down into town for me and get some ice—the fridge is acting up, as if we hadn’t had enough confusion today … 
quite seriously, Ram, I’m fed up!” As he left on his errand, Anabel thought that difficult as he had been since she’d known him, she had never been quite as angry at Ram as she was now. Nor had he ever seemed more indifferent to how she felt, now that she thought about it.

Nevertheless, as she surveyed her dinner table an hour and a half later, Anabel had to admit to herself that whatever it was that had been changed in the atmosphere of
La Marée
by the departure of Jean-Marc and his family, only good had come of it, unpleasant as the preceding day had been. It was the most agreeable evening she could remember of the entire summer. Everyone seemed touched with kindness and good will and jovial spirits and they were not caused just by the four bottles of champagne Ram had brought back from his errand to buy ice. Perhaps, she mused, it was because Ram himself had finally relaxed and lost that cruel, unforgiving look she was so sadly accustomed to seeing on his face. He played the host with charm and a grace which Anabel, herself the consummate hostess, could thoroughly appreciate. Although only his gray eyes physically reminded her of Stash, there was something of Stash in the way he dominated the table, yet refrained from taking over, allowing each guest to shine. He had a special air of being at home that Stash had always adopted unthinkingly wherever he went; he was gracious and gallant to all the ladies and with the men he seemed more mature than his twenty-two years, almost their equal, yet he retained a flashing, youthful gaiety that she was touched to see in him, in spite of her fading anger. It was so unlike Ram to express easy happiness that she couldn’t begrudge it. As for Daisy, although her cheeks were red and her eyes almost feverish, she was subdued. Anabel made a mental note to have a serious talk with the child about getting too much sun: did she want that skin of hers to be tanned like a piece of leather by the time she was thirty? Tonight Daisy didn’t offer to pour the coffee but gladly left it to Anabel, and the capriciousness which she’d been practicing on poor Jean-Marc was absent She seemed disoriented and far away, as if she had been sapped of her usual energy, and no wonder, Anabel
decided
. That riotous, nonstop night of dancing yesterday would be bound to cause a reaction in such a young girl. She wasn’t surprised when Daisy decided to go to bed almost as soon as the late dinner was over.

Once she had shut herself into her sea-green refuge, Daisy collapsed on her bed. She was in such confusion of mind and body and spirit that it had taken all her resources to get through dinner. Too much had happened for her to think about it coherently. In her mind she was still lying in that eucalyptus grove, still hearing Ram’s voice saying her name. Uncontrollable vibrations swept over her newly awakened body. She quivered from her toes to her scalp. She unbraided her hair and brushed it hard, she took off her dress and flung open the windows, hoping that the sight of Le Havre gleaming in the far distance might calm her, but the slightly misty air was too soft and the stars over the sea hung too low and the crickets were chirping in a way which she had never noticed before, a way that she could barely endure. She had never understood why adults asked each other how they had slept. That night Daisy was initiated into the great company of those who have passed sleepless nights. “White nights” the French call them, a night filled with thoughts she couldn’t escape. The thing that had happened—Ram hadn’t
meant
to do it! He was sorry—had he not wept, had he not said he was sorry, over and over? Of course it would never happen again. Of course they must never let anyone know. These tormented thoughts mixed and whirled with thoughts of Ram’s lips, Ram’s words of love, above all his words of love. He had told her he loved her.
He had said he had always loved her
. First one thought attacked her, then another, then they twined painfully round and round in her brain until, blessedly, at last the sun rose and touched the tops of the umbrella pines in front of her window, and she knew she could get up and find Theseus, who now slept outside, and take him for a good long run before breakfast.