Princess Daisy (74 page)

“All right, Thompson. It’s not important” As Ram sat motionless in the dining room of his gracious dwelling, one of the most peaceful in all of plenteous, gentle Devon, he wondered how many people in the neighboring market town would eventually read that issue of the magazine. It was easily available in London, of course, with scarcely a day’s difference in time. And in Paris, Rome, Madrid … within a week it would be everywhere. Leaving his breakfast untouched, Ram rose from the table and rang again. “I’m going out, Thompson. Tell the cook to make sure the grocer delivers today. If he can’t, go into town and pick up the order yourself.”

As Ram walked, carrying his shotgun, across his ancestral acres, as he opened the gates of fences and wandered across the meadows, he thought about the pictures and the interview he had given the correspondent for
People
. It would be an enormous story. It would destroy her. She would never recover from it. He had made sure of that.

And so her picture was going to be used on the cover? Was it indeed? Ram stared out across the wet fields, imagining her face, imagining it smashed, crushed, broken, punctured, blood running from her nostrils, from her ears, from her eyes. From moment to moment he was able to sustain himself with these images but then he would see her again and again as she had been on the night of the
Quatorze Juillet
, see her as she danced in her white lace dress, flying mirthfully from arm to arm, ardent and innocent, eyes alight with discovery and jubilation, hair flying, tangled … laughing, laughing, dancing—dancing with everyone but him … the night on which he had finally acknowledged that she must be his or he would die.

He didn’t come back for lunch on that rainy day, nor did he return for tea. Mrs. Gibbons, the housekeeper, began to fret about her employer, who was always so gratifyingly precise in his habits.

“It’s ever so windy out,” she complained to Sally, the
housemaid, “and not a day to go out shooting, not at all. There won’t be any birds about. I thought so when I saw him leave the house, but of course it wasn’t up to me to say anything.”

“Gentlemen have to have their sport,” the housemaid replied, philosophically.

“It’s pneumonia weather, that’s what it is, and cook had such a lovely bit of steak for his lunch,” Mrs. Gibbons grumbled.

“Someone’s knocking at the pantry door,” Sally announced to the housekeeper, who had become increasingly deaf during her long years of service to the Woodhill family. “I’ll go.”

“Tell whoever it is to wipe his feet before he comes into the kitchen.”

The housemaid’s screams penetrated Mrs. Gibbon’s deafness, penetrated into the most distant corners of Woodhill Manor, penetrated into the wing that had been built during the reign of Elizabeth I, into the wing that had been added in the days of Queen Anne, into the wing of Edwardian vintage. Every room in the time-blessed, lovely old house echoed for minutes with the screams of the woman who had opened the door to the farmers carrying Ram’s body, his head half shot away, but washed so clean of blood, because of the hours during which the rain had fallen on his dead body, that they could see the half of the brain that remained.

That evening, when they sat huddled together over a glass of brandy, after the local mortician’s men had finally taken the body away, Sally, her eyes red, said in bewildered tones, “Why aren’t gentlemen more careful, Mrs. Gibbons? I never do like it, never, when I see someone walk out with a loaded gun, no, not ever, no mateer how good a shot he is. I don’t care for the sporting life. Poor Prince Valensky.”

“There’ll be another Woodhill to take his place as soon as the lawyers get on the job, Sally. I wonder who it will be?” said Mrs. Gibbons, comfortingly. “Time will tell, I suppose. It always has.”

No one studied the cover photograph of Daisy more thoroughly than the Honorable Sarah Fane. No one read the article more carefully, almost memorizing each word, than the Honorable Sarah Fane.

As she held the magazine up to her mirror and compared
herself to the cover picture, an expression of pleasure and finally gratification dawned on her features, the features of that exquisite English rose that takes hundreds of years to breed.

She’s a very, very good type—if one likes that type, thought Sarah Fane. Actually, one could hardly ask for anything more lovely. It could be considered to have been a compliment, a rather strange compliment … and one she could never repeat … nor forget … but nevertheless … yes, definitely a compliment.

She threw the magazine into a wastepaper basket and continued dressing. She was so punctual that she was able to linger a bit, admiring her thirty-two-carat engagement ring, far, far too big to be vulgar, thinking of the marvelous life that stretched in front of her as the future wife of the richest oil man in Houston. He was rich beyond comprehension, beyond passion. Nothing in the entire world would ever be out of her reach. His mother’s family came from Springfield, Illinois, and it included two vice-presidents of the United States, one great senator and one signer of the Declaration of Independence. He had a pioneering robber baron as a paternal great-grandfather, a combination which, in America, melded neatly into the equivalent of royalty. Sarah Fane had always sworn to herself that anything was better than being an unmarried post-deb but there was no way to deny—although only to herself—that she had mismanaged her year. Still she’d made the best of it before it was over. Life in Houston, where she would, of course, reign as queen, was by all accounts remarkably
civilized
. They would travel a great deal. And he did worship her, she reminded herself. His worship was so palpable that she could smell it on her hair, feel it swirl around her like smoke burned before an idol. His worship created an image of herself which even she could not wish to be more faultless. And, whatever the future held, he would do exceptionally well as a first husband.

Daisy slept the deep sleep of complete emotional exhaustion. She woke early the next morning, filled with a profound, dream-induced joy. All specific memory of her dreams faded except for one fragment, a single glimpse, one bright image of running rapturously through a vast flowered
field
, hand in hand with Danielle, who could run as lightly and as rapidly as Daisy herself. That was all
there was to it. Daisy lay bathed in a transport of happiness so phosphorescent, so tangible that she did not dare move for fear of losing this vision, this completely mysterious visitation. Had it ever happened? Had they ever run so together? How old could they have been? She had no memory of such an experience, but she felt, deeply, that it must have occurred—or, if it had never happened, it had
now
happened in such a vivid dream that it had become a
memory more
real than reality. It was part of her existence, crystallized forever in light and color and the sensation of running—she and Danielle had run together during that night and they had both been happy. So happy. Together and equal.

The rapture of the dream lasted, the glorious vision persisted, even as the phone started to ring and Daisy realized she had to get out of the apartment in a hurry. She dressed quickly in jeans, sandals and a thin navy cotton turtleneck. She pulled all her hair tightly around her head and secured it firmly and impatiently. Then she wrapped a large navy and red scarf over her hair so that not a strand of it showed. She found the biggest pair of sunglasses she owned and, when she put them on and glanced in the mirror, she was satisfied that no one would recognize her. It was just past nine now and the phone kept ringing eight or nine times, then stopped and then started again.

Daisy put Theseus on his leash and hurried out, away from the phone, away from any contact with anyone who might be trying to reach her. She took a cab through the morning traffic from SoHo all the way up Park Avenue, then went west, crossing the park at 72nd Street. When the driver was near the Sheep Meadow, she got out, paid him and let Theseus loose to frolic. Around her swirled the other dog-walkers, the children playing with Frisbees, the perpetual volleyball games, the young couples necking on blankets under the sun of the morning, as settled in as if they had been there all night. Daisy sat cross-legged on the dubious grass and watched the towers of the city circle around her.

After a few minutes Daisy was aware of a feeling rising like a tide from her toes to the roots of her hair, a feeling she was unfamiliar with and couldn’t identify although she knew it was important. She tried to capture its essence, but it wasn’t until she had watched Theseus running loose and wild, ranging from one end of the vast field to another
with the bounding energy of a dog who usually has to be kept under stern control, that she began to understand.
She felt free
. She felt as if a great clutter of debris of the past had been swept away, debris as caked in mud and sediment as objects brought up by a diver from a sunken ship, debris that had enchained her. It had demanded so much of her attention, that heavy, mucky load. She had needed to dismantle the past before she could dive into the sea of the future and, in one stroke, Ram had unfettered her, no matter how brutally, from a lifetime in which she’d been bound and gagged by irrational taboos, fears, secrets. She had been led out of the labyrinth, led, by cruel surprise, out into the fresh, clean air by an act that was meant to annihilate her. Again she saw Ram lying in the deck chair at
La Marée
, beckoning, always beckoning, and this time she began to forgive him and, in forgiving him, she made her first step toward forgetting him.

A grimy little boy stumbled over Daisy’s legs and fell, crying, into her lap. She comforted him until his mother arrived, in no particular hurry, to collect him. Another baby hung in a sling on the woman’s back. Daisy gave the child up without reluctance and returned to her thoughts.

In London she had asked Shannon how she could unthink her feelings of guilt for Dani’s condition, just because mere logic told her it wasn’t her fault. He had answered that perhaps it was necessary to replace a truth that is wrong with one that is right. But what if there was a third way?
What if she simply had to let it go?
It was not her problem to portion out blame. Why should she be
limited forever
by whatever it was her father and mother had done to each other—and to her and to Dani?

Ram’s assertion that Dani might have had a normal childhood was disproved by dozens of memories Daisy had of the time in Big Sur, of the differences she had seen between herself and Dani from the earliest days she could remember. Her dream of running in a field of flowers—she knew now that it had never happened. Dani had never been able to run like that. But Ram’s falsehoods had been printed and no amount of later retraction or clarification would ever change the public’s idea of the truth.
But what did it matter?
Everyone concerned was dead now, and she was the only person left who cared. And it was all too long ago. Ram’s series of ancient recriminations made Daisy realize how much she, too, had been caught up in the fatal net of the past.

Abruptly Daisy found herself in the line of fire between four leaping, shouting Frisbee players. She sat quietly while they threw the plastic disk harmlessly over her head. In a few minutes, their game moved to one side and their exhortations to each other faded, as her thoughts turned to feelings she had tried to cope with so often during her life, the feelings of being an impostor, not Princess Daisy, not someone with a right to that title. Suddenly it seemed so clear that she gasped. She hadn’t been Princess Daisy because Dani had not been Princess Danielle. All the while that Danielle had been hidden away from everybody, the thought of her, closer than any sister could be, had always been carried within her. Her knowledge that Dani was doomed to never grow up had prevented her from really living her own life. She had always held back from taking happiness as her due, she had not felt
entitled
to enjoy to the fullest whatever joy had come her way. But now! Now she and Dani were rejoined. There in
People
she stood with her arm around the twin who had been taken away from her so long ago. Their separation was over. Their immemorial kinship had been avowed, once and for all. And now Daisy could admit that Dani was happy in her own way and that nothing that Daisy did
not
have would make Dani any happier. She couldn’t solve the past. It was impossible. It had always been impossible.

And in the dream, in the dream … they had both been happy.

Theseus came loping up, a pigeon held gently in his mouth, and deposited the struggling bird in her lap. It was unharmed and indignant and Daisy, knowing the fearless gangster ways of New York pigeons, watched without surprise as it merely walked away with hasty dignity.

“No,’ Theseus. Naughty dog.” Oh, why not, she thought, let him catch another if he can. It’s not as if he ever kills them. “Go on, run, Theseus, run as much as you like. Good dog.”

What was it she had always thought she wanted? The freedom to become herself? Well, by God, she’d become herself, willy-nilly, in full color and black and white and hundreds of words of text. In spite of Ram’s inaccuracies, her double life, with the tiptoeing around the Horse People to make the money to keep Dani in Queen Anne’s was now common knowledge. And so what? She’d never sold a portrait of which she was ashamed. And what difference
did it make that she’d taken the Elstree contract to buy her freedom from Ram? She had the right to dispose of herself any way she chose, just as any other woman did. She didn’t have to worry about the Valensky name—she
was
the Valensky name and she could do with it what she liked. What a pompous, stuffy fool Ram had sounded. Daisy knew exactly who she was and she knew why it was worth a million dollars to Supracorp to obtain the rights to an image that could be photographed and interviewed, an image that was a potentially profitable approximation of someone called Princess Daisy. But, since she was clear about the difference between the two, what harm was there in it? The people she cared about knew the difference: Kiki, Luke, Anabel—even Wingo and Nick-the-Greek. And North. To be fair, North had known the difference. Maybe that was what had made him so angry at her.