“Try again!”
“I tried … now she won’t listen to me. Oh, Mama, I tried so hard.”
“All right … it’s all right, Daisy darling. I don’t really have to go away. It was just an idea. Would you tell Dani that I’m not leaving, that I’m not going anywhere?”
Daisy put her arms around her mother’s neck and pressed her warm, soft face into Francesca’s cheek. “Don’t be sad, Mama. Please don’t be sad. I’ll help you work. I’ll help you make some money. I promise I will.”
Francesca looked at the courageous little figure with the eyes like flowers, her white-blonde hair in one long braid which reached halfway to her waist, her tan knees scratched from adventurous rambles in the deep forest, her hands beginning to lose their baby fat, to become capable, caring and strong.
“I know you will.” She smiled without a trace of sadness. “We’ll figure out something … something fun.”
“Can’t we ask Daddy?”
“No! Daisy, that’s the one thing we can never, never do.”
“Why not?”
“I’ll explain—when you’re older.”
“Oh,” said Daisy, with an air of resignation. “That’s one more thing I have to remember, for you to explain when I’m older.”
“Do I say that a lot?”
“Yes, Mama. But it’s all right. Don’t be sad again.”
Suddenly Daisy changed the subject. “Mama, am I really and truly a princess? Daddy said I was.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Is Danielle a princess?”
“Of course she is—how could you be a princess if Dani weren’t a princess too?”
“But you, Mama, are you a queen?”
“No, Daisy, I’m not a queen.”
“But in stories the mother of a princess is always queen,” she said stubbornly.
“Once—I was a princess, too, Daisy,” Francesca murmured.
“ ‘Once’.… Aren’t you a princess anymore?”
“Daisy, Daisy, it’s too complicated for you to understand right now. And anyway, it’s just a word, it doesn’t mean anything really, nothing important, nothing for you to bother about. We don’t live in a world of princesses here—just the two of us and Masha and Dani and the deer and the birds—Isn’t that good enough for you, my Daisy?”
Something about Francesca’s face told Daisy to agree with her mother. But it wasn’t good enough for her, she didn’t understand it at all and no one seemed to ever give her an answer to her most important questions, particularly the ones she had never dared to bring up: why did her father only come to see her at long intervals? Why did he never see Dani? And most important of all, what had she, Daisy, done wrong to make him go away each time after only a few days? It was never discussed, never even hinted at, and somehow she understood that she must never ask, never.
“Masha, look, I’ve shelled all the peas.”
“How many did you eat, little one?”
“Only six. Eight. Maybe ten.”
“I know, they are better raw. I always thought so, too.”
“Oh, Masha, you know everything!”
“Ah, will you tell me that in ten years?”
“Masha, Masha … why is Dani different from me?”
“What … what do you mean?”
“She’s my twin sister. That means we were born at the same time. Mama told me that. That’s what twins are, two babies in the same mother. But Dani doesn’t talk like me and she can’t really run like me—not as fast—and she can’t climb trees and she’s afraid of thunder and rain and birds and she doesn’t draw pictures like me or cut her own meat, and she can’t count like me, or tie her own shoes. Why, Masha?”
“Oh, Daisy, I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do, Masha, you know. Mama won’t tell me but you will. You always tell me everything.”
“Daisy, you were born first, that’s all I know.”
“Born first?” Daisy was astonished. “Twins are born together, that’s what makes them twins. You’re silly, Masha.”
“No, Daisy, one twin is born after the other. You are both in the same mother, the way your Mama told you, but one has to come out of the mother first and then the other. You were born first.”
“So it is my fault.” She spoke slowly, as if something she had long suspected had, at last, been confirmed by adult authority.
“Don’t be silly, little one, it’s God’s will, not anybody’s fault. You should know better than to talk like that! Daisy?”
“Yes, Masha?”
“You understand, don’t you?”
“I understand, Masha.” Yes, she understood. She had been born first so it was her fault. Masha always talked about God’s will, but Daisy knew that when Masha said that it meant that Masha didn’t understand either.
As 1957 wore on, the winter storms brought driftwood to the hidden beaches of Big Sur, wild, windswept beaches where sandpipers jittered and great waves carved strange bridges out of giant rocks; where sea lions often roared; beaches from which migrating whales could be sometimes seen in their benign, silent flotillas.
Francesca had found a craftsman in Carmel who made lamps out of driftwood and she made a little money collecting it from the beaches, polishing the best pieces and bringing them in to him from time to time. She usually went alone to the beach, but one early spring day in 1958, she took Daisy and Dani with her. She left Dani in Daisy’s charge and wandered along the beach, one piece of driftwood luring her to another, until she suddenly realized that the children were out of sight.
“Dear God!” She ran back the way she’d come and stopped suddenly. Daisy was sitting on the warm sand out of range of even the farthest lapping wave. She held Dani in her little lap, awkwardly since they were almost the same size. Their sixth birthday was only a week away. Daisy was rocking Dani back and forth and from the shape of her mouth, Francesca could see that she was singing to her sister. From time to time Daisy patted her hand over Dani’s hair and kissed her cheek, with a maternal gesture. Dani’s beautiful face wore its usual sweet, contented expression. A great inner peace descended on Francesca, a feeling of joy so simple and so deep that she almost fell on her knees. She had been right. She had done the only possible thing. She had been blessed.
One week later Stash received a long-distance call from Matty Firestone in California. The agent was sobbing unashamedly.
“You get here as quickly as you can. Francesca’s gone … she’s dead. She was driving back from Carmel, on the ocean side, Route One, I always warned her—some madman in a pickup truck swung wide, she went off the road … into the sea.”
“Daisy!” Stash screamed.
“Francesca was alone. I went up and brought Masha and the kids back. They’re here at our house. Come and get them, Valensky.… You’re all they’ve got left, God help them.”
9
On a spring Sunday in London in 1963, Stash Valensky and Daisy, who was now eleven, entered the Connaught Hotel for their regular Sunday lunch alone together.
Lunch at the Connaught is one of the premiere experiences of Western civilization, the Uffizi Gallery of dining, and Stash, still absorbed in taming his invincible child, thought that the Connaught, with its richly subdued air of comfy pomp, its air of being not a hotel but a lordly private house, in which one always feels the subliminal ticking of a soberly friendly Victorian grandfather clock, provided the best atmosphere for his purpose. The doorman greeted them as old friends; they walked through the small, deeply carpeted, russet-toned lobby dominated by a sweeping, prodigiously polished flight of mahogany stairs, and turned right to pass through the corridor which led to the restaurant, recognized as one of three finest in England. As usual, Stash had to keep a firm hand on Daisy’s elbow, for the passageway was lined with a series of tables bearing silver platters laden with a dozen different kinds of cold hors d’oeuvres, melons, salads, lobsters, stuffed crab and a selection of game pies. The tables laden with food were crowded in that wide corridor, w
hich also held a little mirrored bar and tall vases of spring flowers, in a way that suggested an overflowing abundance that caused Daisy to linger inquiringly over each dish, trying to decide, even before she read the menu, what looked most interesting today.
The restaurant had walls of highly waxed, dark honey-colored wood, on which glowed crystal sconces with apricot shades. The chairs and banquettes were covered with burgundy-striped velvet and large screens broke the restaurant up into sections, at the same time imparting an Alice in Wonderland feeling to the substantial room since the bases of the screens were carved wood to the height of a seated diner, but above they were made of engraved glass, so that standing up, one could see through them. Stash and Daisy’s favorite table was in the center of the restaurant rather than at one of the banquettes because it provided a vantage point from which they could see all their fellow gourmets and speculate on them.
Many people looked up from their plates as they entered. Stash had changed almost not at all. At fifty-two, his hair was as blond, as thick and as close cropped as ever; his features as strongly marked with an air of valor and resolution. Alone, he would have attracted attention, but with Daisy he aroused the most lively inspection, even in this sanctuary of solid, upper-class lack of curiosity, for she was a child out of fairyland. Daisy was five feet tall now and possessed the slim roundness of prepuberty which is so tender, so free of the slightest fault, so pristine and yet so full of rushing life, that it causes the most hardened adults to give a sigh for a vanquished vulnerability and strength they must have once possessed. She wore an ivory dress of the thinnest wool challis printed with clusters of pale pink flowers and pale green leaves. It was pleated down the front, with a sash that tied in the back, and the collar was like a little garland around her neck, where the flowers of the dress had been cut out and thickly appliquéd.
Her gilt-blonde hair almost reached her waist and it was brushed back and held by a simple band, but nothing could restrain the individual curls that sprang from her forehead and escaped above her ears. The light coming from the great Victorian windows of Carlos Place seemed to attack Daisy’s hair, snatching and catching it with a rollicking freedom, all the planes and shafts of the watery spring sun finding an object worthy of their focus. It was the hair of an old-fashioned heroine, tresses that looked as if they had been lovingly brushed by a mother and admired and envied by aunts and sisters; hair precious enough to be kept in lockets and treasured for decades.
Stash guided her to their table with an air of possession that he couldn’t conceal. He cherished Daisy in a way that deeply frightened him. He had long ago learned that it was unbearably dangerous to invest so much emotional capital in another human being, but he was helpless in the face of the mere existence of this daughter of his, this treasure he had almost lost, this obstinate, bold-hearted, loving female creature he had worshiped from the first, never-to-be-forgotten sight of her, as he had never worshiped another female in all his life.
Now, in Daisy, he saw himself as a young boy, the forever lost, forever innocent, forever hopeful self which can only be recaptured in a dream, the forgotten self that vanishes as one wakes, leaving only a feeling of impossible brightness and unreasoning happiness, a feeling that rarely lingers for more than a few seconds.
As the tail-coated waiter handed Daisy the white menu bordered in brown and gold, with the date printed at the bottom, she gave a sign of anticipation, although she knew it nearly by heart now, after almost three years of such lunches. She had long since passed the stage of chicken pie, of lamb chops, even of roast sirloin of Scottish beef, the three favorites on which she had first settled. Stash had, in the beginning, tried to lead her carefully through the menu, but he quickly found out that there was no way he could convince or cajole her into ordering something new. She had no interest in “training her taste buds,” she said to him, repeating his pedantic phrase with a teasing look. He often wondered where his nimble girl, who never faltered in her attempts to make her own decisions, had learned to be so adamant in those backwoods in which she had spent those early years of her life. But even when she was first confronted by the grandeur of the service of the Connaught, Daisy’s smile informed the mâitre d’hôtel that she represented no one on earth but herself and that since she had wanted chicken pie every Sunday for a year, that was what she would order.
“Well, Princess Daisy,” the mâitre d’hôtel greeted her with relish, “what is your choice today?”
“What,” she asked, “is the ‘croustade d’oeufs de caille Maintenon’ besides eggs?”
“Tiny quail eggs, served with creamed mushrooms and hollandaise on little pastry barquettes.”
“Daisy, you had eggs for breakfast. Why don’t you start with some smoked Scotch salmon?” Stash asked.
“That’s listed under the ‘extras,’ Father,” Daisy rebuked him gravely.
Stash sighed inwardly. No matter how often he explained to her that she was permitted to order from the extras, she never would. Her habits of thrift, learned so young, couldn’t be forgotten even in this restaurant in which the final bill would represent such an astonishing total that one or two extra dishes wouldn’t be noticed. She went to the Connaught because he took her there, but nothing he could say had ever convinced her to order an extra, not even the Salade Caprice des Années Folles, surely the most delightfully named dish in the world.
“If I might suggest,” said the mâitre d’hôtel, “the trolley of hors d’oeuvres so that you have your choice, and then, perhaps, the lobster grilled with herbs—we have just received a superb shipment from France—”
“Are they still alive?” asked Daisy.
“But of course! They must be alive before we cook them.”
“I’ll have a Lancashire hot pot then,” announced Daisy, not knowing what on earth it was but determined not to directly cause the immediate death of a single lobster.
Ah, thought the headwaiter, Prince Valensky must take care. If the little girl should become, disaster of disasters, a vegetarian, we might not see her every Sunday.
Lunch finally ordered, Daisy and Stash settled into the easy conversations he enjoyed now more than any other single thing in his life. He was teaching her his world, little by little, and she, in turn, brought him all the excitements of her life at school and acquainted him with the small adventures of her friends. But today she had something special on her mind.
“Father, in your opinion, do I have to do maths?” asked Daisy.
“Naturally—they teach it in school, don’t they?”
“Yes, but I hate it and I can’t study my maths and do a proper job on my new pony. How can I ride Merlin every afternoon after school and then muck out her stall and turn over her bedding, groom her with the curry comb and vacuum her all over and use the body brush and the rub rag and the hoof pick and …”
“All that takes exactly one half-hour and you know it,” Stash said, laughing at the dramatically detailed list she’d presented him in the hope that he’d be impressed. “You still have time for maths.”
Daisy, a seasoned strategist, abandoned Merlin instantly. “Anabel says she doesn’t see why I have to do maths—she never did and she says she never missed it. Anabel says she’s never balanced a checkbook in her life and the only reason for maths is to balance checkbooks or find out if the fishmonger is cheating you and if you tell him he is, you won’t get the best fish so you might as well resign yourself.”
“So Anabel has become your authority on education?”
“Anabel is my authority on many things,” said Daisy with dignity. “However, if you gave me three good reasons why I have to do maths, I’d try, even though I think there’s something missing in the place in my brain where most people have maths.”
“I’ll give you only one good reason because I don’t need another—Lady Alden requires that all girls at her school do maths.”
“I think it’s most unreasonable of Lady Alden … most unreasonable,” Daisy grumbled.
> “Did Anabel teach you to say things are unreasonable?”
“No, you did. You said it was most unreasonable of me to want to jump Merlin over the railings in Wilton Crescent.” Daisy’s face crinkled in mischief. She changed her moods so rapidly that Stash sometimes wondered if he was talking to a child, a grown woman, a scruffy farmboy or a sage member of Parliament.
“I’m afraid you’re a pagan, Daisy.”
“I wouldn’t mind. Don’t they dance around trees and do strange things when the moon is full?”
“I believe those were Druids. Pagans are like the ancient Greeks or Romans, people who worshiped many gods, not just one.”
“Oh, good, I think I’d like to be one. Like you are, Father.”
Heading her off this unpromising subject Stash asked quickly, “How’s Merlin getting used to the stable?” Merlin, the latest in a series of ponies, each taller than the last, was named after Stash’s old favorite, now retired from the fray. Daisy’s horse was stabled in Grosvenor Crescent Mews, a few minutes away from Wilton Row, where the Valensky house was located. The stable had been run by Mrs. Leila Blum for twenty years. It was dark, with cobbled floors, and Merlin occupied one of the four loose-boxes rather than a less spacious stall where she would have to be tied up.
“She’s as happy as the day is long,” Daisy said importantly. “There’re a few black cats hanging about and she gets along very well with them, but Merlin really and truly wants a dog. She craves a dog, passionately.”
“She does, does she? Did she say what kind of dog?”
“Just a dog.”
“She ‘craves’ it passionately?”
“Absolutely.”
“Something tells me that Merlin’s been talking to Anabel.”
“No, Father, she communicates with me. You know horses can, if they like.”
“Hmmm. Daisy, isn’t it time for a sweet?”
Princess Daisy Page 15
