Princess Daisy

by Judith Krantz

  Daisy inspected her father’s face closely. For three years she had been trying to get him to buy her a dog. He wasn’t a man who loved dogs, he wasn’t a man who even liked dogs, and he had resisted her successfully. Today, by the light in his eyes, she realized it was hopeless to pursue the subject.

  “I’d love a sweet,” Daisy said. The matter was not yet settled, but it was only a question of time. She had no intention of giving up.

  Stash signaled the waiter who wheeled over one of the dessert trolleys, shining objects of solid mahogany on four silent ball bearings, with several levels of trays, each covered in an array of desserts: chocolate, lemon and raspberry mousse, bread-and-butter pudding, rice pudding, apple tarts, assorted pastries, poached fruit in port, fresh fruit salad served with thick cream from Normandy, large, rich cakes and mille feuilles aux fraises. The doting waiter, worthy inheritor of the Connaught tradition, never waited for Daisy to make the agonizing choice but simply filled a plate with small samples of every dessert on the trolley, except for the rice pudding. After dessert, while Stash had his coffee, the waiter, as he did at each table, brought a silver compote on which lay a variety of miniature sweets: fresh strawberries dipped in chocolate, tiny eclairs and cherries iced in frosting. Each one of them lay in a fluted paper cup. While Stash stared fixedly at the floor, Daisy deftly swept every single one of these delicacies into her small handbag, which she had lined with her best handkerchiefs in anticipation of this loot The first time she had done it Stash had been horrified.

  “Daisy! A lady can eat as many of those as she likes at the table, but she doesn’t take them away with her!”

  “They’re not for me.”

  “Oh.” Stash knew immediately for whom they were intended. She was taking them to the other. He never mentioned them again but endured in silence the humiliation of the weekly incident. Daisy would not have allowed him to order a box of the candied treats for her, he knew, because then they would be “extra” and he couldn’t bring himself to deprive her of the pleasure she took in her gift to her sister.

  When Stash had received the telephoned news of Francesca’s death from Matty Firestone, he had started to consider his options even as he booked the flight to Los Angeles. Almost immediately he realized that someone had to be told the story which had been, until now, kept absolutely secret from all the world. He needed help in managing the future and Anabel was the only person he trusted. During the few days that Stash was away in California, Anabel managed to find Queen Anne’s School, the best home for retarded children in England, and make arrangements for Danielle to live there.

  She drove Stash’s big car to the airport to meet the little band since he had been adamant about the need to keep the arrival of the children hidden, even from his chauffeur. As they came through customs she saw Stash, walking ahead, with Daisy’s hand in his. The little girl was as confused by the rapidly changing events of the last week as she was grief-stricken. She still didn’t quite understand how it was possible that her mother had driven off one afternoon and had not come home. How could she be dead? Neither Matty nor Margo nor Stash himself had yet been able to bring themselves to explain the details of the accident to her, and Daisy was engulfed in the reality of her childish fears of abandonment. Behind Stash walked Masha, carrying Danielle who had retreated into a world of silence and immobility. Quickly, without asking questions, Anabel drove them to the school which was located in the country outside of London.

  When they arrived at the large building which had once been the main house of a great private estate, and was still surrounded by wide lawns, fine old trees and flower gardens. Stash told Masha, Daisy and Anabel to wait in the car for him. He picked Danielle up, the first and last time he ever touched her, and stepped out of the car, putting Danielle’s feet firmly on the driveway. Daisy jumped out and followed him, hanging on to his leg as he started up the steps, Danielle silently trailing behind.

  “Daddy, where are we going? Is this where you live? Why isn’t Masha coming, too?”

  Stash kept climbing the wide steps. “Daisy darling, your sister’s going to live here for a while. It’s a wonderful place, a school for her. You’re coming to live with me in my house in London.”

  “NO!”

  He stopped, bent down and spoke earnestly to the disbelieving and defiant child. “Now, listen to me, Daisy, this is very important. All the things you know how to do that she can’t—like telling time and reading the cards I send you and jumping rope? Well, if she lives at this school for a while she’ll learn how to do all those things from the best teachers in the world and then you’ll be able to play together the way you’ve always wanted to …”

  “I love to play with her exactly the way she is—oh, don’t make her, Daddy, don’t—she’ll miss me so much. I’ll miss her—please, please, Daddy!” As she began to understand the implacable extent of his intentions, Daisy’s defiance turned to terrible fear.

  “Daisy, I understand that it’s hard, but you’re thinking only of yourself. Danielle will get to like it here very quickly and there are many other children for her to play with. But if she doesn’t live in a special place like this, she won’t learn. Now, you don’t want that to happen to her, do you … you don’t want to keep her from learning all the grown-up things that you can do? It wouldn’t be fair, you know that. Now, would that be fair, Daisy?”

  “No,” she sobbed, tears running down her face, down her neck and disappearing down the front of her dress.

  “Come along and you can see her lovely room and meet some of the teachers.”

  “I can’t stop crying … I’ll make her cry, too.”

  “You have to stop. I want you to tell her all the things I said. You’ve always said that she understands you, best.”

  “She won’t understand now, Daddy.”

  “Go ahead and try.”

  Finally Daisy controlled herself enough to communicate with her sister in their private language. After only a short while Danielle was weeping huge tears and howling like a small animal.

  “She said: ‘Day, no go!’ ”

  “But didn’t you tell her about all the things she’d learn?” Stash said impatiently.

  “She didn’t know what I meant.”

  “Well, that just shows I’m right. If she learns the things they can teach her here, she will understand. Now come on, Daisy, get her to stop that terrible noise she’s making and we’ll both take her to her nice room and she’ll be fine, just fine, before you know it.”

  The dedicated professionals who ran the institution were accustomed to, as they put it, “unfortunate scenes” when a child was finally left in their excellent care, but nothing had prepared them for the parting of Daisy and Danielle. All of them who were unlucky enough to be present found themselves in despair and some of them were reduced to unprofessional tears by the time Stash finally pried Daisy away, as gently as he could, although he eventually had to use brute force.

  After Daisy, shrieking and struggling and kicking, had been bodily carried down the corridor from Dani’s room and bundled into the car, Stash determined that such emotional traumas could only be bad for her. The following Sunday, when he had promised Daisy that she could visit her sister, he refused to take her, carefully explaining that it was for her own good and for Danielle’s good, too. The little girl listened intently to every word he said and, deigning no reply, merely turned away and went to her own room.

  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.