But there was no doubt about the utter necessity for earning some money. The quarterly payment for Danielle’s care was due in a month. The prices at Queen Anne’s School had gone up gradually, over the years, more than keeping up with the sums Daisy made through her painting as well as whatever was left over from her salary. Danielle’s continual care now cost Daisy almost twenty-three thousand dollars a year and she hadn’t been able to afford to fly to England to see her twin in the past eight months. Although she still faithfully made drawings to send Dani, sometimes she had so much work that she had to substitute one of the postcards she bought at a store in SoHo called “Untitled Art Postcards,” postcards she knew Dani would like: the original illustrations from Alice in Wonderland, Odilon Redon butterflies, the carousel figure of an ostrich from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, three Edward Lear cartoons of Foss the Cat from Lear’s Nonsense Songs and Stories, the strange fairy painting by Anne Anderson which illustrated Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies.
And now, just when she needed advice, Kiki wasn’t exactly being helpful. Ever since she’d met Luke Hammerstein yesterday she’d been acting as if she were a moonstruck female satyr.
“Kiki,” she’d objected, “I saw you coming on to Luke Hammerstein yesterday—you just can’t behave like that … it isn’t ladylike.”
“My dear Daisy,” Kiki answered loftily. “It worked and that’s what counts. And, in any case, your language shows the deplorable effect of association with that person you call Nick-the-Greek, if I may say so.”
“What does that mean, ‘worked’?” said Daisy suspiciously. “Where did the two of you go last night?”
“Out to dinner.” Kiki’s face was a circle of merriment and secret humor.
“And?”
“Princess Valensky, the fact that at the advanced age of almost twenty-four you only have had two unimportant love affairs with shy, undemanding, easily handled, and essentially passive men hardly makes you a person to consult on romantic matters. I’ll answer your question when there is more to report.”
During her years in New York, Daisy had, by dint of persuading herself that it was necessary to overcome her feelings about sexual involvement, allowed a few of her most persistent suitors to make love to her. She found that she could respond to them physically but not emotionally, and the relationships had not been important or lasting.
“I’ve had three love affairs,” Daisy said angrily. “And one was with your own cousin.”
“But did I describe the gentlemen properly?” Kiki demanded.
“You didn’t say that they were all very attractive.”
“I stand corrected. They were, but not my type. Now Luke Hammerstein on the other hand …”
“Spare me. KM, come on. Help me out I’ve only got an hour to pack. The car’s coming to take me out to the airport at six—the Shorts’ jet leaves promptly at seven. Now, what do you think I should wear on Saturday night? It’s that usual nonsense of ‘Don’t bother to dress, dear, because we’re only having sixty for dinner.’ In Middleburg they think dressing for dinner is ‘pretentious’ so they compromise—you know, silk blouses, long tweedy skirts, granny’s pearls, everything fabulously expensive and just the right amount of dowdiness. You know I don’t have that sort of drag—I wouldn’t even if I could afford it,” she said in a worried tone.
When she had first started spending weekends with the Horse People, Daisy had been forced to carve out a unique style for herself. She couldn’t possibly buy fashionable dinner clothes so she became an old-clothes aficionado, avoiding the antique-clothing boutiques with their exquisite garments which only a Bette Midler or a Streisand could afford; avoiding the almost-new shops which were crammed with last year’s couture clothes, already dated; and avoiding as well the flea markets at which only a miracle could uncover a garment in good condition.
Her buys, all came from London jumble sales in church halls that she found time to go to each time she visited Dani. There she specialized in unearthing English and French couture originals, preferably over forty years old, clothes that had been made in the great dressmaking decades of the twenties and thirties. She researched them after she brought them back in triumph, for nothing she owned had cost over thirty-five dollars.
Daisy led Kiki into the third bedroom of their apartment in which she kept her nonworking clothes hanging on a horizontal pipe which crossed one end of the room.
The two girls stood and contemplated the garments that hung there. “It wouldn’t be so hard if you only had regular clothes, like other people,” Kiki sighed.
“Ah … that … how right you are. But it’s simply too expensive and too dull, although I admit it would make life easier,” Daisy replied.
“The Vionnet?” Kiki suggested.
“Too dressy,” Daisy said regretfully, fingering the pale violet satin dress, cut on the bias and dating from 1926. “What do you think about the striped Lucien Lelong?”
“To be honest, I’ve never really liked it on you. Your essential wood nymphishness is not enhanced by zebra stripes, no matter how well done. How about the black velvet Chanel suit? It may be forty years old, but it looks as if it had been born yesterday,” Kiki answered.
“It’s not the right time of year for black velvet, especially in bluegrass country.”
“Wait, wait, I see those Dove tea pajamas—you said they were around 1925? Just look, Daisy, cyclamen brocade and green satin with a black satin jacket—it’s a smash!”
“They’re Locust Valley maybe or Saratoga, but definitely not Middleburg.”
“So that lets out the white satin pajama suit from Revillon too?”
“Afraid so. Oh, rot!”
Kiki carefully pushed the hangers aside, sighing wistfully over Daisy’s treasures—they were all too long for her, but she itched after them.
“Ah ha!” Daisy pounced. “How could I have forgotten? Schiaparelli to the rescue, as usual.” Triumphantly she held up an ensemble from the late 1930s when the daring Schiaparelli was doing clothes which were four decades ahead of their time. There was a jacket in lettuce green tweed touched with sequins at the lapels, worn with a pair of corduroy pants in a darker shade of green. “Just right, don’t you think?”
“It’s heaven—really a fuck-you number, as in ‘fuck you, Mrs. Short, I know it’s tweed and I know it’s sequins and I know you didn’t think they can be worn together, but now you do.’ ”
“In a nutshell. I really need this commission, so it’s important to look as if I didn’t.”
“Then you’d better take my fake emeralds again.”
“Emeralds with green sequins?”
“Especially with green sequins!”
15
Of all the potential differences in human tastes, habits, interest and predilections, among the strongest is that which divides people who care about horses from people who don’t. People can love cats or dogs and not feel as if they exist on an entirely different plane from those who are indifferent to these animals, but Horse People not only do not care to understand people who don’t give a damn about horses, but the mere idea that such people exist—and are the vast majority—makes them wonder about the future of the human race. Horse People may be heads of state or professionally unemployed in their ordinary lives, but horses are their passion, as Jerusalem was the passion of a soldier in some ancient Crusade. The cult of the horse as their idol is as central to their lives as cocaine is to some and applause is to others. Perhaps not all of them know that the earliest work of art known to archaeology is a two-and-a-half-inch sculpture of a horse, made from the ivory tusk of a woolly mammoth, a masterpiece of supple grace which is thirty-two thousand years old—but this fact would seem only fitting and right to any Horse Person. It is only normal that the Cro-Magnon people of the Ice Age appreciated the horse twenty-five thousand years before the dawn of our civilization—normal and to be expected, since they believe that the horse is nature’s finest achievement, not excluding man.
&
nbsp; “Stupid, dumb, moronic beast!” Patrick Shannon told his horse quietly. He didn’t want to be overheard. He was taking a private riding lesson in an outdoor ring at a stable in Peapack, New Jersey, only an hour and fifteen minutes from Manhattan. During the last month his chauffeur had driven him out to the school every night, right after he finished his heavy schedule of work as president and chief operating officer of Supracorp, a two-billion-dollar corporation. This had meant giving up all social life and the after-work squash games at the University Club that were one of the only chances he ever had to release his tensions, a cherished respite that he had now abandoned, in favor of this enraging, ridiculous, humiliating pursuit of something at which he would never be really good. At thirty-eight, Patrick Shannon was a natural athlete who had a way with a ball, any ball … but growing up in an orphan asylum had given him lots of ability with balls and none, none whatsoever with horses. He hated the things! They drooled and they snorted and they huffed, they turned their heads and tried to nip at his legs with their ugly, big teeth, they reared like silly girls if they saw something they didn’t like, they walked sideways when they were supposed to go forward, they stopped to eat the grass when you hadn’t pulled on the reins and wouldn’t start when you kicked them.
They smelled good—that was all he would say for them. Horseshit was the best smelling shit he’d ever come across, oh, he’d grant them that.
The trail of events that had put Patrick Shannon on the back of a horse was clear. He had set his heart on acquiring for Supracorp another real-estate company, one solely owned by Hamilton Short Ham Short had suggested that Shannon come next month to spend a weekend in Middleburg, Virginia, while the wooing of his business was going on. Short, assuming that Shannon rode, had spoken of “a little hacking about.” Shannon, after committing himself to the weekend, had realized too late that he hadn’t said he didn’t ride. He didn’t know just how crazy Horse People were, but he certainly knew enough about them to guess that the only excuse they would find understandable for an able-bodied man who did not mount a horse was a broken leg. He assumed that many of them rode even with broken legs, and he was perfectly right. Horsemanship, from the moment he accepted Short’s invitation, became a challenge, which was next best to the thing he loved most—a risk.
Pat Shannon was a born risk taker who understood that the ability to cope with an occasional failure was a vital part of successful risk taking. But his failures, few as they were, had been business failures, and they had never been due to lack of effort or preparation. Since it was clearly possible to learn to ride, ride he would.
Short had said that he had some “fairly pleasant trails” on his place. Shannon had had one of his secretaries check the place out and discovered that it was called Fairfax Plantation, covered eighteen hundred acres, boasted a private jet airstrip, housed twenty servants and was worth, conservatively, four million dollars.
Shannon didn’t have to be very clever to realize that if he were to go hacking about on almost two thousand acres, he had to count on fairly long hours in the saddle. And Shannon was clever, indeed exceptionally so. And a clever Irishman can be counted among the cleverest kind of man the human race produces. Hadn’t Shannon’s favorite Irishman, George Bernard Shaw, said, “A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it; it would be hell on Earth.” Pat Shannon grimly reminded himself of these words as he gave his horse the signal to canter for the fiftieth time that evening.
“You’re making progress,” Chuck Byers said drily, in a tone of voice which took any approval out of the remark. He had never had such a pupil before. He hoped never to have such a one again. Shannon had told him he wanted to learn to ride. Fair enough—lots of people did. But no one else had ever demanded that he be able to trot at the end of the first lesson, canter at the end of the second, and gallop at the end of the third.
Byers had told him it was impossible. Byers had said he’d break a bone at the least and he had made Shannon sign a paper saying that the stable wasn’t responsible for any injuries to the man and that Shannon was responsible for all injuries to the horse. But the bastard had galloped after three lessons although Byers could tell by the way he walked back to his car that every muscle in his body was killing him.
The man was a demon, Byers thought. After the third lesson Shannon had sent out a crew of electricians to rig up lights around the ring so that he could ride late into the night, and he had insisted on a three-hour lesson every single night, paying so much that Byers had had to accommodate him in spite of his family’s objections. He hadn’t spent any time with his wife and kids since Shannon had started this nonsense.
Something about the single-minded way in which Shannon tackled the business of learning to ride made Byers feel downright vindictive toward the man. To Byers riding was the last vestige of chivalry in the world, a realm of magic which linked the past to the present as nothing else did, a sport that was both his religion and his romance. He grew more and more disgruntled as he watched Shannon make incredible progress of a mechanical kind, but without falling in any way under the spell of horses—the son-of-a-bitch acted as if mastering horsemanship was simply another form of locomotion. And not for him the ritual, pleasant half-hour of discussion after the lesson was over. No, the man just said a brief goodnight and disappeared into that big black Cadillac in which his bored driver had been reading all the while, and sped off to the city. Byers was a proud, sensitive man, and he knew he was being treated as a mere convenience. If a robot could teach riding, he was convinced that Shannon would have preferred it. He never realized, nor did Shannon tell him, that Pat Shannon didn’t think of learning to ride as a human occupation which made human contact with his instructor necessary. It was merely a challenge he had chosen to confront, an obstacle which he had to conquer, a necessary nuisance which he had to put behind him. He went at it with total concentration, as if he were breaking rocks on a chain gang with an overseer watching him. He resented having to spend these hours in the ring just as much as Byers resented teaching him.
They had only one moment of non-instructional discourse in the past month. Shannon was limping badly, Byers noticed, in his new boots from M. J. Knoud, Inc., the venerable firm which had also made his handsome riding clothes.
“Trouble with the boots, Mr. Shannon?” Byers remarked, not without malice.
“My ankle bones are bleeding,” said Shannon in a matter-of-fact fashion. “I suppose it’s always like that when you break in new boots.”
“Not necessarily—people don’t all go at it the way you do.”
“What size foot do you have, Byers?”
“Twelve-C.”
“That’s my size. Will you sell me your boots?”
“What? No, Mr. Shannon, you don’t want these boots.”
“It happens that I do—they’re exactly what I want Beautiful leather and well-broken in. We wear the same size and you certainly have other pairs.”
“I do indeed.”
“I’m willing to pay whatever you ask, but I want your boots, Byers. I’ll give twice what you paid for them, hell, make it three times.”
“You’re absolutely sure about that, Mr. Shannon?” Byers didn’t show he was offended.
“My God, they’re not sacred objects, man, just boots. What’s all the fuss about?” Patrick demanded, more harshly than he realized. He’d been in considerable pain for three hours, although he would never have admitted it.
“They’re yours,” said Byers curtly. “No charge.” He had been many things in his life but never had he bargained over second-hand boots.
“Thanks, Byers,” Patrick said. “I really appreciate it.” As far as he was concerned, it was the least the man could do, although he would not have grudged him any profit he cared to take. Business was business. He had no conception of the cult of tack, the preoccupation with all the leather appurtenances which belong to the equestrian world.
As Byers handed over the worn pair of boots he thought to himself, screw y
ou, Pat Shannon. Who the fuck do you think you are?
It was a thought many people had had about Shannon in the course of his life, and all of them had eventually realized that whoever Shannon thought he was, he turned out to be. This had not endeared him to a rather large group—and if he’d bothered to consider this he would not have been astonished. Particularly since he’d forgotten all their names in the course of his climb to the top. A dedicated nonconformist, a maverick by deepest instinct, his success had depended on his following no one’s plans but those he chose for himself, without consultation.
There were only a few men Patrick Shannon considered his equals in the corporate world. No man, no matter how powerful, who had inherited his business, belonged in his peer group. They had to have made it on their own. God knows he had.
From the orphanage in which he’d grown up he had won a scholarship to St. Anthony’s, a minor Catholic boys’ prep school. The scholarship had been established by a former student, now an elderly and childless millionaire, for a parentless boy who showed equal excellence in academics and athletics.
At St. Anthony’s, Patrick saw immediately that he had found his first world to conquer. Nothing about the upper-middle-class East Coast boys he found himself among was familiar; their points of reference and the things they took for granted were all unknown territory to him.
Princess Daisy Page 29
