During the entirety of Daisy’s speech, the little man had been struggling to maintain an appropriately solemn air of sympathy. But the constant twitching of the mustache betrayed him, and his true feelings finally won out, as a burst of magnificent pearly sunshine forced its way between the curtains of his previously pursed lips. Daisy was unnerved by the impression that the man was laughing out loud at her.
“But,” he cried with delight, “that is the most wonderfully delightful and magically delicious thing that I have ever heard! Please to tell me your name, so that in the future I will know how to properly address such a delectable creature.”
“It’s Daisy,” she hesitated, still not completely certain that she wasn’t being mocked.
“Well, Daisy,” he said, wiping at his own mirthful tears, “you must permit me to introduce myself. My name is Pacqui—never to be confused with Packey or Paki.”
Daisy’s vacant expression revealed her confusion. It all sounded like paeki to her.
His hands moved constantly as he spoke, the conductor of some silent symphony that perhaps only he could hear. “It’s spelled with a c-q sequence, rather than a c-k or a lonely k. The Londoners nicknamed me that in order to distinguish me from the other two that they have nicknamed at the Embassy.”
Daisy gave a tentative smile of understanding. She thought that, just maybe, she had caught the glimpse of a linguistic point in there somewhere.
“Please, Daisy. You must let me show my gratitude to you for providing me with such a moment of incomparable joy. You must permit me to escort you to the embassy party this evening,” he pronounced, his hands describing a final flourishing crescendo.
“But I wasn’t invited to any party this evening!” she protested.
“That is of no matter. I was.” He paused for just a second, beaming. “Wait ’til they get a load of you.”
2
“Tasteful brown skirt and businesslike blouse? What do you think you’re going to here—a job interview?” had been Bonita’s skeptical reaction upon being shown Daisy’s choice of eveningwear. She wrinkled her nose. “Don’t think so, dear.”
They were seated on the delft-and-white covering on the bed in Bonita’s cozy single in the Hotel Russell.
Daisy, not normally given to caring two shakes about what she wore, experienced a peculiar moment of fashion distress at Bonita’s critical tone, as she rose and crossed through the connecting door to her own double beyond. “But what am I going to do?” she shouted back, desperately rifling the few items that actually required hangers. A note of agitation crept into her usually more placid voice. “I don’t have the kind of wardrobe that gets asked to Embassy soirees.”
“Hmm.” Bonita consulted the timepiece ticking away on a chain around her neck. It was three twenty-four and the party wasn’t due to start until eight. “Might be just enough time.” A thoughtful finger stroked the walnut face. “Might know just the right place.”
3
If there was any truth to the Harrods motto of Omnia, Omnibus, Ubique—“all things, for all people, everywhere”—then what was now being required of that venerable shopping institution was that it cough up the perfect dress to transform a Danbury toilet bowl cleaner into a princess for the evening. And if the jaded shop clerk, whose attentions they had commandeered for their purposes, thought—wrongly—that she had seen other women like Daisy before, it soon became obvious that she had never encountered anybody quite like Bonita.
The shop clerk, whose own impeccable attire rivaled that of any model strutting her stuff on a Parisian runway, evoked an uncharacteristic frisson of fashion inferiority in Daisy, as she waited obediently in her underthings in the vast changing room. She was dead certain that she would never possess even half as much style as the sales clerk.
Bonita, casting an Ungaro eye on the proceedings, fast rejected everything black that the heretofore unruffled, but soon to be harried, clerk brought in as being “common as fish and chips—everyone who hasn’t the imagination to come up with a real color always wears black”; white was for “babies, virgins, brides, and nuns in their coffins,” in that exact order; and the one red number that the clerk had brought in, while it definitely passed muster on the “real color” test, was deemed deficient in that it “certainly does make a statement,” but “… ‘come up and see me sometime?’ Mm… Think not.”
And Daisy, changing garments with the speed of a photographer snapping away, rejected anything without at least a crew-necked collar. A slightly darker-hued miniature strawberry of skin had marked her collarbone since the time of her birth. And, in spite of a nature that was otherwise devoid of physical vanity, she had always been reticent about exposing this stain to the probing eyes of the world at large. In her own mind, she explained away this insecure behavior by telling herself that she wasn’t exactly embarrassed by her birthmark, but rather that it just clashed with a lot of things.
“Refresh my memory,” Daisy was heard to despair at one spiritual low point during her tenure in the changing room. “Just what am I doing here? And why is this so important?”
As the clerk, her French twist now completely uncoiled (it really was amazing how much damage two women from Danbury could cause in the space of one harmless hour) exited underneath the weight of yet another pile of rejected clothing, Bonita—using that rare and wonderful personal referent—declared it time to “do the job myself.”
Back in a flash so quick that it seemed scarily inhuman, Bonita hung the lone garment from the hook on the wall, flashing her baby-teeth grin at Daisy. Accompanying the clerk out of the room, Bonita declared, “If this doesn’t do the trick, then by all means, go with the dead-nun look.”
Daisy found herself suddenly alone with The Dress.
She slipped the gossamer fabric over her head, and by performing just the minimum of contortionist acts, she was able to manage to zip the back all the way up her neck. Almost fearfully, she turned to confront her image in the looking glass.
The material wasn’t a single color, and yet there was no discernible pattern to it. Rather, it was opalescent, as if the designer had managed to capture the interior of an abalone shell and had talked Rumpelstiltskin into magically spinning the hard substance into the sheerest of threads. At the neckline, the collar climbed further upwards, protectively embracing Daisy’s neck. The entire top half of the dress hugged her form to the waist, but there were no sleeves to it, thus showcasing her athletic and shapely arms to full advantage. From the waist the skirt flared out, ending finally in a hemline that was designed like the layers of a handkerchief, with some of the points extending just below the knee, while others afforded a provocative glimpse of thigh now and again.
As Daisy took in the head-to-toe reflection, absentmindedly tucking the Star of David beneath the collar, it occurred to her that she wasn’t in Kansas anymore.
Daisy no longer looked like a Silverman.
• • •
The duo from Danbury flew through the rest of Harrods, the sales clerk a permanent fixture in tow. “Might not think they’re all your department, honey, but they will be now,” Bonita advised.
Lingerie coughed up silken undergarments, a far cry from Daisy’s usual torn and tattered invitations to ambulance embarrassment. Hosiery nobly lived up to its name. And in the shoe department, they managed to track down a lone pair of size fives, whose curved stiletto heels were architectural marvels, and whose color and form would enact a perfect union when paired with The Dress.
Sparing a fleeting thought for the very disheveled shop clerk, who was at that very moment gratefully consuming the dust churned up by the passing of their wake, as they hurried through Knightsbridge, wending their way back towards the hotel in Bloomsbury, Daisy basked in the warm afterglow of shopper’s success. It now seemed to her that the initial frustrations of the search had all been part of someone else’s bad dream; and the excavation of that most sought after item, that confection of perfection—The Dress—as easy as plucking an apple
from a low-hanging branch.
4
It hadn’t taken long for Daisy to recover her inherent sense of the proper hierarchical structuring of priorities.
“Substance before style,” she informed the protesting Bonita as she did up the neon pink laces on her sneakers. Neon pink meant that nobody could possibly miss you at night.
“But,” Bonita objected, trying to interject her own brand of rationalism, “you only have two-and-a-half hours left, and you still need to shower and change and do your hair and—oh, who knows?—mentally prepare yourself or something of the sort.”
“Not to worry,” Daisy laughed, dismissing her concerns with a mildly insulting, patronizing pat on the topknot. “I’ll be back from my run in plenty of time to attend to all of that fashion stuff.”
5
Daisy jogged south down Montague Street, heading in the general direction of the Thames. Making a few quick turns, she crossed New Oxford and veered onto Shraftesbury to the right. So far, so good.
She was thinking about how much nicer it was to run in London than it was back in the States. In spite of the city’s much-maligned climate, hardly a day passed when it wasn’t decent enough out to get in at least some form of workout. Here, men didn’t react to her sprinting form with verbal assaults, assuming an exercising female must certainly be in want of sexual solicitation. And, best of all, she found that the idea of falling prey to a drive-by shooting never even crossed her mind.
Sometimes the sidewalks did get a little congested, but she did try to avert knocking other people over whenever possible, and they did seem to appreciate that. As she made her way through Piccadilly Circus, usually one of the most crowded pedestrian areas, a sprinkle began to fall from a suddenly notorious gray sky. In an attempt to avoid being blinded by brollies, she maneuvered her way through the mass of milling bodies and, exiting the other end, turned right onto Old Bond Street.
At this juncture, having passed the halfway point of what she considered to be her short route and thinking herself home free, Daisy let her guard down. Her mind began to wander, her thoughts the victim of random input, which—if you really gave it some serious consideration—some would argue could be far more dangerous than any drive-by shooter.
As Daisy propelled her body north by northwest (Hamlet, anyone?) along Old Bond Street, her consciousness began to clear itself of all unnecessary clutter. In fact, such was the vacancy of her meditations that any Zen master might have been proud of the mental vacuum that she had created.
She was ripe, then, as she crossed the line from Old Bond Street into New, for a single item of sensory input to invade her being, temporarily laying siege to the entirety of her existence.
Chocolate? She sniffed the aroma on the damp air. Violets? She experienced the bit tightening in her mouth. Chocolate and violets, both, at the very same time? was her final waking thought, as the reins yanked her back for a 180-degree turnaround, where she would have encountered possibly the finest chocolate shop of her life, had she not, in her haste to discover the source of the unprecedented aroma combo, bumped a brollie, tripped over a Chow, and been sent sprawling rump over teakettle, all before ending up smack on top of a damp sewage drain.
Which, when you really thought about it, wasn’t all that far from where Miss Silverman had started.
6
On the floor of the guest room in the Hotel Russell stood a silver champagne bucket, sans bottle and with an overabundance of chipped ice. Encased within the ice and, thankfully, protected from view by the surrounding linen towel, was one formerly delicate, but—for the time being—now hideously swollen left ankle. The form extending upward from the ankle in question belonged, of course, to Daisy, who was holding in her right hand the missing champagne bottle. This original administration of first aid, brought about with the enlisted help of one very startled room service waiter, had all been, of course, Bonita’s doing.
As Bonita peeled back the linen to see how the patient was doing, it was revealed that the ice had not caused the swelling to go down one jot. But that didn’t really matter much anymore, since the champagne bottle was more than holding up its share of the bargain, and Daisy was no longer feeling any pain.
“What am I going to do?” she asked hazily, bending over to study the ankle with a scientifically inquisitive smile. Daisy, the proud recipient of Rachel’s DNA right down to the very last strand, had crossed over the border of tipsy and was fast approaching sloshed on the strength of little more than a single glass of the bubbly. “What will I do about those shoes?” she pressed, as if nothing else had ever mattered quite so much or quite so little to her before.
Bonita pried the champagne bottle away from Daisy, moving it safely out of reach, before crossing to the closet. Turning back again, she offered her idea of a sensible solution. In her left hand, she held The Dress. And from the curved joints of one extended forefinger, she dangled a single neon-pink-laced sneaker. “Just put a sock on the other and no one’ll even notice the Elephant Man likeness,” was the sage advice.
To which Daisy emitted a groan. It was impossible, really, to tell if it was a groan of dismay at her predicament and the idea of making a stylistic fool out of herself, or if it was a groan brought about by the giddy intoxication of relief; she would not be required to stumble around in public in the unaccustomed architectural marvels, thereby making a tottering fool out of herself.
In fact, all that you could really be certain of was the exact words expressed within the confines of the emitted moan:
“Oh no.”
7
The Prince of Wales stood, studying his own image, in front of a mirror that was fit for a king. He was adjusting his own tie.
“Do you believe, Sturgeon, that every now and again, when I disappear from the center of things—as if I’ve fallen off the face of the earth, as it were…” He paused here, brooding over the exactly correct wording that would complete his thought. “Do you think that people forget all about me, as if I never really existed in the first place?”
Sturgess held open a stupendously well-tailored evening jacket, the sleeves gaping an invitation to the Royal arms. “Well, I certainly never do, Sir.”
8
As Pacqui held open the door of the black cab for Daisy, she noted that her escort was attired in a black suit, white shirt, and skinny black tie. The effect created might have been that of an Archie Bunker-inspired hit man, were it not for the pair of unnecessary dark sunglasses that pushed the whole outfit into the realm of Pakistani Blues Brother.
“Your coach awaits you!” he announced, sketching a bow in the air as he ushered her into the back.
Showtime, Daisy thought, grabbing onto his arm for assistance as she dragged the sock-clad swollen ankle into the cab behind her.
9
Daisy always knew that she’d had too much to drink whenever she found herself engaging in philosophical debate with her own contemplated mirror image in a public bathroom.
“We could just hide out in here all night,” Real Daisy suggested.
“We could go out there and mingle,” Reflected Daisy replied. “How often do we get the chance to meet so many different people?”
“It’s kind of cozy in here,” the first suggested, wistfully, indicating the commodious expanse of the pink powder room and the generous offering of stalls in the Pakistani Embassy’s Ladies’ Room.
“Well, it is if we want to spend our entire life in the toilet.” This time, Reflected Daisy didn’t wait for a response. “I, for one, am heading on out.”
“But what about Pacqui?” Real Daisy asked in distress, hand flying unconsciously to the Star of David at her throat. Her hand groped around for a moment, alarm beginning to seep in, until she felt the outline of the reassuring jewelry beneath her dress. She had forgotten that earlier in the evening, while putting on her new things, her tipsy focus had deemed the chain to look “somehow not-quite-right” with the perfection of The Dress and, rather than removing it entirely, had t
ucked it away safely inside.
“How in the world are we ever going to find Pacqui again among the crush out there?” she persisted. But even as she uttered the words, her focus expanded and she realized that, not only had Reflected Daisy deserted her, but that some of the other female partygoers, many of whom were now queuing to use the stalls in the loo, were all staring at her.
Oh, dear, she thought, flinging open the door and sallying forth under a pretense of self-confident hauteur. Did I really say all of those things out loud?
Unlike earlier in the day, when it had seemed as if everything was for once just her size, as she emerged now on the other side of the bathroom door, it was to be found that the world had grown large once again. The Embassy hall was jam-packed with everybody who aspired to be anybody. Why, a person couldn’t swing a stick in there without hitting a marquis, an earl, or a sheik. And every single last one of them was taller than Daisy.
Like a squirrel lost in a redwood forest, she searched in vain for Pacqui, but he was nowhere to be seen. Having sought out liquid sustenance from champagne acquired at the open bar in the corner of the room, she was further diverted from the hunt for her companion by the whiff of sweets she caught off of a passing dessert cart. Bending over it, she studied the selection intently.
Falling for Prince Charles Page 4
