In that sedate, supremely aristocratic part of London, with its concentration of imposing foreign embassies, Stash had managed to find an exceptionally large house, low and rather wide, painted a pale yellow with gray shutters. It had a distinctly foreign look about it, this house that might have fit easily into many parts of the European countryside. The three sides of Wilton Row surrounded a cobbled space with a pale blue lamppost at its center, where no cars were allowed to park unless they belonged to the other homeowners, all of whom had painted their houses in pastel, altogether un-British colors.
There were bow windows on the ground floor of Stash Valensky’s home and the rooms inside had fine proportions. He had filled them with the contents of the Lausanne villa; those rare and valuable French rugs, furniture, paintings and jeweled bibelots which had once made the journey from St. Petersburg to Davos with his parents. It never occurred to Stash to decorate his home in any way but the one he had been used to as a child.
The noise of London was extinguished in Wilton Row, and an air of rustic peace prevailed. At the corner, where Wilton Row joined a tiny alley called Old Barrack Yard, stood a pub, the Grenadier, bravely painted in red and gold, with benches in front, sheltered by a twisted, venerable wisteria vine. A sign announced that only customers who had entered Wilton Row by taxi or on foot were allowed to be served. All in all, there was scarcely a more private dwelling place in all that great, gray city than the Valensky home.
For many years Stash and Daisy spent a large part of Saturday in Kent, where he owned stables in which he kept many of his horses. It was after one of their companionable rides through the country, on a day when Daisy was almost twelve, that father and daughter spied two gypsy caravans. They were parked close to Stash’s property and, mistrustfully, he eyed the wagons with their painted canvas tops stretched over hooped ribs. They hadn’t been there last week. Stash went over to investigate.
“Daisy,” he ordered, “you go back to the stable. I’ll just be a minute.”
“Oh, Father, you wouldn’t deprive me of seeing gypsies?!” she cried in dismay.
“They’re just tinkers, Daisy, but I don’t want them around my ponies. They can always use an extra horse or two or five.”
“Please, Father,” she said longingly.
“All right,” he sighed, not in the mood for discipline. “Just don’t let anyone tell your fortune—I detest that.”
The gypsies were friendly, overfriendly, thought Stash, and easy about answering his questions in their accented English.
They would move on if he liked but they were only planning to stay another day or two anyway. Just the time to do a bit of tinkering in the local village.
Not really reassured, but not able to order them off a field he didn’t own, Stash turned to leave, but Daisy was no longer at his side. She was on her knees in front of a box crooning a love song and both hands were full of a puppy which looked to Stash like a beanbag. The puppy’s bottom and hind legs drooped down from one of Daisy’s hands, his head and front legs flopped from the other. In the center of Daisy’s palms he rested his bulging belly. The puppy’s color was at one and the same time gray, brown and blue, with white paws and white ears. He looked as if he could be any kind of dog at all except some recognizable breed.
Damn and bloody blast, thought Stash, puppies! I should have guessed.
Stash was not a sporting man, not for him the joys of the turf or the pleasures of the hunt, both of which seemed so inferior compared to polo. He hadn’t the faintest interest in animals other than horses and he had no knowledge of the part that hunting game on foot plays in the lives of many country people.
“He’s a good lurcher,” said the gypsy. “And for sale.”
Had Stash any knowledge of dogs or the hunt this statement would have caused him to take Daisy by the arm and leave on the instant No gypsy can sell you a “good” lurcher puppy. It is a definition without meaning since no lurcher can be called “good” until it is old enough to hunt, for that is a lurcher’s role in life. It is a poacher’s dog, a gypsy’s dog, a tramp’s dog, silent, swift, deadly. A good lurcher can catch a low-flying seagull in one jump; a good lurcher can support a family in its deadly nightly raids on the countryside, can leap high barbed-wire fences, gallop miles over frozen ground and kill a deer by itself.
“Looks like a mutt to me,” said Stash.
“No, a lurcher. Dam’s half Irish wolfhound crossed with greyhound, and his dad’s a cross of deerhound and greyhound with whippet and sheepdog both in there one generation back. Can’t ask finer than that.”
“That’s just a mongrel.”
“No, sir, lurcher. You won’t find them in dog shows, but you can’t ask for a better dog.”
“If he’s such a prize, why are you selling him?”
“Got eight in the litter. Can’t take them all traveling, now, can we? Still, a bargain for the man who buys him.” The gypsy knew that the puppy Daisy was holding with such adoration had one hind leg shorter than the other. Such a lurcher probably couldn’t outrun a hare and wouldn’t be worth feeding. The gypsy had planned on abandoning him when he moved on, but the puppy’s ancestry was exactly as he had reported it and had it not been for that short leg, he wouldn’t have sold him for a hundred pounds.
“Come on, Daisy, let’s get back.”
Daisy didn’t have to say anything. The appeal in her eyes was enough to make Stash suspect that he had postponed the dog question too long.
“All right,” he said hastily, “I promise I’ll get you a dog. Next weekend, Daisy. Well go visit some good kennels and you can pick any dog you want. That’s a mutt, some kind of hound and God knows what else. You don’t want him. You want a purebred puppy.”
“I want Theseus.”
“Theseus?”
“Father, you know, the boy who went to fight the minotaur in the labyrinth—we’re doing the Greek myths this term with Lady Ellen.”
“And that is Theseus?”
“I knew the minute I saw him.”
“Funny name for a lurcher,” said the gypsy.
“Never mind about that,” snapped Stash. “How much are you asking for him?”
“Twenty pounds.”
“I’ll give you five.”
“I’ll give you the other fifteen. I’ve got it from my Christmas money, Father.” Daisy rushed into the bargaining, shocking both men who had been ready to settle for ten pounds right from the beginning.
And so Theseus the lurcher, for whom Stash eventually had to give twelve pounds, came to live in London, where Daisy now added the duties of feeding him and training him and exercising him to her other activities, managing somehow to get over the first few difficult weeks when Theseus often collapsed on the floor from the weight of his full stomach and wasn’t able to get up without assistance. However, with enough minced beef and raw eggs and milk and honey he soon grew stronger and finally came into his lurcher heritage on the day he slipped like a shadow into the big kitchen larder and without a sound which might have betrayed him, snatched clean a platter of stuffed, boneless chicken breasts, leaving a raging cook with suspicions but no proof.
He soon accommodated himself to his shorter rear leg which only showed up in a rolling gait, like that of a hard-drinking man who’s had three martinis but is still good for a few more. He slept in a basket next to Daisy’s bed, often on his back with all four legs up in the air, and quickly was on the most intimate and friendly terms with Daisy’s pony, sniffing Merlin’s nose like an ardent lover and curling up at her hooves.
However, he divided the Valensky’s servants into two camps: those who wooed and spoiled him, victims of his con-man tactics of wild affection combined with a certain morose look of incredible pathos he knew how to give them that melted their hearts, and those who detested him on the solid grounds that nothing was sacred to Theseus, not their roasts of beef nor their blinis, nor their rashers of bacon, nor their piroshki nor their fondue, and certainly not their mugs of stout.
Theseus seemed to eat his weight every day, and in a short time the floppy puppy became a lean dog, the size of a large, strong greyhound, two and a half feet tall at the shoulder. Short of locking and barring the doors to the kitchen and larder, it was impossible to keep out the crouching, sidling, slinking, all-but-invisible animal who pounced silently, consumed his prey in a gulp, and disappeared before the theft could be discovered. He was merely performing his function in life, but few of them were sympathetic to this inborn criminality, a lawlessness which had been carefully bred into him throughout centuries.
Yet lurchers, for all their stealthy ways, are noble dogs. Many hundreds of years ago the ownership of these rough-coated, mixed-blood greyhounds was confined to princes. They wore collars of gold, they were indispensable at court, where hunting was the principal pastime, and many an antique tapestry is adorned by their royal presence.
Daisy’s school, Lady Alden’s, was the most fashionable in all of London. It operated on two principles which, extraordinarily enough, turned out well-educated young women. The teachers all were required to come from aristocratic backgrounds; Lady Alden had a decided preference for the daughters of impoverished earls—Lady Janes and Lady Marys abounded. The girls, from six to sixteen, did not need to fill such requirements. All they needed was parental money, preferably on a monarchical scale. That many of the parents were also wellborn was merely a happy coincidence.
During all the nine years that she was a pupil at Lady Alden’s, Daisy wore the expensive uniforms bought in different sizes every year at Harrods, but always exactly the same design: navy blue sailor dresses with white collars and piping, covered by pale blue pinafores that buttoned down the back.
She arrived every day before nine o’clock at the entrance to the school’s three adjoining buildings on a quiet street not far from Kensington Gardens and the Albert Memorial. After prayers Daisy and all the other students, some hundred girls in all, filed out past Lady Alden, dropping her a curtsy and saying good morning in a voice which had to be clear, audible and well-articulated. Lady Alden, a former beauty, was a firm disciplinarian, and when her attention turned toward any individual girl a heart palpitated instantly. She wielded a formidable ruler which she never hesitated to use on the knuckles of her pupils, and even the titled teachers quailed before her.
When Daisy left for school one fall day, shortly after Theseus had come to live in her room, the cook and the ancient butler carried out a plot to get rid of Theseus. The cook lured the dog to the front door by holding a chicken high in the air. She flung the chicken outside, onto the cobbles, and when Theseus flashed through the open door she closed it behind him and locked it. The two conspirators waited for sounds of the dog’s paws on the front door, determined to ignore him until he wandered away. Theseus merely engulfed the chicken, briskly shook his coat of longish hair that was rough to the touch, perked up his white ears, and followed Daisy to Lady Alden’s by smell. When she emerged that afternoon she found him there, patiently curled up outside the entrance to the guard box from which Sam, the porter, protected the school and its precious young ladies from contact with the world.
“So that’s your dog, Miss,” said Sam, who called all the students Miss because he couldn’t be bothered to remember the great variety of titles they bore. “Well, he can’t stay here every day, if that’s what you’re thinking. Against the rules. Lady Alden’d have a proper fit if she knew.” Theseus, in a delirium of delight, was hurling himself at Daisy, putting his front paws on her shoulders and passionately nuzzling her face, all in proper lurcher silence.
“No, Sam, of course not,” said Daisy thoughtfully.
Had a dog ever gone to Lady Alden’s school before? No one knew. Such a violation was beyond the realm of imagination, rather like the possibility of the art students having a naked man to pose for them, or for that matter, a naked woman. But go to school Theseus did for three years; smuggled in through a tiny door at the back of the shed that was reserved for the gardener. Tactfully, he slept all day on a bed of cushions Daisy brought, one at a time, from her own room, so totally hidden in one dark corner that he went unnoticed except for the cooperative gardener who loathed Lady Alden as much as he loved dogs and never asked any questions, but made sure he carried his own lunch in a buttoned pocket, having had much experience with lurchers before he came to the City.
Daisy was fifteen. It was April of 1967 and London was at its peak, the center of all that was new and vital. Daisy was equally in love with all the Beatles, Vidal Sassoon, Rudolf Nureyev, Twiggy, Mary Quant, Jean Shrimpton and Harold Pinter. She was not in love with Andy Warhol or Baby Jane Holzer or even Mick Jagger.
Yet in a year in which any shopgirl could choose between dressing like an American Indian in leather and beads and headbands, or like a romantic trollop in Viva Maria-inspired lacy, tucked bloomers and frilly blouses, in a year in which the mini-skirt became a micro-skirt and eventually turned into shorts, she was still confined to a navy sailor dress and a pinafore.
“I’d have to wear my school uniform all the time, if it were up to Father and Masha,” she exploded to Anabel after lunch in Eaton Square one Saturday, tucking her long slender legs up under her on one of Anabel’s gray green couches.
“Hmmm. You don’t look so terribly underprivileged to me,” Anabel answered, surveying her from top to bottom. Daisy was wearing black velvet knee breeches and a matching jacket trimmed with gold buttons and black braid, over a ruffled blouse of white silk. She had on white ribbed tights and flat black slippers with a rosette on the front. Today she had dressed her incomparable hair in curly bangs and tied it back on each side of her face with bunches of shiny black ribbons. She had darkened her blonde eyebrows a little and wore a hint of mascara, but no other make-up.
From the time Anabel had first seen Daisy, a six-year-old whose mother had just died, a six-year-old who was about to be separated from her twin sister, and who had come to live in a strange country with a father she knew only from fleeting visits, Anabel had been fascinated by the little girl’s indomitable sense of what was right. She could scarcely believe that a child was capable of the absolute loyalty that had enabled her to force even Stash, that man of hard metal who, in Anabel’s opinion, had never quite gotten the hang of life, to give in to her insistence that she visit her sister every week. She had watched Daisy grow up with intense interest, missing nothing. Often Anabel wondered how Daisy managed to slip, seemingly without too much difficulty, into a life that must have been utterly foreign to her. Anabel was too wise to think that she understood everything about Daisy—she was not a child who confided, who poured out her troubles. She was not a child without secrets. She must have paid a price.
Would Daisy, Anabel wondered, burn out this early promise and become just another pretty teenager? Now at fifteen, Daisy had not only retained the purity and fire she had always possessed but approaching adulthood could be clearly read on her face. There, thought Anabel, is a girl who is going to cause all kinds of perfectly wonderful trouble. Even another woman was forced to imagine the pulse of curiosity which must beat in the hearts of the men who saw her … that full, enigmatic mouth, so ripe with promise and yet so innocent, and those eyes that, no matter how frank they were, contained unfathomable, never to be analyzed depths in their velvety blackness … and, oh, a body, a faultless body, strong and slim, and lucky child, she came naturally by the romantic and wild look which was the fashion of the day. Yet here Daisy was, suddenly painfully full of the pent-up turmoil and ferocious misery of adolescence, now focused on clothes, which had never meant anything to her before.
Indignantly, Daisy continued, “You just don’t know how I had to fight like a mad thing to get
Father to let me go shop at Annacat—can you imagine it, Anabel, Father wanted me to go to Harrods’ young ladies’ department and buy plaid skirts and twin sets. Twin sets!”
“That’s what English girls are still wearing, some of them anyway,” Anabel observed mildly.
“Only in the country, only if they’re parsons’ daughters, and then only with jeans,” Daisy said rebelliously. “He doesn’t realize I’ve grown up. I’m not allowed to go out with boys yet, not that I know any! It’s just impossible!”
She was at the rebellious age, no doubt about it, Anabel thought. Trouble in sight for Stash with his old-fashioned ideas. At fifty-six he had become as conservative where Daisy was concerned as he was unconventional for himself. Not an uncommon fix for the fathers of beautiful daughters to find themselves in, she ruminated with a touch of inward glee. Why, when she was only a year older than Daisy was now she’d run away and married that awful bore, what’s his name. He’d died last year … yet if she’d stayed married to him, she’d be the Dowager Marchioness now. At the thought Anabel couldn’t help but smile, although she was trying to be as serious as possible since she truly loved the girl and knew how adolescents hate it if they aren’t treated with appropriate solemnity. Anabel had arranged their intimate lunch on purpose for just such conversation, because she sensed the essential, the irremediable loneliness of the age Daisy was going through.
Both the girl and the woman were surprised at the sound of the doorbell on the floor below. Anabel expected no visitors until Stash that evening. In a minute Ram entered the drawing room and Daisy rose to her feet in delight. Now that he had his own flat and was working in the City she rarely saw this twenty-two-year-old half-brother.
“What’s that God-awful fancy dress you’ve got on?” he asked. He looked annoyed. He’d dropped by unannounced, hoping to find Anabel alone, so that they could have a chat, and here she was closeted with Daisy. He didn’t even notice that Daisy’s expectant look of joy, her open smile at the sight of him, a smile that had such completeness to it, faded and shrank with hurt at his careless words.
Princess Daisy Page 17