Shall I walk in the woods, she wondered as she brushed her hair. Sparks of static electricity like a flock of indignant fireflies crackled in the night air. She wandered over to the chest of drawers in which she kept a store of old clothes for her visits to La Marée. She was wearing a pair of much-washed cotton pajamas which she’d owned since she was sixteen. The jacket had missing buttons and the pants had shrunk.
Or, Daisy asked herself, shall I go and see if Pat Shannon is quite comfortable in his room? Standing with the hairbrush still clasped in her hand, she thought of how he had looked rushing down the terraces of Berkeley Castle. What urgent errand had brought him there? She remembered how quickly he had brought her back to Claridge’s last night, understanding that she was so tired that even an arm around her shoulders would have been a burden to her, of how tactfully he had left her alone to talk with Anabel earlier that evening. And yet I do believe he finds me attractive, she told herself, smiling in the dark, remembering the wordless moment when he had kissed the palm of her hand. Yes, unquestionably attractive. He’s almost too considerate. Wouldn’t it be hospitable to see if he’s comfortable? Truly and deeply hospitable? Thoughtfully, Daisy took off her pajamas and searched rapidly in her suitcase for the good-luck present Kiki had given her before she’d left for England. Daisy pulled out of the tissue paper a nightgown such as she’d never owned, a slithery gown the color of apricots, made of two shining pieces of satin held together at the sides only by tiny bows which linked one piece to the other at eight-inch intervals. Daisy dropped it over her head, gasping as the fall of satin touched her naked skin with its coolness. Then she put on the matching robe that closed with a bow at the base of her throat. She considered looking in the mirror to see how she looked, but she didn’t want to turn on the light.
Daisy opened her door as silently as a somnambulist but there was nothing of the sleepwalker about her steps as she walked, on her hospitable mission, quietly, but with eager determination, down the entire length of the house to the door of Pat Shannon’s room. She knocked at the door and waited, hardly breathing, for it to open. There was no response. She knocked again, rather louder this time. It was, of course, possible that he was asleep, she thought. But it was also entirely possible that he wasn’t comfortable. There was only one way to make sure. Daisy opened the door and saw him, sound asleep in the wide, double bed. She padded silently across the room and knelt on the floor next to his dreaming form, throwing off the long robe as she leaned over him. There was enough moonlight for her to study his face. In sleep the lines on either side of Shannon’s mouth softened and their relaxation lent his characteristic expression of purposeful banditry a youthfulness at which Daisy peered tenderly. His hair, always tousled, fell more carelessly than he would have permitted in a waking moment, adding to his unguarded look. He seemed trapped in a savage solitude, Daisy thought, wondering what he was dreaming about. Shannon, so often seen in action, swift, set apart, beyond self-doubt or failure, the powerful conductor of the great conglomerate orchestra, was sleeping the sleep of childhood, his wide mouth vulnerable, somehow beseeching, a look on his face as if he’d lost his way. She pressed her lips softly to his. He slept on. Again she kissed him and still he slept. This is not at all gallant of him, thought Daisy, and kissed him once more. He woke up gasping.
“Oh, the best kiss …” he mumbled, still half-asleep.
She kissed him again, fleetingly, before he could say more.
“The sweetest kiss … give me another …”
“You’ve already had four.”
“No, impossible, I don’t remember, they don’t count,” he insisted, finally awake.
“I just came by to see if you were comfortable. Now that I see you are, I’ll go back to my room. I’m so sorry I woke you—go back to sleep.”
“Oh, Lord, don’t! I’m not! It’s freezing here and the mattress is lumpy and the bed’s too short and too narrow and I need another pillow,” he grumbled of Anabel’s luxurious guest accommodations, as he adroitly lifted Daisy from the floor where she was still kneeling and tucked her under his covers.
Shannon cradled her in his arms as gently as a cherished child and they nestled quietly, each tentatively experiencing the warmth of the other’s body, the sound of the other’s breathing and the beating of the other’s many pulses—a communication without words, so full of a sense of the extraordinary that neither of them dared to speak. Little by little they sank deeper, and surrendered themselves, with their whole sentient beings, becoming immersed, enlaced in awareness of the life force of the other, until, without voices or motion they had attained a trust that had been waiting to be born.
It seemed a long time before Shannon began to imprint a blizzard of tiny kisses at the point where Daisy’s jaw joined her throat, that particularly warm curve, spendthrift with beauty, that he had not allowed himself to realize had haunted him for weeks. Daisy felt fragile and rare to Shannon, as if he’d trapped a young unicorn, some strange, mythological creature. Her hair was the most intense source of light in the room since it reflected the moonlight creeping through the windows, and by its light he saw her eyes, open, rapt and glowing; twin dark stars.
It seemed to him now as if they had never kissed before. The kisses she had awakened him with were so chaste, so tentative that they were only the memory of a kiss. Now he pressed her mouth with a rain of kisses like blazing flowers.
Oh, yes! she thought, opening her lips to him, tumbled and craving and daring. She arched her body toward him, nudging his hands toward her breasts until they were clasped and claimed. It was she, not he, who raised her nightgown over her head in one swift impatient movement and tossed it on the floor. It was she who guided his hands down the length of her body, she who touched him wherever she could reach, as playfully as a dolphin, until he realized that her fragility was strength, and that she wanted him without reserve. He bent to the glorious task, dimly aware that never before had life flowed through him without the static and interferences of thought, never had he been so close to drinking the elemental wine of life. He tasted it on her lips and on her nipples and on her belly, his whole skin drank thirstily of her and when he thrust into her, he knew he had arrived at last at the source, the spring. Now, Daisy lay quietly, invaded, filled, utterly willing. She felt as if she were floating down a clean, clear river with birds singing in green trees on the bank. But there was more; more than this blissful peace and together they quickened, panted, quested as eagerly as two huntsmen after an elusive prey, plunging through the forests of each other until they came at last to their victories, Daisy with a sound that was at least as much a cry of astonishment as it was of joy. She had experienced fulfillment before, but never with this excellence, this plenitude.
Afterward, as they lay together, half asleep, but unwilling to drift apart into unconsciousness, Daisy farted, in a tiny series of absolutely irrepressible little pops that seemed to her to go on for a minute.
“Termites riveting,” observed Shannon lazily. She lunged out from under the covers and almost managed to jump off the bed before his long arms pinned her on the mattress.
“Minuscule termites, midget Rosie the Riveters. You get an E for effort.”
“Let me go!” she cried, humiliated.
“Not until you realize that if you fart, you fart—and that’s fine … farting’s part of life.”
“Oh, please stop repeating that word!” Daisy begged, more embarrassed than ever.
“You’ve never lived with a man.” He stated this rather than asking.
“What makes you think that?” she said quickly. Of course she hadn’t, but at twenty-five, what woman would admit it?
“Because of how you reacted to … ah, giving a salute to the queen … does that sound better?”
“Yes, much,” she murmured, pressing her face into his shoulder. “Is that your idea of a romantic declaration?”
“The circumstances were not of my choosing. I think I can do better.”
“Go
right ahead.”
“Dearest, darling, adorable Daisy, how can I convince you of the profound chivalry and absolute tenderness and devotion which lie in my heart of hearts?”
“You just have.” She trembled with laughter. “Now, go to sleep, Shannon, or it will be morning. I’m going back to my room and you’ll have to make the best of the terrible lumpy bed.”
“But why? Sleep with me. Don’t go. You can’t leave me here all alone,” he protested.
“Yes, I can. Don’t ask me why because I don’t know.” He sat up, watching as she wrapped her robe around her naked body, all shadows and secrets in the moonlight. “Goodnight, sleep tight, and don’t let those termites bite,” she whispered, kissing him on the lips with the speed of a hummingbird, and was gone.
At breakfast Anabel serenely offered Shannon a choice of five kinds of honey to go on his buttered brioche while she managed simultaneously to watch Daisy, incendiary with joy, yet limpid as dawn and dressed like a ruffian.
“And what are your plans for today, children?” she asked.
“Children?” Shannon grinned at her.
“A generic term,” responded Anabel, “for anyone not of my generation.”
“You don’t have a generation,” he assured her.
“And you grow more charming every day.”
“We were going to walk into Honfleur to show Shannon the port, but perhaps I should just leave you two alone together,” Daisy suggested. “You could spend the time doting on each other.”
“No, much as I would like that, there’s a long list of things for you two to pick up for dinner. When you’re ready to go, it’s on the kitchen table. I’m going to cut some flowers,” Anabel said tranquilly.
“I’ll go get it now—I’m all set,” Daisy said.
“Like that?” Shannon asked.
“Naturally.” Daisy looked down at her costume. When she woke that morning she had jumped into a pair of jeans with holes in the knees which dated from her freshman year at Santa Cruz, a sleeveless jersey equally dilapidated, and tennis shoes that had weathered almost a decade. Around her neck she’d slung a moth-eaten navy cardigan which had been part of the detested uniform at Lady Alden’s School, worn when the girls had marched into the park to play rounders. She’d made two long, absolutely simple braids which hung down her back, and she wore no make-up at all. “Not chic enough for you?” she asked him with a grin which should have told him that she knew exactly what she was doing and that she had prepared this new metamorphosis of herself just to further enchant and befuddle him. However, she doubted that he was in any fit condition to figure it out—hers were hardly Supracorp tactics.
“I like you like that,” Shannon said. “It makes another Princess Daisy for my collection. And quite a different one than the Princess Daisy I saw recently, just last night in fact.”
She said nothing but she instantly noted his words. Another Princess Daisy? His collection? Her grin faded imperceptibly while Anabel’s eyes brightened as she watched them. She supposed they thought she couldn’t read their words and actions as clearly as if they’d made an announcement. Oh, but it was strange to watch old stories being acted out as if they were fresh and new, and had never happened before. Still, one never knew the endings, only the beginnings were the same.
“I’m trying to count how many people kissed you on both cheeks this morning,” Shannon said when they had finally filled their shopping baskets and found a seat at a café looking out onto the arc of the old port with its motley collection of boats bobbing in front of the tall, narrow houses that edged the opposite side of the little harbor. “There was the butcher and the cheese man and the vegetable lady and the fruit man and the fish lady and the mayor and the policeman and the postman—who else?”
“The baker and his wife, the man who sells newspapers, the old fisherman who used to take me out in his boat and the two art-gallery owners.”
“But the waiter here only shook hands. Why is he so unfriendly?”
“He’s new here—It’s been about eight years since he was hired, so I scarcely know him,” Daisy answered, drinking her Cinzano.
“This is really home for you?”
“It’s as close to a home as I’ve had since my father was killed. And remember, they watched me grow up, every summer from the time I was a child. Nothing changes here … only more tourists.”
“You’re lucky to have a place like this,” he said wistfully.
“And you? What do you have? You complained that you didn’t know anything about me. What do I know about you?” She touched his lower lip with one finger, the quirky lip which she found herself looking at so often, that expressive lip which could be thoughtful, humorous, decisive—she didn’t doubt it could be disapproving, angry—perhaps even merciless?
“I have a few faint memories of being a little boy with a mother and father who loved each other and loved me very much—we were very poor, I realize now, and we didn’t have any family in the mill town where my father worked—at least I don’t remember any. He was a mechanic, and I think that he must have been out of work a lot because I remember that he was around the house much of the time—too much.” He paused, shook his head and sipped his drink. “When I was five they were both killed in an accident—a streetcar—and I grew up in a Catholic orphanage—I was a miserable kid, suddenly all alone, not understanding anything and too much of a handful for anyone to want to adopt me. It wasn’t until I realized that the only way out was working, working much harder than anyone else, getting better marks, being the best at everything, that I changed—and by that time I was too old to be adopted.”
“How old was that?”
“Maybe eight—nine. The nuns put up with a hell of a lot from me.”
“Do you ever go back?”
“The orphanage is closed now. They ran out of orphans—or maybe they relocated it, but I’ve lost track completely. I wouldn’t want to go back anyway. My real life started when I got a scholarship to St. Anthony’s at fourteen.”
Daisy listened attentively, almost painfully, trying to extract the secret meaning of his bare recital. Nobody’s “real” life could begin at fourteen, she thought, too much of what forms the personality of the adult has happened by then. Perhaps she would never know enough about him to be able to share his childhood as he had shared hers. Perhaps it didn’t matter? In any case, they would soon be late for lunch, which would annoy Anabel.
As they walked back, up the steep hill of the Cote de Grace, Shannon was thoughtful. He’d never talked as much about his early years. He sensed that he’d left out something, missed some essential connections. But all he could find to explain himself to Daisy was his favorite quotation from his durable sage.
“Listen—this is the way I feel about life—George Bernard Shaw said it. ‘People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, they make them.’ ” He had stopped walking as he spoke.
“Is that your motto, too?” she asked.
“Yes. What do you think of it?”
“It’s almost probably half true … which isn’t at all bad for a motto,” she said. “You might try to give me a kiss … there’s no one to see us.”
He kissed her for a long moment and Daisy felt that she was growing around him as a climbing rose grows around a sturdy arbor.
“Am I a ‘circumstance’?” she murmured.
“You are a silly question.” He pulled her braids. “I’ll race you back.”
As the three of them ate dinner Anabel asked, “How long can you stay, Patrick?”
“I’m leaving tomorrow,” he said. There was regret in his voice but no touch of indecision.
“But can’t you stay just one more day? You’ve just come,” Anabel protested.
“Impossible. I’ve been out of the office and out of touch for days. The people at Supraco
rp will think I’m dead. It’s never happened before.”
“Don’t you take vacations?” Anabel asked curiously.
“Not out-of-touch vacations. Not even out-of-touch long weekends. It makes them nervous or it makes me nervous; I’m not really sure which.” He laughed, the buccaneer again.
“Daisy, you can stay a while, can’t you?” Anabel inquired hopefully.
“No, she can’t, Anabel,” Shannon said firmly. “She has to get back to New York. There are dozens of things going on—interviews, photographs—my publicity people have been working on stuff that I don’t know about yet. Remember, Supracorp has a ton of money tied up in Princess Daisy. The commercials were only the beginning.”
Daisy bit the inside of her lip in vexation. She was perfectly aware that she had to return, but she bristled to hear Shannon answering a question Anabel had asked her. But there was a gulf between her responsibility to the corporation and being told by Shannon what she could or could not do. Did he, by any grotesque chance, think that now he owned her? Bugger that!
She turned to Anabel, ignoring Shannon’s words. “Actually I really have to go back for Kiki’s wedding.… Nothing Supracorp needs me for is more important.”
“Well, thank heaven that wedding’s taking place,” Anabel said with that slightly condescending appreciation of respectability to which only the most successful of retired courtesans feels entitled. “From what you’ve written me, and what her poor mother has hinted at, I’d say it comes not a minute too soon.”
Princess Daisy Page 51