Princess Daisy (50 page)

“I didn’t know that.”

“It’s a very important one,” Daisy said wisely, tweaking a lock of his red hair. “And you can wish on a plane, too, if you really think it’s a star, but only as long as you’re in a car moving in the same direction as the plane.”

“I’ll remember that,” North said with rue in his voice, the wistfulness of falling leaves, a sad, autumnal tone he’d never used before.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Absolutely nothing. Everything’s perfect.”

“Yes … I know what you mean.” Daisy was thoughtful. “It is a problem.”

The next morning while they were still asleep, the phone by the bed rang.

“You didn’t leave a wake-up call, babe, did you?” North muttered, confusedly, after the phone had rung several times, dragging them both from their dreams.

“No, no,” Daisy sighed, reaching with acrid resignation for the insistent phone.

“Don’t answer it!” He put his hand tightly over hers.

“North … you know what it must mean,” Daisy said urgently.

“Leave it! We can have one more day.” She listened carefully to his voice, torn between the honest urge to shut out the world and his instant inescapable response to the continuing summons of the phone. Daisy evaluated what she heard and picked up the receiver while she smiled at him with love, regret and understanding, so mingled that they formed one cloud of feeling, so bittersweet that her voice trembled.

“Hello Arnie. No, no, you didn’t wake me—I had to get up to answer the phone.”

19

S
arah Fane, in Ram’s considered opinion, was both more and less than he had hoped she would be when he had acted on his decision to investigate her as a candidate for marriage, months ago in the early spring of 1976. She pleased him rather better than he thought she had any right to, since she did not fulfill all his requirements for a wife. True, she had been most carefully brought up and she was accustomed to holding her own in the great world as she had seen it, as a future debutante, in its country hunting-fishing-shooting manifestations. In this he found her irreproachable, neither too sophisticated nor too provincial. Yet, according to Ram’s calculations, according to any reasonable analysis of what any woman, much less a young girl, could hope for from the attentions of an excessively eligible bachelor such as he, she should have been prepared to adore him, as Miss Fane, the Honorable Miss Fane, did not At least not visibly.

She was a flirt. A damned hard, cold, calculating flirt. And she was a beauty, a damned hard, cold, ravishing blonde beauty of the kind that has always been known as the “English Rose,” a kind whose unblemished perfection of feature, whose dainty pink-and-white coloring, whose lovely lips and candid eyes, has caused many a man to curse the falseness of the sweet exterior that concealed a temperament and a will worthy of Queen Victoria. Ram wondered how he could ever have suspected that Sarah Fane had intended to skip the Season. She was going to have it
all
, not just Queen Charlotte’s Birthday Ball, dressed in her long white gown and long white gloves, but
Royal Ascot and Henley as well. She was invited to every important private dance that would be given from May to July, and there would be six hundred guests at her own dinner dance in July. After the dancing Season was over, she had planned to go to Goodwood for Race Week, Cowes for the Regatta, and Dublin for the International Horse Show. When Ram pointed out that Cowes Week and the Dublin Show overlapped by several days, she only smiled beautifully and explained how she intended to attend almost three-quarters of each celebration by leaving the Isle of Wight for Ireland right after the Royal Yacht Squadron’s Ball. “It would be a pity to miss Dublin, Ram, now that my parents have finally admitted that I’m old enough to go,” she said with a ravishing smile which Ram only wished he could say was too practiced, a smile he had to admit was both innocent and unspoiled. Her prettiness was of the kind which would never slide into mere decorativeness but rather would grow greatly distinguished as she aged—and she even knew
that
.

Sarah Fane’s last three years had been spent at the Villa Brillantmont, the Lausanne finishing school which still provides a rapidly vanishing minority of upper-class girls with a polished education, excellent French and friends culled from the richest families around the world. As far as Ram was concerned, its chief function had been to serve as a quarantine that kept Sarah from being overexposed to London.

Brillantmont had confirmed Sarah’s opinion that almost all girls fell into two categories: those who wanted to get out of school and find some exciting, glamorous job, and those who wanted only to free themselves of chaperones as soon as possible and enter into a giddy whirl of romantic adventure. Both categories she judged were equally self-deluding. However, she was delighted that they didn’t understand, as clearly as she did, that the first step in any future life was the right marriage. For some it could be merely an acceptable marriage, for others a good marriage. For herself she contemplated only the
exceptional
marriage, even taking into account the fact that in any given year only a few exceptional marriages were made. She added up her assets, without false modesty, and decided that she was entitled to the very best.

Sarah Fane despised the relative poverty she saw gradually enveloping the English upper classes. She felt personally offended by the fact that she’d been born into a society
that had virtually undergone a bloodless revolution, a socialist society with the name of a monarchy.

But, she reminded herself, there was no point in being petulant. The 1970s wouldn’t go away because she found them odious. The trick was to evade them, to escape them, to ensure a life that would come as close as possible to being the life she
should
have led by right.

From Brillantmont, Sarah had closely observed the elaborate cotillion of each London Season as she waited for her year to come. She had concluded that the best marriages were those made during a girl’s first year out, while she was still a novelty. The expression “post-deb” actually made her feel a pang of revulsion—could there be anything more bedraggled?
Timing
. Timing was the secret, she thought as she sat at her desk, going over the guest list for her ball. She put down her pen to add up the months. She had the entire spring and summer of 1976, lasting through September if she went north for the great Scottish balls. Then, of course, to London for the Little Season which continued until Christmas. After that came the exodus to country houses. With the coming of the spring of 1977, the focus of the year would change and it would begin to belong to the next crop of girls who would be coming out. So a mere nine or ten months, in reality, were all that existed of the best part of her debutante year.

That increasingly rare and elusive species, the eligible English bachelor, with great wealth and solid background, often waited until they were well into their early forties before they were brought to the altar. Some, too many, never married. No fools they, she thought, tightening her dainty pink lips over her faultless teeth in a momentary grimace. They never went out of style: a man could be sixty-five, ugly, bad tempered and boring and he was still a catch if he had a good position in the world. As for the bachelors who were distinguished chiefly by the fact that they were someone’s heir, they wouldn’t do for her at all, living, as they did, on overdrafts and expectations. Nor was she attracted by those possessors of ancient names who formed syndicates to open flashy new restaurants or discotheques. The young lord as a saloon keeper struck Sarah Fane as an unacceptable prospect, quite as bad as those who, for financial reasons, became photographers or film producers and pretended it was merely a whimsical lark. In her eyes this substantially diminished their value, even if they enjoyed worldly success. Nor would she be
happy as the chatelaine of a great house who had to allow the public to come in and look around, at so much a head, in order to keep the roof in repair. A mug’s game, that. Why be a Marchioness if you had to run a roadside attraction?

How did she feel about Ram Valensky, Sarah asked herself, pushing the list aside? Ever since he had invited himself to visit for a weekend, he had shown certain signs of becoming attached, although never quite enough for her to consider him as a declared suitor. He had been one of the great catches of the country for seven or eight years now, and, so far, he had easily resisted capture. He was certainly handsome, in his steely, slim, aristocratic way, with those intelligent gray eyes which looked at her with keen interest yet cool appraisal.

She couldn’t help but enjoy seeing herself reflected in all her immaculate prettiness in the expression of measured approbation on his dark, aquiline face. He had just enough grave, quiet distinction; he approached life in a way she shared—he, too, felt a desire to get the best out of what was left to people of their kind. She liked the way he held his shotgun, at a lazily alert angle, neither too tensely nor too casually. He danced adequately for a man who didn’t like to dance, and he rode superbly. And he was a great gentleman. Of course he didn’t have a sense of humor, but humorless people were easier to deal with in the long run. Sarah Fane had little tolerance or need for humor.

From a purely objective point of view, and Sarah Fane was nothing if not objective, there were a great many things right about Ram. His age was ideal: at thirty-two a man was ready to settle down. From her father’s grunts and offhand remarks, she judged that his fortune, the vastness of which was so often the subject of speculation and rumor, must be remarkably solid. Sarah had great respect for her father’s money sense, and he was as closely informed as it was possible to be about Ram’s financial position since they did a great deal of business together. Her mother was the genealogical expert in the family and she had indicated in her vague but fully conversant way that Valensky, while not an English name, was quite good enough, joined as it was to the Woodhill side of the family. A trifle unorthodox perhaps, but quite sound, and indeed one mustn’t be stuffy, especially since his father Stash Valensky had flown with her father during the war. Her mother wouldn’t have said anything more approving if she
had been discussing the heir to the throne. In fact, she had even been known to sniff at the House of Windsor, when she had a genealogical rampage going. And how fortunate it was that his father was dead. With Ram, one knew exactly where one stood in respect to those death duties which could hang over other eligible prospects indefinitely.

She didn’t know about Ram’s sensuality, Sarah Fane reflected absently. She had always reserved sensuality for some time in the future. She feared and respected the powers of sensuality, thinking of it as a priceless coin in the game of life which should never be played unless it were the very last coin you spent in order to ensure the future. Sensuality, poorly handled, was clearly responsible for bad marriages. Thank God her sensuality was no problem and never had been. In her opinion, uncontrolled sensuality was for people who couldn’t afford luxuries.

Ram Valensky was quite possibly her best shot, Sarah Fane decided. Hers and that of every other girl who was hoping to marry as well as she intended to. But he was far from a sitting duck. He behaved more like an inquisitive, measure-taking eagle. As she thought that, she decided definitely not to ask him to be her escort at Queen Charlotte’s Ball. She knew that he expected to be asked, as he had been asked year after year by other hopeful girls. A marvelously guileless expression spread over her pure features and lit her lovely, clear blue eyes as she imagined Ram’s reaction to being excluded from the first important event of her year. It was the best idea she’d had all morning, she told herself, and returned to her guest lists with renewed zest.

Reluctantly, in spite of his well-concealed rage, Ram began to respect Sarah Fane. He suspected every move she made, but nothing she did or said ever betrayed the glacier-hard calculation of her maneuvers.

Her manner toward him was admirable. Instead of the melting and preening he had every right to expect from a young and inexperienced girl to whom attention was being paid by a man of his stature and desirability, she presented an unwavering picture of placid, sunny charm. She almost, but not quite, treated him as just a friend of her father’s, younger than the others but still not inordinately interesting to her. She thanked him for his flowers on a note of gratitude that indicated precisely that they were far from the only flowers she had received that day, yet her thanks
never dipped into the perfunctory. She let him take her to the theater and to restaurants almost as often as he asked, but somehow other couples always joined them so that he was never alone with her. “But Ram, dear, it’s always like this during the Season—you know that,” she lightly reproached him on the solitary occasion on which he protested that he did not enjoy being part of an eternal crowd. After that, he accepted the flock of young people with whom she was surrounded without any sign of impatience. I know her game, he thought, as she teased some young man with one of her classic smiles or delicious pouts, but he found himself wondering more and more if he really did. Ram decided it was advisable to be seen with other young women: there were many he took out or served as escort to during the months of the Season, treating them with the same, exactly the same, careful, restrained, lordly gallantry as he did Sarah.

The Honorable Sarah Fane was having a splendid Season. All the magazines and newspapers agreed that she was among the most beautiful debutantes of the year and her name was proposed as a possible bride for Prince Charles, despite the fact that he favored her with no more—and no less—notice than he did other young ladies. However, finding brides for Prince Charles was a permanent national pastime. April and May passed and June came, with no change in Sarah’s bright, serene attitude, as she continued to float through a series of parties and dances, always faultlessly dressed in clothes chosen to play against her pink-and-white beauty. Rather than the obvious pastels, that were almost mandatory for debs, she leaned toward deep dusty blues and rich emerald greens, severely cut, never too sophisticated gowns above which white shoulders gleamed with a special distinction. She never mentioned to Ram the almost unending parties to which she was invited, unless, as she did occasionally, she asked him to go with her. Her bland reticence was more infuriating than any amount of information would have been. He waited for her to boast and he waited in vain. He waited for her to mention the other girls he saw, and again he waited in vain. She was a formidable adversary, he finally admitted to himself. He would have preferred to have found the proper wife embodied in someone less sure of herself, and yet he was flattered to think that his choice, now that it had been made, was of an exceptional young woman. It began to seem inevitable that, rather than some
unformed girl who would have fallen automatically into his hands, he should have picked a girl who knew her own worth and disdained to sell herself cheaply.