Princess Daisy (9 page)

Stash, released from his bondage, grasped the kneeling woman around her waist with both his arms and, without removing his penis from her tight sheath, lifted her up and turned her so that she was under him. With one gigantic thrust he poured himself out into her while he bit her lips mercilessly and crushed her breasts in both hands. As soon as he could breathe again, he said, “Don’t you ever dare to ride me again! I’ll do the riding from now on!”

“Oh, ho,” she muttered in a harsh whisper, “so now it’s you who gives the orders? But, my friend, only one of us is satisfied … so relatively speaking, the lesson has not been learned.”

“No?” She realized that his penis had never left her vagina. It was growing again, growing bigger than before. He ground it into her waiting body with unsteady strokes, until she reached a violent orgasm. And still he rode her, swollen with blood, pausing only once to wipe his sperm from her wet pubic hair with her black lace gown. This second time he had already learned much he needed to know and he took his time in pleasing himself, ignoring her protests that he was hurting her, that he must stop a minute, that he was too big. His second orgasm was much more intense than the first, coming, it seemed, not just from his penis and his testicles, but from his whole spinal column. The fourteen-year-old boy lay, momentarily exhausted, beside the voluptuous, satiated form of the woman.
Neither spoke as the fire crackled in the fireplace. It was dark outside.

“Claire,” Stash said. “I’m going to take a bath in your tub. Ring the maid for hot chocolate and bring it to me there. And then …”

“Then …?” she interrupted, astonished at the voice of command which came from the youth to whom she had just given his first lesson in love.

“And then we’ll have another lesson in relativity. In the bedroom. This couch of yours is too slippery for me.” His voice was rough with new authority.

“But … you’re crazy!”

He took her hand and put it on his penis. The hot sticky organ was already beginning to rise and fill. It moved under her touch like an animal. “Don’t you want me to bathe?” he asked. “Shall we just go to the bedroom now?”

“No, Stash—no—go take your bath. I’ll ring for the chocolate.” She hastily covered herself with the bedraggled gown.

“Don’t forget the pastries.”

Every day of that Christmas vacation, Stash cut short his skiing and spent all afternoon in the rose-red sitting room or the lavender bedroom of the Marquise de Champery, leaving only when it was time to go home for dinner. She wrote a note to Titiana to say that a head cold prevented her from joining the usual gathering at the chalet and gladly gave up her dinner engagements to preserve the fiction.

Stash became familiar with the long slow strokes, the quick jabs, the excruciatingly disciplined pauses which only made them both more eager, the quiver, the holding back, the pulses beating together—all the ebb and flow of making love. The Frenchwoman taught him how to please her, and all the other women he would possess, with a sensuality that explored every detail. She taught him to be shameless, as she was, so that all the prohibitions of conventional sexuality never had a chance to make an impression on him. She taught him the many delicate uses of his mouth, his tongue, his teeth and his fingers moving urgently between her legs. She taught him the importance of patience and stealthy gentleness. She taught him nothing of tenderness or sentiment … between them there
was none of that … she was not false, whatever else she was. When they parted, as he left to go back to school, there were no promises exchanged or backward looks. He was a youth, she a woman who did not permit herself the luxury of believing for an instant that he would come back to her for anything except her body … and then only if he did not find another he preferred. But she knew that in the entire lifetime which stretched ahead of Stash Valensky, she would occupy a place that no other woman would ever fill. When he was an old man and had forgotten a hundred other women, he would still remember the rose satin and the firelight and the lesson in relativity.

After the boy’s departure, the head cold of Madame la Marquise vanished. However, she decided not to return every day to the claustrophobic tea-time group at the Princess Titiana’s. Instead, she took up skiing. In the next decade, as her husband persistently, unforgivably lingered on the verge of death, Claire de Champery deserved credit for having been the instructor of an entire legion of naive village youths, those Alpine ski instructors who are, today, legendary animals of pleasure. Even if they have never heard of her, they owe much to her teaching, lessons which have been handed down from one generation of ski-school heroes to another.

In 1929 Stash Valensky graduated from Le Rosey. He spent that summer on a vast ranch in Argentina, owned by the father of one of his classmates. The finest polo ponies of the world were bred in South America and many of the best players lived there. They came up from Argentina to compete with the American or British teams, often bringing a string of forty ponies which they sold after the season for great prices. The golden age of polo lasted from 1929 to 1939, those years during which Tommy Hitchcock, Winston Guest, Cecil Smith, Pat and Aiden Rourk, the brothers from Ireland, Jai, the Maharajah of Jaipur, Eric Pedley from Santa Barbara and other equally great players were all in competition, all marvelously mounted, all devoting their lives to the game.

At Rolle, the spring and fall campus of Le Rosey, and during his summer vacations in Davos, Stash had become a consummate horseman. Now, in the Argentine, he discovered why. Polo might have been invented for him. Had he another life to live, he would have chosen to be Akbar, the Mogul ruler of India in the 1500s who loved polo so
much that he played it in the dark, with balls of smoldering wood, galloping after the trail of sparks they left behind them. After three months of constant practice, in the “pit” and on the field, his hosts felt it safe to pay Stash the honor of asking him to play in a practice match. Filled with jubilation he wrote home and explained that it was absolutely necessary for him to extend his visit for another three months, since the South American polo season was just beginning.

Princess Titiana was desolate that her son was staying away for so long, but Prince Vasily took the request with equanimity. What else was there for a boy to do, after all?

“My dearest, had there not been the Russian Revolution or the Great War, your Alexander would have made a splendid cavalry officer. At least polo is becoming to a prince.” He deposited a large sum of money in Stash’s Buenos Aires bank account and wrote to him that he must buy his own ponies and no longer depend on borrowed mounts.

The essential element in a great polo player, once he has established the perfection of his horsemanship and his coordination, is raw courage. Stash Valensky, who had now reached his full height of six feet, two inches, was perfectly trained for the sport, but more importantly, his warrior spirit
needed
it.

Beginning in that summer of 1929 when he was eighteen, Stash roamed the world, following the polo seasons: England in the summer, Deauville in August, autumn in South America, winter in India, spring in the United States. With him went his household: his valet, an Englishman called Mump, his grooms, his trainer and, of course, most important of all, his ponies.

Mump’s duties extended beyond the care of the Prince’s wardrobe. He spent as much time at the florist’s and delivering notes by hand as he did on his master’s boots. Stash, who had been so precociously indoctrinated into carnal love, spent no time laying siege to marriageable virgins or even young ladies of good reputation, virgin or not He had early learned a taste for another kind of woman, and such women were inevitably the wives of other men. A complication, but not one which couldn’t be managed, particularly with the participation of Mump—who made sure that letters were discreetly delivered and
received; that flowers only arrived before or after a party, so as not to arouse suspicion; that no lady who found herself alone for a minute in Stash’s apartments would ever stumble upon evidence of another.

Stash discovered that polo had a way of confining him to a single love affair at a time, since the lady in question invariably considered it her precious prerogative to drive out to the field and watch the teams practice. Decency demanded that two women were not observed, each parked in a great open car, cheering him on at the same time. However, the teams never lingered long in any one country, and the glowing general’s wife in Brazil never knew about the young maharanee in Delhi; the exquisite English countess had never heard rumors of the lovely San Franciscan who came out every day to the Old Monterey Polo Club.

The only interruption in the gilded years of pleasure Stash led after his graduation from Le Rosey came when Princess Titiana, worn and wasted, yet struggling to the end, died in 1934. Stash had always visited his parents in Davos twice a year and neither of them ever brought themselves to comment on the dash and heedlessness with which he lived. It made them too happy to see him full of health, brio and the joy of the chase. Now Stash paused long enough to realize that his father was sixty-five, a devastated man whose reason for living had vanished. For the next few months Stash remained in Davos with Prince Vasily, curbing his impatience to resume his life. Soon he saw that his father was slipping away, giving up, coming to an end of the exile that he had imposed on himself, an exile that had preserved his fortune yet left him only half a man, able only to watch, but never to participate in the great events of history, self-marooned, on the heights of Davos-Dorf.

After the death of Prince Vasily Valensky, the new heir found that besides the diminished but still great amount of Russian gold that had been deposited in Swiss banks twenty-two years before, he had inherited a huge houseful of terrified servants, all of whom had come from Russia with his parents and were now well into middle age. None of them knew anything but service to the Valenskys. Their greatest fear was of what was to become of them. Stash was their feudal lord as far as it was possible in the modern world. They neither accepted nor aspired to any other point of view. Their children had been brought up as
Swiss citizens, but nothing could shake the need these old Russians had to cling together in an atmosphere that reminded them of a country as remote as drowned Atlantis.

They were his responsibility now, Stash realized, with a grimace of astonishment. He had never considered what he would do with them if his parents weren’t alive, never once thought realistically about the future. Now he called their leaders, Zachary, the former chasseur, and Boris, the former sledge driver, to him.

“I dislike Davos,” he told them. “It has too many sad memories. Yet some of you have children in Swiss schools. What would you think if I were to move to a lower part of Switzerland—and take you all with me? Would you want to come or would you prefer to stay on here? In either case you all will continue to be paid during my lifetime.”

“Prince Alexander,” answered Zachary, “we have no home that is not your home. We are not too old to move, but we are far too old to change.”

Soon Stash found the villa outside of Lausanne and, within a short time he had reproduced there the interior of the palace he had never seen in St. Petersburg, just as his father had brought it intact to Davos. But the Lausanne establishment was free of any trace of the sickroom, empty of the chatter of invalids, swept bare of any nostalgia except that which might cling to the increasingly valuable paintings and furniture. The treasure of icons remained sleeping in their velvet boxes, with the exception of the one his mother had always loved best, which Stash kept in his bedroom, and the humble ones the servants hung in their own rooms. Stash spent only a month or two of every year in Lausanne, just enough to reassure the servants, but they maintained the great house as if he were expected home every night.

In 1934 polo and women were almost eclipsed by a new passion. The lure of flying caught him after the English summer polo season had ended. A badly broken leg, souvenir of a match in September, had kept Stash from going on to South America that year and, on the 20th of October, 1934, he was among those who gathered at dawn at Mildenhall, Suffolk, to watch the start of the MacRobertson Race, from England to Australia, the single greatest sporting event in the short history of aviation. He was
immediately caught up in the thrilling, exultant tension of the crowd of sixteen thousand, as it watched twenty of the finest, most experimental aircraft of the period take off toward the East and the first checkpoint at Baghdad. That same day, still on crutches, Stash joined the London Aero Club, an offshoot of the Royal Aero Club. By the following week, he had convinced his doctor that he no longer needed crutches, and he immediately drove to the Aero Club for instructions. He soloed after six hours in a little training biplane, the de Havilland Moth, and after another three hours of solo flying, followed by an examination, he earned his pilot’s license.

Stash bought a monoplane, the Miles Hawk, and began the pursuit of speed which was to obsess him for the next six years. He entered his first race in France the next year, the Coupe Deutsch de la Meurthe, flying a Caudron racer, small-winged, slim and built of wood, with a supercharged Renault engine, a plane which could, at its peak, reach a record-breaking 314 miles per hour. In 1937 he went to the United States to compete in the Bendix Trophy race and returned to try again in 1938, to become one of the ten men to lose to Jacqueline Cochrane, a woman who set the coast-to-coast endurance record in ten hours, twenty-seven minutes, fifty-five seconds. He flew Severskys; he flew the madly dangerous, tiny Mignet Pou-du-Ciel or Sky Louse. He flew anything with wings, and he always flew alone, a predilection which prevented him from entering many of the distance competitions which required a flying partner. But being alone in the air was more than half of the joy of flying to Stash. It provided such a total contrast to the team play of polo. The sky meant solitude, a
solitude
which had become almost impossible to find on the ground. The next four years, spent in headlong pursuit, chasing almost mindlessly after speed records in the sky and women and polo balls on the ground, were scarcely interrupted when Stash read, one day at the end of September 1938, of Chamberlain’s return from Munich with the promise of “peace in our time.”