Princess Daisy (16 page)

In one glance she committed herself irrevocably to protect and cherish her child, knowing that whatever happiness this attachment would bring, it would always be linked to shadows and a vast sadness that she rejected even as it was stitched tightly into her soul.

7

N
one of the servants dared to say a single word to their master. Stash Valensky’s face, as he went about the business of selling the huge Lausanne villa and moving them all to London, was set in lines of pain which made him almost unrecognizable. Even among themselves they only whispered a few words of speculation. The unexplained disappearance of the Princess, with Daisy and Masha, was so threatening to their sense of security that they tried to ignore it. They closed their minds to the mystery. A family quarrel, they prayed, that would be resolved as suddenly, as mysteriously, as it had sprung up.

Stash could do nothing. Any legal action to recover Daisy would instantly become public knowledge, and then the whole story would have to be revealed. He had entirely justified his actions to himself, but, armored with scorn, he accepted the fact that the great majority of people, people who allowed unfortunate accidents to control their little lives, would never understand what he’d had to do about Danielle.

They would never understand how right he had been. How right he
was
. He reasoned that the situation couldn’t last long. Francesca had acted emotionally, out of the shock of the moment, but she’d come to her senses soon and realize that he had merely
shaped
events for her sake and for Daisy’s sake, that he had taken the only rational, the only right course to ensure a happy life for the three of them.

Yet Stash had no idea where Francesca was. By the time he had returned from London and discovered that she was gone, he could only trace her as far as Los Angeles. He
called Matty Firestone. Whatever further information existed, her former agent was the obvious first source.

Matty expressed his almost incredulous contempt for Stash by informing him that
both
of his daughters were very well; in fact, Danielle was beginning to hold her head up nicely for a second or two. Daisy? Oh, yeah, Daisy. She was sitting up and saying mama, but that little Danielle, now she was amazing. He could almost swear she’d smiled at him the third time she saw him.

Stash spoke as coldly as possible. There was nothing to be gained by rising to the bait. Would Francesca see him? Could he write to her? There had been a misunderstanding which could be worked out.

“Well,” said Matty, enjoying himself viciously, “there’s no way on earth that I’m going to let you know where they are. They’re safe and they’re well and they’re not starving and that’s all you get out of me. And it’s more than you deserve.”

Months passed. Stash went to California, but Matty was obdurate. He was acting under orders from his client. Mr. Valensky would get nothing from him. Of course, he could sue for divorce if that’s what he wanted. The newspapers would bless him. There hadn’t been any juicy scandals lately.

Stash spent New Year’s Day of 1953 alone in his great house in London. His wife and child had been gone for just over four months. He was a prisoner in his own home. He knew that if he appeared in public without Francesca the rumors would start. Already he had received telephone calls from the British press requesting interviews with Francesca. Everyone, they assured him, wanted to know how the movie-star-turned-princess was enjoying London. They all clamored to photograph her with Daisy again. The
Life
cover picture was many months out of date. He ran out of credible excuses. He knew that soon his postponements would be futile and that any day now the press would be watching outside the house to see if they could spot a nanny with a pram.

Stash fled to India, where the polo season was in full swing, but this year he didn’t play. There were palaces into which no reporters had ever dreamed of being allowed to penetrate, a dozen maharajas who were delighted to have their old friend as a houseguest. Calcutta was safe during all of January; February and March could be spent in
Delhi, Bombay and Jaipur. But in the spring where would he go?

By April he had had enough. Stash announced that he and Francesca had separated and that she had returned to the United States. He had no plans for a divorce. And he had nothing else to add. In a week, for lack of details, the story faded, disappeared and was soon forgotten.

That summer of 1953 Stash played polo again. The thin line between riding fairly and riding to intimidate grew even more questionable than it had been before, but he still kept on the right side of it. He flung himself into the purchase of new ponies and the establishment of a stable in Kent, within an easy drive of London. He sold the British fighter jets, both the Gloster Meteor and the de Havilland Vampire, which he had bought after the war. He acquired an Argentinian plane, the Pulqui, another fighter jet of a later vintage, which was powered by a Rolls-Royce Derwent engine. He tracked down and bought the most recent model available of the Lockheed XP-80, known as the Shooting Star, a jet which for many years could outmaneuver and outperform almost every other aircraft in the world. He invented excuses to fly these warplanes: keeping his pilot’s license current, recreation and relaxation. What he never
admitted to
himself in the years after Francesca left him was that he would welcome another war. Only an aerial duel with an enemy, with death the inevitable outcome for one of them, would have given him the terrible release he sought. Girls, fresh desirable girls, at the peak of their youth, were everywhere he looked. There was so little struggle and even less pleasure in their capture that he sometimes wondered why he bothered.

Anabel de Fourment was a member of a unique, little-known breed of woman, the great modern courtesan. Few women other than her own kind ever managed to comprehend her ruinous charm. She was not a great beauty, she lacked chic and she was close to forty. Yet, stretching from her nineteenth year there existed a history of notable men who had spent fortunes for her favors. One brief, youthful marriage had convinced her that the role of lover was far more agreeable than the role of wife. Ravishing young women anxiously asked each other what her secret
was, but only a man who had lived with her could have told them.

Anabel wrapped a climate of utter comfort around the man who possessed her. With her possession—and it could belong only to the very rich—came entry into a hitherto unknown country of harmony, ease and a level of good humor which seemed Edwardian in its mellow patina. She made it her business to find and keep the best cook in London. Her home was arranged with such art that no man ever managed to analyze why it was so supremely relaxing: all they felt was that the problems of their world stopped at her door. Anabel didn’t know what a neurosis was. She had no complexes, no phobias, no obsessions. She was never depressed or out of sorts or annoyed or short-tempered. She had iron health and no one had ever heard her complain of so much as a broken fingernail. In fact, she had never been known to speak in anger, yet she managed her domestic affairs with absolute dispatch. Below Stairs she was a benevolent dictator who maintained absolute rule.

She was never, never boring. She was rarely witty, but she was often just plain funny, with a fresh felicity of phrase. She couldn’t remember the punch lines of even a single joke, so she laughed as much the tenth time as the first time she had heard the same man tell one—a laugh that might alone have ensured her fortune, a laugh so generous, so full-bodied, so
admiring
that to hear it was to sit at a fireside and expand in its welcoming warmth. She was not shrewd but she understood instinctively why people acted as they did. Anabel was not outstandingly clever nor particularly intellectual, but she had a way of looking at people as she spoke to them which invested the straightforward, uncontrived things she said with significance and grace. She always asked precisely the questions a man was most anxious to answer. Perhaps it was her intensely personal voice, perhaps the rhythm of the words themselves, that explained the sense of utter agreeableness men found in the way she expressed herself. They looked forward to a peaceful chat with Anabel as they never looked forward to a
tête à tête
with women known to be far more brilliant and sparkling.

Anabel de Fourment had a
bounty
which made her only average prettiness seem like beauty. Her skin was flawless, and so were her teeth. Her hair was straight and Titian red and always incredibly clean. She had a wide, happy mouth,
a rather long nose and nice gray green eyes, remarkable only for their kindness. Her body was so soft and supple, so subtly perfumed, so well-tended, that it was unimportant that she was always just a little too plump. Her breasts were sumptuous and her bottom was full and dimpled and no man ever noticed that she was short-waisted and just a bit dumpy.

Anabel had been born to an improvident French portrait painter, Albert de Fourment, the black sheep of a good, old provincial family of minor nobility. Her mother, a fey, rebellious daughter of a stuffy English lord, was an art student at the Slade who had hung around the fringes of Bloomsbury, trying wildly to be let into that feverish, incestuously tangled circle, but found herself only marginally accepted as an artist’s model, valued for her beauty but judged of little talent. She married the first real artist who asked her, only to discover that his was merely a small talent, too, scarcely greater than her own.

Their only masterpiece was their daughter Anabel, whom they brought up on a diet of crusts and caviar. Anabel’s earliest memories combined, in a confusing mixture of place, delicious, improvised meals in a shabby Paris studio where there was always enough wine for the multitude of guests, even if the food ran out, and Christmas visits to a grand English country house. There the little girl was allowed up for Boxing Day dinner, and looked with wonder at the grownups wearing evening gowns and funny paper hats, pulling snapping crackers and blowing horns at each other as if they were as young as she. As she grew older she decided, very quickly, that she liked the ease of her parents’ bohemian life but didn’t like being poor: that she liked the wealth of her grandparents, but didn’t like doing what was expected of her.

Her only marriage, at sixteen, was a mistake. No amount of money could compensate for being as bored as she had been, Anabel decided. After her divorce at nineteen, she had been discovered by the first of the men who would be able to afford the enormous private extravagance of keeping Anabel. He was a member of the House of Lords, a friend of her grandfather’s, a distinguished man in his sixties to whom she remained faithful for the last ten years of his life, years that were the best he’d ever known. It was he who introduced her to the succulent details of her true career, he who patiently educated her in the complex expertise of wine and food and cigars, he who
hired a clever Frenchwoman to “maid” her, he who took her to Phillips of Bond Street and trained her to recognize and use only the best Georgian silver, he who explained why the banked fires of old, rose-cut diamonds were so much more becoming to her than anything from Cartier no matter how sumptuous. It was during those years with him that she learned that old money, aristocratic money, was the kind of money she understood. She hated all that was flashy and modern and obvious. The ambience she created always had, lingering in its perfumed leisure, the honeyed graciousness of some other better time than the present.

Anabel was not a daytime woman. She slept very late, lunched alone and spent much of every afternoon regulating the perfect functioning of her household and arranging large bunches of flowers in great, seemingly careless bouquets which gave all her rooms the feeling of being inside a Renoir. To her cook’s jealous dismay, she particularly enjoyed marketing, personally picking out the ripest fruit, the best meat, the most aromatic cheeses. The merchants who enjoyed her custom saved their finest produce for her because Anabel de Fourment not only paid for quality but she made the transaction a pleasure in itself. She entertained frequently; small dinner parties of an interesting composition. The men were always invited by her protector, the women by Anabel. These women were wellborn—or at least always seemed to be—but either they were not English or they were not members of London society. They were a worldly, raffish, reckless, amusing lot and they set Anabel off as a collection of costume jewelry would set off one perfect gem Her dinner parties became a delightful club to which only a few important men belonged, a club whose very existence was a secret. When Anabel needed a woman friend for woman talk, which wasn’t often, she could always count on the members of her loyal, if unconventional coterie.

Somehow Anabel never looked chic or even elegant in her expensive day clothes. She knew it and didn’t care in the slightest. She was at her best at twilight, in her own house. There she was superb. She spent a fortune on what her lingerie maker called “at-home garments,” long robes of velvet, silk, chiffon and lace, of no particular period or style, brilliantly designed to expose the wonderful skin of her bosom with a flattery so subtle that it was never recognized. Her underclothes and nightgowns were custom-made
for her with equal skills from a treasury of fabrics. Her bed linens were those of a queen and on them occurred an astounding number of what Anabel called, but only to herself, “nice, comfy fucks.” She didn’t much care about sex. She was a courtesan, not a full-blown
grande amoureuse
, a type who could be so showy and drearily full of troublesome passion, always getting involved and making messes. The worst thing that could happen to her, she knew, would be to fall profoundly in love. That was not at all her line of country. Young, ardent men were as schoolchildren to her, schoolchildren on whom she had no time to waste. Oh, she loved the sensuality of being made love to, but sexuality was another story—hardly worth the trouble it took. She purred and sighed and moaned softly and thought that really it
was
rather nice.