She came across no answer to this question in any of her books, though she took to re-reading the Psychology and Genetic Sciences sections with some attention. Eventually, she had to admit to herself that it was simply the case that she alone among princesses lacked a destiny; and then she discovered that the door to her turret was not locked. She used the revelation to put a stop to the chiming of the big clock on the lower landing, and then returned to her room, where she found her clean laundry waiting for her, just inside the doorflap. For some time now there had been no sanitary towels.
A new idea came to her. What if there were other princesses in other towers, scattered here and there, who also waited in vain? Perhaps the stories had simply omitted to tell about her sort of princess, or, simply by chance, she had never received those stories through the doorflap. There might be many princesses to whom nothing had ever happened, and who simply lived in their towers day by day. Perhaps their towers were too far off the beaten track for destiny to find them; or it might be that destiny was a limited commodity, and while every princess waited, not all of them could be accommodated. There might be hundreds—thousands—like her. Who could tell, there might even be more of her kind of princess than the sort for whom destiny finally arrived. She began to see that the problem was with the books, and felt some resentment at her keepers for having provided her with stories which took only part of the truth into account. There was no reason, of course, to write about princesses such as her: a life of waiting without an end was not the stuff that stories were made of, but it did give an unbalanced view and a possibly unreasonable expectation to those princesses whose destiny failed to turn up. The provision of books, she felt, was a mistake. She left a note with her soiled laundry to explain this to her keepers.
One morning, the princess woke to find that Dinah had died in the night. The cat lay at the foot of the bed, as if asleep, but she wasn’t breathing and took no interest when breakfast came through the doorflap. The princess knew about death: she had read about it. She knew that life had its limit, and that beyond the boundary of old age there was an absence of life. She recognised it immediately in Dinah, whom she stroked for old times’ sake. She would miss her only companion—even though it was similar to the ticking of the clock, she had enjoyed Dinah’s purring; the sense and sound of another living thing in her life. But Dinah had reached the boundary of her existence and would purr no more.
The princess carried Dinah across the room and put her through the doorflap, and, as she did so, she had a sudden sense of excitement. Something had happened to Dinah after all these years. Something had happened to her friend, the cat.
The following morning, the princess was woken by a mew. She thought for a moment it was Dinah, and then when she was more fully awake, that she must have been dreaming of her old companion, because she remembered that Dinah was dead. But there was another mew, and when she lifted herself off the pillow, she saw a kitten standing by the doorflap, demanding that someone pay it attention. The princess picked the little creature up and held it in her arms, where it immediately began to purr. So, she thought, Dinah has died, and now there’s another cat. What a busy life it was.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JENNY DISKI was born in 1947 in London, where she lived most of her life. She was the author of ten novels, five books of travel and memoir, two volumes of essays, and a collection of short stories. Her journalism appeared in the London Review of Books, among other publications. She died in Cambridge in April 2016.
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ALSO BY JENNY DISKI
FICTION
Nothing Natural
Rainforest
Like Mother
Then Again
Happily Ever After
Monkey’s Uncle
The Dream Mistress
After These Things
Apology for the Woman Writing
NONFICTION
Skating to Antarctica
Don’t
Stranger on a Train
A View from the Bed
On Trying to Keep Still
The Sixties
What I Don’t Know About Animals
In Gratitude
CREDITS
COVER DESIGN BY SARA WOOD
COVER ARTWORK © JAREK PUCZEL
COPYRIGHT
Some of these stories previously appeared in the following publications: “The Vanishing Princess” in New Statesman; “Sex and Drugs and Rock ’n’ Roll: Part II” in New Statesman and New Woman; “On the Existence of Mount Rushmore and Other Improbabilities” in London Review of Books; “Bath Time” in Sacred Space (Serpent’s Tail, ed. Marsha Rowe).
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE VANISHING PRINCESS. Copyright © 1995 by The Estate of Jenny Diski. Foreword © 2017 by Heidi Julavits. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
First paperback edition published in Great Britain in 1996 by Phoenix, a division of Orion Books Ltd.
FIRST ECCO PAPERBACK EDITION PUBLISHED 2017.
EPub Edition December 2017 ISBN: 978-0-06-268572-8
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-268571-1
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