Normally when riding out to face an adversary, Guy’s blood would be fizzing with exhilaration. For, more than anything else, he loved a fight. Embattlement was his normal state of mind. He woke each morning from dreams of bloody conquest ready to charge through city boardrooms leaving a trail of wounded enterprises in his wake. Caparisoned by Savile Row, laved and barbered by Trumpers, he saw himself as a twentieth-century merchant prince. In truth he was a robber baron although his lawyers would have crucified the first man bold enough to say so.
Guy could not bear to lose. He had to be the best at buying and selling; the best at laying waste. His horses must run faster, his yacht be the most splendid. The racing cars he sponsored only came second under his patronage once. ‘Show me a good loser,’ he would bawl into the driver’s sweating, oil-streaked face, ‘and I’ll show you a loser.’
But although he bought and sold men like so many peanuts and bent whole companies and countless women to his will, there was one area in which, up until now, he had not yet succeeded. Even in this instance, though, the word ‘failed’ was never uttered. The love of Guy’s life, and his greatest torment, was his daughter Sylvie.
Naturally when Felicity first became pregnant Guy had wanted a boy. He was so used, even in those early days, to getting his own way, that the birth of a girl had devastated him. The measure of his disappointment at this insult to his manhood alarmed his wife, her parents, the hospital staff and anyone else who came within singeing distance. For all he knew, (too late, too late), it had even alarmed the baby.
Guy simmered down over the first few weeks but resignation was not in his nature. He despatched someone to glean the latest information on genetic research from scientific and medical journals and bought the best advice available. It seemed from what he had read that the point had been as good as reached when it was possible to choose the sex of one’s child in advance, and he did not intend to be cheated by nature a second time. But, as it turned out, all the gleaning and expenditure, and bullying confrontations with specialists, were a waste of time and money - for Felicity never conceived again.
Guy had taken his first mistress during his wife’s pregnancy and suspected that Felicity’s consequent wilful refusal to give increase was a deliberate act of revenge. Later, when this point of view became medically indefensible, he was faced with what was, for a man of his sensibilities, an appalling dilemma. Either he went through life the father of one female child or he began again with another partner, thus announcing to the world that his marriage was a failure.
To understand the absolute impossibility of such an admission would be to understand what an astonishing, breast-beating triumph his capture of Felicity had been in the first place.
Her family, of course, had seen him for what he was. They had investigated his background and been appalled. She, fresh from a Geneva finishing school, presented with a collection of suitable young and not so young men had found them all pallid in comparison to Guy - who had thrilled and alarmed her in equal measure. Aware of this, he skilfully kept the fear quotient at just the right level. High enough to keep her intrigued, low enough for her to believe that he was tameable if the right girl took him in hand. She was wrong and he destroyed her.
But their life together, if one could so call such an empty baroque extravaganza, must be seen to continue. He would not be bought off and they had all tried. No one would ever say of him he could not hold what he had won.
His daughter’s childhood held no interest. He hardly noticed her. There had been nannies (one or two deliciously satisfactory), and occasionally other children in the house. Once Guy came home and found hordes of them with balloons and carnival hats and a man in a harlequin suit riding a one-wheeled bicycle. Sylvie had thanked him gravely on that occasion for a magnificently attired four-foot-high doll that he had never seen before. But mainly she did not impinge and how could Guy, who had no imagination, perceive the passionate longing for love and praise or just simply attention that possessed his daughter’s lonely heart?
And then, just after her twelfth birthday, everything changed. He remembered the day and time almost to the minute. She had been asked to play something on the piano. Music was on the curriculum at her very expensive boarding school so music she had to learn. Sylvie had no talent for the subject but, compelled to have lessons and practise during term time, had inevitably acquired a rudimentary technique. She had chosen ‘The Robin’s Return’, an old-fashioned, tinkling rather sentimental tune. Guy had been leaning on the mantelpiece wondering if he had been right in sensing a wind of change in Blue Chip Trusts when he glanced across at the white Steinway and saw, as if for the first time, his daughter’s face.
Pale, intense, rigid with anxiety. She was frowning and her lips were bitten together in a narrow line of concentration. Thin arms arched high over the keyboard, her shining brown silky little girl’s hair was caught back from her face in a velvet-covered slide. She had been wearing a blue and white striped dress with a large white collar and bow that had fluttery, dark blue streamers. All these things appeared to Guy with such vivid and dazzling clarity that he might only that second have been awarded the gift of sight. And then, before he could become even slightly familiar with this almost hallucinogenic prospect, a second and even stranger thing occurred.
He became overwhelmed by a torrent of extraordinary emotion. Drowning in it, swept away, he gripped the mantelpiece, deeply alarmed. He thought he was ill so violently did his body react. His heart felt as if it were being squeezed, his guts looped and tangled. And more, and worse. For when this wave of feeling ebbed away it left behind a terrible residue. It left him with the gift of understanding.
He received and appreciated, compressed into the briefest space of time, all of his daughter’s despair, her aloneness, her desperate hunger for love. And then knew an immediate agony of protective tenderness towards her. The newness and strength of this pain, that any father could have told him was par for the course, pierced him like a knife. He drank in her downbent serious face and realised how rarely he had seen her smile. (How could he not have noticed that?) He felt unbearably moved at this revelation of her sadness and then consumed by a desperate need to make amends. To offer all his love.
Yes - he recognised the emotion, even though he had never received any himself, for what it was. He vowed to give her everything. Find time to do all sorts of things, to make up for the lost years. When the music faltered and, after a few more hesitant notes, stopped entirely, he applauded, striking his hands together too loudly. Felicity stared, amused and disbelieving.
‘That was very good, Sylvie. Marvellous, darling! You’re coming on really well.’ He was surprised how naturally the words sprang from his mouth. He, who never praised a living soul. He waited for her response, indulging in a little fatherly contemplation, imagining her pleasure at this enthusiasm. She closed the piano lid gently, got up from her stool and left the room. Felicity laughed.
Guy had pursued his daughter from that moment on. He took her away from boarding school so he could see her every day. Each weekend he devised outings that he thought might please and entertain. He poured presents into her lap or hid them in her room or rolled them up in the napkin by her plate, sick with apprehension lest they should not find favour. She rejected all these attempts at gaining her affection not harshly or vigorously - he could have handled that, there would have been an opening to build on - but simply turning from them with an air of quiet, well-mannered resignation. Occasionally she would look at him and her eyes were like pale blue stones.