Only once did she respond with any show of emotion and that was when, in a renewal of remorse at the years of neglect, Guy had struggled one day during an outing at the zoo to put his shame and regret into words. To unload perhaps, however unfairly, a fraction of the guilt. He had hardly started to speak when she turned on him shouting; ‘Stop it, stop it! I don’t care.’
He had desisted of course and they had spent the rest of the afternoon silent and apart although, he reflected painfully, no more apart than usual. Everywhere he looked that day there seemed to be fathers holding their children by the hand or carrying toddlers shoulder-high. One boy who looked no more than sixteen wore a canvas sling cradling a tiny baby. It was asleep, its scarlet crumpled profile resting on the boy’s hollow chest. I could have done that, thought Guy, looking down in anguish at the narrow parting of his daughter’s hair. Christ - I don’t even remember picking her up.
He never again attempted to burden Sylvie with a declaration of his feelings although he had once struggled to put them in writing. He had not given her the letter of course, just locked it away in his desk drawer with a lock of her hair, some photographs and school reports. As the months and then the years went by his bitter regret inevitably, given her continued indifference, became less sharp. He could not ease up though. Doggedly he conversed till his throat ached; asking questions, making suggestions, commenting on day-to-day affairs. Once he had got the idea that it was Felicity’s presence that was causing the child’s restraint. That if he and Sylvie lived just with each other, they would by some happy miracle of familial osmosis breathe warmth into each other’s lives and hearts. He had suggested it to Sylvie, not caring by that stage that such a move would broadcast to the world the failure of his marriage. She had appeared puzzled, frowned and pondered for a moment then said: ‘But why would I want to do that?’
Then five years ago everything changed again. On the morning of her sixteenth birthday Sylvie disappeared. Walked out of the house as if going to school, never arrived, never came home. Guy, mad with terror, was convinced she had been kidnapped. Then, when no ransom call was made, he concluded that she had been the victim of an accident or murderous attack. He had contacted the police who, once they had been given Sylvie’s age, were irritatingly un-alarmed and said she was probably staying with friends or just wanted to be on her own for a bit.
Knowing this could not possibly be the case, Guy had visited the school and asked if he could talk to anyone with whom his daughter was particularly close. He could not give a name for Sylvie had never discussed her friends nor, for many years, brought any of them home.
A tall girl with narrow, supercilious eyes had been brought to the principal’s office. She informed Guy that Sylvie had always said she couldn’t wait to be sixteen so that she could leave home. ‘She told me,’ said the girl with feigned reluctance, ‘she’d always loathed her parents.’
That night Felicity, home after her third cure and already over the yardarm, heard out her husband’s pain-filled revelation and said: ‘God, you’re so dense about everything except making money. She’s hated us for years.’
Guy had tracked Sylvie down fairly quickly. She was living in a squat at Islington. Quite decent as squats go. Water, electricity, off-cuts of carpet on the floor. He had gone round with the bloodstock papers relating to the three-year-old racehorse that was his birthday gift. She had appeared in the doorway and immediately started to shout and yell abuse at him, almost spitting in his face. After the years of bloodless unresponsive introversion it had been like receiving an electric shock. He had stepped back alarmed, amazed and - yes he had to admit it - exhilarated. Then she had flung the papers over the basement railings and slammed the door. They must have been picked up later, though, for the horse was sold the following month for two-thirds of the original price.
Oddly enough, after becoming almost resigned to what was virtually a non-relationship, this brawling encounter reawakened in Guy all his previous yearnings. He could not believe any of the half dozen sponging troglodytes smirking behind her in the open doorway gave a damn for her wellbeing.
Over the next few years she moved around a lot. Guy employed a firm of private detectives, ‘Jaspers’ in Coalheaver Street, and always knew where she was. She never lived alone, sharing sometimes a mixed flat and occasionally with just one man. These liaisons, if such they were, never lasted long. Guy wrote to Sylvie regularly, asking her to come home, always enclosing a cheque. A very large cheque at Christmas and birthdays. She never replied to the letters but the cheques were always cashed so at least he was still good for something. Once she was twenty-one and could draw on her trust fund, even that small usefulness would be denied him.
Of course she was getting her own back, he thought. She has bided her time. She has waited and waited until she could humiliate and reject me as I, for years, did her. He recognised with an almost elated surge of recognition: She is just like me. And then, with a terrible falling back, And I would never forgive.
He wondered sometimes, to comfort himself, if perhaps her mind had not devised some cold and cruel symmetry. Could she mean this punishment, this banishment to last for precisely twelve years as his had done? She’d be twenty-eight then. Married, perhaps, with children of her own. She might be living anywhere. Abroad even. Thinking this, Guy had the shameful and traitorous notion that he could have borne it better if she had died.
He took to hanging around near her current apartment, discreet and self-conscious, like a thwarted suitor. Once, getting into a cab, she had spotted him in a doorway and gestured with crude and vigorous panache like a lustful navvy. Another time - and this was much worse - he had seen her come out of the building hanging on to the arm of a bored-looking man in a tweed jacket. She had been chattering brightly, laughing up into his face, her whole posture that of someone desperate to please. Half way across the road the man shrugged her off and Guy, even whilst appreciating the irony of the reaction, could have killed him.
Then she disappeared for the last time and much more thoroughly. In receipt of this disturbing intelligence Jasper himself took on the task of trying to trace her. Posing as a debt collector he had called at her last place of residence only to be thrown down the stairs by an Amazonian domestic. A female operative was then employed, at first with equal lack of success.
During this time Guy was in a pit of despair. Until he found himself totally ignorant of his daughter’s whereabouts, he had not appreciated how crucial this knowledge was to his peace of mind. Bitterly estranged from him she might be but at least he had known she was ‘all right’ in the most basic sense of the words. After she vanished he became aware in his days and nights - and especially in his dreams - of a great yawning darkness that, in unguarded moments, threatened to engulf him.
Once when these fears seemed to be almost eating him alive he had briefly thought of talking to the Press. They would find her. ‘GAMELIN HEIRESS VANISHES!’ They had photographs a-plenty on their files, she would be hunted down and flushed out. Someone, somewhere knew where she was. But although such action could hardly damage the father-daughter relationship further, it would surely tip the balance against the chance of any future reconciliation. An eventuality in which Guy, hope triumphing wildly over experience, still unreasonably believed.
Sylvie had been gone about three weeks when the distaff side at Jasper’s picked up a crumb of information. The investigator had the bright idea of booking an appointment with Sylvie’s regular hairdresser. Seated there, her wide-eyed and gushing assumption that Felix and his rollers must be privy to half the top-society secrets in London flattered the stylist’s tongue into looseness. Once he had determined that no one sporting such a ghastly home-made jumper and suburban haircut could possibly be writing a gossip column, he gladly dropped the odd name and juicy titbit for her to take away and thrill her boring little chums with in Ruislip or wherever.