Death in Disguise (9 page)

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.

Two of the items related to Sylvia Gamelin. Apparently she was sick of Hammersmith (‘and who wouldn't be, darling?'), and was moving somewhere quiet, clean and peaceful. Pressed as to the possible place of relocation, Felix replied, ‘She just said the country. And we all know how big that is don't we? She may not even have meant the Home Counties.' Snipping scissors faltered at the enormity of such a prospect.

‘She did say she'd met a marvellous man, tho' whether the two things are connected…'

Although these fragments of information yielded naught for his comfort Guy, starving, fell on them and instructed Jasper's to fan out and redouble their efforts. But no further lead could be discovered and six more sterile months dragged past, affecting Guy adversely. The fierce relish he had once obtained from the grab and grind, and cut and thrust of the market place became transmuted into a numb unfocused longing to inflict pain. This in turn affected the clarity of his judgement. He bought and sold clumsily and, for the first time in twenty years, started to lose money. Then, a few days ago, the letter had arrived.

After the first violent jolt of disbelief, inevitable when something yearned for over a long period of time seemingly drops into the hand, Guy had been overwhelmed with excitement. Although the communication was not in Sylvie's handwriting (was not, in fact, from her at all), it was
about
her and, even better, contained an invitation. Guy made to touch the letter which had come to hold almost talismanic powers for him. It was not where he expected it to be. He tried other pockets, slapping and pulling at his clothes in an excess of panic before remembering that since putting it away he had changed his suit. No matter. He knew the address and every line of the contents by heart.

Dear Mr & Mrs Gamelin, Your daughter has been staying with us for some time now. We will be celebrating her birthday on August the seventeenth and would be happy if you could both be present. Perhaps arriving around seven-thirty? We eat at eight. With kindest regards, Ian Craigie.

Guy had lain awake all the previous night, excited and intrigued, turning over each phrase and intimation in the brief note, extracting solace where he could. The ‘us' consoled him greatly. For a start it didn't sound as if Craigie was the marvellous man for whom Sylvie had left London. The word implied plurality to the extent of at least a wife, perhaps even a family. And there was something a bit formal and middle-aged about ‘your daughter'.

Naturally Guy had not mentioned the invitation to Felicity. Her dislike of Sylvie, the relief she had not troubled to conceal when the child left home, her indifference to her daughter's welfare—she never even mentioned Sylvie's name—made it unthinkable that she should accompany him. Guy decided to say that she was ill. That seemed simplest. And who would be any the wiser?

Danton Morel was one of the best-kept secrets in London. No one who employed him ever told a living soul, so jealously did they guard the advantages his ministrations gave. In spite of this whenever the rich and glamorous, famous and infamous were gathered together in celebration's name, there would most likely be present, taking the collective breath away, at least one example of Danton's sorcery.

His card described him with becoming modesty as
Coiffeur et Visagiste
but the dazzling transformations that his art contrived far exceeded the simple ‘making over' techniques shown in magazines or on television. Danton magicked up not only dramatically transfigured flesh, but also an apparently dramatically transfigured personality too.

As well as these fairy-godfather abilities, Danton was blessed with the most mellifluous cream-and-brandy voice. And when not speaking, the quality of his silence was warmly, encouragingly, receptive. Consequently people felt compelled to tell him things. All sorts of things. Danton would listen, smile, nod and continue on his designing way.

He had started out twenty years ago as a mask-maker and puppeteer and would often ironically reflect that he was still in the same line of business, although his devotees would have been mortified had they known he thought so. His private life was one of extreme simplicity. He lived vicariously, nourished by information received from muddled emotional outpourings, confessions and confidences, and by the descriptions of sybaritic events so much larger than life that his heart would glow with envious excitement. Because he never gossiped everyone assumed he was discreet and in that one respect he was. But he wrote everything down and was now in the tenth year of keeping the diaries that he hoped would make him disreputably wealthy. He was helping himself to some fresh bay leaves when Felicity opened the door. She looked wild. Her hair was standing on end as if she had been tugging at it, and he could have been a stranger so blank was her stare.

Once upstairs she began pacing about, lamenting; long expensively tanned legs flicked in and out of her housecoat like deep-brown scissors. She had thrust the letter into his hand the moment he entered the house. Danton, having read it, sat down and waited.

‘The deceit of it Danton…
the deceit
… My own daughter! As if I wouldn't want to see her…'

Felicity gasped out the words. Her shoulders twitched and she kept brushing at her arms as if being attacked by a swarm of insects. She said again: ‘My own daughter!' in a loud accusatory voice as if Danton were somehow at fault. She had awaited his arrival in a positive torment of emotions. Amazement at the very fact of the invitation, fury that she had not been informed and a growing queasy awareness that, having discovered the envelope, she would now be compelled to make some sort of decision regarding its contents. Coming and going in this boiling mess was a needle-sharp surprise at the letter's compulsive power. She had been quite sure that her love for her daughter was long since dead. She had ground it into oblivion herself, devalued it over the years until now it was a tawdry thing of no account.

Sylvie had never wanted her mother. As a baby she would struggle and strain away when Felicity tried to cuddle or even hold her. Toddling, she would direct her steps towards her nanny, the au pair, or even casual visitors to the house. She would go to anyone—or so it seemed to Felicity—but the person who loved her best. Later, when it became plain that Sylvie not only didn't love her mother, but also refused even to like her, Felicity began the slow pulverisation of her own affection. This had caused her great pain for she had already guessed at the arid landscape that her marriage would prove to be and had seen the child as an antidotal source of comfort and joy. Now, so many years later, how could she let hope in? She would not dare.

‘It's some sort of practical joke I suppose.'

‘Why do you say that Mrs G?'

Danton was always being asked by his clients to use their Christian names and he always declined. In Felicity's case the diminution of her surname was as far as he was prepared to go. She disliked it intensely, thinking it made her sound like a Cockney char in some rubbishy play but would not have risked offending him by saying so.

‘We haven't seen or heard of her for five years.'

‘Didn't you say once she comes into some money when she's twenty-one? Perhaps he's a solicitor and you both have to sign something.'

‘We don't. It's perfectly straightforward. All tied up by my parents when she was small. Anyway—we're asked for dinner.'

‘Is it a lot? The inheritance.'

‘Five hundred.'

Danton mentally added the missing noughts and shivered with envy. Felicity stopped pacing and sank on to an over-stuffed footstool, wrapping icy satin tight around her knees. She said: ‘I shall go,' and felt the enormity of it. As if she had leapt into an abyss.

‘Naturally,' said Danton. ‘The point is, what will you go as?'