"It took you a while, though, here. To step up and become Cronus, I mean."
"I waited, in order to be sure. I had no desire to rush into anything."
"You wanted us to lay the groundwork first. To field-test the suits and iron out any kinks."
"Which you did, incomparably well. Shall I get back to my narrative?"
"Be my guest."
"Thank you so much. Now, I'm not making excuses for myself. I'm simply relating what happened. I never ignored Xander. I never shut him out. Every minute of free time I had, I devoted to him. But there wasn't a lot of it to devote. When you have manufacturing plants on three continents, a workforce of several thousand depending on you, innumerable suppliers to court and clients to schmooze, it consumes you. It leaves you with very little else.
"Xander never lacked for company as he was growing up. Our huge house was never empty. An army of staff, mostly female, tended to him day and night. His every minute, when he wasn't at school, was occupied with play, sports coaching, swimming, horse riding, music lessons, extra tuition. You name the extracurricular activity, Xander did it. But he was lucky if he saw me, his dad, for more than a few hours a week. I tried my utmost to be there for bedtime, to read him the stories I loved and I thought he loved, the classical tales of gods, heroes and monsters.
"But I only made it perhaps every other evening, if that. Visiting politicians from abroad do so like to be taken out to dinner, you know, and it's only polite to make videoconference calls with subcontractors in Asia when it's their daytime and our night. Xander was never alone. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he was never left alone. The one person he really needed to be with, however, was hardly ever around."
"I feel sorry for him."
"You should. I do. Poor lad. My God, I loathed my own parents sometimes. Uptight, restrictive pair of cretins, they were. But I'd still rather have had them there than not. So many times I wished them dead, but equally I knew I would have been devastated to lose them. My mother smothered me, my father was a passive-aggressive bully. And then there was our rabbi, who seemed to be constantly around at our house, like a third parent. A pox on them all, but I wouldn't have done without them, even without Rabbi Rabinowitz, a kindly man in person but wrapped up in his Torah.
"And Xander had no one like that. No one he could rely on to the point where he was heartily sick of them. He had just me, absentee dad, whose chequebook was always open even if his appointments diary was not. And still he forgave me. Still he loved me. Small children do that. They have that capacity. They will love you boundlessly, unconditionally, whatever your faults and your shortcomings. And if you are good and attentive and you nurture their love, it will last. But if you aren't and you don't… don't…"
"Take your time."
"Thank you. This is pure self-pity. That's the only emotion that can still choke me up. I can go on now. Awkward moment over. Is this like one of your criminal interrogations, Sam? Am I like a suspect you need to crack?"
"I already cracked you, Mr Landesman. This, now, is just paperwork. Tying up the loose ends."
"Maybe I should ask for my lawyer."
"Only the guilty ask for their lawyers."
"Then I should definitely ask for my lawyer! Especially with 'bad cop' over there glowering at me. I hope we're not in for some of that police brutality one hears so much about."
"Just keep going, Mr Landesman."
"So, Xander continued to be my number one fan until he was about eight or nine, even if often he was adoring me down the phone or during a scant hour or two of together time that I could snatch on a Sunday afternoon."
"You'd even work on Sunday?"
"I was a driven man, Sam. Beyond workaholic. My job was me. I was my job. Forbes profiled me once. 'Captain Industrious' they called me in the headline, 'the hands-down most dedicated employer in the business world,' next to a ten-year-old publicity still that was the most up-to-date picture of me they could find. They weren't actually terribly flattering in the article itself, but that was mostly resentment because I kept refusing them an exclusive interview. I hate all that stuff, as you know. Always have, always will.
"But back to Xander. Our problems began — or rather, I began to be aware there were problems — when I started getting calls from his prep school headmaster. Xander was in trouble. Fighting other boys. Being disruptive in class. Stealing. He'd take money from the bursar's office. Break in, raid the petty cash tin, then trot off to the local village shop and splurge on sweets. I thought, 'Oh, this is harmless enough, it's a phase, it'll pass,' though I had a few stern talking-to's with him and pointed out to him that if he needed money as he had to do was ask. The Bank of Dad was never shut. Which, of course, was completely missing the point. Xander wasn't stealing because he needed money. He was stealing because he needed attention. My attention. It was the classic cry for help, and I in my stupidity and blinkeredness was completely blithe to it.
"Then he went to public school, and things just got worse. I sent him to Eton, naturally. What else do you do when you're filthy rich? The most expensive school in the land, where a year's fees set me back, oh, half a day's income, if that. Xander lasted four terms — 'halves,' I should say — before he was, ahem, invited to leave. After that it was a succession of schools — Harrow, Bedales, Charterhouse — working down the list until we were in the second division, and it was a miracle if Xander saw out a full term in any of them.
"And then even the second-division ones started refusing to take him, which is remarkable in that within the independent system there are usually no conditions of entry other than making sure the parental cheque doesn't bounce! But headmasters were talking to headmasters, and frankly Xander was getting such a bad reputation that nobody wanted him as a pupil. If it wasn't smoking, it was drinking, and if it wasn't drinking it was thieving, and if it wasn't thieving it was disruptive behaviour.
"One time, he stole a teacher's moped and rode it through the dining hall during lunch. Another time, he set fire to his desk in a history lesson — poured lighter fuel over it, struck a match, and chucked textbooks onto the flames to stoke them. He punched a French teacher who awarded him an F for a dictation — gave the man a lovely oeil au beurre noir — and nearly gassed an entire chemistry class by emptying a vat of sulphuric acid on the floor. Naturally I was able to soothe furrowed brows by offering handsome donations. I daresay there are several new science blocks and music faculties up and down the land that ought to have plaques on them bearing my name. And all the time, I was trying desperately to convince myself that Xander would grow out of it, that he was not a bad boy, beneath it all he was just hurt and misunderstood, he would come good eventually."
"And we all know how that turned out."
"Until you have children yourself, Sam, be slow to judge the parenting abilities of others. Xander ended up at an international academy in Geneva. His notoriety, thank heaven, hadn't extended beyond British shores. They took him in, and I braced myself for the inevitable explosion — and it never came. Something about the school, the environment, the Swiss climate, the polyglot peer group, I don't know what, seemed to have a calming influence on him. Maybe it was just being in a different country, putting some distance between him and all he was used to. It gave him perspective. That was what I thought, anyway.
"Xander knuckled down to his studies. He proved to have a great aptitude for the sciences, and in particular biology. He passed his International Baccalaureate in that subject with flying colours. I allowed myself a sigh of relief, letting out a long-held breath. The worst was over. We had weathered the storm. A place at Oxford beckoned for Xander. His future looked bright, and mine looked, well, certainly a little less vexing. I'd been right, I felt, to give him time, to let him work things out in his own way. My wait-and-see approach had paid off. This, as you might gather, was me justifying my own inaction to myself. I believed Xander cured of what was plaguing him…"