from my sixteenth birthday, the part when Daddy stood up to give a speech about me.
‘I haven’t seen this one for ages,’ I breathe, and we all fall silent to watch. Daddy’s addressing the ballroom at the Hurlingham Club, where my party was. He’s in black tie, and Mummy’s all shimmery in silver and I’m in a red minidress, which Mummy spent Saturday after Saturday helping me look for.
(Now I look back, it really doesn’t suit me. But I was sixteen. What did I know?)
‘My daughter has the wit of Lizzy Bennet …’ Daddy is saying in that commanding way of his. ‘The strength of Pippi Longstocking … the boldness of Jo March … and the style of Scarlett O’Hara.’ On screen the guests break into applause and Daddy twinkles at me and I gaze back up, speechless.
I remember that moment. It blew me away. Daddy had secretly gone through all the books in my bedroom, looking for my heroines and writing a speech around them. I glance over at Mummy now, my eyes a little hot, and she gives me a tremulous smile back. My mother can drive me mad – but there are times when no one gets it like she does.
‘Good speech,’ says Dan after a few moments, and I shoot him a grateful smile.
But as we’re watching, the screen starts to go blurry, and suddenly the voices are distorting, and the video becomes unwatchable.
‘What happened?’ demands Tessa.
‘Oh dear!’ Mummy jabs at the remote, but can’t improve the picture. ‘This copy must be damaged. Never mind. If everyone’s finished, let’s go into the drawing room and we can watch something else.’
‘The wedding!’ says Anna.
‘The wedding!’ shrieks Tessa.
‘Really?’ says Dan incredulously. ‘Haven’t we done family DVDs?’
‘What’s wrong with watching the wedding?’ I say. And if I sound a little defensive … it’s because I am.
So, yet another key fact about my family: we watch our wedding DVD a lot. A lot. Probably every other visit to Mummy’s place, we all sit down to watch it. The girls love it and Mummy loves it and I have to admit I do, too.
But Dan says it’s weird to keep replaying one day of our life. In fact, Dan hates our wedding DVD – probably for the same reason that Mummy loves it. Because while most wedding videos are about the happy couple, ours is basically all about Daddy.
I never even noticed to begin with. I thought it was just a lovely, well-produced DVD. It wasn’t until about a year after our wedding that Dan suddenly flipped out on the way home from some gathering and said, ‘Can’t you see, Sylvie? It’s not our DVD, it’s his!’
And the next time I watched it, of course, it was obvious. It’s the Daddy show. The first shot of the whole DVD is of Daddy, looking gorgeous in his morning suit, standing by the Rolls-Royce we used to get to the church. Then there are shots of him leading me out in my wedding dress … shots of him in the car … the pair of us walking up the aisle …
The most moving moment of the whole DVD isn’t our vows. It’s when the priest says, ‘Who gives this woman to be married?’ and Daddy says, ‘I do,’ his resonant voice all choked up. Then all the way through our vows, the camera keeps panning over to Daddy, who is watching with the most poignant expression of pride and wistfulness.
Dan thinks Daddy went into the editing suite and made sure that he featured prominently. After all, he was paying – he was the one who insisted on hiring an expensive video team, in fact – so he could have it just the way he wanted.
I was incredibly upset when Dan first suggested this. Then I accepted that it was possible. Daddy was … not conceited, exactly, but he had healthy self-esteem. He liked to be the centre of attention, always. For example, he was desperate to be knighted. Friends would mention it and he’d brush them off with a lighthearted joke – but we all knew he wanted it. And why not, after all the good he did? (Mummy’s really sensitive about the fact that he missed out. I’ve seen her blinking while reading the Honours List in the newspaper. Let’s face it, if he had been knighted she’d be ‘Lady Lowe’ now, which does sound pretty good.)
Even so, I have a different theory about our DVD. I think the video team were