Harry Marriott

Harry Marriott is a powerful Sitex Oil executive whose defeat in a prolonged corporate struggle demonstrates the reach of Emma Harte’s influence. After three years of bitter, manipulative conflict, the board removes him as president and makes him chairman instead; Emma’s chosen successor takes over, leaving Sitex safe in her view but Marriott diminished in authority.

Position and defeat at Sitex

Marriott’s fall follows a confrontation in which he tries to appeal to his long friendship with Emma. By then, he has maneuvered himself into a position from which she sees no possible retreat. When he pleads for her support, she answers with silence, and the board backs her. He is not expelled from the company: his promotion to chairman preserves a formal position while displacing him from the presidency and its effective power.

Emma takes no pleasure in his downfall. She regards the outcome as necessary to protect Sitex, but sees nothing joyful in another person’s defeat. The distinction gives her victory a controlled, unsentimental quality: she acts decisively, yet does not present Marriott’s humiliation as a cause for celebration.

Character and business judgment

Emma’s assessment of Marriott is severe. She considers him demanding and specious, and believes dissimulation has become habitual. In her view, accumulating wealth and succeeding in business have strengthened rather than corrected these qualities. She also judges his business judgment to have deteriorated: he has lost what little foresight he once possessed and cannot comprehend the rapidly changing international business environment.

These are Emma’s conclusions, formed through years of dealing with him, rather than an independent account of Marriott’s inner life. The novel links his corporate defeat to the conflict between her strategic vigilance and her belief that his judgment has become unreliable. His loss of the presidency is consequently both a change in leadership and a repudiation of the way she believes he conducts business.

Relationship with Emma and Paula

Marriott and Emma have crossed swords repeatedly over the years. During the Sitex crisis, their long acquaintance becomes a resource he tries to invoke, but it cannot outweigh Emma’s view of the danger he poses to the company. Her refusal to answer his appeal underscores how thoroughly professional judgment has taken precedence over personal history in that decisive moment.

After the change in leadership, Paula worries that Marriott, now chairman, appears to hate her and may make her work at Sitex difficult. Emma suggests instead that he may fear Paula. Her response draws on her own many unpleasant memories of Marriott and their repeated conflicts, while positioning Paula’s new responsibilities within a struggle for power that predates her involvement.