Lady of Fortune

by Graham Masterton

  Sometimes Effie took the letters along with her when she went to visit her mother, at the great grey convalescent home in Dunkeld, St Vigeans. But her mother seemed scarcely interested. She spent all her days wandering aimlessly around St Vigeans’ gardens, even when it rained, standing sometimes at the far end of a dark vista of cypresses, frowning, as if she were thinking of something unhappy but almost forgotten; or sitting on a white-painted iron seat, watching the sparrows twitter in and out of the eave-boards. Effie and she spoke together quietly, but always of mundane things, like Mrs McNab’s bad back, and how Prudence was managing at Charlotte Square, and whether it was time to take down the living-room curtains for cleaning. Sometimes, to Effie, her mother’s voice seemed like nothing more than the rustling of tissue in an old dress-box; or the stirring of autumn leaves on the greystone path of a sad and derelict park.

  On the second of June, 1902, a Monday, Robert came home in the middle of the afternoon, perspiring from the heat, and called Effie and Prudence into the library. He said, There’s good news. I’ve just heard that the war in South Africa is over at last.’

  Effie said, ‘Thank God. But poor Jamie Arbuthnott.’

  Jamie, as it turned out, had been only one of 20,000 young British soldiers who had died in South Africa from dysentery, cholera, Boer snipers, or the bombastic incompetence of Lord Methuen and General Buller. But Lord Kitchener had had enough of the Cape, and enough of the Boers, and had been champing for months to come home. Only four weeks after he persuaded Botha and de Wet to sign a treaty on the dining-room table of his house at Vereeniging, he was on board ship for Southampton. He was soon followed by most of his 400,000 troops, who crowded the rails of their steam-vessels as they sailed into the Solent, singing to celebrate what they earnestly believed had been another magnificent British victory, another war won for the Empire, and the final assertion of the benevolent might for the Dear Old Flag.

  Robert celebrated by giving each of the staff of Watson’s Bank a half-bottle of Strathspey malt whisky, a decorative tea-plate with a stencil of ‘Bobs’ Roberts on it, and permission to go home a half-hour early (although most of the diligent careerists in the bank made sure they impressed him by staying an extra half-hour late).

  There’s something else I wish to do,’ he told Effie and Prudence two days later, at the dinner table. ‘I wish to bring Alisdair back from St Andrews. I think, with the future of the world so certain, and so profitable, that it is time I had a son.’

  Prudence, who had been eating a mouthful of beef, had to press her napkin to her lips, to stop herself from sobbing. Effie, too, had tears in her eyes, although she still suspected nothing of the random and brutal way in which Robert was asserting his husbandly rights on Prudence, or how desperately Prudence needed her son to give her comfort.

  The clock chimed seven. They drank a silent toast. But as they sat at the dining-room table, a whole era had passed, the world had turned, what lay before them would not be certainty or profitability, but all hell and squandered riches.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Shortly after Alisdair was brought home from the Craigs (to the delight of Mrs McNab), Effie found that she had a suitor. His name was John McDonald, and he had been a captain in the Black Watch. He was a friend of the Armitages, a rather bustling well-to-do family of furniture-store owners who lived on the opposite side of the square, and when the Armitages came to call one September afternoon for tea, they brought him along.

  John McDonald was slender, soft-spoken, and almost embarrassingly polite. He had been at Magersfontein with Major-General Andy Wauchope, and he had been wounded there, a bullet in the upper thigh. He rarely spoke about the war, and when he did he was always detached, and remote, as if the war had been nothing more important than a few chukkas of polo. He had lost five of his best friends on that drizzly morning at Magersfontein, five boys who had been at school with him, and he was still unable to stop himself from wincing if he heard the clatter of a bucket-lid when the garbage men called, or the sudden pop of a coal in the fire. He had a beaky nose, and slightly protuberant eyes, and a downy black moustache which, his mother had proudly assured him, looked nearly as luxuriant as Lord Kitchener’s.

  They had tea scones and Dundee cake. John obviously felt uncomfortable in his stiff civilian collar and his new grey suit. He cleared his throat a great deal, and shuffled his feet in his new patent shoes, But when Effie said to him, ‘I can’t imagine you as a captain,’ he raised his head and looked her straight in the eye and said, ‘I was, Miss Watson, I can assure you. I was captain of the fives team, too.’

  After tea, Effie showed John the library. He lighted at once on the books on birds, Mckinloch on Terns, and The Loch Garten Ospreys. ‘I used to spend hours, as a boy, looking for eggs. I’m a great nature-lover, you know.’

  ‘What will you do now, with the war over?’ asked Effie. She looked particularly pretty that day, in a pale pink tea-gown, with a ruffled lace collar, and her hair pinned up. The fire in the living-room had flushed her cheeks as pink as her gown.

  John put down the book he had been leafing through, and shrugged. ‘My father wants me to join him in the family business. We have a cattle farm at St Fillans, by Loch Earn, and a fishing concern at Inverbevie. But, I’m not yet sure if I’m the right man to be feeding the rich and exploiting the poor.’

  Effie said, ‘Doesn’t any man make his own way in life? That’s what my father used to say.’

  ‘Well,’ John told her, ‘I used to think that, too, until I was lying in a muddy ditch in South Africa with Highlanders who had signed for the Army because they had no other means of earning their living. I could have been selling beef and haddock to make my living. I didn’t have to be there. They could sell nothing but their own lives. That’s a poor pass to come to, when you have no other way to keep yourself alive but to accept the risk of being killed. I remember saying to a sergeant of mine, “You’re a madman,” but he said in reply, “No, sir, I’m a sodger.” And I said to him, “Same thing, Callander, same thing,” and I was right. He tried to save a friend of his at Magersfontein who was already dead, and a Boer sniper blew the top of his head off, bonnet and all.’

  He closed Mckinloch on Terns, and then suddenly looked up, as if he were following Sergeant Callander’s blown-off bonnet with the eyes of his imagination.

  There was silence between them for a while. Then, John McDonald glanced across at Effie, and said, ‘Could I ask you a very impertinent question?’

  Effie smiled. ‘I think so.’

  ‘Well, there’s a concert on Friday, of singing, to honour the dead. The proceeds will go to the widows. I know it sounds rather morbid, especially to someone like you –’

  ‘Someone like me? What do you mean by someone like me?’

  John went red. ‘Someone light, and pretty, I mean.’

  ‘Someone frivolous, who doesn’t care about dead soldiers?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘Good,’ said Effie, ‘because a boy of whom I was very fond died in South Africa; and you were hurt there, too; and I’d be proud to come to your concert.’

  ‘You really will?’ asked John.

  Effie said, ‘Of course.’

  He was never her lover. He was never strong enough for her. If he upset her, if he snapped at her, he always apologised, and although they kissed sometimes, and often held hands, he treated her with so much ‘respect’ that he often exasperated her. But he was a good friend to her, and loved her, and brought her flowers that he had picked from the gardens of Linlithgow Palace, and heather-honey in stone jars, and a necklace of peat-coloured crystals from the Cairngorms. He even wrote her a rhyme:

  ‘Where Effie walks,

  The winds will sing,

  And every bird will trill;

  Where Effie lies

  The sun will smile

  And flowers will cloak the hill.’

  They went to concerts together, and to theatres, and often walked in the Royal Botani
c Gardens, or in Holyrood Park. At the foot of Salisbury Crags, one dazzling morning in July 1904, he asked her to marry him, adding hastily that she shouldn’t be afraid to say no. She took his hand, kissed his cheek, and told him how dear he was, and then refused him.

  ‘You don’t mind if I ask you again in a year’s time?’ he had said, with a visible swallow of his Adam’s-apple.

  She kissed his cheek again. He was so dear to her. She had given him for Christmas a beautiful glass paperweight; and she knew that he would do anything for her. Fight, even die. But she was working hard for Robert now, at the bank, and learning book-keeping from old Mr Turrentine, and she was too deeply absorbed in loans and investments and foreign bonds to want to give it up all for a man she was fond of, but didn’t really love. Robert, in a strange way, had begun to depend on her. Now and then, he even asked her opinion about lending money to particular companies or individuals. Most significantly, he had allowed her to sit in on his meeting to discuss lending £2 million in gold to a Japanese shipbuilding company, which for Watson’s was easily the most politically sensitive loan of 1905.

  Effie grew graceful, poised, confident, and knowledgeable. From the spring of 1906 onwards, she made a point of travelling down to London at least twice a year, to buy her clothes, and to visit the Cornhill office on Robert’s behalf. She would be entertained in London by Malcolm Cockburn, who had grown distinctly fatter since she had first set eyes on him; and by Vera Cockburn, who had grown noticeably more shrill, and considerably more wrinkled, but who had still kept her eye for the finest fashions, and for the most expensive little fripperies in town. There was never much affection between Effie and the Cockburns, but there was a very great deal of money, and there were scores of complicated deals, and Effie had learned enough about Robert and the way he was running Watson’s Bank to know that it would be selfish and stupid of her to tell Malcolm how unctuous she thought he was, or Vera how empty-headed.

  During the day, she was usually escorted around London by Mr Niblets, who had now been appointed head of the trust department, and although she found him rather staccato, and abrupt, and although he always smelled strongly of lavender-water, he ran every errand she demanded of him with furious diligence, and even carried her shopping, and she couldn’t ask much more of anybody than that.

  She hadn’t yet discovered that in the Edinburgh office of Watson’s Bank she was popularly referred to by the junior clerks as The Unback’d Filly’; and in London they called her ‘St Effie of the Driven Snow’. Both nicknames carried the same sharp slight: that Effie was a virgin, and that she would always remain so. One wit at Cornhill regularly called her ‘Greenland’s Icy Mountain’.

  She was serene, though, even if she wasn’t completely happy. Through the Cockburns, she made dozens of friends and acquaintances in London, and met not only Edwin Lutyens, the architect, and Sir Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, who both affectionately called her ‘Eff’, but also Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who in 1905 had just been constrained to write The Return of Sherlock Holmes, and spent an entire dinnerparty complaining to Effie about it. Sir Arthur was a native of Edinburgh, too, and he remembered Thomas Watson well. In fact, he said, he had partly based the character of Sir John Roxton on Thomas Watson, when he wrote The Lost World. Effie didn’t know whether to believe him or not, but it was a satisfactory flattery.

  More than anything, though, Effie learned about money. Not money as she had understood it when she was younger, some vague commodity with which her father played peculiar tricks when he was at work. When she was six, she had imagined money to be almost animate, like the playing-cards in Alice, since her father had talked so often of it being short, or sparse, or even tight, and the only other example of ‘tight’ she knew about was Mr Angus Joyce-Drummond, a friend of the family, whose breath had always smelled exactly like the inside of father’s whisky-cabinet, and who was given to singing Ye Jacobites By Name during the pudding course.

  But now Effie learned about bulls and bears, convertible bonds and stocks, short-term notes and gold reserves. She began to meet some of the suave and cosmopolitan men who controlled the great German-Jewish banks of Europe; dry, cultured men, who believed in international peace, enormous profits, and who frequently wore on their fingers gold and diamond rings which Effie found even more fascinating than their calm, hooded, acquisitive eyes.

  Robert used Effie well. She was pretty, and charming, and all the bankers who did business with Watson’s used to adore her. Heinrich Nadler, from the Deutsche Bank, presented her with a necklace of gold and pearls; and even James Stillman, the ‘drab, tight-lipped, cold, and passionless’ president of Citibank of New York, whose favourite pastime was sitting in utter silence with his equally frigid friend William Rockefeller to see who would give in and talk first, sent Effie by messenger a pair of ruby and diamond earrings, with the message, ‘Never sell me short.’

  Effie began to feel confident, attractive, and better still, pampered. It was Robert’s intention that she should. Because now, with Europe so politically and financially unstable, he was able to lend vast amounts of money to Belgium, to France, to Austria-Hungary, to Russia, and even to Germany. Unlike Alfred Rothschild, who refused on principle to lend money to Russia, and who believed that conflict in Europe could always be prevented by an honourable alliance of international capital, Robert was not at all squeamish where he did his business. If Kaiser Wilhelm wanted money to produce armaments, and he was prepared to pay a high interest rate, then Robert would lend money to Berlin. If the Czar was desperate for short-term funding, then Robert would lend money to Moscow. By 1910, Watson’s Bank was underwriting nearly £100 million of bonds to help finance the military build-up in almost every country in Europe, no matter what side they were on, and there were deposits in the bank at Cornhill of nearly £ 13 million. Watson’s was more than three times bigger than it had been when Thomas Watson had died, and was challenging major European and American banks for a voracious share of the world lending market.

  In Robert’s eyes, Effie was playing a small but important part of this expansion. He could trust her, because she was a Watson, as well as being the only Watson he could trust. She was also socially unusual, a beautiful young lady who happened to know about money. And, since she was still unattached, he could send her almost anywhere to mesmerise almost anyone he needed to seduce.

  Effie adored playing the part. She met barons and princes, millionaires and nabobs. In 1911, after a hectically social winter, she and Robert commissioned from the modernistic architect C. R. Ashbee a striking new house at Numbers 72-73 Cheyne Walk, in London’s Chelsea, and had its interior decorated in Ashbee’s sparest and most aesthetic (and most expensive) style. This house they used to entertain all the most fashionable writers and scientists and actors, and to do business with visiting heads of state, from Sweden to Sarawak, from Turkey to Tasmania.

  In her wardrobes, in London and Edinburgh, Effie had floor-length fur-trimmed gowns in shocking yellow, by Poiret; and gold embroidery by Paquim. She was driven everywhere in London in a midnight-blue Albion 16-hp with beige hide upholstery and whitewall tyres. She even began to smoke, scandalously for 1911, Turkish cigarettes made specially for her by Fribourg & Treyer. She always drank champagne.

  She still saw John McDonald, from time to time, whenever she was in Edinburgh. He used to buy her tea at Murdies, and she would sit elegantly posed at the table, with her dark mink coat casually thrown over the back of her bentwood chair, smoking ostentatiously, while he sat with his knees together and his eyes cast down, nibbling his shortcake and sipping his tea. The sunlight would fall through the smoke and the steam and the neat Edinburgh conversation, and both of them would feel as if they had turned back the clock by several years.

  One day, in October, 1911, John said, ‘I don’t think we ought to meet any more.’

  Effie had been looking around the tea-room impatiently, to see if she could catch sight of anyone she knew; and she didn’t quite understand what he ha
d said at first. She exclaimed, ‘What? What do you mean?’

  He laid down his half-finished cake. ‘I don’t want to say anything critical about you, Effie. I love you, and I always have, ever since I came back from South Africa. Do you remember that day, with those awful Armitages?’

  She caught hold of his sleeve. ‘But John, sweetie,’ she said, in her best London drawl ‘you know I adore you.’

  John shook his head. His hair stuck up on the crown of his scalp, like a bashful cockatoo. He had long ago shaved off his Kitchener moustache, and now he looked younger, and very much more vulnerable. He said, ‘You don’t adore me. You like me, and I’m glad for that. But you don’t adore me, nor even love me, and I’m afraid that it is going to be far too painful for me to continue to see you, knowing that you don’t love me, or adore me, and never will, than it is for me to say that this must be the last time we must meet, forever.’

  ‘John,’ she said. She realised that she was quite shocked.

  He tried to smile. ‘You mustn’t sympathise. Please. Sympathy is the very last thing I want. Come on, Effie, look at you. You were smart and wealthy when I first met you. You’re even smarter and wealthier now. You’re the talk of Edinburgh, with your London fashions and your modern talk. And look at you smoking!’

  Effie looked at the cigarette burning between the fingers of her left hand. Quickly, decisively, she stubbed it out in her saucer. ‘John,’ she appealed to him, ‘I don’t want to lose you. How can you think that I do?’

  John stood up, and fumbled in the pocket of his wide green tweed trousers for his money. He paid the bill for the tea, 1s. 3d., and left the waitress a 2d. tip. He blinked a little, and then he said, ‘You’ve been marvellous to know, Effie. You’re bright. Blindingly bright! But you’re too cold and self-contained for me. I can never reach you. You’re like a star. Haughty, beautiful, but far beyond us ordinary people.’