The telephone rang, making her jump. She picked up the earpiece, and said, ‘Edinburgh 43. Who’s speaking, please?’
‘Effie? It’s Robert. I got your message that Prudence died.’
‘About fifteen minutes ago,’ said Effie.
‘She wasn’t in pain?’
‘No. No, she wasn’t. It was peaceful. She just sort of …’
‘Good. You can call Dr Henderson, can you? He’ll have to make out a death certificate. And why don’t you call Murdoch and Rann, the undertakers? There shouldn’t be any reason for delaying the funeral, should there?’
‘Robert,’ put in Effie. ‘I think you should understand that I’ll be leaving Edinburgh now.’
‘Well, let’s talk about that later,’ said Robert. ‘This isn’t exactly the moment, is it, to be talking about ourselves? Besides, I expect you to take care of Alisdair now, with his mother departed, and all. There’s nobody else to look after him, is there, with his daddy so busily occupied at work and his granny rocking her every day away in St Vigeans? It’ll have to be sister Effie, at least until he’s old enough to go to board.’
‘Robert –’ Effie began.
‘Och, I know,’ said Robert. ‘You’re as modest as always. It’s too much of a responsibility for you, taking care of the Watson heir. You’re not good enough to bring him up right, that’s what you’re thinking. Well, you’re wrong. I trust you, Effie. No matter what quarrels you and I have had in the past, I trust you implicitly. I want you to bring up my son as your own, like the true Watson he is, and I want him to think of you as much as his mother. You’d not refuse me that?’
‘Robert,’ said Effie, ‘Prudence is dead. She died less than half an hour ago.’
There was a crackly silence on the other end of the phone. Then Robert said, ‘Aye. You told me that.’
‘She’s dead, Robert. Your loving wife is dead. Haven’t you anything to say, if only something blasphemous?’
‘She’s been ebbing a good few months, Effie. I don’t see why blasphemy is called for. She’ll be more than happy now, up above with the angels.’
‘Robert, I’m trying to tell you something. I’m trying to tell you that Prudence is dead. Doesn’t that make you feel like anything?’
Robert was quiet for another few seconds. Then he said, ‘I’m upset, yes. Of course I am. But she was very ill.’
‘Robert, she was your wife. Didn’t you love her?’
Robert ignored the question. He said, abruptly, ‘Where’s Alisdair now?’
‘He’s having his violin lesson with Signor Corso.’
‘Well, don’t tell him about his mother. Lock her door and make sure that he doesn’t see her. I want to explain this to him myself. Do you understand me?’
‘I wish I did.’
‘Effie, I don’t have time for fatuous remarks. Will you do as I tell you?’
‘Yes, Robert.’
‘Effie, will you do as I tell you?’
Effie took a breath, and then said, ‘Yes.’
Robert hung up, and there was nothing on the line but a faint and irritating fizzing sound. The operator said, ‘Did you wish to make another call, Miss Watson?’
Effie said, ‘No.’
She never knew exactly what Robert told Alisdair about his mother, but later that night, when she was lying sleeplessly in her room, Alisdair came in to her, in his long blue and white striped nightshirt, his face a chaos of tears and distress. He climbed into bed with her, and lay close to her, shuddering and crying, while she soothed him and shushed him, and did everything she could to make him feel that he was still cared for, and still loved, and not abandoned.
He slept for two or three hours, but he woke just before five o’clock, and stared at her with sticky eyes.
‘Is she really in heaven?’ he asked her.
Effie nodded. ‘I think so.’
‘What’s it like, heaven?’
‘What do you think it’s like?’
‘I don’t know,’ Alisdair ventured. ‘Clouds, and sunshine. Being happy, I suppose.’
Effie kissed him. ‘What you think it is, that’s what it is.’
Alisdair was silent for a while, his tousled blond hair lying on the pillow next to her. Then he said, ‘Did it hurt her very much, being ill?’
‘Hardly at all. She died as if she were falling asleep, and that’s the truth, because I was there.’
‘Daddy said it hurt her very much.’
‘It did, early on. But she hasn’t felt any pain for two or three months. Didn’t feel any, I mean.’
There was an even longer silence. Then Alisdair said, ‘May I see her?’
Effie looked at him, so bright and young and alive; and so much like Dougal. ‘Your father says you shouldn’t.’
‘My father says I shouldn’t?’
Another difficult pause. Then Effie said, ‘What did you mean by that?’
Alisdair tried to look innocent. ‘What did I mean by what?’
‘What did you mean by saying my father says I shouldn’t?’
He shrugged. ‘I meant, did my father say I shouldn’t, or did my adopted father say I shouldn’t?’
Effie said, ‘You know?’
Alisdair nodded. ‘Mummy told me, about a month ago. When she was very ill, but before she was blind. She said that my real daddy was Uncle Dougal, and that daddy only married mummy so that I could have somebody to look after me.’
‘It’s true,’ whispered Effie.
Alisdair reached out with his boyish hand, chewed nails, ink-stained palms, middle finger calloused by the shaft of a pen, and touched the lace lapels of Effie’s nightdress. He said, in a hollow, hoarse, appealing voice, ‘May I see my mother please, Auntie Effie?’
The clock in the hallway downstairs was striking six as they stood in Prudence’s room, Effie with her arm around Alisdair’s shoulders. Prudence’s head lay on the pillow as yellow and shrivelled and ghastly as a mummy’s head from the British Museum, her lips curled back to bare her teeth, her hair as sparse as a worn-out broom, her eyelids drawn shut over blind eyes.
Effie said, as strongly and as evenly as she could manage, ‘I want you to understand something, Alisdair. This body that you’re looking at now is not your mother. Your mother was pretty, and energetic, and strong. When she brought you here on Christmas Eve, she was doing something which only the most loving of mothers would do; and when she agreed to marry your daddy she was sacrificing her own feelings for your protection. You mustn’t ever feel guilty about that, because it was her own choice. You must never feel angry or resentful about your daddy, because he’s always brought you up well, and he will continue to do so. But remember that your mother was beautiful, and that she adored you, and try to make her proud of you.’
Alisdair was weeping now, silently but openly. He said, ‘I want to go now.’
Dr Henderson came later that day. He was not entirely to be overwhelmed by Robert’s bludgeoning patronage, because he wrote on the death certificate that Prudence had died from a malignant stomach tumour that ‘most likely resulted from a sharp accidental blow to the abdomen, of a nature and at a time unknown.’ Robert fumed, but didn’t take the matter any further. There were enough Edinburgh socialites who could testify to a coroner’s court that they had seen him strike his wife at dinner parties and soirées and even in the champagne tent at the McCurran picnic at Linlithgow; and the last thing that Robert wanted now was a scandal.
Prudence’s funeral was held on a sharp, crisp day, at St Giles’ Kirk. A contingent of the pipe band of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders played a lament, The Hills of Invermoriston. Alisdair and Effie stood by the grave, she dressed in a long black-beaver coat by Doucet, and a black-feathered hat, with a veil. Alisdair wore his kilt, and stood as straight as he could, but Effie saw his lower lip juddering as they lowered the gilt-handled coffin into the ground, and his hand when she held it to help him throw the first trowel of soil on to his mother’s resting-place was as cold as anything
she had ever touched.
Robert came over, bulky in black, and held out a black-gloved hand to Alisdair. ‘Come on, son,’ he said. ‘It’s time for home.’
CHAPTER FIVE
She could have gone. Perhaps she should have gone. But there was Alisdair to look after, and her old Edinburgh friends to give her encouragement, and her work with the bank; and there was always the possibility, no matter how ridiculous or remote, that one day she might hear again from Karl. So she stayed, and continued to arrange Robert’s meetings for him, although she made sure that she remained as distant and formal with him as she could, and never introduced him to anyone as her brother. It was always ‘Mr Robert Watson, our chairman.’
Her life entered a strange and shuttered phase. Occasionally, she went to dine with friends and families she knew; or invited some of her childhood girlfriends, married now, for afternoon tea. But away from the bank, she spent most of her time walking alone by the sea at Portobello or Musselburgh; or in her rooms at Charlotte Square, reading about finance and politics. In the two years after Robert’s Turkish fiasco, she grew to understand more about money and banking than at any time in her life. What was more, she began to correspond with several important bankers around the world: Amadeo Giannini of the Bank of Italy in San Francisco (later the Bank of America), Thomas Lamont at Morgans in New York, Sir Ernest Cassel of the National Bank of Turkey. They wrote back to her in airy generalisations at first, because she was a woman; but when she showed them that her grasp of investments and securities was as clear and as constructive as anything that they were doing, the letters became more cordial, and more frequent, and often startlingly revealing. She knew well in advance, for instance, that Morgans were going to stand up against the German and Irish lobbies in New York and support the English and the French in Europe. She knew – even before Citibank knew – that Albert Wiggin of the Chase Bank would compete hotly with Citibank’s business in Latin America. She even wrote to Baron Louis Rothschild, of S. M. Rothschild und Söhne in Vienna, and developed with him an intelligent, teasing correspondence about politics and currency manipulation and horses (Baron Louis owned one of the finest strings of polo ponies in Europe).
For all of her international letter-writing, however; and for all of the wealth and influence which Robert’s aggressive expansion of Watson’s Bank was now bringing her, she kept herself intensely private. She often dined alone in her rooms, and she would always prefer to read a book than go to the theatre, or off to a dance. On her twenty-ninth birthday, in 1913, she took Alisdair to St Andrews in the new bright blue Rolls-Royce motor-car which Robert had recently bought for ‘spins’, as he called them. She walked with Alisdair arm-in-arm around the sandy curve of St Andrews Bay, until they could see as far as Eden Mouth, where the sun lay dappled on the sea, and yachts out from Guard Bridge leaned stiffly against the wind.
Alisdair, his hair lifted by the breeze, smart and serious in his tweed knickerbockers and his belted jacket, took hold of Effie’s arm and stood with her for a long while looking out to the east.
‘Do you know where you would end up, if you sailed out there and kept on sailing?’ asked Effie.
‘Denmark, wouldn’t you?’ asked Alisdair.
She smiled. ‘Yes. The North Sea, and then Denmark; and then down the coast of Denmark to Germany.’
Alisdair said, ‘Would you like to go back to Germany?’ She had often spoken to him about her visit there.
‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘But nobody can live in the past. Regrets aren’t very nourishing fare, you know. You must learn that, when you grow older. Never to regret what you’ve done, no matter how painful or foolish it was.’
‘I regret that mother died.’
‘I know you do. But you should try your best not to. She’s somewhere, even now, and she watches over you still.’
They walked a little way further along the sand. In the very far distance, grey and bristling with masts and guns, a British battle-cruiser steamed swiftly northwards. Alisdair shaded his eyes, and said, ‘I think it’s the Invincible. She can sail at twenty-six knots, did you know that? She’s so fast she needs hardly any armour.’
Effie took his hand, and smiled. ‘I hope I see the day when she’s scrapped, without ever having been tried out.’
‘I’d join the Navy if there were war with Germany,’ said Alisdair.
There won’t be war with Germany,’ Effie reassured him; although from the letters she had been receiving from Baron Louis in Vienna, she knew that Europe was shifting and stirring like a sleeper who is being haunted by a nightmare so terrible that he must soon awake. ‘All my friends in Germany and Austria say that there won’t be war.’
‘Signor Corso says there will be war.’
‘He’s a music-teacher. He doesn’t know anything about politics.’
‘Yes, but his brother works for the government in Rome. He keeps sending him letters saying that Germany will invade Russia.’
‘That’s nonsense. You know how excitable these Italians are. They’re like a lot of clucking chickens.’
‘Shall I tell him that?’ asked Alisdair, cheekily.
‘Don’t you dare.’
They walked back to the car. McVitie, their new chauffeur, was sitting in the driver’s seat smoking a Bicycle cigarette and reading Photo Fun – ‘more than sixty pictures’ of pretty young actresses like Marie Studholme and Gabrielle Ray. As soon as he saw Effie and Alisdair approaching, he quickly nipped out his cigarette, tucked his magazine under the seat, and opened the motor-car door so that he could greet them at attention, hands along the seams of his trousers, chin up, just as he had been instructed in the Gordons.
‘You’ll certainly be ready if there’s war, won’t you?’ smiled Effie.
‘War, mum?’
‘Alisdair is quite convinced we’re going to have to fight the Germans.’
‘Oh, is he? Well, Master Watson, that wouldn’t be much of a war. Not like that last lot, in South Africa. Tough, those Boers were. Tough as old hobnailed boots. But your Hun, he’s a fundamental coward. Stand up to your Hun, and you’ll have him on the run in three weeks, and surrendering in a month. That wouldn’t be much of a war.’
‘Shall we drive on now?’ said Effie.
McVitie saluted, and opened the door of the rear compartment for them. ‘Don’t you worry about no war. Master Watson,’ he said, as Alisdair climbed in.
On the way back to Edinburgh, along the road that led them through Leven and Kirkcaldy and Burntisland, the sky darkened from the south-west, and it began to rain, big shivering transparent drops which clung to the Rolls-Royce’s windows. Over towards Loch Leven, a faded rainbow rose, but quickly disappeared again when the weather began to close in.
Alisdair said, ‘Father says I have to go to school in September.’
‘I know.’
‘You didn’t go to school, did you? You were always taught at home.’
Effie touched his hand. ‘I know. But things were different then. Your father thinks it would be better if you went away.’
Alisdair stared out of the window for a minute or two. Then he turned to Effie, and said, ‘I’ve written a letter to my real father.’
Effie was silent for a moment, but then she said, ‘He doesn’t know about you, you know, your real father. I’ve never told him. And these days, I scarcely hear from him at all.’
‘I still want to write to him.’
‘May I read what you’ve written?’
Alisdair thought, and then nodded. He reached into the pocket of his tweed jacket, and produced two lined sheets torn from his geography exercise book. The writing was in green ink, rounded and sturdy. Effie unfolded the sheets, held them towards the reading-light in the back of the motorcar, and went through them line by line, her lips moving slightly as she read. Alisdair watched her without saying a word.
‘My dearest Father,’ Alisdair had written, ‘We have never met each other so this is a surprise. I am your son Alisdair although when I was
born my mother Prudence Louise Cuting called me William Albert. My mother is dead now but before she died she told me that you were my real father and that father (Mr Robert Watson) is not actually [sic] my real father. So I wanted to tell you that I am your son. Do you think it is possible somehow for us to meet. It would be a good idea, and I would like to. Can you please tell me how this could be managed? Your affectionate son Alisdair.’
Effie folded the letter up again, and handed it back. Alisdair said, ‘Do you think it’s all right?’
Effie shook her head. ‘I’m glad you wrote it, Alisdair. But I don’t think you ought to send it. My brother Dougal has had his own life in America for years now, and I don’t really think it would be fair to do this to him. Can you imagine how he would feel? And you must think of Robert, too. Your father has brought you up very well, and he cares for you deeply. You wouldn’t only be giving Dougal a surprise son he may not want, you’d be taking away from your father a son he has already proved to you he does want.’
‘Father doesn’t want me. He’s always so strict.’
‘The time to start wondering if he doesn’t want you is when he isn’t strict. Fathers are only strict if they care about their sons; and your father’s strict because he wants you to grow up strong, and well-disciplined, and wealthy, like himself. One day, he wants the whole bank to be yours.’
Alisdair looked down at his letter. He folded it over once more, and then again.
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