Lady of Fortune

by Graham Masterton

Effie said, ‘Make the very best of what you have, Alisdair. If Dougal had wanted your mother he would have stayed with her, no matter what, and he would have known about you and brought you up himself. Robert loves you, you know that. I love you too. So don’t do anything rash. Don’t do anything that’s going to hurt people just for the sake of it. Think of your future instead of your past. You’re Robert’s son now. You always have been, really. And you’re my nephew, and my very best friend.’

  Alisdair wound down the window a little way, hesitated, and then tossed the folded-up letter out on the road. Effie looked back out of the brown-tinted opera window, and saw it tumble across the road and into a field of heather and gorse.

  She said, ‘You’re not cross, are you?’

  Alisdair shook his head.

  ‘It isn’t easy, taking care of other people’s feelings as well as your own,’ Effie told him. ‘Most of the time, it hurts very much.’

  Alisdair whispered, ‘I just wanted him to know, that was all. I didn’t want to upset him. And I did want to see what he was like.’

  Effie kissed his forehead, and held him close. ‘I know,’ she told him. ‘But I think if he could ever understand what you’ve done for him, he’d be very proud of you.’

  Later, she spent a wakeful night wondering if she had done the right thing. Perhaps he should have posted the letter after all. But there was no way of knowing for sure. She could trust only her own intuition, and her distant memories of Dougal.

  She could picture Dougal so clearly. She could almost reach out and touch the image of him that came into her mind’s eye. Yet sometimes he seemed more like Alisdair than Dougal; the two of them became confused, and she realised that she couldn’t actually remember what Dougal looked like at all. When she thought of Dougal’s voice, Alisdair’s voice somehow imposed itself on top of it, like two people talking at once.

  She opened the musical box on top of her dressing-table, a Christmas gift for 1910 from Vera Cockburn. She listened to it playing Au Clair De La Lune over and over, until it plinked into silence.

  She looked at herself in her gold-backed hand-mirror. A tired and anxious face that floated in her hand, like a Twelfth Night mask on a stick. She thought: I want so much. I need so much. But what is it that I need? What is it that I want? Who am I?

  They spent the Christmas of 1913 with friends of Robert’s at Cramond, on the coast west of Edinburgh. The goose was fatty and red-raw at the bones, and the husband and wife had a fearful argument about the plum-pudding. On their way back, in the funereal silence of Robert’s long black Albion tourer, Alisdair was violently sick.

  During the spring and early summer of the following year, 1914, Effie spent almost all of her time in London, at the house in Cheyne Walk. There was little to keep her in Edinburgh. Most of her close friends had gone off for the season to the Highlands, to Elgin and Kinlochewe and Inverness. Alisdair was in his second term at Gordonstoun, and in only a few months had grown surprisingly braw and braggart and independent, and as cocksure as only a thirteen-year-old can be. He rarely talked to her about anything now but rugby football and pet guinea-pigs and how he ragged his Divinity teacher. No hint of sadness: no hint of that tumbling letter across the road from St Andrews. No mention of his ‘real’ father or his dead mother.

  Robert, too, had less use for Effie than he had in the past. Just when she believed that she was beginning to take charge of investments and securities, he started to become secretive and irascible, and talk about ‘tensions in Europe’. He shouted at her two or three times for attempting to make banking decisions for him when he was out of the office, and told her that she should act like a lady, instead of a ‘half-baked investment consultant in tweed skirts’.

  She caught the train from Waverley Station on the last day of April 1914, with sixteen suitcases in the baggage-car, and both Tessie and McVitie travelling in third. On the way down to London, she read Les Liaisons Dangereuses, by Laclos, and Le Lac, by Lamartine. In Le Lac, as the train swayed and rattled through Derby, she found an appeal to Time which resonated so deeply in her memories of Karl von Ahlbeck that she had to look up from the book with tears in her eyes and stare out through the grimy window at anything at all, at the untidy fields and houses, at the rutted roads, at the smoking factory chimneys, at anything.

  Lamartine had written, ‘Ô temps, suspends ton vol; et vous, heures propices, suspendez votre cours! O time, suspend your flight; and you, happiest of hours, hold still!’

  She closed her eyes and she could almost hear the crackling of the hardwood logs in her bedroom at the Schloss; almost feel the touch of Karl’s naked body.

  She had slept with nobody since she had left Germany, although she supposed there had been several opportunities. Most nights, she was so tired when she returned from the bank that it didn’t trouble her. But there were times particularly during the week before her period, when she dreamed of Karl kissing her and stroking her, and went through waking fantasies of being touched and caressed by strange men. She could never bring herself to touch herself as Karl had done; but she found a way of pressing her thighs together and rubbing her legs until at last she found a measure of relief.

  The dining-car attendant opened the compartment door and said, ‘Luncheon, madam?’

  The staff at Gheyne Walk were noticeably irritated at having to open the house at short notice, particularly since ‘Mr Robert’ wasn’t expected, and ‘Mr Robert’ always left £200 on the hall table when he left to be shared between them. But they dragged the dust-sheets off the Hermann Muthesius furniture, bought by Effie after her return from Germany; and they stoked up the furnace and the kitchen-range; and arranged irises and daffodils in Effie’s own three-room suite – a bland, white-painted, highly-elegant arrangement of bedroom, sitting-room and bathroom of which Hermann Muthesius and all of his futuristic friends would have approved wholeheartedly. Effie loved it simply because it was stark, and restful. After a lifetime of Victorian Edinburgh, with its stags’-antlers and its tartans and its fringed piano-drapes, the modern style was refreshing for her soul as well as her eye. The architect M. H. Baillie Scott, after too many glasses of dry sherry, had remarked to Effie after seeing her apartments that she should have been a man. ‘A man,’ he had said, ‘would have become famous for creating rooms like these.’

  In London, Effie went to the theatre, held dinner parties, and bought herself dozens of haute-couture dresses, including a Poiret evening gown with a gold top and a green embroidered skirt which cost nearly £350. She was escorted by actors, businessmen, and lords. She danced, drank champagne, and ate breakfast at the Ritz. Her life, though, was still a hollow performance. The harder she tried, the more empty it seemed to become. She would be sitting at a dinner party, laughing with everybody else at a joke about the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith; or about hobble-skirts; or the recently-inflated price of getting oneself squiffy (gin was now 6d. a double); and she would suddenly think to herself, what am I laughing for? What am I doing anything for? Why am I here? I’m an odd, unlovely, unmarried woman of thirty years old. I’m too wealthy to be lonely and too old to find a husband. All my friends know that I’ve been unlucky in romance. Even silly young vaudeville girls like Phyllis Dare pity me. I’m a millionairess; I correspond with Rothschilds and discuss currency with Morgans; yet cheeky little actresses feel sorry for me.

  It was a hot summer. The streets of London were dusty and noisy and busy with motor-taxis, beer lorries, trams, horse-drawn drays, and motorbuses. Errand boys still whistled In The Good Old Summertime as they kicked empty tins along the pavement. Cigarettes were 5d. for twenty, and the British Empire was secure in the popular imagination as the greatest and most glittering power that the world had ever known.

  Effie, in May, under a cream fringed parasol, in a dress like a cloud of smoke and daisies, was punted along the smooth-running upper reaches of The Thames by a clipped young social-climber called Peter Davyes-Edwards, who wore a red and yellow blazer and a straw hat, and c
ould sing Tommy Atkins, from San Toy, without drawing a single breath.

  Effie, in early June, in a huge buttermilk-coloured hat, was taken to Brooklands to watch Claude Piper-Owen driving the new 55 horse power 25/50 Talbot sports car in the Handley Trophy, by Lord Rupert Clarke (known as Ting-Pong’ to his closest friends) a 26-year-old lounge lizard who once tried to kiss Effie at a reception at Lady Shottenden’s house in Belgravia and accidentally knocked over a T’ang dynasty vase instead, and smashed it.

  On 29 June, a Monday, the evening newspapers carried early reports that Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, on his official visit to Sarajevo, in Serbia, had been shot by extremists and killed. McVitie said that it had probably served him right, although why he couldn’t quite say. The following day, just before Effie was about to go out to meet her socialite friend Katherine Walmsley for luncheon at Scott’s, a telegraph boy arrived outside on a bicycle, carrying a telegram from Scotland.

  The message said simply, ‘Mother passed away yesterday, Robert.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  The system of interlinking alliances which had kept the nations of Europe at peace since the turn of the century now proved to be the chains which dragged them into war. Austria, ostensibly outraged at the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, declared war on Serbia in July. Russia was an ally of Serbia, and was bound to help Serbia defend herself; and so Germany, which was an ally of Austria, prepared to make war on Russia. The French, who were allies of Russia, and still bursting with nationalistic anger from Prussia’s invasion of France in 1870, hurried to mobilize in support of the Czar.

  On August Bank Holiday Monday, when most of Britain was picnicking, or going to the races, or trundling bathing-machines down to the beaches of Brighton and Filey and Southend, the Cabinet met at eleven o’clock in the morning at 10 Downing Street, and then attended a special session of the House of Commons in the afternoon. Sir Edward Grey, who had been Foreign Secretary since 1905, gave a long and partially indistinct speech about honour and patriotism and British duty. At three minutes past five, a laconic single-word telegram was sent to Aldershot, to the British military command. It read, ‘Mobilise’.

  The following day, crowds gathered at Westminster, and Union Jacks were waved everywhere, there was singing and cheering and cries of, ‘God Save The King’. The latest news was that the French had moved their troops up to the German frontier, following a foolproof defence plan that had been perfected by French generals over nearly twenty years. McVitie, as he buffed up the car, told Effie that he’d thought about it, but it really wasn’t worth him offering to sign up for the British Expeditionary Force because the fighting would all be over before they got there.

  At two o’clock that same afternoon, in Belgium, a young lieutenant spotted the distant grey ranks of German cavalry crossing the Belgian border. With almost apoplectic alarm, the French and Belgian high commands recognised the advance as the beginning of a swift German drive through the Low Countries, with the frighteningly obvious intention of outflanking the French on their northern borders.

  Word was promptly sent to London; and since Britain had signed a treaty with Belgium in 1839 which guaranteed her neutrality, the British Government had little choice but to hand to the German Ambassador in London a stiff message which required a halt to the German advance by midnight.

  The afternoon faded warmly into evening, but no word came of a German withdrawal. Concerned, grave, but not unduly alarmed, the British ministers waited until the stroke of eleven (since eleven o’clock in London meant that it was midnight in Berlin), and then sent another message around to the German Ambassador, informing him quite politely that since there had been no news of a halt to the German invasion of Belgium, a state of war now existed between Britain and Germany. Afterwards, most of the ministers went off for a late dinner, and then home to bed. Mr Asquith remarked to Sir Edward Grey that the time differential between London and Berlin was most convenient, since it had allowed them all to get an early night.

  While the world slept, though, the grey-uniformed German Uhlans hurried deeper and deeper into Belgium, overwhelming the Belgian defence lines and forcing them to retreat back towards Brussels. The Germans’ swift advance was to change the map of Europe forever, to bring down kingdoms and princes, to wash away fortunes and inheritances, and to slaughter in the mud of the Western Front millions of young men from every quarter of the world. Something else was shaking at its foundations, too: the power of the great European banks, and the intricate financial system that had created the international Empires of the nineteenth century. It was, quite literally, the end of the world.

  The next four years were to alter Effie’s life so suddenly and dramatically that, for over a decade afterwards, she found it difficult to believe that the innocent young girl who had grown into a woman in the idle days of Edwardian Scotland had actually been her. She often used to look at photographs of herself as she had been in 1911 (when she had met Karl) and 1914 (when she had spent her last peacetime summer in Chelsea) and yet the face she saw in the pictures didn’t look like her at all. Was that ever me? Did I actually lie in that punt, under that summery parasol, with a glass of champagne in one hand, and an open picnic basket, wearing a hat that was weighed down with as much artificial fruit as a coster-monger’s barrow? Was that me?

  The war changed Effie on every level of her exitence. Everything that she had believed about herself, and about her work, and about her inability to find love, was turned inside-out, without warning, and became suddenly incomprehensible and unfamiliar. She felt as if she no longer knew herself, or what she wanted to be, or why. That dark comfortable hideout she had found for herself and her bruised emotions had revealed itself to be nothing more than a prickly niche in a hostile forest – a forest where strange events leapt at her like grey wolves, and day never seemed to follow night.

  The death of her mother, in the month before war was actually declared, was the first event which unsettled her. Then, there was her catastrophic confrontation with Robert, and the Brazilian affair. This was quickly followed by the terrible news which she received from Europe, the collapse of all her hopes, and the anguish of what happened with Alisdair.

  But more than anything, it was the financial cost of the war which changed her. After Sir John French and the British Expeditionary Force had helped to check the German advance at the Battle of the Marne, in September 1914, and after the war had settled down to four attritional years of trenches, and ‘big pushes’, and wasteful butchery, Europe’s capital began to bleed away with every shell that was fired and every man who died in the mud. At the outbreak of war, the United States had been deeply in debt to Europe. By 1918, when it was all over, the United States was a creditor nation, owed debts by European countries of more than fifteen billion dollars: Watson’s Bank, like many others, was almost bankrupt.

  The world’s financial balance had tipped to America; and Effie knew by Armistice Day that if she wanted to fulfil her deepest ambitions, she would have to go with it.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  She arrived at St Vigeans on a humid, overcast day in July 1914, to bury her mother. She wore a black veil, and a long black dress of moiré silk. She rustled and whispered as she walked, chiffon conversing with silk, silk rubbing sleekly against skin. Around her neck she wore a marquise-cut diamond of more than seven carats, in a setting of rubies and gold.

  Robert was there, too, perspiring, with a girl called Joan Duff, whom Effie recognised as one of his typewriters from the bank. Her mother’s casket was of figured elm, with gold-washed handles, and it was laden with mountainous heaps of pink and white carnations. The flowers nodded and bounced as the casket-bearers carried it around the building to the cemetery. Fiona Watson had expressed to the minister of St Vigeans (a deaf, wiry-haired man with wildly crossed eyes) that she would rather be buried here, at St Vigeans, than in the Watson family graveyard at Kilmory. There was no pipe band; no drums; only the chirruping of the sparrows, and the doleful St Vi
geans bell.

  After the ceremony, Effie walked straight back to her car, but Robert cut across the lawns to intercept her.

  ‘Effie!’

  She kept on walking, and Robert had to give a little skip to catch up with her. ‘You’re not going straight back to London?’ he asked her.

  ‘Is there any reason why I should stay here in Scotland?’

  ‘I’m having a dinner tomorrow night for some Brazilians. I need you for a hostess. I was counting on you.’

  ‘What about Vesta Tilley there?’ asked Effie, meaning Joan Duff. ‘Can’t she be trained to serve out the carrots?’

  ‘Effie – Effie! Will you please wait? This is important! It’s more than important! It’s essential. It could mean that we make an extra eleven or twelve million pounds this year, and carry on being profitable next year, whatever happens with Germany.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Effie, stiffly. She had reached her car now, and McVitie was holding open the door for her.

  ‘Well, war looks very probable now, doesn’t it?’ said Robert. ‘We should simply make sure that, whatever the outcome, we don’t suffer any losses. Wars are for making profits, for encouraging industry, for taking over new and wealthy territories. Wars are good for business. We don’t want to miss our opportunity, do we?’

  ‘You really want war?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter two snoots whether I want it or not! It’ll happen, or not happen, regardless of what my preference is. All I want to do is make sure that Watson’s Bank capitalises on the inevitable tide of history. You can’t blame me for that.’

  Effie looked away. ‘Mr Niblets told me when I was in London that Watson’s lent large sums of money to both Austria and Serbia. He also told me that the greater part of those loans was expected to be used for military equipment and ordnance. Is that what you call capitalising on the inevitable tide of history? It seems to me that your preference might have had quite a considerable effect in Europe, one way or another.’