Lady of Fortune Read online

  Dougal peered around inside the gloomy offices; at the bent heads of the clerks; at the clock on the wall saying twenty past three; and at the portrait of Kitchener in the uniform of Sirdar of the Egyptian Army, which had been presented to the bank after the Battle of Omdurman, three years ago. Malcolm Cockburn beckoned, and one of the clerks pushed back his chair and came forward, a young man in his early thirties, with a wing collar, tortoise-shell spectacles, and hair that stuck up on the crown of his head like a cockerel’s plume.

  ‘This is Mr Niblets,’ said Malcolm Cockburn. ‘Mr Niblets is our chief clerk; been with us twelve years now. You should get on. Mr Niblets, this is Mr Dougal Watson; and this is Miss Effie Watson.’

  Mr Niblets nervously extended his hand. I’m honoured to know you. Mr Cockburn has said a lot about you.’

  Malcolm Cockburn uncomfortably retracted his neck into his collar, and said, ‘Yes, Mr Niblets, that will do. Perhaps you’d be good enough to show Mr Watson and Miss Watson around the trust department for me. Show Mr Watson the work we’ve been doing on the De Keyser Trust. A fine piece of financial engineering, the De Keyser Trust. We’re rather satisfied with it, though I say so myself.’

  ‘Well,’ said Dougal, turning towards Effie and smiling, I’m sure that’s something I can look over later. Right now, I’m much more interested in seeing the main banking room.’

  Malcolm Cockburn frowned at Mr Niblets. ‘With respect, Mr Watson,’ he said, congestedly, ‘this is going to be your department, and I really would have thought that –’

  ‘You can think whatever you like,’ Dougal told him, quite affably, but with complete firmness. ‘My sister and I would like to see the main banking room.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Malcolm Cockburn, with displeasure. He had been looking forward to going back to his office for his afternoon tea and digestive biscuits. ‘It’s down on the ground floor, if you’ll kindly follow me.’

  ‘You’re so considerate, Mr Cockburn,’ said Effie, with that over-sweet smile of hers. ‘I’m sure that everybody tells you so.’

  She didn’t notice Mr Niblets removing his spectacles and watching her flounce down the corridor in her heathery skirts, dumbstruck as if he had just been personally visited by Persephone, or Diana, or Venus herself. She didn’t see him try self-consciously to smooth down his hair, and adjust his necktie, and walk slowly back to his desk, stumbling against the edge of his chair like a man who has drunk one too many bottles of India Pale Ale at lunchtime.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Later, as they returned to Eaton Square, Dougal said, ‘I think I’ve found my man.’

  Effie was looking out of the carriage window at the lake in St James’s Park, a silvery breathed-over mirror between the naked trees. She said, ‘You’re going to have to be sure of him. As sure as you may be of me.’

  ‘Och, with bankers you can tell at a glance. There are only two kinds of bankers, stuffed shirts on the one hand, company men; and adventurers. There are not too many adventurers, but this man’s one.’

  ‘What’s this name?’

  ‘Cutting. He’s in charge of East African investments at the moment, but I believe he’ll be able to help me get into the home investment field. And if Cockburn’s going to be as wary of me as you say, I should be able to get my thumb well into the pie before anyone realises what’s happening. That’s my only chance, you know. To bring in two or three very heavyweight accounts, so that I’m unassailable.’

  ‘What if you can’t?’

  ‘Then father will make absolutely sure that I spend the rest of my born days in the trust department, with Nibbles, or whatever the fellow’s name is.’

  ‘You can do it. I know you can.’

  Dougal squeezed her hand. ‘I’m praying I can.’

  Effie had noticed Dougal talking to Cutting when they were down on the main banking floor. She hadn’t looked at Cutting particularly closely, but she had been struck by his rather languid public-school pose, and the unusually elegant cut of his black frock-coat and his buttoned black vest. Perhaps it was the curl in his hair which had made him seem less stuffy than his colleagues, or the slightly more dashing size of his necktie. He looked like the kind of chap who could throw a cricket-ball rather well; and would have been asked to captain the First XI if he hadn’t been surprised in his study with the headmaster’s nubile daughter.

  It had been typically alert of Dougal to make Malcolm Cockburn take them down straight away to the main banking room. It was here that the real day-to-day business of banking was done; and it was here that Dougal had been most likely to be able to find an influential ally. At first, Dougal had been hesitant about Effie’s breezy determination to seize the initiative with the Cockburns and with everybody else she met in London; and he still wasn’t convinced that she ought to have cast him in the rôle of his father’s secret informant. But he was quick-witted enough to realise that it was important for him to be introduced to the bankers on the main banking floor at once, and by Malcolm Cockburn himself. It wouldn’t have impressed any of the sharp and cynical bankers who worked in the very temple of the bank’s financial power if Dougal had been brought around to them in two or three days’ time by Niblets, or some other senior clerk. They might not even have noticed him.

  He had shaken hands with Mr Millings, whose bald pink head was as knobby and as turreted as a raspberry mould. Mr Millings dealt with the bank’s interests within the United Kingdom, which meant that his customers included Great Western Railways, Hudson Woollen Mills, Staffordshire potteries and almost a third of the privately-owned coal-mines and ironworks in Wales. It was Mr Millings who had lent £450,000 to Baker and Huntley’s, the Clyde shipbuilders, to construct three dredgers which would eventually open up the River Niger to free trade; it was Mr Millings who had recommended that Watson’s should not lend £16,000 to a fellow called Brearley who thought that he could devise a kind of steel that would never stain or mark.

  The huge crystal gasolier which hung suspended above Mr Milling’s shiny head was the symbol of everything that Watson’s Bank stood for: enlightened and paternalistic power. Loans and investments which would benefit the poor benighted masses of the world; and strengthen the principles of free commerce upon which the British Empire was founded. Thomas Watson had founded his bank by lending a few hundred pounds to poor Aberdeen fishermen, to help them build up fleets of herring-boats; then he had financed the rebuilding of the Tay Bridge after the collapse of 1879 to keep Scotland’s railway communications working. It was a guiding doctrine of the bank, a rule by which every one of Watson’s bankers was expected to conduct his daily business, that Watson’s was not a frivolous bank. Watson’s did not risk money on wild inventions and non-conformist schemes. Watson’s was a pillar of the British Empire.

  This doctrine was Watson’s underlying strength. So solid and creditworthy were its borrowers that its lending rates scarcely had to waver, even in difficult times. It also enabled Robert to introduce a highly profitable short-term loan scheme, at very much lower rates than anyone else, including Rothschilds, confident that the companies who took advantage of it would be able to pay him back. This scheme, which was to be imitated again and again in later years by other merchant banks, and heralded each time as a brilliant banking innovation, Robert had called ‘dipping in for a plack.’ Morgan Guaranty Trust, over half a century later, were to refer to it as ‘sticking your head in.’

  But Watson’s greatest strength, as Dougal and many other young bankers were already beginning to suspect, was also its greatest weakness. It was concentrating its investments and loans in the British Empire, and into the encouragement of worldwide free trade; and although in 1901 it was still heresy to say so, the British Empire, as its founders had conceived it, was a dream that was financially impossible to realize.

  Britain’s colonies and possessions, although they splattered the map with red, were capable of buying only a third of Britain’s industrial output, and their buying power had not increased in
forty years. At the turn of the century, the whole of tropical Africa had consumed only one and a half per cent of Britain’s annual exports. What was worse, the Empire could not provide Britain with all the food and raw materials she demanded. Even in 1896, at the peak of the Empire’s expansion, Britain had been obliged to buy 80 percent of the wheat she needed from the United States.

  Underlying this imbalance in supply and demand, the ethic of free trade was gradually proving to be its own downfall. Britain owned Malaya, which produced over half of the world’s raw rubber, and yet Malaya happily and freely exported over half of its rubber to America, for a better price than British companies could pay. Watson’s Bank had invested in British Oriental Rubber to the sum of nearly one and a half million pounds, and while that £ 1 million was not immediately at risk, it could only face gradual devaluation and decay.

  Dougal did not yet understand how drastically the Empire was collapsing into premature senility. Very few bankers did. But he did sense that there was a suffocating economic stuffiness in the City, as there had been in Edinburgh. There was a pompous confidence in the banks and the Stock Exchange founded on very little more than jingoism, G. A. Henty stories of British pluck in Rangoon, and public-school complacency. Too many bankers and too many brokers were making too much profit out of the Empire for any of them to believe that it could ever decline.

  Mr Millings had asked, in a clipped voice, ‘Your father’s keeping well, Mr Watson?’

  ‘My father’s never been better,’ Dougal had told him.

  ‘It was quite a surprise to us, your appointment down here in London.’

  Dougal had looked over at Effie, but Effie was busy being introduced to Mr Preston, who was in charge of Indian investment, and who collected triangular postage stamps, and stuttered frantically.

  ‘I was just as surprised as you were, Mr Millings,’ said Dougal, his voice amused but his face unsmiling. ‘I suppose my father wanted to make sure that the London office had the benefit of its own real, live, genuine Watson. Father can’t be everywhere at once, don’t you know. Not in person. This is his way of being omnipotent.’

  Dougal had hoped that Mr Millings would be bright enough to take the point that he, Dougal, had been sent down from Edinburgh as his father’s eyes and ears. And it certainly seemed as if Mr Millings did, because he surreptitiously closed the cover of the folder on which he had been working, and turned two or three papers face-down, and then raised his puddingy face to Dougal, and said, ‘Um, perhaps you’d be better off in the tender care of some of my colleagues? Home investment, that’s my line. Not particularly amusing! Textile mills, heavy industry, that kind of thing. Nothing to entertain you, in particular.’

  Most of the other bankers in the main banking room had been as circumspect in their greeting of Dougal as Mr Millings. It had been hard for Dougal to tell them apart, in their stiff wing collars and their black tailcoats, because each of their faces had that sugar-mouse pinkness and undistinguished plumpness of the slightly overfed. They had all nodded to Dougal with a carefully-balanced combination of respect (since he was Thomas Watson’s son), and superciliousness (since he was also an interfering young Scotsman in a peculiarly ill-fitting suit who might stir up all kinds of difficult problems.) They weren’t cautious of Dougal because of any dislike of working for a Scottish bank. On the contrary, Watson’s had a cachet in the City which they all enjoyed, a reputation for dourness, meanness and overbearing conservatism (not to mention a flavour of Balmoral). But they were all Harrow men or Haileybury men or Winchester men, and they were all part of a tight social cluster from which Dougal would always be excluded. They had unenthusiastically taken his hand, and pumped it up and down once or twice, and then excused themselves, and sat down again.

  Jack Cutting had been the exception. He had grasped Dougal’s hand firmly, and said, ‘Exiled from home?’

  Dougal had hesitated, and then said broadly, ‘Not exactly exiled. More like exported.’

  Jack Cutting had thrust his hands into his pockets, and given a little hum. ‘Funny, I wouldn’t have thought that London was quite your cup of tea. Very starchy down here. Very conservative. We’ve all got too many chums in the Colonial Office, you see, and the India Office, and nobody’s very keen to finance anything that might upset an old pal. We would have backed Rhodes, you know, if old Beanstaff over there hadn’t been so desperately worried about letting down one of his school pals. But there you are. We got the Victoria Falls Copper Company account instead, so I suppose there was some consolation.’

  ‘You’re East Africa, aren’t you?’

  ‘That’s right. It was all an accident, really. When I came here they asked me if I had any relations serving in the colonies; and like a fool I said that my uncle grows coffee in Kenya. “That’s good,” said Cockburn, “you can be our East African expert,” and that’s what I’ve been ever since. Great stuff if you’re mad on cloves, and coffee, and blackies, in that order. Otherwise, ghastly.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Good God, it’s not your fault. But I must say they keep one stuck in the same department here for year after year; never give you a chance to show what you’re made of. I think I might be rather good at stock investment. I have rather a nose for it. I made twice my salary last year on the stock market, and I could probably do the same for some of the bank’s clients. But, there you are. Is that your sister?’

  ‘Effie, that’s right.’

  ‘Pretty, isn’t she? A very pretty sight.’

  Dougal had turned around. It had never, really occurred to him that Effie was pretty, or that other men should notice her. But when he saw her standing at the far end of the huge marbled banking room, talking to Mr Millings and Mr Cockburn, it struck him that she was remarkably pretty, yes; and that her prettiness was all the more intriguing because she was his sister. Her face looked suddenly pert and bright; her hair shone in the light from the gasolier; and in these heavy and dignified surroundings she seemed to have a feminine fragility about her, a gentle radiance, which any Edwardian man would have relished.

  ‘You’ve never seen it before, have you?’ Cutting had asked him, amused. ‘I mean you’ve never realised how charming she is.’

  ‘I’ve grown up with her. I don’t suppose she notices how braw I am, either.’

  ‘Braw? Well, yes, I admit you’re braw! Will you introduce me to her?’

  Dougal had seen that Malcolm Cockburn was trying to usher Effie across the banking room to the stairs, impatient for his tea and biscuits. This wasn’t the moment for introducing her to Jack Cutting: when they did meet, Dougal wanted to be sure that Effie understood that he might be a confidant, and a friend.

  He had taken Jack Cutting’s hand again, and said, ‘In a day or two, perhaps, when we’ve settled in a bit. We could have a wee bite of lunch.’

  ‘Ah, being protective of her, are we?’

  ‘Quite the opposite. I’m protecting you from her. You’ll see what I mean when I introduce you. She’s a sharp lassie, is Effie.’

  Jack Cutting said, ‘I like a girl sharp. I like a fellow to be sharp, too. You’re taking over the trust department, aren’t you? That should make a difference. Poor old Halethorpe was ready to retire years ago. He dropped off to sleep just before Christmas, and fell in his fireplace.’

  Dougal had glanced quickly from right to left, and then said, in a low voice, ‘Trusts and bonds are not my sole interest.’

  ‘You mean, you’re looking for something a little more exciting? Something with prospects?’

  ‘You’ve got the wind of it.’

  Jack had sucked in his breath. ‘Cockburn and Millings won’t give you much elbow-room there. Nor will Snell. Snell’s in charge of Foreign and Dominion. They don’t like the galley-slaves to poke their noses up on deck, those three. Why, if a poor fellow like me came up with a decent account, and took all the credit for it, they might be shown up for what they are. The three dullest brains in Cornhill. I might as well warn you, now – th
ey’ll fight you, those three. They don’t like young men with ideas and they particularly don’t like young Scotsmen with ideas.’

  ‘But I’m the son of the founder.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter if you’re the Son of God. They’ll sit on you, with those three big wide rumps of theirs, until you can’t breathe another breath.’

  ‘I’m surprised my father appointed them, if they’re as dull as you say they are.’

  Jack Cutting laid a hand on Dougal’s shoulder. ‘They’re safe, that’s why. I don’t want to make impertinent remarks about your father, but the impression we get of him down here is that he’s rather like Caesar – imperious and imperial, but always keeping an eye open for lean and hungry conspirators.’

  Dougal looked Jack Cutting straight in the eye. ‘You’re taking a risk, aren’t you, Mr Cutting, telling me this? You don’t even know me.’

  Jack Cutting shrugged. ‘If you were getting along well with your father, you never would have been sent down here to manage the trust department. You would have stayed in Edinburgh, like your brother Robert, and managed the bank’s affairs in true Watson style, to the strains of We All Stand Together, or O Bonny Was Yon Rosy Brier, or whatever it is you chaps sing up in Edinburgh to keep your hearts beating quick.’

  Dougal had thought at first that he ought to be seriously offended by this remark. He was certainly surprised by it. But Jack Cutting had stood there so calm and collected that all Dougal had done was plant his fists on his hips, like a man whose gundog has just made off with a fresh-baked meat pie from the kitchen windowsill, and give Jack Cutting a pursed-up kind of a grin.

  ‘You’re a man with a taste for a risk,’ he said. ‘I like that.’

  ‘Don’t forget about inviting me for lunch,’ Jack Cutting had reminded him, as he went off to join a smiling Effie and an increasingly irritable Malcolm Cockburn.