Lady of Fortune Read online

  ‘I want to drink your health,’ he said, raising his glass. ‘You’re not only pretty, and fresh, but you’ve got a will of your own, too.’

  ‘I’ll drink to good fortune,’ said Effie, and very softly they touched the rims of their glasses together.

  ‘Good fortune,’ said Henry, warmly.

  The champagne was crisp and cold and extremely dry. Effie had only drunk champagne once before, at Sophie Macfarlane’s wedding in Cramond. It tickled her lips, and gave her the feeling that she was being very sophisticated and grown-up. Henry Baeklander gave her that feeling, too; but there was something about the way he looked at her and the way he spoke to her that moved her insides around, as if her pancreas and her liver and her heart had all decided to play General Post within the confines of her corset, and she wasn’t sure if this sensation was sophisticated or not. She felt as if she were yearning for something, but she didn’t know what it was that she was yearning for. It was almost irritating, and yet it was exciting, too. She felt that if anybody touched her bare skin, she would shudder, and yet the thought of someone touching her bare skin disturbed and aroused her.

  ‘You’re not really going on to Putney so soon, are you?’ asked Henry.

  ‘Not really,’ she admitted, lowering her eyes. ‘That was only Dougal being brotherly.’

  ‘Perhaps I could take you riding tomorrow. Do you ride?’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘Would you ride with me? Miss Prescott could come along as chaperone.’

  ‘I don’t know. You must give me a litte time to think on it.’

  Henry drank a little champagne, watching her over the rim of his glass.

  ‘Do you really need time to think?’ he asked her. ‘You’re not very flattering to me.’

  ‘I believe in my own independence, that’s why.’

  ‘Your own independence? You don’t look like a feminist.’

  ‘I’m not,’ said Effie, ‘I’m an individualist.’

  ‘I see,’ said Henry. She could tell that he was half-teasing her, coaxing her into saying something provocative. He asked her, ‘Does that mean that you will never marry, that you will never seek a husband to serve and oblige, that you will never rear children, or spend your days making your home as cozy a nest as you can?’

  ‘I will not marry unless I am in love.’

  ‘But when you do fall in love? Where will your individualism be then?

  Effie said, ‘First and foremost, I want to be a banker. Then, when that is achieved, I will think about falling in love.’

  She knew she was talking too hotly. The reception room was growing warm and noisy, and she seemed already to have drunk most of her glass of champagne.

  Henry said, ‘I’m sorry?’ His expression had changed from droll amusement to genuine perplexity.

  ‘I said, I want to be a banker,’ said Effie, clearly.

  Henry lifted his tail-coat on one side, and rested his hand on his hip. ‘Do you know,’ he told her, ‘that’s what I thought you said.’

  ‘Well, it’s true. I’m Thomas Watson’s daughter, and I think I could have a flair for it.’

  Henry nodded. ‘I’ll admit you could. But!’

  ‘But, what?’

  ‘But, my bold spring snowdrop, you’re a girl. Girls are not bankers. Bankers are not girls. Banking is a profession conducted exclusively by, and for, men. When you say you want to be a banker, I don’t even understand what you mean. Do you think that any man will do business with you? Do you think that any man will trust your financial judgement? You can’t be admitted to any of the clubs where the day-to-day barter and wrangling of banking goes on. It’s just a dream. It’s fairyland.’

  ‘Some dreams come true,’ said Effie.

  ‘Yes, they do,’ agreed Henry. ‘But not many of them. And not dreams that fly in the face of plain reality. Now, if you’d told me that you wanted to try your hand at being a stenographer, or a telephone operator, that would have been different. Some simple task in which you could have made yourself useful while you waited for your beau to come along …’

  ‘Mr Baeklander,’ said Effie, ‘I have no intention of getting married until I have made my way as a banker, and I am rich in my own right.’

  Henry took her hand, and squeezed it tight. ‘Effie, I love you. Marry me. Marry me next week. Save yourself the storms and the miseries of all this individualism, or feminism, or whatever it is you call it.’

  ‘You’re making fun of me.’

  He didn’t release her hand. He raised his head a little, and looked at her with obvious seriousness. ‘Effie, I’m not.’

  ‘Well, you certainly don’t mean to marry me.’

  That’s where you’re quite wrong.’

  Effie looked around at the people on each side of her. One, a small fiftyish woman with a huge ostrich-feather hat gave her an indulgent smile, and then turned back to the man she was talking to, and asked sharply, ‘Who is that gel? She reminds me so much of Lucy Jones-Radleigh I can’t tell you.’

  Henry said to Effie, ‘My wife died three years ago. I’ve been alone since then. I suppose I could have had any woman I set eyes on; but look at them. Hard, blasé, bitches in diamonds and pearls, if you’ll forgive my language.’

  ‘Henry –’ said Effie, but just then Vera Cockburn came up, with a smart young couple whose grins seemed to have been fixed into position with moustache wax.

  ‘Henry, you’re monopolising Effie,’ said Vera Cockburn. ‘Effie, you must meet the Clough Martins. Cyril and Amelia Clough Martin. They’re frightfully thrilled because Anthony Clough Martin, that’s Cyril’s uncle, well, he’s just been appointed deputy British Agent in Egypt, under Cromer.’

  ‘We’re all dying to go out to Cairo and watch Tony licking the fella-hin into some sort of shape,’ screamed Amelia Clough Martin. ‘He used to be captain of rowing at Cambridge, and you should have seen what he did to the poor oarsmen!’

  ‘Don’t fancy the poor old Khedive’s chances,’ Cyril Clough Martin put in, and then abruptly came out with a series of sharp guffaws, five of them, which ended as quickly as they had started.

  Henry, under his breath, said to Effie, ‘Ride with me, please. I’ll call for you at eleven.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Effie. He held her arm, and she felt dizzy, as if he had seized her arm to prevent her from falling.

  ‘If you’ll come,’ said Henry, ‘pin a handkerchief on to your sleeve before I leave tonight. That’ll give you time to think.’

  ‘Very over-rated, your average Egyptian,’ said Cyril Clough Martin. ‘Nothing at all like your popular notion of a noble hawk-nosed fellow riding around the desert in a flowing robe. Farmers, most of them, and uncommonly bad ones. Filthy, too. I was talking to Scott-Moncrieff the other day – you know, the chap who built the Aswan Dam – and he said that they were utterly hopeless. Hopeless! Never be fit to rule themselves, not in million years.’

  ‘Do come and meet the Stanleys’, Amelia Clough Martin screeched. ‘Edward has such a hilarious story about the Rothschilds, and you must persuade him to tell it to you before Mr Alfred comes.’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Meeting Alfred de Rothschild was, for Effie, the most significant experience of her first visit to London; and the third most telling experience in the whole of her life. She had been led to expect someone absurdly Jewish, a beaky-nosed caricature of a Zionist, ridiculously rich, and impossibly vulgar. Instead, she met an amusing and cultured man who was able, through the immensity of his fortune, to indulge every one of his tastes for paintings, furniture, music, and beautiful women.

  He taught her only one thing that evening: that luxury itself was no vice – that luxury, instead, was a way of exalting the senses, and bringing the deepest desires of the mind into actual being. ‘Many can dream of beauty,’ he told her. ‘Even the poorest can dream of beauty. But only the rich man can turn that dream into reality.’

  Alfred, at fifty-six was the least Rothschild-looking of all the Rothsc
hilds. He was slight, and bald, with sharp blue eyes and magnificently bushy side-whiskers. He worked with his brothers Natty and Leo at the Rothschild office in New Court, but he was far more of an artistic dilettante than a banker. He was something of an eccentric, too. At New Court, he kept his feet tucked in a mink foot-warmer, and when his automobile was sent to collect his weekend guests at the station, it was unfailingly accompanied by yet another car, in case of a breakdown.

  He was considered to be England’s greatest connoisseur of eighteenth-century French painting, yet he was also the owner of the most hideous and showy country house that had ever been built in England. Halton House near Wendover, in Buckinghamshire, was described by Eustace Balfour as ‘badly planned, gaudily decorated … and O, the sense of lavish wealth thrust up your nose! Eye hath not seen nor pen can write the ghastly coarseness of the sight!’

  Nobody protested about Alfred’s hospitality, though. It was said that guests at Halton House would be greeted in the morning when they awoke by a bewigged footman, followed by another flunky with a trolley, and that the guest would be politely asked:

  ‘Tea, coffee, or a peach off the wall, sir?’

  If the guest replied, ‘Tea, please,’ the footman would then enquire:

  ‘China tea, Indian tea, or Ceylon tea, sir?’

  ‘China, if you please.’

  ‘Lemon, milk, or cream, sir?’

  ‘Milk, please.’

  ‘Jersey, Hereford, or Shorthorn, sir?’

  Alfred, when he arrived at Eaton Square, was almost immediately surrounded by a twittering crowd of the prettiest women in the room. He was over an hour late but he made a point of kissing every one of the women, and inquiring how they were. Dinner was already half an hour later than Vera Cockburn had planned it, and downstairs in the kitchen, cook was complaining in heated language about her ruined béarnaise sauce, and her collapsed potatoes. But Alfred de Rothschild was Malcolm Cockburn’s most valuable visitor. Even a crumb of information from New Court was worth a whole loaf of gossip from Barings or Coutts. Dinner could wait; the rest of the guests could wait. New cooks could be found from an agency. New guests could be found anywhere. But there could be no substitute for a Rothschild.

  ‘Well, Malcolm, you have some particularly beautiful ladies here tonight,’ Alfred said loudly, as he walked into the reception room. ‘English roses, all of them.’

  ‘One Scottish rose, Alfred,’ said Henry Baeklander, loudly, from the far side of the room.

  ‘Mr Alfred’ peered across the room to see who had spoken. ‘Ah!’ he said, raising a waggish finger. ‘It’s you, Henry. I thought I recognized that uncivilised colonial accent!’

  ‘Nice to see you awake, Alfred,’ said Henry. Alfred de Rothschild was notorious for rising late, getting to the office at two o’clock in the afternoon, lunching between 3.30 and four o’clock, and then waiting until his two brothers left the office at five so that he could stretch himself out on the leather sofa and sleep.

  ‘Nice to see you alive, Henry,’ Alfred retorted. ‘Where’s this Scottish rose of yours? I thought Scotland was all kilts and misers.’

  Henry held out his arm; and although Effie was in the corner by the cabinet, talking to Edward Stanley and Philomena Daubry, the heiress to the Daubry vineyard fortune, everyone in the room turned to her, and she had to excuse herself and step forward, embarrassed and breathless.

  ‘Well, my dear,’ said Alfred de Rothschild, bowing his head and taking Effie’s hand. ‘You are a beautiful young Caledonian! Henry, I congratulate you on your perception. Vera, my darling, you must make sure that this gorgeous creature is seated next to me at dinner. This is a pleasant surprise. Almost an adoration dinner!’

  Alfred’s ‘adoration dinners’ were well know. Since he had recently taken over the bankrupt Gaiety Theatre, he had met some of London’s most beautiful actresses, and would frequently invite them to dine alone with him, or with no more than three or four gentleman friends.

  ‘You’re very flattering, Mr de Rothschild,’ said Effie. ‘Unfortunately I would rather be respected than adored.’

  There was a moment of difficult silence. Alfred de Rothschild looked closely at Effie, and then at Henry, and then at Malcolm Cockburn, who managed a dyspeptic grin, and then covered his eyes with his hand.

  ‘Well, then,’ Alfred said, to Effie, with a nod of his head, ‘If it’s respect you want, I shall give you all the respect that you deserve. And considering you have spoken so boldly, I would say that you deserve a very great deal.’

  The reception room was filled with uncomfortable laughter. Jerome saved the moment by appearing at the door, and announcing, sombrely, that dinner was served.

  The thirty guests were seated at a long dining-table spread with a cloth of creamy Irish linen, and decorated with huge silver candelabras held up by silver-gilt slave girls and turbaned Arabs. Alfred de Rothschild was seated at the centre of the table, with Effie sitting opposite – much to the annoyance of Lady Pennington, who had originally been seated there. Mr Alfred talked and laughed throughout the whole dinner, but ate nothing, and drank nothing; even though every course was carefully set in front of him. It was only afterwards that Effie learned that he had a rare stomach condition which none of his doctors could cure.

  ‘There is something unusual about you,’ he remarked to Effie, as she spooned her turtle soup. ‘You have a quality which I don’t often see in London women. A clarity, perhaps. A lack of muddle-headed vanity.’

  ‘I think I’m capable of being as vain as any other woman,’ said Effie.

  ‘Rightly so, my dear,’ said Alfred. ‘But you have some inner force; some bright determination. Let me tell you this: you will either make an outrageous success of your life, or you will end up destitute.’

  Effie said, ‘Does there ever come a time when money no longer interests you?’

  Alfred rested his chin in his hand, and traced a pattern on the table cloth with his thumbnail. ‘Money? Well, money as money has long ceased to interest me. Banking is not the most exciting calling in the world. But, I am still fascinated by luxury. I am still amused by the possibilities of money. Do you know something, before I go for a carriage-ride in Hyde Park in the morning, the keepers deliberately spread stones in the path of my carriage, and then speedily pluck them out of the way when I approach, so that I will reward them for being so courteous and conscientious. Now that, in itself, is a strange kind of luxury. So was the circus I got together for myself, with performing dogs and ponies. Money enables me to express every desire I have; whether it is material or cerebral, whether it is serious or silly. Niccolini has performed for me, in my private drawing-room. So have Melba and Liszt, and de Roszke. Luxury is the power so to arrange your world that everything which for most ordinary people can only take place internally, inside their minds, can leap out, and take on reality!’

  He paused, and then he added, with a hint of regret, ‘Of course, not everybody’s mind would take kindly to translating into reality. Some people hate my country house, for instance, and I suppose they’re entitled to. But your mind, I sense, has the right mixture. You are a girl, and yet I sense in you a man’s strength.’

  ‘I want to be a banker,’ said Effie, in a level voice. The man sitting on her left, the third Earl of Winslow, peered at her in complete surprise and almost choked himself on a fatty piece of turtle-meat.

  Alfred de Rothschild, however, sat back in his chair and smiled at Effie through the swaying candle-flames. ‘A banker! A lady banker! Now, that’s an ambition! Here we have a lady, who wishes to be a banker, and never can be; and sitting opposite her, we have a banker, who wishes he were not a banker, and has an equally minuscule chance of getting what he wants. Isn’t life ironic!’

  Down at the lower end of the table, Henry Baeklander had been talking intently to Dougal; ignoring a large moon-faced lady who sat sadly drinking her soup and repeatedly dabbing her lips, and heaving silent sighs.

  ‘You should come to work in Wall
Street,’ Henry was saying. ‘You know what’s going to happen here. Your father’s going to leave you stranded in the trust department, like a beached dogfish; and the next thing you’re going to know, you’re going to be sixty years old and ready to be let out to grass, and you won’t have achieved anything. You want Dougal Watson to go down as a great name in creative banking, don’t you? You’d like a small statue, in your honour? Or at the very least, a plaque?’

  ‘I’m quite happy with my prospects at Watson’s, thank you,’ Dougal told him. ‘I don’t think somehow that I shall be stranded in the trust department for very long.’

  ‘Does Malcolm Cockburn know this?’

  ‘No, and I would prefer it if you didn’t mention it to him.’

  ‘I won’t. I won’t! I’m a banker. You can trust me. But do think about my offer. You could come and work for the Baeklander Trust whenever you felt like it.’ He hesitated, and drank a little white Bordeaux, and then said, ‘I’d expect you to bring Effie along with you, of course.’

  Dougal put down his soup spoon. ‘Effie?’

  ‘Why, sure. You’re not that naïve, are you?’

  ‘I don’t think I know what you mean,’ said Dougal, intently.

  ‘Sure you do. Sure you know what I mean. I’m talking about good old-fashioned horse-trading. A job for a bride. That’s all.’

  Dougal said, baffled, ‘You want to –?’

  ‘You got it,’ said Henry Baeklander, hot but unabashed. ‘You understood me plainly. Your sister Effie is something special. You look at her now, the way she just glows! Mr Alfred can’t take his eyes off her, and nor can most of the other gents in the room. I want her, young Dougal Watson. I want her very much for my own.’

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The next morning was foggy and damp, and they rode along the bridle paths of Hyde Park as if they were riding through the landscape of a wintry dream. There was a smell of wet grass and wet decaying leaves, and that inescapable sourness of thousands of smoking coal fires. Carriages rumbled by with their lamps alight, and omnibuses rolled behind the trees like the ghostly floats of a forgotten carnival.