Lady of Fortune Read online

  ‘Oh, you were such a fool, Alisdair,’ she said, more to herself now than to the statue. ‘You were such a fool to die so soon. I don’t know whether I feel sorrier for you than I do for myself.’

  Carl, with discreet rubber-soled steps, stepped forward and took Effie’s arm. He didn’t attempt to tug her away from the graveside. He was only supporting her, firmly and wholesomely, while she wept. But it wasn’t long before she put away her handkerchief, and closed her purse, and said bravely, ‘We’d better be getting back. There’s no point in bringing on heatstrokes for that dead young idiot.’

  ‘No, Miss Watson,’ said Carl, although they were both aware that she was only trying to persuade herself that Alisdair hadn’t hurt her more grievously by his careless death than anyone had ever hurt her before; and that Merritt’s sudden desertion from the bank had compounded his father’s sin far beyond an old woman’s emotional tolerance. Only two days ago, Effie had asked Carl, with a smile that was sadder than any weeping he had ever seen, if he was secretly Superman; and if, like Superman, he could reverse time, by spinning the world backwards on its axis.

  Just to be there, when Alisdair was boarding that Fokker Triplane to fly to Albuquerque to catch the train. Just to be there, when Dougal took that corner near Ridge in his Cadillac limousine. Just to save them from themselves, and to save her own future and her own past.

  But time could not be turned back. And when Effie Watson died, there would be nobody to take care of her affairs but executors and trustees, banks and bureaucrats, attorneys and executives, IRS officials and Treasury Department investigators. She had grown to believe that her money was the sum of her life; that what she actually was, as a person, was $675 million. And now, with Merritt, her whole life would be officially disassembled, and picked to pieces, and every minute of her ninety-seven years would have been without purpose, and without a final achievement.

  As she walked back to the Lincoln on Carl’s arm, Effie felt that Alisdair must have thought nothing of her, to have died like that, and leave Merritt as his only child. He might even have hated her.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  In November, the week after Thanksgiving, she had some photographs taken of herself, out of vanity, perhaps, or eccentricity, or simply to shock her friends. She chose a Greek photographer who had once been friendly with Salvador Dali – a short man with a shaved head, a huge Teddy Roosevelt moustache, and a garish Hawaiian beach shirt that was open right down to his hairy navel. His name was Kouris Kyriakou, and he spoke devastatingly bad English. Think of yourself,’ he told her, ‘as a bed. One of whole flock of beds. Bluebeds, maybe. Or wobblers.’

  But he took her down on the beach, and dressed her in fine crêpes and slippery silks, and made her stalk, and dance, and throw back her head, so that he could catch the energy that still twinkled inside her.

  Just before Christmas, Kyriakou telephoned her again and asked if he could photograph her nude, wearing nothing but her jewellery. At first she refused, absolutely. But then Kyriakou sent her a lyrical, dizzy letter that was almost a love poem, begging her to pose, He called her ‘a dragoness of Paradise, scaled with gold’. And so it was in February, six-and-a-half weeks before Effie’s ninety-eighth birthday, that Brinks arranged to send a truck with the finest pieces of her jewellery collection from the vaults downtown; and that Effie and Kyriakou were locked up for three hours, guarded by uniformed security men, in the tiled sunroom of her mansion, overlooking the lawns and the pool.

  The pictures, when they were printed, were strange but stunning. Kyriakou sent Effie a complete set of colour prints, as well as all the negatives. They showed a woman of great age, whose breasts had now fallen and whose skin was white and wrinkled, but who still kept within her a secret beauty that transcended her ninety-seven years, and made her appear to be curiously and magnetically young.

  Around her neck and her wrists she wore the symbols of her life’s financial success: a necklace of diamonds and rubies and sapphires that had once belonged to Catherine of Russia; bracelets of gold and silver and diamonds which Louis XV had commissioned especially for his mistress, Madame du Barry; and loops of pearls which had once been worn by Queen Anne. In one photograph, in which she was standing by the window of the sunroom, her hand raised lightly to her forehead, her nipples shining a kind of radiant pink, she was wearing over $15 million worth of jewellery.

  But the photographs showed, in subtle and suffused light, what Kyriakou had intuitively understood about Effie. It was not her riches that had been her life’s greatest achievement, and so whatever happened to them – whether they were dismantled or preserved – her life would never have been in vain. Her greatest achievement had been simply that she had stayed young, and alert, and that in every one of the years she had lived she had tried to be understanding, and conciliatory, and energetic; and that most of all she had always been prepared to surrender her love to anyone who would take care of it, and ask for nothing in return. They also showed that, for all her wealth, she had recognised herself to be an ordinary person.

  CHAPTER SIX

  She had first discovered the unholy bond between love and money when she was seventeen, in Edinburgh. Sometimes it seeemed so long ago that she could scarcely believe it had actually happened, and that maybe she had read about it in a book, or seen a late-night movie about it on television, with Deanna Durbin playing ‘Effie’. At other times, it seemed as if it had happened only yesterday, and that eighty years had sped through the projector of her life in two or three hours.

  George Sabatini had once told her, ‘My childhood took fifty-five years, while I was living it. When it was over, I realised that it had only taken fifty-five minutes.’

  It was the Sunday on which Mrs McNab dropped the roasted mutton in the hallway – the Sunday after the Tuesday on which the old Queen had died. That Sunday, her brothers argued so ferociously that she was frightened they were going to kill each other. Her father had sworn by the hall Bible that he would knock their heads together and disinherit them both. Her mother had gone from room to room trailing her skirts like a wounded partridge.

  It was particularly dark in the house that day, not only because it was a dark house in any event, an Edinburgh mansion built by Robert Adam but furnished in the monstrous style of the High Victorians; but because the skies above the city had been since dawn almost maroon with threatened snow. It was 27 January 1901, in the tightest and deadest days of an iron winter. The Boer War was at its height. Effie had been taking a stone hot water-bottle to bed with her ever since October (apart from Raggie, her tartan doll), and her father had predicted that the snows would not thaw until May. The very weather is in mourning,’ he had said on Friday, first to Effie’s mother, who had sighed at the thought; then to Effie’s brothers, Robert and Dougal, and then to the postie, Mr Innes, from whose nose in wintertime a permanent drip depended, and who had said, ‘Aye, Mr Watson,’ in a voice as resigned as a pair of collapsing bellows.

  Sundays were never comfortable days in the Watson household. In the morning, there was the chilly procession to St Giles, the High Kirk of Edinburgh, across a landscape of grey swept pavements, and snow-topped railings, and sparse trees. Then, on their return, there was the formal gathering of the family in the drawing-room, under mounted stags’-heads and paintings as dark as coal-holes. Thomas Watson would make some ponderous remarks about the morals of healthy investment, or of Christian charity, which in fact he did not hold in particularly high regard. ‘Better tippence in the bank than saxpence in the aumos-dish,’ was one of his favourite mottoes. Robert would drink too much sherry-wine, and Dougal would disinterestedly pick the thread from the arm of his tapestry-covered chair, while their mother sighed from time to time like someone who could think of at least five places she would rather be. Effie would daydream about being rescued by Ivanhoe, and borne away, fainting with ecstasy, on his saddle-pommel.

  Luncheon was a rigid and protracted affair, in a dining-room furnished with mahogany sideboards of i
mmense size and Gothic grandeur. There were drapes at the windows of almost impenetrable lace, and glass domes containing dried-flower arrangements, and clocks, and a stuffed eagle. It was Victoriana in excelsis; and Effie would only have to catch the smell of boiled cabbage or mashed neeps in the years to come – she would only have to sniff the suggestion of that musty sourness which haunts the inside of cutlery drawers – and she would be back at 14 Charlotte Square, in 1901, at the Sunday luncheon table, with her father sharpening the bone-handled carving-knife on the bone-handled steel, and her mother coughing hopelessly into her handkerchief.

  Effie was late coming down to luncheon this Sunday, because her father had required her to change her cornelian brooch for a brooch of jet, as a gesture of mourning for Her recently-late Majesty. ‘The cornelian,’ he had asserted, ‘carries associations of levity.’ She was halfway down the stairs when Mrs McNab appeared from the kitchen, bearing in front of her the Sunday gigot of mutton, girdled with boiled potatoes and Brussels sprouts.

  Even though Mrs McNab was a robust woman, whose reddened right hand was feared by idle scullery-maids and cheeky coal-heavers alike, the huge silver carving dish was as much as she could manage. As a rule, it was carried in each Sunday by Crawford, their butler, but Crawford was on two days’ (unpaid) leave in Motherwell, to bury his emphy-semic father.

  Effie heard Mrs McNab cry, ‘Lord of Hosts!’ and then the whole roasted leg of mutton tumbled off the carving-plate, hit the floor with a thud, and rolled off across the Indian rug, until it came to rest under the console table where the Bible and the visiting-cards were kept. The mutton was hotly pursued by the boiled potatoes and sprouts, which rumbled on to the floor with a sound like distant thunder.

  There was an expression on Mrs McNab’s face of utter horror. Inside the dining-room, even now, Thomas Watson would be completing his ritual of sharpening the carving-knife, and passing a few regretful remarks about the late Queen. Even now, Mrs Watson would be worriedly crumpling up her napkin and waiting for the joint to arrive – anything to avert her husband’s pale and uncompromising stare.

  Effie gasped; and Mrs McNab, who had thought that she was alone, looked up at her in surprise and terror. Together, they surveyed the hallway, strewn with vegetable, and their heads turned in unison towards the steaming joint which lay under the console table.

  ‘Oh, jings,’ said Mrs McNab.

  There was a moment of stricken silence, and then Effie suddenly let out an explosive burst of hilarity. Mrs McNab blinked at her in disbelief, but then she started to laugh, too; until both of them, gripped by uncontrollable hysteria, could do nothing but sit on the stairs and cling to each other and laugh until they were shrieking for breath.

  ‘Oh, Lord,’ gasped Mrs McNab, ‘when I saw yon meat rolling off across the rug …’

  Together, still laughing, they went around the hallway on hands and knees, gathering up the potatoes and the sprouts. Then Mrs McNab hefted up the leg of mutton in her serving-cloth, and restored it to the carving-plate.

  ‘Will you wait,’ said Effie, and dusted off the joint with the ivory-backed brush which was usually kept for perking up the nap on her father’s tall business hat.

  ‘Och, don’t,’ wept Mrs McNab. ‘Oh, Effie, don’t! You know what’s going to happen when your father goes to the bank tomorrow. That Mr Campsie’s going to be sniffing the air, and saying, “Fegs, Mr Watson, I do believe I can smell roast mutton!”’

  This almost finished them. Mrs McNab was wheezing for air, and had to set the carving-plate down on the floor in case she dropped it again, and Effie had to lean against the oak-panelled dado for support.

  At last, Dougal appeared from the dining-room, his napkin tucked into his collar.

  ‘What’s all this snirtling, Effie?’ he wanted to know. ‘Father’s sharpened the knife three times over; and if he doesn’t have the meat to carve soon, it looks as if he’ll start cutting slices off mother!’

  Mrs McNab sobered up at once. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Dougal. I’ll be right along. It’s no easy without Crawford to help with the fetching.’

  Dougal held the door open, and then raised his hand towards Effie. ‘I can see that you’ve been up to your usual gulravage,’ he grinned at her. He knew very well by the tears of fun in her eyes that she had been getting herself into one kind of mischief or another, but he didn’t need to ask her what. She would tell him about it later, the way she always told him about everything. He and Robert may have been nearer to each other in age, but it was always with Effie that he shared his confidence, and his happy disregard for their father’s strict family régime. In their childhood days, if a hoop was ever rolled into a pond, you could always bet that it was Effie who had rolled it there, and that it was Dougal who would get his knickers wet rescuing it. Robert, on the other hand, was his father’s boy: he would have written the hoop off as an irretrievable loss, and saved a proportion of his pocket-money each week to buy a new one. ‘A warld’s worm,’ Dougal often called Robert – a miser.

  Effie at last took her place at the table, on her father’s right hand, facing both of her brothers. Her father peered through his carving-glasses at her brooch, and then nodded his approval. ‘That’s far more decorous,’ he said. He was already standing up, a tall man in his middle fifties with the hint of a stoop, from thirty years of poring over bank-books; but with a large handsome head which was topped with grey curly hair, and dark shaggy eyebrows. There was a pleasantness about his looks which still appealed to women half his age: a straight nose, a firm and angular jawline, a mouth that seemed to be good-humoured even when he was studying figures. Only his unusually pale eyes gave away his essential coldness. They were the colour of the agates which they use for the fulcrums of weighing-scales, and twice as precise. His father, Effie’s grandfather, had thrashed any humanity out of him before he was ten years old.

  Thomas Watson gave the carving-knife one last ostentatious sharpen. ‘The art of the carver,’ he said, not for the first time, ‘is to apportion the haunch according to the needs of everyone at the table, and also according to the needs of the coming week.’

  Effie thought that all of her father’s guests who had dined at 14 Charlotte Square would have agreed that Thomas Watson was an unimpeachable carver. While he may never have stinted on potatoes or bow-kail, the meat was always rigidly ‘apportioned.’

  Robert, tearing bread, said, ‘Mr Stephenson was not at the kirk the morning.’

  ‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ replied Dougal. ‘Mr Stephenson was never your man for a tedious occasion.’ This morning’s service had been a half-hour longer than usual, because of the minister’s lengthy tribute to ‘the great, expired Queen.’

  ‘I trust we’ll have no tapetless talk about this morning’s service,’ said Thomas Watson. He looked over his spectacles, irritated, as Mrs McNab brought in a steaming dish of neeps; although he missed the tight smile that she exchanged with Effie. ‘You all heard what Mr Gowrie said. “She was ours, and we loved her so, and she has gone, and life looks quite different.” So we’ll have some reverence.’

  Robert said, ‘The trouble with Mr Stephenson is that he never seems to remember where his gear comes from. It’s easy enough to think yourself no sheep-shank on borrowed money; but it only counts for anything if you’ve earned it for yourself. And I was only observing that he wasn’t at the kirk the day.’

  Robert had reached, by just a month, the age of twenty-nine. He had the broad forehead and the short straight nose of all the Watsons; but the determined jaw which characterized the Watson obstinacy was already thickening into the beginnings of a double chin. Robert’s collars cut into his neck, and his black Sunday waistcoat was as tight as the skin of a pig’s-blood pudding. His solidity, however, wasn’t the result of over-eating – even though the Watson household maintained a Victorian tradition of weighty puddings and dense cakes, and high teas of herrings-in-oatmeal, collops-in-the-pan, skirlie and poached speldings. Robert’s build was inherited from his pater
nal great-grandfather Angus, who had been popularly known as the Bull of St Boswell’s, and unpopularly known as the Scots Egg. If the family portraits were a reliable guide, Robert also shared his greatgrandfather’s hair: shaved blue and prickly up to the top of the ears, and then topped by a thick shock of black curls. At school, his tutor had once told him severely, ‘I’ll take no snash, Watson, from a boy who so powerfully puts me in mind of a turnip.’ Robert, though, had grown up to be disconcertingly strong, far cleverer than most of his tutors and painstaking to the point of obsession. He had been appointed chief manager of Watson’s Bank when he was twenty-five, and he had earned his appointment by sheer hard work.

  ‘You’re not concerned, Robert, that Mr Stephenson might have absconded?’ asked Thomas Watson, laying two pale and bloodless slices of mutton on to his wife’s plate, and passing it along.

  ‘It entered my mind,’ said Robert, keeping his eyes on Dougal. ‘I always said that he was an adventurer. The minute I met him, I thought, there’s a fellow with a headful of fancy ideas and a purseful of moths.’

  ‘He’s probably abed with a brash,’ said Dougal. ‘All kinds of folk have been going down with the influenza.’

  ‘More likely he’s abed with a limmer,’ muttered Robert, Limmer was a coarse street word for whore.

  ‘Robert!’ rapped his father, raising the point of his carving-knife. ‘We’ll have no such talk at the Sabbath table. You’ll say your apologies to your mother.’

  ‘Forgive me, mother,’ said Robert, shifting his weight in his seat. ‘I should have held my tongue. Dougal is probably quite right, and Mr Stephenson is doubtless sick. All that concerns me is where. More likely the South of France, or halfway to New York.’

  ‘Do you know what your complaint is?’ Dougal challenged his brother. ‘You don’t trust anybody! Isn’t it the whole business of a bank to take a risk or two, and isn’t Mr Stephenson as worthy of a risk as anybody else? At least twice as worthy as Bailies-Home and his property business in Burntisland, and I’ll say no more about Duff, or the Binns, or McEwan. It’s a disease, your suspicion! That’s a good wee bookbindery that Mr Stephenson’s set up. He’s a good man, and he’s reliable; and besides, we hold his mortgage.’