Lady of Fortune Read online

  ‘Mother, where are we going? Do we have to rush so?’

  Her mother turned and stared at her, red-cheeked, as if she didn’t recognise who she was. But then she smiled, and reached out her hand, and said, ‘I’m sorry, Effie. But I had no way of warning you. I can only show you.’

  ‘Warn me? Warn me of what?’

  They were entering the gates of the castle itself now, and climbing the wide esplanade. The flag was dolefully flapping at half-mast from St Margaret’s Chapel, high at the top of the castle, and the two sentries who stood on duty by the inner gates wore grey coats and black armbands, in mourning for their dead queen. Behind them, the ramparts of the castle rose up into the grim Sunday afternoon sky in a succession of harsh shouldering blocks; as if its skyline had been designed as a stage set for Die Walkiire, by Wagner; or some clashing Nordic tragedy about the war between gods and men. There was nothing elegant or decorative about it; no hint of pageantry or medieval fantasy. It was a craggy rock; upon a craggy rock.

  Fiona Watson took her daughter by the hand and led her up the curving cobble path. Within the castle precincts, the fresh snow had already begun to melt, and the trickling of water accompanied their echoing footsteps as they climbed to the first rampart, overlooking the city.

  Effie said, ‘It’s snowing again, mother. We shouldn’t be long.’

  Her mother didn’t answer, but went across to the crenellated wall, and looked out over Edinburgh, with her muffler held up tight to her chin, and said, ‘Look. The city. How dreary it is. How drear.’

  Below them, Princes Street Gardens were draped in snow; and the winding paths which led up through the gardens to the foot of the castle looked as if they had been marked by the spoor of unknown animals. Boys slid and tumbled and tobogganed down the garden banks, but their cries and laughter were muted by the fresh snow which was already beginning to spin more thickly through the skies, and whisper insistently on the stonework. The locusts of winter.

  Fiona Watson said, ‘I’ve spent thirty good years of my life here. Look at it. Edinburgh. Grey and snooty; cold as a curling-rink.’

  From the west, from Lothian Road and Shandwick Place, the snow came tumbling in over the rooftops. From the north, from the Georgian squares of the New Town, from Queen Street and George Street and Moray Place, where they spoke with that clipped nasal Edinburgh precision, and always made sure that there were buttery rowies for tea, arose the smoke of a thousand coal fires; from grand steel fireplaces in magnificent drawing-rooms; from guarded nursery grates; and from the mean small fires allowed to governesses, and maids, three scoops of coal the week.

  To the east, barely visible through the smoke, stood Calton Hill, and on its summit the half-finished model of the Parthenon which Charles Cockerell had designed to honour the Scottish soldiers killed in the Napoleonic Wars. On a clearer day, you could look from Calton Hill northwards to the chilly blue waters of the Forth; and then back westwards to the castle, to the reddish-grey ramparts on which Effie and her mother now stood, cold, and half-abandoned by their own fate.

  ‘Mother, we ought to be going,’ urged Effie. It was not that she really wanted to go. It was just that her mother frightened her, being so silent and so cryptic.

  ‘Not yet,’ said Fiona Watson. ‘Have patience, my dearie. We were a little early.’

  Two or three more minutes passed, and Effie stood beside her mother with freezing feet, blinking against the daudinshowers of snow, and wondering if everything she had said to Dougal was wrong. Perhaps her father was right and her mother was soft in the head. Perhaps everything that she had believed about her mother was wrong; and all of her grown-up years she had been doing nothing but protecting a woman who was weak, and erratic, and a burden that her father was quietly heroic to bear.

  The flag on the chapel flaffed in the wind; the cries of the children echoed across the whirly slopes of the castle gardens. But then, quite suddenly, he was there, standing beside them, a neat-looking man of forty in a brown tweed coat and a cream-coloured Shetland scarf, thin-faced but good-looking, with a small clipped moustache, and brown eyes that were a little wider and a little more gentle than a man’s eyes ought to have been.

  He said, ‘Fiona?’ and held out his hand for her.

  Effie’s mother closed her eyes and reached out for him without even turning her head in his direction. ‘Jamie,’ she said, scarcely moving her lips.

  To Effie’s astonishment, this strange man called Jamie came close to her mother and kissed her cheek. Then he looked at Effie, and said, ‘Who’s this? Is this Effie, at last?’

  Fiona Watson turned around, and smiled. ‘Aye, this is Effie. My sweet young Effie. Effie, say hello to Jamie McFarlane. My friend, and my good companion.’

  Effie felt numb. Who was this young man, with whom her mother seemed to feel so completely and affectionately at ease? She looked to her mother for some kind of explanation; even a nod or a smile would have done. But her mother’s smile was all for him, for Jamie, and as he held out his hand to Effie, her mother possessively linked arms with him, and rested her cheek against the brown tweed of his shoulder.

  ‘Effie,’ said Jamie, squeezing her fingers. ‘It’s good to meet you. Fiona’s told me so much about you. The dortiest daughter anyone could ever have, she said. Rare as summer snow.’

  Effie found herself incapable of saying anything at all. Again she looked to her mother for a sign that might have told her who this Jamie McFarlane could be; but again it was clear that her mother had almost forgotten her in her pleasure at meeting him. ‘How have you been?’ her mother asked him. ‘You’re looking tired.’

  ‘Och, I was awake the night with old man Godden,’ said Jamie, without taking his eyes off Effie. ‘There isn’t too much time left for him, poor old fellow. But I think he’s happy enough to have a fair straw death, and not to be found one morning in the close, with his legs stickit up in the air.’ He held up his hands, in imitation of a dead dog, and grinned. Effie smiled, but shrugged, too, because she couldn’t understand what he was saying, or who he was.

  ‘Jamie works with the sick and the poor in the Lands,’ explained Effie’s mother. ‘He’s a lawyer, of sorts; and a charity worker, of sorts; but, most of all, he’s an angel. Not just to me, but to all those poor souls who have nothing to sustain them, and nothing to look forward to. He’s a man who gives of himself.’

  Jamie stood in the snow, holding her mother’s arm, and watched Effie with a serious but receptive face. Come on, he was telling her silently, challenge me. Challenge my closeness to your mother. Tell me I’m wrong, and that I shouldn’t be here at all. Give me the chance to explain myself. Let me tell you that I love her, this mother of yours, and that she loves me in return.

  Effie said, ‘It would be best if I went home.’

  ‘No,’ said Jamie, sharply. Then, more gently, he said, ‘No. I’d like you to stay, if you would. Your mother said she would bring you to meet me one day, and I’m proud that she has. You’re just like her, did you know that? You have the same demeanour.’

  ‘Please stay, my dearie,’ said Fiona Watson, touching her daughter’s sleeve.

  ‘Mother – I’ll only be a nuisance to you,’ insisted Effie.

  But now Jamie reached out and took Effie’s arm, quite firm and friendly and said, ‘You cannot go until you’ve had your tea. I’ve bought diet-loaf, and petticoat-tails, and two kinds of tea.’

  ‘Effie?’ asked her mother.

  Effie looked at her mother carefully, and then at Jamie. The snow blew between them and clung to their hair, and to the fur of her mother’s muffler. She thought that she had never seen her mother look so romantic, nor so beautiful. She and Jamie McFarlane stood together as if they were a couple who were intended for each other by the wellness of their appearance, if not by fate.

  Jamie didn’t wait for an answer from Effie. With an arm for each of them, mother and daughter, he led them down the curved cobbled path again, and out through the castle gates to the esplana
de, and back down to the Lawnmarket. ‘I’ve one visit to make before we go for tea,’ he said. ‘Mrs McFee had her ninth last week; and I promised to call by on Sunday with some sugar. That’s why my pocket’s so bulging.’

  As they walked together over the sliddery cobbles, Effie noticed that their family brougham was no longer there. Russell had presumably taken it off to somewhere discreet, where it wouldn’t be noticed by anyone who might recognise it. She felt Jamie’s hand clasping her wrist; and the strangeness of being held by this strange man, her mother’s secret companion, made her breathless and mysteriously excited. If her mother could have found herself a secret companion, then anything and everything was possible!

  They turned off the High Street into the warren of tall crumbling tenements which clustered around the foot of the castle, and along the length of the Royal Mile. These tenements, the Lands, had been built in the days when Edinburgh was still bounded by the Flodden Wall – the protective rampart which the Scots had put up in a panic after their defeat by the English in 1513. Scarcely anybody had ventured to build outside the Wall until the eighteenth century, and so for 250 years, Edinburgh’s houses had risen upwards – six, seven, sometimes more than a dozen storeys high – one of the strangest and tallest of European cities.

  In the courts and wynds and closes into which Jamie now led them, the rich had once jostled alongside the poor; the honest with the corrupt; the lady with the whore. Now the well-to-do had moved to the New Town, to the spacious houses of Queen Street and Heriot Row; leaving behind in the Lands the destitute and the ignorant and the brutal.

  ‘I met your mother, you see, at a meeting of the Edinburgh Charity Workers’ Association,’ remarked Jamie. ‘She was the chairman, as you know; and I was the secretary, on account of knowing my law. I don’t think it was our intention to become such close friends; but when you’ve been into some of these tenements, and seen the conditions, your heart goes out, and you show yourself for what manner of person you are. What I saw in your mother was a lady both kind and unusual.’

  Effie said, ‘Mother mentioned your name once, I think.’

  ‘Well, I hope she did. But, as you must see, I mustn’t mention her name to anybody.’

  They came at last to High School Yards Wynd, a narrow and crooked thoroughfare between two narrow rows of tenements. The stone and mortar with which the tenements had been built had taken on a flaking and scabrous appearance, and they were stained with the sulfurous coal-smoke which gave Edinburgh its nickname of Auld Reekie. Washing hung in the snow from lines strung across the street: threadbare sarks and tattered britches; cotton dresses which had long forgotten their colour.

  A fellow in a rusty coat and a Derby hat raised his clay pipe from a doorstep opposite and called, ‘Good afternoon, Mr McFarlane! It’s a fell day to be abroad!’

  ‘Hallo, John,’ said Jamie. ‘Aye, it’s cold enough. I’m just up to see Doris McFee with a pound of sugar, that’s all.’

  ‘There’s two bonny lasses you’ve got there, you run-deil.’

  ‘Away with you,’ smiled Jamie.

  He led them at last to a narrow stone doorway, and up a tilted flight of stone steps, until they reached a dark and filthy landing, cluttered with rubbish and stinking of urine. Effie began to cough with the mustiness of it; but her mother grasped her hand tight, and said, ‘When you work for the charity, my dearie, you’ll experience much worse than this.’

  Jamie clambered over a half-dismantled bed until he reached a decrepit doorway. The green paint was peeling off the damp wood in jagged flakes, and the frame was long since rotten. He banged twice, with his fist, and called ‘Doris! It’s me! Jamie McFarlane!’

  It was almost five minutes before the door was opened, just a crack. There, against the misty afternoon light, her shoulders wrapped in a grey and loose-woven shawl, stood an agonisingly thin girl of thirty. You couldn’t have possibly called her a woman: she had never had the mental or physical nourishment to grow beyond seventeen, when she had given birth to her first baby. Now, she had nine, between thirteen and two months, and the tenement rooms behind her were a filthy jumble of blankets, newspapers, empty bottles, unwashed dishes, toddlers’ shit-encrusted nappies and trousers, fish-heads, green-mouldy loaves, and sodden shirts. She carried her latest baby on her hip, as casually as if she didn’t care whether she dropped it on the stone floor or not; and when she looked at Jamie and Fiona and Effie, her eyes were uncomprehending and unfocused.

  ‘I brang you the sugar you wanted,’ said Jamie. ‘I managed a whole pound.’

  ‘Well, that’s good of you,’ said the girl, thinly. ‘Will you come on in? You’ll forgive the room. It looks like a midden. I haven’t done my cleaning the day.’

  Jamie stepped over a sleeping child of two or three years old, and followed Doris McFee into the scullery, where a rusty tap dripped into a grime-encrusted sink. ‘Is it Monday, your cleaning day, then?’ he asked her, knowing full well that she never cleaned the tenement at all, preferring to be punched by her husband than have to go through the tiresome business of scraping mutton-fat from around the range, and brown excrement from the walls of the room where the children slept. It was extraordinary that she tried to keep up any pretence of gentility or human dignity at all: but she did, and when Effie stepped into the scullery, she patted her greasy hair and tugged at her skirt. The baby on her hip started to greet at being disturbed, and she jogged it up and down, and coaxed it, ‘Hee-balou, baby; hee-balou.’

  ‘Jimmy’s not here, then?’ asked Jamie.

  ‘I haven’t seen him these two days past.’

  ‘Did he not tell you where he was?’

  ‘He didn’t have to,’ said Doris McFee. ‘He’s at Grey Michael’s.’

  ‘Oh, aye,’ said Jamie. Grey Michael’s was a well-known drinking circle, where any man who wanted to forget that he had nine gowling bairns and a forfairn wife could drink whisky all day and all night, until he had forgotten which was conscious and which was unconscious, and even which year it might be.

  ‘Is there anything you badly need?’ asked Fiona Watson, stroking the new baby’s forehead.

  ‘I could do with some tea.’

  ‘Tea, you’d like? Anything else? Clean clothes for the children?’

  Doris McFee’s cheek muscle twitched as if it were a frog’s-leg that had been touched by an electric current. ‘A few blankets, that I could make into coats. And maybe a cast-off petticoat, if that’s not too much to be asking for.’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Fiona, gently. ‘I’d be only too glad.’

  Jamie said, ‘Is something wrong? You seem to be worried today. You know that Jimmy won’t harm you when he comes back from Grey Michael’s. All he’s going to want to do is sleep.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ said Doris. ‘I’ve taken my good share of skelps, and I’m not concerned about more. But I am worried about the children; the older two, Gavin and Eliza. They have to share the same bed now, and I’m worried that they might be up to some sculdudrey.’ Sculdudrey was an old-fashioned word for fornication; which Jamie knew, but Effie didn’t. Fiona could guess what it meant, though, and glanced at Jamie with a frown.

  ‘You’ll have to separate them,’ said Jamie. ‘It’s against God’s law, for a brother and a sister.’

  ‘I’ve asked them, God help me,’ said Doris McFee, jinking the baby on her hip. ‘They always say no, and how could I think such a thing of them. But Jimmy took Eliza, I know that for a fact, when he came home happy one night; and sin syne, I don’t believe that Eliza’s cared who she goes with, or how, and that includes her own brother.’

  ‘Jimmy took Eliza?’ asked Fiona Watson, horrified, and more horrified because of Doris McFee’s matter-of-factness. ‘His own daughter? How could he have done such a thing?’

  Doris McFee shrugged hopelessly. ‘He was nappy. He meant her no real harm.’

  Effie reached out and took her mother’s hand. She had never seen this side of her mother before, or this side of Edinb
urgh. She felt as if everything she had always held true had suddenly crumbled; as if the neat façades of Charlotte Square had unexpectedly collapsed, to reveal a world of misery, and pain, and dark uncertainties. Her mother, loving a strange man? Chilly tenements, in which fathers took their own daughters, and in which drunkenness and wife-beating were so usual that they almost passed without comment? It was like a peculiar nightmare.

  ‘Is Gavin here?’ asked Jamie.

  Doris McFee nodded. ‘But you’ll no tell him I told you.’

  ‘Doris, we have to speak to the boy.’

  ‘You’ll get no sense,’ she said, but inclined her head towards the bedroom door. From the rooms upstairs, there was the sound of heavy footsteps and the banging of a chair falling over, and a man roaring something at a woman, and children crying. Over and over again, the man kept shouting, ‘I’ve had about a wamefu’ of you! You hear me? I’ve had just about a wamefu’ of you!’

  Jamie looked up to the ceiling. ‘That’s probably the only wamefu’ he’ll ever get,’ he remarked. Then, ‘Come on, let’s talk to young Gavin. Does Effie want to stay here, with Doris?’

  Fiona squeezed her daughter’s hand. ‘She’s a grown-up girl now, Jamie. If I can trust her with the knowledge of you and me, I can trust her with anything at all.’

  Gavin McFee was lying in the freezing unlit bedroom on a pallet of blankets, his hands behind his head, smoking a small clay pipe. He was no more than fifteen, but he was a big raw-boned boy, with close-cropped gingery hair, and a big pale face made puffy by a diet of oats and tatties and cheap beer. He wore a long heavy kilt, and woollen stockings through which his dirty toes peeped. The stench in the bedroom was stomach-turning – pipe-smoke and sweat and stale sex. There were two other pallets in the room, and on one of these, a touzle-haired girl of about ten lay sleeping, with her thumb in her mouth.