Lady of Fortune (13 page)

‘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.

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?'