Lady of Fortune (29 page)

Dougal asked in his letter for news of Prudence Cutting. ‘If you can find any way of getting in touch with her, Effie, tell her that I still think of her, dearly.'

‘Who's Prudence Cutting?' Thomas Watson had asked, his eyes as pale as a winter's morning.

‘A middle-aged lady,' Effie had told him. ‘An elderly lady who taught Dougal some of the London manners.'

‘Ah,' her father had said, disbelievingly.

Effie's mother had been right, in the carriage. The atmosphere at 14 Charlotte Square was uncomfortable and odd.
Every conversation with Thomas Watson was like walking barefoot across flints; he came and went from the house with a monotony that seemed almost deliberate, and the days of the summer seemed to be counted only by the number of times he hung up his top hat in the hall, and took it down again. Effie felt as if the whole household were waiting for an electric storm. Sunday joints were carved, Monday mornings came. Children played with hoops in the street. Edinburgh Castle was seen in light and shadow from passing clouds; in rainstorms; in fine evening sunshine. And still the Watson house was crowded with unexpressed dissatisfactions.

Although her father had grown increasingly morose, and sharp-tempered, it was Robert who had changed the most since Dougal's departure for America. He had become suddenly more confident, and wider in the bottom; a bustling, portly young man who knew what he wanted out of his business, and was prepared to do anything to get it. His financial expeditions, during the spring and summer of 1901, became bolder. He lent money to the Germans, to build passenger liners, at Hamburg, on the Elbe. He lent money to the Japanese, to build a silk-stocking factory at Tokushima, on the island of Shikoku, and an armaments factory in Kobé.

Robert was an earnest believer in Rothschild's notion that the world could be united by capital; that the influence of the great private banks could bring prosperity and economic expansion, and prevent war, that money was greater than nations. But he was not wholly romantic. He knew that any of Watson's ventures which ran into trouble in Egypt, for instance, or Turkey, where he was negotiating a great many property arrangements through the National Bank of Turkey, were reinforced and guaranteed by much more than Watson's own assets. They were backed up by the military and naval supremacy of the British Empire; by the simple threat to any foreign government that if they did not pay their interest, or their debts, they would at best be benignly but irresistibly taken over; at worst, shelled.

In August, they heard that Jamie Arbuthnott had been killed in South Africa, shot by a Boer sniper while lighting his pipe. His mother told Fiona Watson, with a strange absence of distress, ‘I never even knew that he smoked a pipe. He lit a match, and they shot him. And I never even knew that he smoked. If only I could have told him not to.' Effie wept all night.

In September, Robert took Effie with him on a business trip to Perth. His usual secretary, a tall unhappy girl from Cupar, had been taken ill after eating bad mussel brose and onions. They travelled in Robert's new motorcar, a cream two-cylinder Albion 12, which he had trained one of his junior clerks to drive for him. The clerk was a bright boy with two front teeth missing, and a way of whistling whenever he said any word with an ‘s' in it. Effie, waiting beside the car in Charlotte Square that morning, elegantly dressed in a long grey motoring-coat of Prince-of-Wales check, and a wide hat veiled in white, listened in delight as he recited his inventory of necessary motoring equipment, ‘One small set socket spanners, one small short-handled axe, half as many extra porcelains as motor has cylinders, one small package raw rubber, one assortment cotter pins, nuts, lock washers, wood screws, and nails.'

Robert came out of the house tugging on his leather gloves. He wore an ankle-length double-breasted coat of brown tweed, a cap, and goggles, in case of dust on the road. ‘Are you ready?' he asked Effie, and helped her up into the back seat, which was as large and comfortable as a leather Chesterfield. ‘Come on, Killin,' he snapped at the clerk, ‘let's be off.'

They started up, and drove noisily around Charlotte Square before heading out across the Dean Bridge for Queensferry. It was a mild, windy morning, with high cirrus clouds streaking the sky. Effie glanced towards the narrow grey-stone house which overlooked the Water of Leith, and wondered how Jamie McFarlane and her mother were getting on. Since the day she had returned to Edinburgh from London, her mother had said nothing more about Gavin McFee, or Jamie McFarlane, or blackmail. They had talked, but never as intimately as before she had gone to London. Effie had grown up while she had been away: not only grown up, but grown distant. She had seen the fashions of Bond Street and Regent Street, she had been adored by Henry Baeklander. She had changed, and her mother could sense that she had changed, and she could never speak to her in the same way again. Before she had gone to London, her mother, when they had talked together by the bedroom fire, had stroked her hair. She hadn't done that once since Effie's return.

Effie said little to Robert until their motor-car had been ferried across the Firth of Forth, and landed at North Queensferry. Then, as they puttered slowly along the uneven road which led through Inverkeithing to Masterton and Halbeath, with the breeze blowing the dust from under their tyres, she said, ‘I'm surprised you bought a motor-car. You always said they were such a tentie idea.'

Robert patted her arm. ‘They were,' he said, indulgently, ‘but times change.'

‘You wouldn't let Dougal invest any money in them, but now you've got one yourself.'

‘Well,' said Robert, ‘it was sold to me by the management of Albion at a
very
reasonable price. Almost for nothing. I would have been a fool to refuse it. And I still stand by what I said before. The motor-car is not a vehicle for the general masses. Perhaps the only thing that I
didn't
quite see until recently, was that there are quite enough people with quite enough money to keep the motor-car industry in reasonably profitable business.'

‘You've invested in Albion?'

‘I've lent them the money they need, if that's what you mean.'

‘But you fought Dougal so hard against it!'

Robert had shrugged. ‘You can only do what seems to be best at the time.'

Effie's mouth had tightened, but she hadn't answered back. With Dougal gone, she knew that the only way in which she could learn about banking was to stay with Robert. A time would come when she could tell Robert just what she thought of him. But she still loved him, as a brother, and she regarded his boastful lack of sympathy with a kind of impatient regret, rather than real resentment. She had been close to Dougal, and she still missed him, but she knew that Dougal had needed to learn a difficult and uncompromising lesson about the business he was in: and that was, never to trust anybody, especially sharp talkers like Jack Cutting. She had told Robert nothing about what had happened in London, and she had promised herself that she never would. Robert had an unpleasant way of gloating over anybody who had tried to be clever, and failed, and she didn't want to give him the amusement of knowing why Dougal had so suddenly emigrated to America.

Robert was loud, and domineering, and occasionally coarse. He could add up columns of three figures in his head, but he knew no poetry, except for a silly rhyme by William McGonagall about birds. ‘But they are still more contented than the children of God, / As long as they can pick up a worm from the sod, / Or anything they can get to eat, / Just, for instance, a stale crust of bread or a grain of wheat.' He saw the world entirely in terms of loans, investments, bonds, and rates of interest, and if anybody had suggested to him that underdeveloped countries could be spiritually humiliated by financial exploitation, he would have been both offended and hurt. He also would have rejected the radical argument that it was politically dangerous for bankers to lend so much money to Russia, Japan, and the United States that they could attain economic independence. All business was healthy; all competition was admirable. He did not see that the vaulting financial ambitions of the newly-independent nations were quickly creating the kind of tensions that could lead to war. Japan, in two decades, had become a major industrial and military power, her railroads and her factories and her armed forces financed almost entirely by British bankers. The recently industrialised Germans, represented abroad by the ‘Four-D' Banks – the Deutsche, the Dresdner, the Darmstadter and the Diskonto – were investing heavily in American agriculture, and in South African gold, and they were expanding their financial and political influence into China, Turkey, and North Africa, and confronting at last the ramparts of the British Empire. The French, under the Franco-Russian alliance, were pouring money into Russian factories and armed forces, and French money helped to build the Trans-Siberian railroad, from Paris to Vladivostok.

Robert, like all good European bankers, believed implicitly in the unrestricted growth of finance capital. He believed in aggressive investment. He did not think for one moment that the rivalries between capitalist nations must inexorably bring them to the battlefield.

Effie didn't understand any of these financial earth-tremors at all, not yet. Robert told her that he was annoyed at the Deutsche Bank for the way in which they had financed the Baghdad railroad through Turkey, and opened a door for German interests in the Middle East. And from the dry, partisan
columns of
The Scotsman
, she gleaned the news that the British had been obliged to borrow money from New York to help finance the Boer War. But who could foretell from this deeply-concealed shift in financial balance that war was the only possible outcome, and that the highest of interest-rates would soon seem like nothing, in comparison with the loss of ten million lives, and the ruination of the European economy?

Robert talked about banking all the way to Perth. When they arrived, just before luncheon, he said, This interests you, doesn't it? This talk of money?'

‘It's the family business,' said Effie.

‘No, more than that,' Robert told her. ‘You're really attentive.'

Effie shrugged. ‘That's a funny old kirk,' she said, as they drove into the centre of the city. The sky was grey now, and there was a feeling of rain in the air.

‘That's St John's,' said Robert. ‘John Knox gave a sermon there once, on church idolatory; and Bonnie Prince Charlie went to services there. And there now, if you look down there, that's Curfew Row, where
The Fair Maid of Perth
used to live, the girl in Sir Walter Scott's book.'

They drew up outside the old Salutation Hotel, where they were due to meet a Perthshire property-owner for lunch. He grew strawberries on the Carse of Gowrie, the flat fertile land to the north of the River Tay, and he wanted finance to enlarge his fruit-preserving business. As Robert helped Effie down from her seat, it began to rain, dark wide spots that measled the pavements and pattered on the hood of the car.

Luncheon was quiet and leisurely, in an old back room of the hotel, where a clock ticked slowly and an old Labrador shifted himself in front of the log fire. They ate pickled herrings and roasted venison. The light that came through the small leaded windows was of a particular slate colour. In years to come, Effie would often be reminded of that afternoon in 1901, and of the characterful hands of the strawberry-grower, resting on the table beside the silver mustard-pots with all the eloquence of a drawing by da Vinci. He told Robert, ‘We'll do well, with the fruit. I'll make your wee sister a giftie of it, next year. More strawberries than she can tuck away.'

‘How will you protect your crop from birds?' Effie asked him. ‘And what will you do about insurance, in case the crop
fails, or it rains all summer? And what about the grey mould?'

The strawberry-grower looked to Robert in bewilderment. Robert, pleased, sat back so that his chins folded over his collar. ‘Go on, then, Mr Graeme, answer if you please. What
about
the grey mould?'

On the way back to Edinburgh, as they drove through Blairadam Forest, with the clouds above them low and moist and as grey as mother-of-pearl, Robert burst out laughing.

‘What's the matter?' Effie asked him.

‘Yon fellow's face when you asked him about the grey mould! There he was, trying to chuck you under the chin, and you knew just as much about growing strawberries as he did! Och, I loved it!'

‘I looked it up in the encyclopaedia last night,' said Effie. ‘Strawberries suffer from all kinds of diseases, and they get eaten by slugs, but grey mould's the worst.'

Robert took out a briar pipe. Effie had never seen him smoke before. He pushed tobacco into the pipe with one plump thumb, and then clenched it tightly between his teeth. ‘I've an idea,' he said. ‘Why don't you come to work at the bank for me, as my assistant? You're clever, you are; and you like to work with money. It would keep you out of trouble until you meet the man you're going to marry.'

‘I don't think I'll every marry,' said Effie.

‘Whoof! Don't give me the blether. A London swankie like you!'

Effie laughed. But she didn't laugh for very long. She thought of Henry Baeklander, kissing her lips, touching her breast. It was a sweet sad warmth she felt for Henry now, that was all; but it was all she had left. He would never know what it had taken for her to send Dougal off on the
Excelsior
, instead of going herself. But the
Excelsior
had been like a test of her strength, a tempting trap to prevent her from doing what she really desperately wanted to do.

If she had been a little older, and a little more experienced with men, she might have gone. But Henry had underestimated her innocence, and her tight Edinburgh upbringing. In his world, morality was only circumscribed by how much money you had. In Effie's, it was decreed by the Bible, and the Kirk, and by her own inexperience. Besides, she was still very conscious of how an early marriage had brought
nothing but despair to her mother; and discontent to the whole Watson family. Only Robert seemed happy. Happy and unflappable, and pleased with life.