Lady of Fortune (3 page)

The woman reporter said, ‘Can I ask you about Merritt Watson?'

‘You may
ask
.'

‘Well, it's difficult to put this question delicately. But the rumour is that there was some very unusual circumstances about his resignation. If you'll forgive me, somebody mentioned incest.'

‘The rumours flatter me, my dear. Apart from the fact that I'm his grandmother, there are more than sixty-three years between us.'

‘But how did you really feel about him? Before he left you, I mean.'

Effie took a deep, dry breath. ‘I loved him. Perhaps not in the way the rumours would have it. But I did love him. Love is not the exclusive territory of the young, you know.'

‘Do you think he loved you equally in return?' asked the woman reporter.

Effie hesitated. On the white-painted cast-iron table beside her was a photograph in a silver frame. The woman reporter had recognised it straight away as Merritt. Dark, swept-back hair, long and angular face, deep-set eyes. Very good-looking, if you weren't afraid of men who seemed to harbour the secret desire to do very complicated and erotic things to you. The sort of man who might buy you a diamond
choker, a bottle of Perrier-Jovët champagne, and a black lace basque, and then expect you to show him how much you appreciated all of his gifts, Not next week; not even tonight. But immediately, wherever you happened to be.

Beneath her veils, Effie whispered, ‘Love appears to us in many different ways. Sometimes, it is immediate, like the love I felt for George Sabatini. At other times, it is not recognizable as love until it is too late. There have been several times in my life when I have let it pass me by, like a stranger in the street, and only afterwards, long afterwards, have I been able to recognise what it was that I allowed to slip by me.'

She paused, and then she said softly, ‘Miss Munro, I asked you here because I wanted to talk about my life and what I have learned from it before I am too feeble to remember what happened and too senile to think what good it may possibly have done me. Perhaps it wasn't such a good idea. Perhaps I expected too much of it. Perhaps, after all, it is better if men like George and Merritt are allowed to remain as they are. One dead, and the other lost. But, you know, life is all a question either of teaching or of being taught. George Sabatini taught me not just how to spend money but how to be extravagant. He taught me how to
waste
money, which in my family was always considered to be the gravest sin of all; even above adultery. To beat your neighbour over the head with a rock, that was one thing but to spend tuppence on a ribbon for your hair … well, the wrath of my almighty father would be upon you.

‘Merritt was my pupil. He was sophisticated, of course; and handsome; and outspoken. But I still had a great deal to teach him about business, and about power. When to strike and when to hold back. When to be charming and when to be angry. I told him everything about love that I knew, and everything about money. I gave him my knowledge, my memories, and my heart. I was far too old to give him my body, although I would have done, gladly, if only I had been forty years younger, and we had not been related.'

Theresa Munro dotted her last shorthand outline, and then she said, ‘Will you ever try to get Merritt back?'

Effie turned towards the pool, and for a very long time said nothing at all. Theresa Munro was beginning to wonder if the old lady had fallen asleep, or wandered off into a semi-coma.
But then she raised one dry, liver-spotted hand, and said, ‘No, Miss Munro, I won't.'

‘Can you tell me why?'

‘No.'

George Sabatini had once told her, shortly after they first met, that she reminded him of a pearl. ‘You've got that shine to you, you know?' he had said, looking up at her almost shyly as he peeled the gold band from his cigar. ‘It's like milk and moonlight, all mixed up.'

Even though eighty years had shrivelled her beauty away, Effie Watson still had the grace of a girl of 17; and when she was helped out across the pillared porch of her mansion two days later, she wore a cream summer dress with a cream straw hat and a billowing veil that, for a moment, disguised her age.

This was the woman whom Fortune magazine had described only three weeks previously as ‘the dominatrix of Western banking', and whose personal assets they had cautiously estimated at ‘well in excess of $620 millions'. Her dress had been specially designed for her by David Emanuel, who had made the wedding-dress for the Princess of Wales, and her veil was sewn with hundreds of tiny crystals and seed pearls.

Her long-wheelbase Lincoln limousine waited for her in the California sunlight, parked beside the small shiny-leaved orange trees which lined the white Futura-stone driveway. A fat white dove had settled on the car's V-shaped television antenna, and was warbling to itself contentedly. The chauffeur opened the car door, helped Effie to settle back in the pale blue velvet cushions in the back seat, and then neatly spread a cream tapestry rug over her knees.

‘Being a wayward girl again today, Miss Watson?'

Effie smiled. She knew just as well as her chauffeur that the doctor had advised her against going out on her own. So had her insurance company. But her chauffeur always took
extraordinary care of her – not as if she were some breakable and expensive vase, which most people did – but simply as if she were a woman of energy and brightness who, accidentally, had grown old. The chauffeur was young and broad-shouldered and tanned the colour of Ritz crackers. He had once been a walker for a fabulously cantankerous movie queen, but he much preferred Effie because she was indignant and amusing, and never patronised him, and because she allowed him whole free afternoons for windsurfing. She called him Carl, because she believed that all chauffeurs should be called Carl. His real name was Jerre.

The Lincoln glided away from Malibu and joined the Ventura Freeway towards Forest Lawn. Effie watched a video-tape of a Bruckner concert for a while, but then switched the television off. She wasn't in the mood for anything but her own deeply-concealed thoughts. She wanted no music but the quiet internal music of her own regret.

It still hurt when she thought of what Merritt had said to the television interviewers when he resigned from Watson's Interbank last month. ‘You think this place is a bank? This place is a jacuzzi. The management is all wet, and all that keeps them bubbling is Effie Watson's hot air.'

My God, she thought, how much Merritt misunderstood me. But how little I tried to make him understand. I just feel too weary to make people understand me any more. If they don't know that everything I do is for the good of the bank, then I can't help them.

The only sad thing is, I have nobody now to whom I can pass on my fortune. I have millions of dollars in investments and trusts; I have a white-walled mission-style mansion with cloisters and courtyards and fountains; I have the finest collection of Gainsborough portraits outside Europe; I have Sèvres plates from which nobody now will ever eat.

If only I were younger. I have so much love in me, so much strength in me. I have so much capability, and the fierce desire to apply it. I should be thirty-seven now, instead of ninety-seven. I should be twenty-seven. Or seventeen again.

All those furious flickering decades of work and laughter and love and anguish, and what do I have to show for them? Dead lovers, and deserted friends. The experience of a whole life. A million meals eaten, a hundred thousand kisses shared. All gone. And no hope of handing any of it on to anybody.

They arrived at the cemetery. Under an unfocused midday sun, Carl led Effie on his arm up to Alisdair's grave, and she stood beside it for almost ten minutes, while Carl stood a little way off with his cap tucked under his arm, and winked at a young woman in a charcoal-grey suit and a flowered hat.

Effie had erected for Alisdair a square plinth of white Italian marble, on which stood the nude statue of a muscular young man, in bronze, with a sword and helmet fallen at his feet, and his face raised sadly but defiantly to the sky. The statue had stylized curly hair, as curly as Alisdair's and as Merritt's. His chest was defined with well-exercised muscles, and his thighs were as convex as those of a Greek discus-thrower. His penis was half-swollen, as if his own defeat had stirred in him a perverse sensuality. That was Alisdair all over.

Effie said, ‘Oh, Alisdair,' out loud, and Carl glanced around at her for a moment because he thought, mistakenly, that she was calling for him. But when she said mournfully, ‘Oh, Merritt,' he looked away.

Effie closed her eyes, and she could picture Merritt as if he were standing next to her. The way he used to run his hand back across his hair and then give a tiny, self-satisfied smile. That funny sideways look he had always given her when he was suspicious of some financial deal that she was proposing. She could hear his laugh, and feel the touch of his hand. She could see him now, sitting at a table on the verandah of the Silverado Country Club, with the golf course and the mountains behind him, and the summer flowers nodding beside his chair. She could see his white silk Italian shirt, very Rodeo Drive, with the cuff casually rolled back over his darkly-suntanned arm. His gleaming gold wristwatch by Patek Philipe, with a face of closely-set diamonds. And only two rings on his fingers. One, his fraternity ring from college. The other, a huge brown diamond set in gold claws, which Effie had given to him after their success in Saudi Arabia. Small brown diamonds are usually worth very little, but this one weighed 44.2 karats, and had been graded flawless. Besides, Effie had told him, it was the exact colour of his eyes. It had been worth paying $780,000 for a diamond which was the exact colour of his eyes.

‘Well, Alisdair,' Effie said quietly, to the nude bronze man, ‘you still managed to disappoint me, didn't you, even after
everything you promised? After everything you said! My children will carry on your fortune, you said. My heirs will make sure you're immortal. Well, I can't bear you any grudges, my dear. I don't suppose it was really your fault, and I was never a girl to bear a grudge. Herr Hitler called me frivolous. Can you imagine that? “Effie,” he used to say, “
du bist so schõn, aber du bist so leichtfertig.
” That's what he used to say. But he wasn't really right, was he? You were pretty, too – prettier than me, in your way; and you were frivolous. And look what it earned you. A tomb, my darling, at thirty-three. Can you imagine that? Merritt will be thirty-four this year. You are younger than your own grandson.'

She found, strangely, that she was crying. She took a small lace handkerchief out of her pocketbook and dabbed at her eyes, beneath the secrecy of her veil.

‘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.

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.