Lady of Fortune (37 page)

They had screamed together at the end, and then stumbled away from the wall. Prudence had collapsed on to the bed, her black wedding-gown still raised over her hips, quivering and aching for breath. Robert had lain flat on his face on the carpet, breathing rapidly but steadily.

Downstairs, the fiddler was playing
Lassie Wi' the Lint-White Locks
.

‘Is this what it will always be like?' Prudence asked Robert at last.

‘What?' Robert had grunted, from the floor.

Prudence hadn't asked him again. Instead, she had climbed unsteadily off the bed, and walked erratically to the dressing-table. She had been surprised to see in the looking-glass that she hadn't altered in any way at all, except perhaps that she was a little flushed, and that her hair was untidy. Beneath her black wedding-gown, however, she had felt Robert's semen crawl down the inside of her thigh like a snail.

She had begun to brush her hair, mechanically, the way women do when they are in shock. Robert had hefted himself up off the floor, still puffing, and had gone over to the bureau and poured out a basinful of cold water, and splashed his face.

‘You're lusty,' he had said. ‘I'll give you that. You're lusty.'

Blinded by soap and water, he had groped around for something to dry his face. Prudence had stood back and watched him, and made no move to hand him the towel which lay neatly folded on the kist at the end of the bed.

Now, here she was, saying goodbye to Effie, with nothing to look forward to but three weeks of Robert's obstinate violence, and day after day of unrelenting separation from William Albert. She touched Effie's cheek and gave her what she hoped was a brave and confident smile.

Russell appeared at the door. ‘Mrs Watson?' he asked.

Prudence didn't realise at first that he meant her. Then Effie said, ‘That's you. Mrs Robert Watson.'

‘Oh, yes!' said Prudence. And then, ‘Yes,' as bitterly as anyone could.

‘The motor-car is quite ready now, Mrs Watson. The trunks are all aboard. Mr Watson inquired when you might come down.'

‘You can tell him, directly,' Prudence replied. Then, when he had gone, she leaned forward to Effie, and quickly whispered, ‘This is the unhappiest day of my whole life.'

She stood up, and stared at Effie, defying her to answer. Effie, shocked, could think of nothing to say.

‘Remember that,' said Prudence, and was gone.

There began now for Effie a time in her life when she worked more busily than she had ever done before; a time on which she would later look back with amazement (that she had achieved so much in so few years) but also with a slightly baffled sense of regret. With her mother in a nursing-home in Dunkeld, and her father dead, and nobody to care for her social life but Robert and Prudence, she became, understandably, one of those girls about whom the smart young men about town would remark, ‘She's pretty, you ken, but no family. An orphan, almost. And you won't get a kiss out of her, neither.'

She wasn't particularly lonely, although she was often wistful, especially when she retired to her rooms at night, and brushed out her hair, on then went to her window and looked out over the trees of Charlotte Square, and beyond, to the distant black buttresses of Edinburgh Castle. She often thought of her father, trying to understand why he had lived and why it had been necessary for him to die. She had loved him in spite of his anger, and in spite of his apparent indifference to his family. She had known that there had been something burning away inside him, some dark and secret warmth, some reason for him being the way he always was. She thought of a time when she was seven, and he had taken her, on her own, to the shores of the Firth of Forth. They had stood in the wind with the transparent wavelets rippling at their shoes, looking out over the blue glittering water towards the new Forth railway bridge, which had only just been opened. Every now and then a train passed over the bridge, and the distant rattling noise it made sounded like the echoes of a long-forgotten Highland battle.

Her father had said, To be a private banker, Effie, is to live a life of charmed value. It is a watchful trade, but not a labourious one and so it gives one time for improving pursuits, and intellectual company. It is a hereditary calling, too. The credit of the bank passes down from father to son, and, in time, this inherited wealth brings inherited refinement. You, my children, will be in the rarest and happiest of positions for the rest of your lives, and your children will be even happier.'

She hadn't been able to recall his exact words, but she had
discovered when she was older that, like all of his remarks, this one had been plagiarised. He had borrowed them from
Lombard Street
, by Walter Bagehot, the nineteenth-century banker who had started
The Economist
. She had read it over and over, trying to recall that chill and salty day by the Firth, until Bagehot's words and her father's words had become inextricably intermingled.

Why had he taken her there? A young white-faced girl in a pink coat with brown braid buttons, and a pink peek-a-boo bonnet? They had spent a whole day away from home; and they had lunched at Abercorn, in a busy little restaurant which served fresh trout fried in oatmeal, and bubbly-jock, and small glasses of very dark beer. For most of the meal, Thomas Watson had stared out of the window, a silent man in a black banker's trailcoats and a rigid collar. But on the way home, in the family calèche, he had slapped his thighs and sung
Coulter's Candy
for her, in a hoarse high voice.

‘Babbie, babbie, babbie-babbie bee,

Sitting on your mummy's knee,

Greetin' for a wee bawbee,

To buy some Coulter's Candy.'

He had been a Victorian father of the strictest sort. He had insisted on the nicest punctuality, the devoutest religious observance, and the deepest domestic decorum. Especially in the early years of her adolescence, when she had been pale and bird-like and shrilly argumentative, Effie had often felt as if she could
shriek
at him for being so pedantic and so boorish, and for criticising her mother so relentlessly. Yet, it was not because she hated him. It was because she felt unable to make him understand that she
saw
what he was, she
saw
, and that she didn't blame him for it. He had been a man who had needed heirs for the accomplishment of his life's greatest ambition (the creation of a banking dynasty), but contrarily he had also been the kind of man who was totally unsuited to marriage – especially to a girl as gentle and complicated as Fiona Nugent-Dunbar. There
had
been love there, within him. Effie had been sure of it. There must have been, for him to raise Robert with such attention, and to allow Dougal so much licence at the bank. She often thought about that day at the Firth of Forth, sadly, a picture-book sadness, and wondered what it had actually meant to her father. Had he taken her there out of duty, or out of affection,
or simply because he had nobody else to talk to?

It was too late now. The only mouth that could have spoken her answers was crowded with soil, under a stone cross by the Chapel of St Maelrhuba.

During the years that followed her father's death and her mother's enforced ‘convalescence' in Dunkeld, Effie also thought constantly about Henry Baeklander. He became, mysteriously, the man of her dreams, and she thought about him sometimes with such intensely sweet regret that she felt she was going to suffocate. When she was in such moods, Robert would accuse her of reading too much poetry, and being soft. Prudence would say nothing, for Prudence knew what Effie was thinking, and Prudence would never gainsay the preciousness of a dream lover, no matter how remote and fantastic he might be.

Effie wrote regularly on blue paper to Dougal in New York, and on several occasions inquired about Henry Baeklander. But Dougal's answers grew more sporadic and less informative, and he scarcely ever mentioned Henry except perhaps to say that Henry was travelling on business to Argentina, or that Henry had complimented him on his work, or (once) that he had bought a half-share in a racehorse called Valley Forge which had won races all over Kentucky and Tennessee. Dougal wrote less and less about himself, and more and more about business, and how eager he was to set up on his own. He did say that he had found a new apartment, however, in the less fashionable stretch of Third Avenue, and he did enclose a small photograph of himself, his hands in his pockets, a straw skimmer tilted jauntily on his head, his eyes screwed up against the New York sunlight. He didn't say if he had found himself a new girlfriend or not, and Effie hadn't yet had the heart to write to him about Prudence. Perhaps he was too busy for girls. His letters always ended up by saying, ‘You will have heard no doubt how warly everybody is in America, and how a fellow has to sprattle pretty quickly if he isn't to be done down for a dollar or a cent! So I must get back to work, and leave you with the promise that I shall write in greater detail later.'

Sometimes Effie took the letters along with her when she went to visit her mother, at the great grey convalescent home in Dunkeld, St Vigeans. But her mother seemed scarcely interested. She spent all her days wandering aimlessly
around St Vigeans' gardens, even when it rained, standing sometimes at the far end of a dark vista of cypresses, frowning, as if she were thinking of something unhappy but almost forgotten; or sitting on a white-painted iron seat, watching the sparrows twitter in and out of the eave-boards. Effie and she spoke together quietly, but always of mundane things, like Mrs McNab's bad back, and how Prudence was managing at Charlotte Square, and whether it was time to take down the living-room curtains for cleaning. Sometimes, to Effie, her mother's voice seemed like nothing more than the rustling of tissue in an old dress-box; or the stirring of autumn leaves on the greystone path of a sad and derelict park.

On the second of June, 1902, a Monday, Robert came home in the middle of the afternoon, perspiring from the heat, and called Effie and Prudence into the library. He said, There's good news. I've just heard that the war in South Africa is over at last.'

Effie said, ‘Thank God. But poor Jamie Arbuthnott.'

Jamie, as it turned out, had been only one of 20,000 young British soldiers who had died in South Africa from dysentery, cholera, Boer snipers, or the bombastic incompetence of Lord Methuen and General Buller. But Lord Kitchener had had enough of the Cape, and enough of the Boers, and had been champing for months to come home. Only four weeks after he persuaded Botha and de Wet to sign a treaty on the dining-room table of his house at Vereeniging, he was on board ship for Southampton. He was soon followed by most of his 400,000 troops, who crowded the rails of their steam-vessels as they sailed into the Solent, singing to celebrate what they earnestly believed had been another magnificent British victory, another war won for the Empire, and the final assertion of the benevolent might for the Dear Old Flag.

Robert celebrated by giving each of the staff of Watson's Bank a half-bottle of Strathspey malt whisky, a decorative tea-plate with a stencil of ‘Bobs' Roberts on it, and permission to go home a half-hour early (although most of the diligent careerists in the bank made sure they impressed him by staying an extra half-hour late).

There's something else I wish to do,' he told Effie and Prudence two days later, at the dinner table. ‘I wish to bring Alisdair back from St Andrews. I think, with the future of the
world so certain, and so profitable, that it is time I had a son.'

Prudence, who had been eating a mouthful of beef, had to press her napkin to her lips, to stop herself from sobbing. Effie, too, had tears in her eyes, although she still suspected nothing of the random and brutal way in which Robert was asserting his husbandly rights on Prudence, or how desperately Prudence needed her son to give her comfort.

The clock chimed seven. They drank a silent toast. But as they sat at the dining-room table, a whole era had passed, the world had turned, what lay before them would not be certainty or profitability, but all hell and squandered riches.

Shortly after Alisdair was brought home from the Craigs (to the delight of Mrs McNab), Effie found that she had a suitor. His name was John McDonald, and he had been a captain in the Black Watch. He was a friend of the Armitages, a rather bustling well-to-do family of furniture-store owners who lived on the opposite side of the square, and when the Armitages came to call one September afternoon for tea, they brought him along.

John McDonald was slender, soft-spoken, and almost embarrassingly polite. He had been at Magersfontein with Major-General Andy Wauchope, and he had been wounded there, a bullet in the upper thigh. He rarely spoke about the war, and when he did he was always detached, and remote, as if the war had been nothing more important than a few chukkas of polo. He had lost five of his best friends on that drizzly morning at Magersfontein, five boys who had been at school with him, and he was still unable to stop himself from wincing if he heard the clatter of a bucket-lid when the garbage men called, or the sudden pop of a coal in the fire. He had a beaky nose, and slightly protuberant eyes, and a downy black moustache which, his mother had proudly assured him, looked nearly as luxuriant as Lord Kitchener's.

They had tea scones and Dundee cake. John obviously felt uncomfortable in his stiff civilian collar and his new grey
suit. He cleared his throat a great deal, and shuffled his feet in his new patent shoes, But when Effie said to him, ‘I can't imagine you as a captain,' he raised his head and looked her straight in the eye and said, ‘I was, Miss Watson, I can assure you. I was captain of the fives team, too.'

After tea, Effie showed John the library. He lighted at once on the books on birds,
Mckinloch on Terns
, and
The Loch Garten Ospreys
. ‘I used to spend hours, as a boy, looking for eggs. I'm a great nature-lover, you know.'