Lady of Fortune (39 page)

John stood up, and fumbled in the pocket of his wide green tweed trousers for his money. He paid the bill for the tea,
1s. 3d., and left the waitress a 2d. tip. He blinked a little, and then he said, ‘You've been marvellous to know, Effie. You're bright. Blindingly bright! But you're too cold and self-contained for me. I can never reach you. You're like a star. Haughty, beautiful, but far beyond us ordinary people.'

‘John, I am not haughty. If there's one thing I absolutely am not, it's haughty!'

John cast down his eyes, and put his hands in his pockets, and shrugged. ‘Well, no. Well, I didn't mean haughty. I mean, you've always been friendly. You've always been warm. But I haven't been able to persuade you to love me, have I? To marry me?'

Next to them, a very large woman in the violently yellow dress-tartan of the Maclachlans turned in her chair, the grouse-feather on top of her tartan bonnet quivering in interest, and stared at John and Effie through the upper lenses of her bi-focal spectacles. Effie, quick as a lizard, stuck out her tongue at her.

The woman turned back to her heathery companion and said, caustically, ‘Smoking, behaving in public like a wild animal! I've heard about her. More money than good sense, if you ask me.'

Effie said, ‘Will you just stick your broonie into your mouth, madam, and mind your own affairs?'

‘Well!' the woman expostulated, indignant, but quite thrilled all the same that she would have such a splendid piece of scandalous gossip to tell her friends at tomorrow morning's tea-circle. ‘Effie Watson herself told me to stuff up my mouth with my broonie!'

John said, ‘Effie, I have to go. And I'd much rather you didn't try to keep in touch with me. I need to find somebody else, somebody to love me in return, somebody to marry me. A wife, Effie, a wife!'

‘Walk with me awhile,' Effie asked him.

Arm-in-arm, they strolled along Princes Street. It was a sharp golden October afternoon, with Calton Hill far in front of them, crowned by the misty pillars of its half-finished Parthenon, and the castle rock rising in purplish shadows to their right. In her long dark mink coat and her pearl-beaded beret of crushed-raspberry-coloured angora wool, Effie looked exactly what she was, an heiress. The setting sun made John's ears glow bright red, and he kept having to sniff.

Effie said, ‘I never meant to hurt you, John.'

‘Well, I know that,' he said. ‘But hurt I was.'

‘Do you think I've changed? Do you think I'm suddenly
unpleasant
now?'

John shook his head. ‘No, Effie, you're the pleasantest person I know. You're grander these days, certainly. You put on all these London airs. But you're only doing it because it amuses you, and because you enjoy showing off. I love you still as much as ever. Probably more.'

Effie said nothing, but held his arm tight against her. To lose John McDonald's friendship would be to lose the last reassuringly ordinary companion she had in Edinburgh, the only person with whom she could walk and talk and have tea and while away whole Saturdays without having to worry about going home or what time the next appointment might be. Almost all of her girl-friends from Charlotte Square were married now. Celia Calder-Haig had married Duncan Thurso of Dornoch, a huge gingery man with a trumpeting voice and knees like joints of uncooked pork. Mary McArrol had been ‘won', as she liked to call it, by a teacher in physics from the Royal High School, a skeletally-thin man whose shoulders were always a Ben Nevis of dandruff.

John said, as diffidently as he could manage, ‘You need a husband, you know, Effie. You can't spend the rest of your life being as wild and independent as you are now.'

‘You think I'm wild?'

‘I don't know. I think you're free. But too much freedom can do you as much harm as too much captivity. I'm sorry that you didn't want me for a husband. But I hope that you do find a man for yourself; a man you can love, and respect, and cherish.'

‘I cherish you, John.'

‘Perhaps.'

They walked a little further. The air was growing mistier and chillier now, and the motor-cars which whined their way along Princes Street had lit up their headlamps. Effie was about to say that she wanted to start walking back home again when she noticed in the window of Usher's, the small traditional shop which sold bone-handled hunting-knives and salmon flies and decoy ducks and silver-capped whisky flasks, a huge glass display-case in which was mounted an arrangement of stuffed birds from Herma Ness, in the
Shetlands. On a plaster rock, against a painted sky, sat a great skua, a gannet, a puffin, and a kittiwake.

‘John!' she said, excitedly, and took his hand.

‘What? What is it?' he asked her. But she dragged him into the shop without another word, only a smile of glee. The door-bell jangled, and a tiny grey-whiskered man appeared, in a hunting tartan of Stuart of Bute, a brown and green sett which always reminded Effie of kippers and cabbage.

‘Is it hunting equipment you're needing?' the tiny man asked, drily.

Effie said, ‘No. It's the birds. The stuffed birds. The ones you have in the window.'

The tiny man stared at her solemnly. ‘They're only on display, I regret. They're not for sale.'

‘A hundred pounds for them.'

John protested, ‘Effie, this is quite ridiculous. They're not even worth
half
that.'

‘A hundred and fifty.'

The tiny man said, ‘Well … I suppose some arrangement could be reached …'

Ten minutes later, John and Effie were walking back west along Princes Street, carrying between them the huge glass case crowded with stuffed birds. John was so embarrassed that he kept stumbling, but Effie laughed at him and encouraged him not to be so bashful.

‘They're for you, anyway!' she smiled. ‘A goodbye present, from somebody who cares for you very much.'

A street-boy shouted after them, ‘I should hurry up, if I were you, missis, or you'll not get them chickens into the oven in time for your sups!'

They carried the case of birds as far as the steps of John McDonald's house, in Castle Street. It was dark now, and very cold, and their breath steamed in the frosty air. Effie gazed at John through the glass of the case, between the small yellow-billed puffin and the superior-looking skua. It was like gazing at a face in a photograph album, of a friend you had lost long ago.

‘Goodbye,' she mouthed, silently. ‘I love you.'

She heard a week later that he had re-enlisted in the Black Watch, and was expecting to be posted to India.

She was also told by Robert that week that she should buy herself a new winter outfit, smart, and subdued, and
business-like. ‘I want you to go to Germany for me,' he said, puffing on his pipe. ‘I'm trying to set up an arrangement with the Deutsche Kreditbank of Hamburg, to make a loan to the Turks to improve their railways, and to rebuild some of the worst slums in Izmir and Bursa. The loan could amount to £20 million, between the two of us. A very profitable affair indeed.'

‘Why should I go?' asked Effie. ‘I was supposed to be going down to London for a few weeks.'

‘You won't be on your own,' said Robert. ‘You'll have Tessie with you, and somebody from the Cornhill office. You should enjoy it. Your first trip abroad. Haven't I always said you should travel?'

‘Do you think the Germans will want to do business with a woman?' asked Effie.

Robert, his hands planted firmly in his pockets, his pipe gripped between his teeth, smiled at her with exaggerated good humour. He was nearly forty now, and plumper than ever, and as each year went past he grew to look more and more like his dead father. It sometimes gave Effie a strange feeling to watch him cross the hallway at night, as if he were Thomas Watson, deceased, but revisiting his house in a shoddy and careless disguise.

‘The particular German whom I want you to meet will be absolutely
delighted
to do business with a woman,' said Robert. ‘His name is Karl von Ahlbeck. A count, from Pomerania originally, so you should like him, too.'

Upstairs that evening, Effie sat at her dressing-table for a very long time, staring at herself in her mirror. A woman of twenty-seven now, with finely-lined features and captivating eyes, and upswept hair that gleamed in the lamplight. But already, in spite of the creams she used, in spite of the magnetic-electric battery she usually wore around her neck for ‘invigorating, simulating, and putting new life into every nerve in your body', she could see the lines around her eyes that marked how old she was, and feel the treacherous softness in her skin of a mature woman, rather than a young girl.

What had John McDonald said? ‘Too much freedom can do you as much harm as too much captivity.' But somehow Effie had never found herself able to fall in love. She had found plenty of men to be witty, quite a few men to be charming, and
some of them attractive indeed. A playwright in London called Herbert King, tall and straight-backed and quite as handsome, as Vera Cockburn had lustfully remarked, as ‘a whole circus full of stallions', had taken Effie twice out for dinner, once to the Café Royal, and once to the Trocadero. At the end of the second evening, when he had driven her back in his motor-car to Cheyne Walk, he had pleaded most eloquently to be invited up for a ‘demi-tasse, or perhaps even a demi-kiss', but Effie had heard herself refusing him, gently but firmly, and she had never seen him again.

She picked up a tortoise-shell pompadour comb from her dressing-table and ran her finger around it, so that it made a soft plinking sound. Perhaps she was somehow deficient. Perhaps there was something essential that was missing in her personality. Perhaps she didn't actually have a heart. When she had visited Celia Calder-Haig, she had been envious that Celia had found herself a husband, and a home, but not in the slightest bit covetous of Duncan Thorso of Dornoch himself. How could any woman have fallen in love with a great beefy bellowing creature like that? He spoke so loudly that if he was holding a conversation in the dining-room, it rattled the plates in the parlour. And to have to lie beneath him, during the marriage act, pressed upon by fifteen stones-weight of red freckled flesh! Effie couldn't imagine how a girl as particular as Celia could bear it.

Perhaps I'm unnatural, Effie thought. She watched her eyes in the mirror but her eyes quickly shielded themselves from too close an analysis. She had heard of such women – women who could only love other women – but the thought of kissing another woman's lips, of touching another woman's breasts – well, it made her feel distinctly peculiar. Even if she were unnatural, she obviously wasn't very good at
that
, either.

It was not unusual for a girl in 1911 to be a spinster and a virgin at the age of twenty-seven, particularly if she was the youngest in the family, and expected (as Effie was expected by Robert) to live in the family home and run the daily affairs of the household. Effie was exceptional, too, in that she spent at least three days a week in her mahogany-panelled office in the bank, under a vast oil painting of Clunie Water, and an orange stained-glass Tiffany lamp, arranging meetings and compiling figures. Except when she went to London, she had
very little time for courting and dancing and doodling away her time with men.

But there was more to her lack of love than that. There was a cold, silvery undercurrent of fear inside her, whenever she thought of men, and marriage. She would think of her mother, nodding uselessly in her chair at St Vigeans, so involved with her own fantasies and memories now that she would hardly ever speak. She would think of her father, brow-beating and shouting. And she would often think of Prudence, given a child by Dougal, and reduced by illegitimate motherhood into surrendering her dignity and her freedom of choice to a man she didn't love. Prudence in the last few years had lost all of her London sparkle, and had become instead a typical young Edinburgh wife, wealthy, prudish, genteel, mimsy-mouthed, and tedious as tea-cake.

She and Effie were still close, still sisterly, still linked arms, but Prudence never shared any secrets, not real secrets, and whenever Effie tried to ask her if she was happy, or if she was lonely, or if she was irritated by Edinburgh, Prudence would do nothing but apply herself to her needlework, or stare at Effie in a way which made Effie feel as if the person behind her eyes had somehow mislaid her entire reason for being here.

When she had told Prudence about John, Prudence had simply said, ‘Well it says in my magazine this week that, “When a girl who has encouraged a young man for several years tells him she can never be more than a sister to him, he can for the first time see the freckles on her nose.” Don't you think that's apt?'

Effie had started to say something in reply, but then decided against it. Prudence had smiled, as if she were quite pleased with herself, and carried on sewing.

The only person in her life with whom Effie could feel any real closeness was Alisdair, Prudence's little boy. He was nearly twelve now; and although he had been brought up in a wealthy world of huge well-sprung baby carriages, hand-tailored broadcloth sailor-suits, and all the Bavarian toy soldiers he could crowd into his bedroom, he had remained remarkably unaffected. He was confident, friendly, and cheerful, and he often reminded Effie of Dougal at his very best. One afternoon in the late summer, when they were both sitting in the library – Effie reading a book on gold, and Alisdair lying on the carpet with G. A. Henty's In
Times of
Peril
– Effie looked up and said, without thinking, ‘Do you remember that time when we stole all the crusty knobs from the ends of Mr Bruce's loaves?'

Alisdair stopped kicking his legs backwards and forwards and stared up at her. He said, ‘What, Auntie?'

Effie had haughed. ‘Och, I don't know what I'm talking about. It wasn't you at all. How could it have been? It was your Uncle Dougal.' But after Alisdair had gone back to his book, and the thrilling escape of two English boys from the massacre of Cawnpore (by the simple expedient of swimming seventy miles up the River Ganges), Effie was left with a feeling of disquiet, as if time and events were deceiving her, as if years had passed and yet not passed.