Lady of Fortune (5 page)

‘You're not concerned, Robert, that Mr Stephenson might have absconded?' asked Thomas Watson, laying two pale and bloodless slices of mutton on to his wife's plate, and passing it along.

‘It entered my mind,' said Robert, keeping his eyes on Dougal. ‘I always said that he was an adventurer. The minute I met him, I thought, there's a fellow with a headful of fancy ideas and a purseful of moths.'

‘He's probably abed with a brash,' said Dougal. ‘All kinds of folk have been going down with the influenza.'

‘More likely he's abed with a limmer,' muttered Robert, Limmer was a coarse street word for whore.

‘
Robert
!' rapped his father, raising the point of his carving-knife. ‘We'll have no such talk at the Sabbath table. You'll say your apologies to your mother.'

‘Forgive me, mother,' said Robert, shifting his weight in his seat. ‘I should have held my tongue. Dougal is probably quite right, and Mr Stephenson is doubtless sick. All that concerns me is where. More likely the South of France, or halfway to New York.'

‘Do you know what your complaint is?' Dougal challenged his brother. ‘You don't trust
anybody
! Isn't it the whole business of a bank to take a risk or two, and isn't Mr Stephenson as worthy of a risk as anybody else? At least twice as worthy as Bailies-Home and his property business in Burntisland, and I'll say no more about Duff, or the Binns, or McEwan. It's a disease, your suspicion! That's a good wee bookbindery that Mr Stephenson's set up. He's a good man, and he's reliable; and besides, we hold his mortgage.'

‘Dougal,' said his mother, from the far end of the table, almost hidden by the grotesque silver centrepiece of triumphant
angels that had been presented to her husband to celebrate twenty-five years with the bank. ‘Dougal, hush now. And you, too, Robert. It's the Sabbath.'

For Effie's mother, it was crucial that her sons should be distracted from quarrelling about business over Sunday luncheon. A little bit of wracking talk from Dougal; a few sharp retorts from Robert; and the next thing would be a ferocious collie-shangie about who was right about investments and who was wrong, and how could Dougal have promised £2000 to some miserable printer in Canongate who had dyvor written all over him, and how could Robert have guaranteed £30,000 to some Grassmarket property-owner who would be renting out slummy tenement rooms to failed teachers and hopeless whiskey-suppers.

Thomas, her husband, held her unfailingly responsible for any arguments between the boys, and for any disruption of what he liked to refer to as ‘the household decorum.' If there was an argument this luncheon-time, there would be hours of condemnation later in the night, in their huge oaken bed, with Thomas accusing her of spoiling the boys, and of forever giving in to them, and even of having diluted the strength and fortitude of the Watson blood with her weak and watery Nugent-Dunbar blood. Thomas seemed to have forgotten that when he had married the daughter of the Acting Sheriff-Substitute of Alloa in 1869 he had been marrying one of the prettiest girls in Scotland, and one of the brightest, too. Even in her late forties, Fiona Watson had kept her looks – her perfect oval face, her huge blue eyes that could have been hand-painted in Delft, and her long reddish-blonde hair which she usually wore in a pinned and elaborately-plaited bun. She was so becoming, even now, that gentlemen would raise their bonnets to her in the street, for no reason at all but to compliment her beauty. But Thomas Watson appeared to have grown blind to her prettiness, and completely insensitive to her charm. If he still believed that she was as
bonny and genty as the day that he had first met her, then he hid his feelings remorselessly. He expected her to run his family life according to each of his particular prejudices, and all of his exact tastes, and if she failed to do so, then he would lose his temper to the point of madness.

‘I talked to the Arbuthnott sisters after the service,' Fiona Watson remarked to her husband, by way of changing the subject to something safe, as the family began to eat. They tell me that young Jamie is signing up for the 92nd, the Gordon Highlanders.'

‘Jamie Arbuthnott, in the Gordons?' asked Thomas Watson. ‘Well, that's grand news. At least there's a laddie who tries to live up to his family's expectations. Good blood in him, though, both Arbuthnott and Graham. Good strong blood.'

‘Personally, I can't think of a way to lose the war sooner,' said Dougal folding over his slice of mutton in a way which irritated his father, but which at least gave the meat some substance.

‘I think Jamie Arbuthnott's most polite,' put in Effie, defiantly. ‘He always says “how d'ye do” to me, and he gave me that posy for my birthday, and that was a winsome thing to do.'

‘He's not trying to woo you, is he?' teased Dougal.

‘I wouldn't object if he were,' replied Effie, blushing a little. She didn't know many boys of her own age, and Jamie Arbuthnott was special. He was very tall, with the thickest of fair hair, and he had an easy, coaxing manner which always left Effie feeling delightfully light-headed. She was always trying to persuade her mother to invite the Arbuthnotts for tea, in the hope that Jamie would come with them; and her mother, who had pestered her own mother in the same way to invite the Watsons to Alloa, would usually give in. Jamie had been eighteen last Yuletide, and his father had been pressing him to study the law. But, as all of Jamie's friends well knew, he had talked of nothing since he was fourteen but going to war, and he frequently entertained the drinkers in Bennet's Bar in Leven Street by acting out a one-man drama of the rout of the Boers by the Highland Light Infantry. It was a popular act: the Black Watch and the Gordons had been sent running by the Boers at Magersfontein, and if anybody mentioned ‘Magersfontein' in a Rose Street bar, even today, he was risking having his teeth punched down his throat.

‘Well, at least the Arbuthnotts are honourable,' said Robert, helping himself to more caper sauce. ‘Which is more than I can say for Mr Stephenson.'

‘Are you still whinging on about Mr Stephenson?' demanded Dougal. ‘Good heavens, Robert, a man has to take but one Sunday away from the kirk, and you're accusing him of bilking. That's a kind of madness, that is.'

‘Will you restrain your conversation?' demanded Thomas Watson, staring fixedly at his wife.

‘Oh, but it's true,' complained Dougal. ‘We have the man's mortgage. We have his oath, as a gentleman. We have his signature, three times over. Why should we be so concerned about his honesty, just because he hasn't appeared in the kirk; unless we're irked about the fact that it was I who authorised the loan, without Robert's approval?'

‘You had no right to approve the loan without my consent,' snapped Robert. ‘That's the long and the short of it.'

‘I'm entitled to approve loans up to five thousand pounds, without your authority. You said so yourself.'

‘Just because I
said
so, that didn't mean you could do it. Not without the plain courtesy of informing me. I could have told you straight away that Mr Stephenson is unsteady with his debts; and that his wadset's worth about as much as a pair of midden-creels.'

‘That's enough talk of money on the Lord's day,' said Thomas Watson. He kept his pale eyes on his wife as he chewed his meat, and Fiona knew that the boys' argument had already gone too far.

‘We're not talking about money, father,' said Dougal. ‘We're talking about trust. And is trust not a fit subject for a luncheon discussion on the Lord's day? Robert here doesn't trust a soul alive. He doesn't even trust his own kin.'

‘You'll hold your tongue,' ordered Thomas Watson.

‘Dougal, Robert,' appealed Fiona, as gently as she could.

But Robert was angry now. He lifted his fork threateningly and said, ‘It's Albion, that's what Dougal's so sore about. It's nothing to do with Mr Stephenson, or trust, or loan approval. It's Albion.'

‘If you want an example of what I'm so sore about, then Albion's as good as any,' replied Dougal.

‘If I want an example!' Robert spat back. ‘What kind of haivers is that? You've been blethering about Albion for
three weeks, and I should have known that it would lead to this. Well, laddie, you can forget about Albion, because I'm going to stick by what I said to you on Friday. The loan is too great; and the returns are too uncertain; and to tell you the honest truth I would rather lend the money to a loun.'

‘What is Albion?' asked Effie, ingenuously.

Dougal said, ‘Albion, my dearie, are going to be one of the greatest manufacturers in Scotland. They produce –'

‘Motor-cars,' interrupted Robert, with triumphant sarcasm, ‘horseless carriages, for the amusement of the wasteful and the idle. A nine-days' wonder for those who don't object to paying two or three hundred pounds for the privilege of being jolted along at ten miles an hour, with the road-dust blown in their faces, and the perpetual nuisance of noise, and oil, and mechanical failure.'

He pushed away his plate, and stood up. ‘Young Dougal here believes that Watson's Bank should advance £21,000 of hard-earned money into the support and development of this gowkie scheme. His enthusiasm, however, fails to take into account the fact that there is scarcely a road in Scotland suitable for them; that they can only be afforded by a small and tentie minority, and that it is far cheaper for a man to keep a horse and cart. Why, a man can travel at twenty miles an hour from Edinburgh to Aberdeen on the railway for less than it costs him to buy a pound of beef sausages, and he can read the paper as he travels! What on earth will possess him to buy a motor-car?'

‘The natural desire for freedom,' Dougal retorted. ‘That's what Albion are appealing to. The natural desire to travel when you like, and where you like, heedless of the timetables, and the taxi-cabs. Losh, Robert, you cannot see further than your own hooter! It's a new age we're talking about, a whole new age, right here in Scotland, and all you can bring yourself to do is talk it down! Not out of good judgement, but simply because you cannot bear to approve any scheme that I have put up, and that's the truth of it!'

‘I'll hear no more,' Thomas Watson ordered, in a soft voice like boiling milk which is just about to rise up the side of the pan. ‘Robert, sit yourself down. Dougal, keep your peace. Mother – we can talk about this later.'

‘It was him that brought up Albion,' protested Dougal.

‘That's enough!' Thomas Watson shouted.

‘Thomas, my dear –' put in Fiona, but Thomas Watson silenced her with a stare. He said to Effie, coldly, ‘Pass your mother the neeps.' Then he watched as Fiona helped herself to more neeps that she didn't want, her hand trembling so much that the spoon rattled against the side of the silver dish. She knew what to expect tonight, once their bedroom door was closed, railing and shouting and flinging-around; perhaps even a beating. ‘There's the weakness in my sons!' he would bellow at her, as she miserably prepared for bed. ‘It's you! You and your spoiling of them, doodling the pair of them as if they were still babbies! No wonder they bicker and argue so much! No wonder they're so menseless!'

He didn't often strike her; and when he did, it was usually a knuckle-blow on the ribs, where it wouldn't show when she was dressed. Once, after they had given dinner to Fiona's father and mother, and a gaggle of her cousins, he had been in such a fury of wine and jealousy that he had forced her down over his knees, lifted her nightdress, and spanked her bare bottom. She, in return, had been both angry and aroused, and she had reached out for him. But he had quickly tugged down the tails of his nightshirt, and vehemently shaken his head, and said, ‘I'll have none of it.'

Fiona had long ago given up trying to understand what went on in her husband's mind. She was unable to tell if he was happy or miserable, if he loved his family nor not. He worked steadily at the bank, building up its influence and its assets, and he plainly regarded himself as one of the pillars of Edinburgh's wealthy merchant establishment. But she couldn't tell if this satisfied him or not, because he never talked to her about his work, except to grumble about his managers and his staff; and the only times he ever expressed any opinions about anything, he spoke in such lofty generalisations that he gave no clues about his feelings at all. ‘I am a man of my time,' he often said; and perhaps this was the most revealing admission of all, although Fiona wouldn't be able to see what it meant in her lifetime. To her, the Victorian ideals of ostentatious wealth, pompous morality, and patronising charity were all too familiar to be remarkable.

Effie watched her mother with helpless sympathy. She didn't know that her father beat her mother, but she sensed how frightened she was of him. As Robert was his father's son, a real Watson, so Effie was her mother's girl. In fact,
Thomas Watson, when he was younger, had often taken Effie's chin in his hand, and said, There's a Nugent-Dunbar, right enough. A plain, no-mistake Nugent-Dunbar. Thin in the blood and pale in the face. Nugent-Dunbar and no quarrel about it at all.'

At seventeen, although she didn't quite realise it, Effie was on the verge of breaking out into some of the prettiest years of her life. She had always been mousy, when she was younger, and shy; and embarrassed about her skinny arms and legs. Her bright blue Nugent-Dunbar eyes had seemed far too large for her, and her paternal grandmother, now seven years dead of double pneumonia, had remarked from the lacy fastnesses of her bed that she looked like a fledgling that had fallen out of its nest. ‘Do you eat your parritch, child?' she had rasped. ‘If you don't, you'll expire for the lack of it.'

Like many of her friends in Charlotte Square – the other pale, primsy girls of wealthy Edinburgh families, like Celia Calder-Haig, who always wore velvet collars, and Mary McArrol, who had bright ginger hair and had embroidered her father a chanter-case for Christmas – Effie had been tutored at home. Her first teacher, Miss Murdoch, had been a mim-mouthed woman of thirty whose only suitor had died in 1879 in the Tay Bridge disaster, and who would now and again lapse into remote trances, and hum Bonny Dundee to herself. Then, she had been brought a variety of tutors – Mrs McCreith for English and historical studies (‘The Celts, Effie, were a
wild
collection'); Miss Wallace for mathematics; and a Portuguese lady with an unpronounceable name and a startling facial tic, for piano.