Lady of Fortune (52 page)

Then, in the corner of the room in which they were standing, she saw a white washbasin. She realised with excruciating panic that this was Karl's nemesis; that if he ever got close to it, he would be lost, and she would never see him again. She screamed, and did everything she could to leap across the room, in slow, glutinous bounds, but then Karl rushed towards the door, and slipped out of it, and escaped her.

Terrified, she shrieked, ‘Don't! Don't leave me! Don't!
Don't!' and suddenly found that she was awake, and smothered in sweat, and tearing at her sheet.

She sat up in bed, sobbing and panting. She had felt Karl so closely that she found it impossible to believe that he was no longer here. Not only gone, but dead. She began to cry, in deep heartfelt gasps that hurt her ribcage.

A gentle voice said, ‘Effie? Aunt Effie?'

She looked up through the wincing wet concertinas of her tears. There was someone in a white nightshirt standing by the door, silent and attentive and shy. It was Alisdair.

She couldn't speak, but she held out her arms for him, and he came over and sat on the edge of the bed and hugged her close. He smiled of soap and man; not boy any more, but man. She leaned her head forward on his thigh, and he stroked the hair at the nape of her neck, and soothed her with murmurs and soft songs.

‘You dreamed about him?' he asked.

She lifted her head, and nodded. ‘Yes,' she said, miserably.

‘Can I get you anything? Chocolate? Or a drink?' He was trying to be very considerate, and mature.

‘I don't think so. I think I've probably been drinking too much anyway.'

There was a pause, and then Alisdair said, ‘You're very unhappy, aren't you?'

She was going to deny it, but then she thought, if I can't tell Alisdair how upset I am, who can I tell? She said, ‘Yes.'

He stroked her back, and around her shoulders.

‘I seem to have taken the wrong course somewhere,' she said. ‘I seem to have missed reality. Sometimes, when I'm in a room crowded with people, I feel as if I'm seeing them through thick plate-glass, as if I'm always separated from them. They always seem to know things that I don't know; they seem to be involved in a conspiracy of life which I haven't been let into. I
think
I'm attractive. I act pleasantly to people; to men; and yet nothing ever seems to come out of it. Other women find lovers and husbands, and fulfilment, and I never do.'

She held Alisdair's wrist, and pressed the palm of his hand against her cheek. ‘I'm not trying to sound sorry for myself,' she whispered, into the darkness where he sat. ‘I've been too ambitious to feel sorry for myself. I've wanted too much. When I was younger, I dreamed of nothing else but mixing
with kings and princes and millionaires. Suddenly, I'm thirty-two years of age, and I
have
. I've met them all. But do you know something? I blink, and think to myself, was that them? Was that actually them? Those empty heads, those rattling little men? Those pompous, conceited women with their diamonds and their swaying bosoms? Because if
they
are the kings and princes, if
they
are the highest one can ever go, what can I possibly do now?'

Alisdair said, They're not the highest. You know they're not.'

She let go of his wrist, but lifted both her arms and clasped them behind his neck. ‘You're right, of course.'

She kissed him, on the lips this time. He felt warm and comforting and manly. ‘You're right. Just like your father, your real father, to be right.'

They sat together for a long time without saying anything. The clock downstairs struck five, but it was still dark outside. Alisdair said, ‘Are you sure you don't want anything to drink?'

Effie shook her head.

‘I'd better get back to bed now,' said Alisdair. ‘I'll see you in the morning.'

‘No,' she said. ‘Don't go. Stay and talk to me. I don't want to be alone.'

He hesitated. She touched his hand, and a tiny, dark, message – as cryptic as the messages that quickly flow from one nerve to the other – pulsed through her fingers, and alerted him. He stayed on the edge of the bed, not moving. There was an unreality about tonight which might never happen again, a suspension of the real rules of existence. He didn't know where his mind ended and the night began.

‘Let me tell you a story,' Effie murmured. ‘Or, perhaps not.' She closed her eyes, and lay back on the pillow. She knew what she was doing, she knew all the dangers of it, all the fears and the strangenesses; she knew that this was Alisdair and not Karl. But she pretended to herself, or pretended that she was pretending, that she was drunk, or dreaming. She pretended that she was in the highest tower of a complicated Byzantine fortress hidden from the night, hidden from the moon, hidden from the whispers of her courtiers and the disapproval of her viziers.

‘Lie next to me,' she said, and with her eyes still closed, she
drew him down, and kissed his long boyish eyelashes, and his nose, and his lips.

He said nothing. There was nothing he could say which wouldn't have broken the spell. If he spoke to her, he would have to call her ‘Auntie'; and when you kiss your first-ever woman in the darkness of a winter's night, you can never call her that. So he closed his eyes, too, and pretended that they were other people, in another place.

Effie unbuttoned the front of her ruffled nightdress, found Alisdair's hand and guided it towards her bare breast. He felt it cautiously at first, tenderly and carefully, stroking the nipple in mesmerised wonder. Like all public schoolboys of his generation, he knew scarcely anything about women, except some of the fantastic and usually grotesquely inaccurate stories that were whispered around the Remove after dark. One or two copies of
Photo Charm
had been passed around, and Duncan McCormick had a picture of Eva Tanguay, the American burlesque star, in not very much but a fake harem costume of beads and feathers. He had met girls, of course, in the village; or for Highland dancing, but most of these girls seemed to be indomitably plain, or have braces on their teeth. The black-eyed houris of
Photo Charm
remained remote and unattainable, except in the fleeting moments of masturbation before they slept – when, in the words of one notably dryhumoured Latin master, ‘the combined calorific expenditure of the Lower Remove between lights out and five minutes past would be sufficient ‘to heat a competition-sized swimming-bath.'

Alisdair kissed Effie again and again; her lips, and her neck, and then her breasts. She thought, the innocence of this is enough. My need for consolation is enough. I don't care whether it's wrong or it's right. She reached beneath his nightshirt for him, and found that he was already hard and slippery with anticipation. His breathing was shallow and quick, and it was obvious to Effie that he was overwhelmed with what was happening, yet still wanted it. She soothed him, whispered silly words in his ear, and guided him downwards and a little across, until the head of his penis was helmeted by the lips of her sex. She whispered, ‘Push … push into me.'

It was fragmented. There were bursts of uncertainty, energy, fright, and intense excitement. She lay back knowing that she had committed herself to a sin; although somehow the
sinfulness made it sweeter. She imagined and remembered the oddest moments. John McDonald, with his forearms tanned liked long brown evening-gloves. Karl, naked, standing by the fire with his back to her, and slowly slowly turning to smile at her over his shoulder. A picnic near St Abb's Head, on the eastern coast, when she was fourteen years old, and how she had suddenly wet herself while down on the beach looking for seashells. Her mother, her dear mother, taking Jamie McFarlane's hand on the battlements of Edinburgh Castle.

Alisdair gasped, and jerked, and then stayed still, uncertain what to do next, while his penis shrank within her. Then, he withdrew from her, and knelt up on the bed, staring at her through the darkness, although she couldn't see his face. She said nothing. She wanted him to speak first. But he was quite silent, speechless, even afraid. ‘A man's character alters so
radically
after sex that you suddenly find you're in bed with a different person. One minute he doesn't want anything in the world but you, then he wants a chicken sandwich.' That's what Vera Cockburn had told her one morning, as she tried to decide whether to wear six strands of pearls around her neck that morning, or eight. ‘Men are like motor-cars,' she had shrilled. ‘Keep on twiddling their little gearsticks from time to time, and they run about quite happily, taking you wherever you wish to go.'

Alisdair said hoarsely, ‘I think I should go now.'

Effie held out her hand for him. ‘Yes,' she said.

‘I'm sorry,' he whispered.

‘What for? You were a great comfort, and a great pleasure, and you have nothing to be ashamed of.'

He didn't know how to answer that. He simply said, ‘If we're going to Stirling –'

‘Yes,' she said. ‘I suppose you're right. You'd better get some sleep.'

He felt embarrassed now, and awkward. What had happened between them, so suddenly and so briefly, had jolted their lifelong friendship off balance. They still loved each other; but now they didn't know how. Were they aunt and nephew? Friends? Or lovers? Even if they were retreating from each other now, what would happen when they began to feel like having sex again?

Alisdair said, ‘Goodnight, then.'

Effie said, ‘You should kiss me, when you say that.'

They kissed, lips against lips, and held each other for a moment that was so tender and close that it brought tears again to Effie's eyes.

‘Sleep well, my darling,' she told him.

He stood up, hesitated, and then left her bedroom without another word.

Effie slipped her hand down between her legs, as she had always done with Karl. Warmth and stickiness. The evidence of committed love. The liquid residue of joy. She was never ashamed of her body, and never would be, even though her mind was spinning with uncertainty at what she had just done. Had she seduced Alisdair just to entertain herself, or to seek genuine comfort? Did she love him as a man, or as a fantasy of Karl?

She lay face down on the bed, and thought about what had happened for hours, until she feel asleep from sheer tiredness. The grey winter sunlight touched her tangled hair, and the rumpled nightdress on her back, and the upraised curve of her bare bottom. She looked very pretty that morning, if there had been anyone to see her, prettier than she had for months.

Rosie woke her at eight with a cup of tea and a plate of biscuits. She sat up in bed, propped with pillows, and watched the birds fluttering around the window-ledge. She thought of Alisdair again, and felt content. What she had done with him had been nothing more than simple human loving, and however she thought of it, she could not feel ashamed.

It would never happen again. But it had helped her to get over Karl's death, and it had helped her realise that she was part of the real world again, and it had done something else, which she wouldn't discover until much later, that would alter the course of her life for ever.

At ten o'clock in the morning, while they were having their breakfast in the morning-room, Effie received a hand-delivered letter from London, addressed in completely unfamiliar writing. She slit it open with Robert's gold letter-knife,
while Alisdair dipped soldiers in his boiled egg and watched her with eyes that were still shadowed from sleeplessness. He had been lovely to her this morning: affectionate, but still respectful, and he had kissed her hand when he had taken her down to the dining-room.

‘Is it important?' he asked, as Effie quickly scanned the letter's typewritten message.

Effie nodded. ‘Very. I may have to postpone our trip to Stirling.'

Alisdair wiped his mouth with his napkin and frowned.

The letter was from Mr Niblets. It was unsigned, and had probably been written on an office typewriter to avoid identification. It said, ‘My dear Miss Watson, You should know that nine and a half million pounds of gold bullion is being loaded at Southampton today for delivery to Brazil. The ship involved is the Uruguayan passenger-liner
San José de Mayo
. En route to Brazil, the vessel will be intercepted by a German battle-cruiser, which will confiscate its cargo. The gold will be sent directly to Germany, as a disguised war-loan from Watson's Bank to Berlin. You must destroy this letter as soon as you have read it, since I am now treading very dangerous ground. Signed, Your Admirer.'

Effie put down her napkin and rose from the table. ‘Excuse me, Alisdair,' she said. She went immediately up to her room, her long pale green skirt whishing on the stairs, locked the door, and picked up the telephone. The telephone-girl said, ‘Aye?'

‘I want the Admiralty, in London. I want to speak to Lieutenant-Commander Horace Dawes.'

Horace Dawes was the only naval man she knew: she had met him at Kew, at a tedious party held by the Wing-Smytons, where they had served stewed duckling with black cherries and made everybody listen for hours to a trio of Magyar glee singers, who had revealed themselves at the end of the evening (to nobody's surprise) to be three estate-agents from West Ewell.

It took Effie twenty minutes to get through to Lieutenant-Commander Dawes' office: and when she did, she learned from his adjutant that he was away for the day. ‘Signals,' he said, mysteriously.

‘I must speak to somebody. There is an illicit arrangment to
transfer British gold in mid-Atlantic to a German battle-cruiser.'

‘I see. Did you say gold? As in coast?'

She succeeded at last in having her message transferred to the duty officer, who assured her that the matter would be taken up. She wasn't at all sure that it would be, so she also rang Sir Godfrey Lelew, the Conservative member for Thornton, who had always quite fancied her. He sounded both drunk and astonished, but he told her seven or eight times, ‘Don't you worry, m'girl. Dont you worry,' and she hung up the phone feeling that it would be difficult to do any better.