Lady of Fortune (55 page)

Dougal gave her an odd sort of look and then said, ‘I have, as a matter of fact.'

‘What? You're married? But why didn't you write and tell me?'

‘Oh, come on, Effie; we lost touch with each other, didn't we? I was doing what I wanted to do and you were doing what you wanted to do, and that was all. I met a girl in Battery Park not long after I got here. In the summer, I used to go to Battery Park to eat my sandwiches, almost every lunchtime. Henry wouldn't give me an expense account at first, and in any case I found that it was easier to buy a salt-beef sandwich or a hamburger steak and onions for fifteen cents, than it was to go home every evening and try to cook for myself. I was eating my lunch in the park one day and I started talking to a girl who was sitting on the bench next to me. I took her out to dance; and then to the theatre. I met her folks. And, about six years ago, I married her.'

‘Six
years
ago?' Effie exclaimed. ‘Dougal, why didn't you
tell
me?'

Dougal reached for the champagne bottle in the cooler, but the wine-waiter reached it first, and topped up their glasses. ‘You like New York?' he asked Effie, shooting his eyebrows up and down. ‘Your first time here?'

‘She loves it,' said Dougal, to cut the conversation short.

Effie said, ‘You astonish me, Dougal. You really do. Where is your wife now?'

‘We have another house, on Long Island. She stays there most of the time.'

‘Doesn't she want to stay in New York, with you? Or doesn't she like it here?'

Dougal stirred the croutons in his chowder, and then looked up at Effie with an expression that was a mixture of regret and apology. He had forgotten, in all the years he had been away from her, how close they really were, and today he had been reminded of everything they had shared as children: feelings, as well as memories. Fifteen years had gone by, a whole era had risen and died, a war had begun; and yet they could talk to each other as easily as if they were still on the window-seat in their playroom at Charlotte Square, with their children's annuals and their toys.

‘The marriage didn't work, Effie,' Dougal said. ‘In those days, I wasn't particularly well off, and neither was Mariella, and I suppose we clung to each other for security as much as for anything else. She's very attractive; she's
handsome, and graceful. But I realised after only two or three years that she wasn't right for me. She doesn't even begin to understand banking. She doesn't try. She would rather spend her time on Long Island, looking after the house and the garden, and expect me when she sees me.'

‘Isn't she unhappy? Aren't you unhappy?' asked Effie.

Dougal shrugged. ‘She never complains. She knows I have other women friends, or at least she guesses that I do. I'm sure she does. I suppose we've worked out a
modus vivendi
between us, and that's all you can say about it.'

To Effie, brought up in Edwardian Edinburgh and a London in which ‘appearances' were still essential, Dougal's talk about his marriage seemed impossibly modern, almost incomprehensible. Men did, of course, keep mistresses, just as wives had lovers; but for a marriage to be worked out like a business, and open adultery to be regarded as a ‘
modus vivendi
' – that would have ruffled even Vera Cockburn's feathers, and Vera Cockburn always considered herself a connoisseuse of what she called ‘rumpled sheets'.

‘What kind of a woman is she?' Effie asked Dougal.

Dougal said, ‘She's Estonian. Her maiden name was Mariella Aegviidu. As I've told you, she's very handsome. But all she seems to want to do is lead a quiet domestic life. She doesn't care what's happening in the outside world, as long as her flowers are well-arranged, and her rooms are spotless, and the garden looks idyllic.'

‘Do you have any children?'

Dougal shook his head. ‘Mariella always wanted them, but I always said no.'

‘You don't want any children?'

‘Not by her.'

‘You sound as if you hate her.'

‘I don't hate her,' said Dougal. ‘As a matter of fact, if I allowed myself to, I could probably still love her. But she's not the woman for me. I made a mistake in marrying her, that's all. It's my fault; and it's my problem. I have to live with it. Every time I come home, and see the way she looks at me, I feel guilty. Don't you think that's a high enough price to pay for having proposed to the wrong person?'

They ate in silence for a while. Then Effie said, ‘Will I get to meet her? Mariella?'

‘Of course. I want you to come out to Long Island for the weekend.'

‘And May? What does she think?'

‘She's coming too.'

Effie looked at him, and then blushed. ‘You've suddenly made me feel rather old-fashioned.'

Dougal took her hand. ‘You're not old-fashioned, Effie. It's just that I made a mess of my life and somehow I have to cope with it. Believe me, I'd much rather it hadn't happened this way.'

Effie sipped a little champagne, and then put her glass down. ‘I'm not sure that I do,' she said.

‘You're not sure that you do what?' frowned Dougal.

‘Believe you,' said Effie.

During the next two days, Effie began to understand just how wealthy and well-connected Dougal had become. Free of Robert's heavy-handed influence, and free of Henry Baeklander, he had thrown himself wholeheartedly into his favourite form of banking: lending money to private inventors and to small companies with competent management and bright ideas, but a need for powerful financial backing. Watson's New York Inc., from its marble-fronted headquarters at 23 Broad Street, now controlled shares in everything from Rockard's patented oil-drilling bits to Coolidge's ductile tungsten and Sperry's searchlight arc. Annual interest and share dividends had brought the bank in more than $27 million in 1915, and Dougal confidently told Effie that 1916 would be another record year. ‘You just have to believe in the future, no matter how peculiar it seems, he told her, sitting back behind his wide leather-topped desk, on which a chromium-plated model of a Curtiss bi-plane sparkled like a symbol of tomorrow's world.

‘And you really want me to join you?' asked Effie.

‘Of course. You have a reputation in New York already. Frank Vanderlip at Citibank is always talking about you, and
you've been, corresponding with Amedeo Giannini, haven't you? They have more respect for women in New York, Effie. They expect women to be aggressive and to understand business. That's why Mariella and I can never get on together. She's too old-country for me. You, though – you'll do this business no end of good.'

Effie sipped the strong black coffee which May had brought her. Outside the window of Dougal's office, she could see the gleaming towers of Lower Manhattan – the Woolworth Building, the Municipal Building, and the spire of the Metropolitan Life Insurance building, only just completed. It was the city of the future; and she knew that she could find her own future here.

‘All right,' she said. ‘What do you want me to do?'

Dougal was lighting a cigar. ‘I want you to use all of your charm and all of your skill to find new businesses for us; new clients who need finance. I also want you to help our Overseas Loans manager, Dan Kress, to judge the creditworthiness of clients who approach us from Europe. You know far more about European loans than anybody here, I'm sure; and perhaps you could suggest one or two new fields for him to explore.'

‘That sounds marvellous,' said Effie.

‘I expect you to
work
,' Dougal warned her, with a smile.

‘Just try to stop me,' Effie challenged him.

That weekend, they drove in Dougal's white Peerless automobile out to Long Island. It was a wet, squally day, and the windshield wipers squeaked monotonously backwards and forwards as they bounced and splashed along the Middle Country Road through Coram and Ridge towards the Peconic Bay. Only when they were turning at last into the gates of Dougal's estate did a weak watery sun appear through the clouds over the ocean behind them; and a brief golden sparkle touch the waves.

May, wrapped in a dark blue bouclé coat which must have cost nearly a hundred dollars, said, ‘Isn't this awful? The weather always matches my mood.'

‘You don't feel bad, do you, honey?' Dougal asked her.

‘Bad? I feel like a pound of bacon in a kosher deli.'

Dougal smiled at Effie, and explained, ‘May always gets nervous when she comes to Long Island.'

‘I think I'm nervous, too,' said Effie.

The mansion which Dougal had bought as a country home for his unwanted Estonian wife was a huge Queen Anne style building designed by Henry Hudson Holly, one of America's great domestic architects, and originally built in the 1880s for Cyrus Maconochie, the Erie rail-road tycoon. There were balconies and glass-enclosed verandahs all around it, and broad-ended gables to give the appearance of solidity and history, and inherited wealth; even though Maconochie, a grocer's son, had walked around in bare feet until he was twelve.

Mariella, Dougal's wife, was waiting by the front steps, where the swirls in the gravel that had been drawn by the wheels of visiting automobiles had formed the spiral pattern of a seashell. She was a tall, dark-skinned woman, her darkness emphasised by the white satin dress she was wearing with an overlay of fine white lace, and by her wide white hat, bobbing with white peacock feathers. Nat, the driver, opened the door of the Peerless, and Effie stepped down, followed by May and Dougal.

Mariella came forward. ‘Dougal,' she greeted him, with a noticeably Nordic accent – ending his name, as she ended every sentence, on a strangely interrogative high note, so that Effie felt as if she were asking an endless series of questions.

‘Mariella, this is my sister Effie,' said Dougal. ‘She arrived on Wednesday.'

Mariella came forward and took Effie's hand. Then, spontaneously, she kissed Effie's cheek. Effie thought: she isn't just pretty, she's beautiful. She had startling brown eyes, high cheekbones, and a mouth that was as sensual and as classically curved as a fresh-picked rose-petal laid on top of another fresh-picked rose petal. Even the way she walked displayed the complicated elegance of complete femininity; her hips performing a motion that could only be described on the gentlest of seismographs.

‘May,' said Mariella, greeting Dougal's ‘assistant and stenographer and life-preserver' with coolness, but not with hostility.

‘Mrs Watson,' May acknowledged her, with a smile that didn't quite know if it wanted to be a smile or a grimace.

‘Let's go inside,' said Dougal, with an intent glance at Effie. ‘I could do with a drink after half an hour on the Middle Country Road.'

‘Please, come this way,' said Mariella, taking Effie's arm.
They climbed the steps to the front door, where a tall white footman took their coats and their motoring scarves, and a small white-faced butler guided them through to the Mirror Room, where they usually received their guests.

The Mirror Room had been intended to reflect the gorgeousness of Cyrus Maconochie's party-guests twice over; but unfortunately he had been too mean and cantankerous to hold more than two parties at the house, and he had died only three years after the mansion was completed. So now, the huge French mirrors reflected nobody more than Effie, and Dougal, and May, and the mistress of the house, Mariella. It was an odd experience, Effie thought, sitting amongst so many reflections of herself. She felt as if the mirror-Effie who sat beside her might suddenly stare at her and demand why she was dressed in such an outdated style: and how she could possibly imagine that anybody in modern and bustling New York would want to have anything to do with her.

Mariella said, ‘You would like some tea, or some coffee?'

To be quite truthful,' said Effie, ‘I would absolutely adore a whisky and water.'

‘Ah, you are an honest person, Miss Watson,' said Mariella. Dougal sat back in his armchair and tried to reassure Effie with a smile. Don't take any notice of Mariella, she's foreign and she scarcely speaks any English; and, besides, you know what it is that I want out of life, and it isn't her. May said, ‘I'll just have a soda, thank you.'

The butler appeared on shoes that squeaked to the point of insolence, and took Mariella's orders. Mariella smiled at everybody, and said, ‘Well how was your week? You were busy?'

‘There's a war on,' said Dougal, with unconcealed impatience. ‘Of course we were busy. And then we had to show Effie around the city.'

‘You like New York?' Mariella asked Effie.

Effie nodded. ‘It seems very exciting; although I'm only speaking from three days' experience.'

‘I like too the city,; said Mariella.

‘But you choose to live out here?' Effie inquired.

There was a difficult pause. That has been the wrong question to ask. Mariella didn't want to have to explain that her husband preferred it if she stayed isolated out on Long Island; or that she prefered it because it kept her away from
the painful truth about her marriage; which was, that there was no marriage. She and Dougal were a man and a woman whose destinies had been tangled together by a chance meeting in Battery Park; who had each paid no more than twenty-five cents for the picnic lunch that had brought them side by side on a bench on a warm and happy day in August 1910; and who were now impossibly tied by property and money and matrimonial law. Mariella knew that Dougal was sleeping with May, and perhaps she should have done something about it. But what? She still loved him.

Dougal crossed and uncrossed his legs for a while, and drank a cup of coffee, and then said, ‘I think I'll go down to the pool. I want to see how those fish are getting along.'

May said, ‘Why don't I come with you?'