Lady of Fortune (58 page)

Dougal stared at her open-mouthed. ‘You've lent John Browning
half a million dollars?
Effie, you're out of your mind! The very fast industrial panhandler you meet when you come to America, and you are a like a child giving away an ice-cream to a total stranger! Half a million dollars! I don't believe it!'

Effie came over, laid a hand on his shoulder, and kissed his cheek. ‘Well, you'll just have to believe it. It's true.'

‘Let me explain something to you,' said Dougal. ‘President Wilson may
privately
approve of the British struggle against the Huns. He may
privately
say that the British are fighting the American fight, and when he sends formal complaints to Whitehall about the high-handed way in which the British Navy was blockading the Atlantic, he may
privately agree
that they can be filed away in the waste-paper basket and forgotten. But he was re-elected on the single principle that he has kept America out of the war. Good God, Effie, America didn't even declare war on Germany in 1915, when the
Lusitânia
was sunk. And now the Germans have agreed that they won't sink any more neutral passenger-ships, unless they offer resistance. America is not going to go to war, and that means John Browning's ridiculous machine-gun is never going to be anything at all but a very expensive white elephant.'

Effie was quiet for a moment. Then she said, ‘I seem to remember, a very long time ago, how you stood up at the Sunday luncheon table in Edinburgh and argued in favour of Albion motor-cars, despite what Robert said about cars being an expensive white elephant for the idle rich.'

‘Motor-cars were different. Everybody needs to get about.'

‘At the moment, Dougal, people in Europe are not so worried about getting about as they are about winning a
terrible war. You've been living and working here for fifteen years: you haven't seen what it's like. I lost the man that I loved in that war, and unless it's ended decisively, and quickly, it's going to drag on for year after year, and each year it's going to devour more and more young men and more and more money, until there's nothing left in Europe but corpses and bankrupts. I'm a woman, Dougal. I don't think there's any glory in war and I hate the sight of guns. I fired John Browning's machine-gun last week, and it was the most moving and the most terrible experience of my life. Imagine firing a thing like that at living men! But it has to be done, and it
will
be done, and my half a million dollars will help.'

Louise, a pert young redhead in a shirtwaist blouse and a long green skirt, brought in a tray of coffee. Dougal said nothing until he had taken three or four scalding sips, and then put his cup down again.

‘You've changed, Effie
. You've changed beyond all recognition.'

‘Of course I have. But so have you. Haven't you looked at yourself lately? Instead of being energetic, you're flabby. Instead of facing up to your responsibilities, you're avoiding them. I think I knew when you left London that you weren't quite the aggressive young spark that you seemed to be. Perhaps I'm being unfair. Perhaps your marriage has had something to do with it. Perhaps you would have been better off in London, rather than New York. But you've grown prematurely tired, Dougal. Where's your spirit? You're a rich and clever young man, and yet you're talking to me about canning machinery and sneaking off for weekends with your stenographer. Where's my adventurous brother? Where's
Dougal?
'

Dougal blew out his cheeks and drummed his fingers on the desk.

Effie said, ‘I'm sorry to speak to you like that. You know I love you.'

‘Yes, of course,' said Dougal. He picked up his coffee-cup again, stared into it, and then put it down again. He said, ‘I wish I could have seen mother before she died.'

‘Has that been bothering you?'

‘Now and then. I always feel that I let her down, by not going back to Scotland to look after her. She shouldn't have gone to a home, you know. Robert should never have sent her there.'

‘Dougal …'

‘It's all right. I know what she did; and I know she was lucky not to be locked up. But I can't help feeling guilty.'

‘You shouldn't,' said Effie, gently. ‘It wasn't your fault at all.'

She watched him with concern and sadness. More confidence had gone from him than she had first realised, although she couldn't understand why. He could still be funny, still be energetic, and yet there was a hollowness about him, as if somebody were peering with uncertainty and puzzlement through two eyeholes cut in a portrait of
The Laughing Cavalier
.

Perhaps the problem was complex, and Freudian, and deep. Perhaps it was nothing more than the problem which any small Scottish boy would have if he were exiled from home and obliged to play the part of the fearsome Wall Street tycoon. Dougal was one of those people who had grown up to be not a man, but an old child.

When Dougal had gone, Effie sat down at her desk and smoked a cigarette. It was more fashionable for women who smoke in America, particularly since Alice Roosevelt had done it, in her madcap days in the White House. After she had finished the cigarette, however, Effie began to feel distinctly nauseous, and she could feel her stomach rolling over as if there were a rat in it.

She went to the executive bathroom, and sicked up her breakfast. She hung for a long time over the lavatory bowl, feeling shaken and breathless. Then she went to the wash-basins, rinsed her mouth out, dried her face, and combed her hair in the mirror. Then Effie who looked back at her was white-faced and staring, a different Effie altogether. ‘You've
changed, Effie
,' Dougal had told her. ‘
You've changed beyond all recognition
.'

He telephoned her a week later at the office. Louise buzzed her at her desk, and announced, in her nasal Queens' accent, ‘There's a Dr Schwarz?'

‘Put him through,' Effie told her.

Effie had been talking to Dan Kress, who was sitting opposite
her in his grey square-shouldered suit and his prickly grey haircut like a man poured out of concrete. She asked, ‘Could you excuse me for just one minute, Mr Kress?'

Dan Kress lifted out of his vest pocket a watch that could have been drop-forged in a Pittsburgh steelworks. ‘I'll come back this afternoon,' he said. ‘I have an appointment with Bill McCombs; from the Treasury.'

‘Come back in three minutes,' Effie instructed him, without blinking.

‘But –'

‘Three minutes,' said Effie.

Dan Kress rose stiffly from his chair, and stalked out of the office. Effie heard him say something to Louise like ‘damned female Tartar' before the bird's-eye maple door swung closed behind him.

Dr Schwarz said, in her ear, ‘Miss
Watson?
'

‘Yes. Good morning, Dr Schwarz.'

‘
We've made all the tests, Miss Watson, and I had the result through this morning.
'

‘
Yes, Dr Schwarz?' She was trying very hard to be calm; trying very hard to think of Dr Schwarz's black wavy hair, and round-rimmed eye-glasses, and the woodcuts on his office wall of Summer In The Catskills
.

Dr Schwarz said, ‘I'm
afraid I have to tell you, Miss
Watson –'

Effie didn't hear the rest, or didn't want to. An odd kind of deafness and blindness came over her, like a brief spasm of electric shock. When she opened her eyes again, she was quite surprised to find that she was still sitting in her office, still talking on the telephone to Dr Schwarz, and that outside her window the cold grey eleven o'clock clouds were still rolling over the spires and towers of downtown Manhattan at the same cinematic speed.

‘I see,' she said.

There was a hissing silence on the telephone. Then Dr Schwarz cleared his throat, and said,
There are conditions, of course, under which we could legally do something for you
.'

Effie shook her head. Dr Schwarz said,
‘Miss Watson?'

‘No,' said Effie. ‘Well, at least, give me a little time to think.'

‘
Always at your service, Miss Watson
.'

‘Yes, Dr Schwarz. Thank you.'

She hung up the telephone. Then she reached across the
desk for the silver and onyx cigarette box which John Browning had sent her three days ago. She took out a Chesterfield, and unsteadily lit it, blowing out a long stream of smoke.

‘Miss Watson?' said Louise, peering around the door.

‘What is it, Louise?'

‘Mr Kress says he must finish this meeting, because he's due at the Treasury at eleven-thirty.'

Effie drew in her cheeks as she sucked at her cigarette, then tapped off the ash into her astray. ‘Tell, er, tell Mr Kress that ‘I'll – well, tell him to go ahead.'

‘Are you all right, Miss Watson? You look like you saw a ghost.'

‘I'm fine,' said Effie, and realised as she said it how American she was beginning to sound. But as Louise closed the door she closed her eyes and thought to herself my God, my God, Alisdair's baby.

On 16 January 1917, a dark snowy Tuesday, Effie moved out of Dougal's house on Fifth Avenue, and into her own apartment on the eighth floor of a wealthy red-brick block on East 81st Street. Untypically for her, she had decorated it in a rich, lavish, old-fashioned style; with walls of pale moiré silks and gilt rococo furniture. There were scarcely any mirrors in the apartment, and the windows were hung with elaborate lace curtains and velvet drapes, so that the whole place had an enclosed, tight, inward-looking feel about it. Even John Browning, who was one of the first to visit her there, said it makes me feel as if I'm suffocating in fabric, like one of the poor little Princes in the Tower.'

John Browning had built, with Effie's money, two new prototypes of his machine-gun, and was convinced that he had invented a weapon ‘as revolutionary as the bow-and-arrow, at least'. He had invited Effie to visit the factory to see them, but Effie was feeling unwell that day, and had to decline.

She knew that the baby growing inside her was Alisdair's: it could be nobody else's. But far from making her feel disturbed and unhappy, as she supposed it should have done, it gave her for the first time in her life an almost incandescent desire to care for somebody else, and nurture them, and enfold them in love and happiness. She should have been distressed, renting her raiment and stalking haggardly from room to room, but she wasn't. She felt a secret joy that sometimes brought her close to tears.

A large measure of her joy came from her belief that when somebody good dies, somebody else is born to replace them. It had happened several times in her life that a friend had died, and a few weeks later, or a few months later, a new baby had been born to somebody else who was close. It could have been that Alisdair had been born to replace poor Jamie Arbuthnott; and it could be that out of the grief she had felt for Karl von Ahlbeck, a child would be born to her. Alisdair's seed had given her baby life, but she thought of it constantly as Karl's child.

She said nothing to Dougal, although she confided in Kitty, whom she had taken with her to 81st Street. Kitty, God bless her, had said nothing, but hugged her very tight, and kissed her. In the few weeks that she had been Effie's maid, they had become intensely close, although not so much through words and conversation as through mutual respect and affection for each other. Every night, when she came home from the bank, Kitty would bath Effie, and while Effie lay nude on the ottoman in the bedroom, a silk scarf around her hair, her face in a thick cream pack, Kitty would massage her with Exotica perfumed oils from Paris (pre-war, of course), her strong black fingers easing the muscles in Effie's neck and shoulders, firming her cheeks, smoothing around and around her breasts, her stomach, and slapping at her upper thighs. Kitty knew Effie more intimately than any other woman ever would; and, after a while, Effie came to know Kitty just as well, because she asked Kitty to undress as well whenever she bathed or massaged her. Effie never questioned her own feeling about Kitty; and really there was nothing to question. She felt more feminine now, with her baby inside her, than she had ever felt in her life, and when she and Kitty were together, naked, she was enjoying nothing more complicated than a celebration of femininity, of
womanliness. She would lie back with her eyes closed, feeling Kitty's hands on her stomach and her hips, and the swaying touch of Kitty's bare breasts against her thighs, and she would feel as if she was closer to what she actually was, closer to the essence of herself, than she could ever be in Robert's company, or Dougal's.

She sometimes wondered, though, at the office the next day, if she was being over-romantic, carried away by the gushing prose of
Ladies Home Journal
, or by the plain oddity of mind from which pregnant women were always supposed to suffer. She had no husband to give her emotional equilbrium, and Kitty, after all, was only a servant.

Dougal took advantage of her silent moods and her moving-away to East 81st Street to see very little of her. Sometimes, they met each other as seldom as twice a week, and then only during policy meetings which were attended by ten or eleven other bank executives. Dougal seemed to be ill-at-ease with himself, twitchy and preoccupied. She asked him to come round to her apartment one evening, hoping that she might be able to talk to him, but he didn't show up. The next day, when she reminded him about their appointment, he simply stared at her, as if she must have made a mistake.

On 1 February 1917, the German government, desperately trying to isolate Britain and France from the war-supplies that were still being sent to her from America, announced that unrestricted submarine warfare against neutral ships would resume. The Kaiser himself wrote in the margin of a memorandum from the German Admiralty, ‘Now, once and for all, an end to the negotiations with America! If Wilson wants war, let him make it, and let him have it.'