Lady of Fortune (62 page)

Dougal said nothing, but cupped his podgy hands in front of his face, so that only his tiny glittering eyes showed over his fingertips.

Effie dropped her gaze, to the soumac rug on the floor. She said, in a much softer voice, The trouble is, Dougal, that as each day goes by, Watson's New York is increasingly affecting my reputation. Everybody knows we're going through a boom: but you're acting like a small boy in a cake shop. You used to have judgement, as well as enthusiasm. Now you don't seem to have any judgement at all, and people on Wall Street are beginning to sense it. Look at you. You hardly ever come out of this office; and when you do, you do something disastrous, like failing through a plate-glass window. You've been throwing loans around like nobody's business. I don't know whether you're drunk, or stupid, or just plain rash.'

‘I see,' said Dougal, his voice muffled behind his hands.

Effie looked up at him again. ‘Dan Kress showed me the figures for last month's loans. I don't understand all of the entries, but it seems as if you've advanced more than $147 million to National City Bank. Is that something I should know about?'

‘You have no particular right to know anything,' said Dougal. ‘You're on the board, certainly, but this wasn't a board decision. You can read about it in the annual report.'

‘You lent $ 147 million without the board's approval? You're seriously trying to tell me that?'

‘It's on paper, that's all. It's just call money. Charles Mitchell at National City wanted to get around the Reserve Board's restrictions on lending.'

‘In other words, it's a bootleg loan.'

‘In other words, it's a way of keeping the market booming, that's all.'

Effie was silent for a moment. She took a cigarette out of her purse, and put it between her pink-painted lips. Dougal picked up his desk-lighter, in the shape of
The Spirit of St Louis
, and flicked the propeller to light it. Effie ignored him, and lit her cigarette with her own matches.

‘The market won't boom for ever,' she said. ‘What are you going to do when it declines?'

‘It won't,' said Dougal.

‘You don't think so? It could drop just as spectacularly as it rose. It's only built, on confidence, Dougal, and not much else.'

Dougal lit a cigarette himself, and noisily blew smoke through his nose. ‘Didn't you hear what that Yale professor said? Stocks have reached a permanently high level. It's boom time, Effie. Things won't get anything but better.'

Effie said, ‘For God's sake, Dougal. Where's your sense? I don't mind pumping money into a bull market; I don't even mind lending up to 36 per cent of our deposits; more, it it's possible. But where are our reserves? What's going to happen if the market falls, and even a quarter of those little people all over America want to cash their stocks in for hard dollars at today's prices? Watson's New York would be wiped out overnight. You may be able to create the
illusion
that you're juggling five balls in the air when you only have three; but sooner or later somebody's going to ask you if they can have those five balls back, and then what are you going to do? Run along to Morgan's, to back you up? Go begging on your knees to the Reserve Board?'

Dougal said, ‘I don't need kindergarten lessons in banking from you, thank you very much.'

He pushed back his chair, and stood up, and walked around her with a podgy jerkiness that reminded Effie, painfully, of Robert at their mother's funeral. Big fat bottom, swollen thighs.

He said, ‘I do have backing, as a matter of fact, even if there is a temporary lull. Which there won't be.'

‘Oh yes. What backing?'

He laid his hand on her shoulder, and squeezed it two or three times. ‘Hmmph,' he said, amused with himself, and sucked at his cigarette. ‘It's Robert. I've been corresponding with him lately, and he's agreed to underwrite us.'

‘Robert?' said Effie. ‘You mean brother Robert?'

‘That's right. Didn't I tell you? I wrote about three months ago, and asked if he'd be interested in co-operating with us. He's coming over on the fifteenth.'

‘The fifteenth? The fifteenth of what?'

‘April. Didn't I tell you? Well, well, well, that was remiss of me. It'll be just like old times again. Just like home.'

Effie felt cold; then colder; as if someone had slowly poured a jug of iced water over the back of her dress. She
said, ‘You can't have! I think you're teasing me.'

Dougal nodded, with flares of smoke pouring out of his nostrils. ‘You can't bear a grudge for ever, can you? Well, you can, maybe, but I can't. But why should you care, anyway? You're quitting aren't you? Throwing in the towel. Just in case your spotless reputation gets splattered.

‘Dougal –' said Effie.

Dougal sat down behind his desk again, and tilted back his swivel chair. He looked so swollen and strange behind those dark glasses that Effie felt as if she were having some kind of illogical nightmare, in which an inflated, synthetic person was masquerading as her brother. He didn't look like Dougal and he didn't speak like Dougal, and yet he was Dougal. She saw him for the briefest glimpse as a boy, in a brown tweed coat, standing at the windy top of Arthur's Seat, and saying – ‘Look,
Effie, look
- ' but then the words were gone, swallowed by too many years of time, too many years of turmoil; and by the grotesque reality of the man who sat opposite her now, obese and unsympathetic, and speaking in a language which she found it almost impossible to penetrate.

Dougal said, ‘You might be interested to know that I saw May again last week.'

‘May? You mean the girl you –'

‘That's right.
That
May. She married, you know. Can't blame her for that. Met her by accident in Macy's, by the perfume counters, when I was looking for something for Mariella. She's not – not wealthy, you know. Not by any means. You should have seen her coat. Shabby! Well, very shabby; patches and everything. Well, not patches, but very cheap. We hardly recognised each other, until I told the assistant what my account was.'

Effie said nothing at all. Watching Dougal now was unbearable. One minute he was agonizing; then he was cursing; then he was trying to be cunning and clever. The pain of his performance was extreme.

‘We …' said Dougal, then reached forward and forcefully tapped the ash from his cigarette. ‘We, um … made some arrangements to see each other again. In time, you understand. Neither of us wants to rush into anything. But, well, she said …'

There was a crushing silence of almost a minute. Then
Dougal put down his cigarette in his ashtray, with great care, and pressed both his hands over his face, and began to weep. Deep, wrenching, sobs that made his whole body shake.

After a while he took off his glasses again, found his pocket-handkerchief, and wiped his eyes. ‘I'm sorry,' he said.

‘You don't have to be,' said Effie.

Dougal sniffed; folded his handkerchief over twice, and loudly blew his nose. ‘It ruined me, that affair. You've no idea. It ruined me.'

‘You could have left Mariella. You could have gone with May.'

‘I wish I could.'

Effie said, ‘I've never known why you two stay together. Mariella loves you, I suppose; but you certainly don't love her; and she'd be far better off with somebody else.'

Dougal had regained his composure now. He stuffed his handkerchief back in his pocket, and tugged at his lapels, and sniffed again, and straightened his pens and his onyx-handled letter-opener next to his blotter. The letter-opener had been a gift from President Coolidge. He said, ‘Guilt, I suppose, that's all. Plenty of people stay together because of guilt.'

‘I don't know why
you
feel guilty.'

‘Don't you? Well, I suppose you wouldn't.'

There was another pause. Then Effie said, ‘What about Robert?'

‘Robert? I've been writing to him, that's all, and he's been writing back. We've discussed investments in Europe, and investments on the US stock market.'

‘He lent money to Germany during the war. You know that, don't you?'

‘Of course he lent money to Germany during the war. So did most of the private banks on Wall Street.'

‘You didn't.'

‘No, I didn't. I didn't happen to think that it was right. But, it was all a long time ago. Ten years ago! A lifetime! You can't allow memories to stand in the way of business. Anyway, Robert's my brother; my older brother.'

‘Robert is a calculating bully. You ought to know that by now. He won't do you any good at all.'

Dougal flapped his hand at her dismissively. ‘You're being hysterical now, Effie. Just because you had an argument with Robert during the war.'

‘Dougal, what's the matter with you?' Effie demanded. ‘Look at you! You used to be so bright and active. You used to be such fun. I could always count on you to be understanding and energetic and thoughtful.'

Dougal grunted, as if what Effie had said was funny. ‘I've grown older, Effie, that's all. More responsible. Richer. Wiser.'

‘No,' said Effie. ‘That's not it.'

‘Oh, yes it is,' said Dougal. ‘And you've grown older, too, if you'd only realize it. Perhaps it's time you stopped trying to behave like a nineteen-year-old flapper, and realised that you're a middle-aged woman with a duty towards her family and a great deal of responsibility towards the bank she works for.'

‘I'm still quitting, whatever you say.'

‘Quit, go ahead. See if I care.'

‘I know very well that you don't. That's why I'm trying to find out what's wrong with you.'

Dougal puffed out his lips, and then shrugged. ‘I'm working too hard, that's all, I should ease up a little.'

‘You're not working hard at all. Dan Kress told me that you've been delegating almost everything. You spend most of your afternoons at the Côte D'Or Club on 50th Street, drinking bootleg liquor and messing around with cheap girls. If you're not drunk you're sniffing cocaine in the men's room. Dan says he hasn't been able to get a coherent decision out of you in months.'

‘Well, that's fine, coming from you,' said Dougal. ‘The lady banker who gave birth to a bastard, and messed around with a notorious gangster.'

Effie stood up, and walked around Dougal's desk. She stared at him for a moment, breathing deeply; and then she plucked the dark glasses from his face, and crushed them in her bare hand. ‘You,' she said, ‘are a fat and ridiculous failure. I never thought that I'd ever see my own brother like this. Not Dougal. Not the brother who was always close to me, and always shared everything. You are the reason I'm quitting; and you alone. Not because I hate you, because I don't, no matter what you say to me, but because I once loved you, and it's unbearable to see someone you once loved reduced to a blabbering idiot.'

Dougal looked up at her with his tiny, piggy eyes; and then
pouted, and looked away. That's the way you want it,' he said.

Effie said, ‘It isn't the way I want it. Not at all. But sometimes, a body gets left with no more choices.'

She left the office at nine o'clock. Instead of taking a taxi home, however, she went for a long walk in the snow, the collar of her dark mink coat turned up, her Russian fur cloche pulled down in case she was recognised. She walked as far as University Square, and stood on the corner of Fifth Avenue, her hands in her pockets, watching the snowflakes teeming down past the streetlamps.

Kay was still awake when she got home, although she was very sleepy. Effie sat on the edge of her pink brocade-covered bed, in her pink-and-white bedroom, and leaned forward to kiss her. Kay said, ‘Your hands are cold.'

‘I went for a walk in the snow.'

Kay frowned at her, and then kissed her hands, and chafed them, to warm them up. ‘You look sad,' she said.

Effie shook her head. ‘I'm not sad. It's going to be Christmas soon.'

Kay smiled. ‘I hope I can have the dollhouse I saw in Kleinberg's.'

‘Maybe. You'll have to write to Santa Claus.'

‘There isn't a Santa Claus.'

‘I know,' said Effie. ‘That's what I'm afraid we're all going to find out.'

Her affair with George Sabatini had been brief, baroque, and bitterly tragic. She hadn't wept long for him; although her friend Margaret Shaw, the interior designer, to whose elegant summer home in New Hampshire she had retreated for three weeks after the murder, told her time and time again that she hadn't wept enough.

‘You
loved
him, didn't you?' Margaret had demanded of Effie. ‘Then give your love all the tears it deserves.'

Effie had said, ‘I've tried. But I just can't cry any more.'

The same was true of Dougal: she couldn't cry for
him
any more either. He had so completely lost his confidence in himself, in his career, and in everybody around him. He was no better off than a patient in a hospital for the incurably ill, confused by anesthetics, incoherent with fear and agony, and hoping for one thing only: that he would die before the pain became too much to bear.

Effie knew that her most urgent priorities now had to be herself, and Kay, and the protection of her own fortune. The week after her Tuesday-evening talk with Dougal, she visited her attorneys on Third Avenue, Schwab & Moorhouse, and began to arrange for the extrication of all her private capital from Watson's New York, and from any company whose stock prices she knew from inside knowledge to be artificially inflated by bootleg loans.

Sitting among Mr Moorhouse's collection of rare indoor ferns, wearing a green day dress by Worth with a large green bow at the hip, and a hem that was outlined with scallops of seed-pearls, she said gently, ‘I think you'd better order a bottle of champagne before we start. Both of us are going to need it.'