Lady of Fortune (80 page)

Effie said, ‘I didn't mean to tell you that I knew about any of this. I was prepared to keep the boat steady, and see how you handled it. But I'm afraid this is one time when I can't possibly keep my mouth shut.'

‘I don't see why you should,' said Robert, cutting the head off one of his sardines with the edge of his fork. ‘I've always believed in complete straightforwardness between members of the family, complete openness, haven't you?'

‘Robert,' said Effie, ‘I want to know that you're not going to use this set-up to bring down Watson's New York.'

Robert glanced up at her, one agate eye. ‘Now, why on earth should I want to do anything like that? I want to use Watson's New York for my own personal profit. Why should I destroy it?'

‘I want your guarantee.'

‘You
have
my guarantee. You have a foreign bill of exchange for $24 million, which any large bank like Morgans or Chase would pick up for the full amount, if you asked them nicely enough.'

‘The $24 million only covers 20 per cent of the full value of the common stock which Dan Kress has bought on our behalf.'

‘If Dan Kress has misread the future trends of the market, is that my fault? I'm just as liable to lose money as you are. In any case, Dan Kress is your employee, not mine Pin the blame on him, my dearie, not on me.'

‘Robert, I'm warning you –'

Robert beatifically raised a hand, the Pope of international finance. ‘Let me tell you something, Effie, before you start issuing warnings. This arrangement which seems to anger you so much is completely legal, and completely unassailable. If you believe that it gives me an undesirable measure of control over the destiny of my own money, then that is quite up to you. But you can do nothing whatsoever about it, nothing, and as you probably know already, your own husband was involved in setting it up with me, which rather implicates you, too, wouldn't you say? If I were you, I would keep quite quiet about it, and do what you thought was good sense before: and not rock the boat. I'm going to do what I have to do, which is disperse and invest a large amount of European money on behalf of certain favoured clients of mine –'

‘All Germans,' said Effie.

‘Some Germans,' agreed Robert. ‘Some Britons, too, and quite a few Portuguese. But once I've dispersed this money, everything can return to normal, and I hope that both sides of Watson's Bank can continue to work together towards a flourishing future.'

Effie finished her drink. The waiter came over and asked if she had changed her mind, and would care for something ‘
petite
' to eat; but she smiled and declined.

‘Well, Robert,' she said. ‘You seem to have me cornered.'

‘A rather businesslike way of putting it,' said Robert, with his mouth full, ‘but, accurate enough.'

Effie pushed back her chair, and stood up.

‘You're not going?' asked Robert.

Effie said nothing, but picked up one of his tomato-smothered sardines by the tail, dangled it above him for a moment, and then dropped it straight down the back of his neck. It left no trace of its sudden dive into the depths of his shirt but a small reddish splotch on his clean white collar.

Robert froze, and then abruptly coughed up a whole mouthful of half-chewed fish into his napkin.

‘You did something similar to somebody once,' said Effie, trying hard to keep her voice steady. ‘It was the only thing that I admired about you at the time, and jt still is the only thing that I admire about you.'

She turned away then, and walked smartly across the restaurant, without looking back once. Robert, in crimson-faced fury, hurled a breadroll after her, as hard as a cricket-ball, but missed, and hit an elderly art dealer on the side of the head instead.

The following morning, the New York
Daily News
carried the gossip item ‘Scots Bankster KO's Art Expert with Breadroll'.

Effie, reading the paper in bed, was interrupted by her telephone ringing. Charlene came in, picked it up for her, and said, ‘It's Mr Caldwell, ma'am. He says he really needs to speak to you real critical.'

Effie took a breath, and then said, ‘Tell him I'm taking a shower.'

‘He sounds terrible upset, Miss Effie.'

‘I expect he is. He's not the only one. Tell him I'm taking a shower.'

Effie, despite what she felt about Mariella, drove down to Long Island later that day to talk to Dougal. As it turned out, Mariella was away, visiting a friend upstate, and so she and Dougal had the estate to themselves. They walked down to the bay, and threw pebbles at the water, and then sat on a dune amongst the rustling grass and shared a flask of Buchanan's whisky. A yacht arched its way across the Peconic, as white and starched as a laundered sheet, and Effie was reminded of the day she had walked by the sea with Alisdair, long ago, on the curve of St Andrews Bay.

Dougal was wearing a large white cotton golfing cap, a Fair Isle sweater, and plus-fours, with Fair Isle socks. He
was quiet, and a little diffident, but otherwise he gave every sign of being quite well. Effie wore a pink cloche hat, and a pink and beige cardigan, with a skirt the colour of pink chrysanthemums.

‘Caldwell tried to call me this morning,' she announced.

Dougal tipped back the flask, and drank three good swallows of scotch. ‘Tried?' he asked.

‘I didn't speak to him.'

‘You should have done. He might have had something interesting to say.'

‘How could he have done?' asked Effie. ‘We're deadlocked, and you know it. This arrangement of Robert's is like a time-bomb. We can't touch any single part of it without it blowing up in our faces; and the terrible thing is that it's going to blow up anyway. The only question is when.'

‘When Robert feels like it, I presume,' said Dougal, squinting towards the ocean.'

‘Don't you have any connections who could help?' asked Effie. ‘Isn't there anybody at Morgan's who could untangle it for us?'

‘It's too risky. And the trouble is, by buying up the loyalties of Caldwell and Dan Kress, Robert has made the whole thing look as if
we‘re
involved, too.'

‘But Morgan's wouldn't want to see Watson's go down, would they? Nor would any of the other big banks.'

‘Of course not. But what do you think we're going to say to them? “Oh, excuse me, we've innocently allowed our older brother to knot us up into the most incredible financial pretzel since the Harding Oil Scandals, and we'd really appreciate it if you'd untie us?” They
might
untie us, they probably would, but the price would be that they wouldn't let us run our own damned bank any more. Would you, if you were them? Besides, this German money scares me. There are some very heavyweight interests involved in this; the Gene Tunneys of money, as one of my directors used to call them. I don't want to go blithely dancing in to Morgan's boardroom and pirouette on all the wrong toes.'

Effie said, ‘Jimmy Byrd called me again this morning. He says it's possible that Robert may be waiting until early September. One of his informants believes that some very large German bills of exchange fall due on 1 September, and that Robert may want to include the proceeds of those bills in his plan.'

Dougal said, ‘I'm amazed what common knowledge this all is.'

Effie took the flask of whisky from him, and sipped a little from the neck. ‘It's the ultimate arrogance, isn't it? Robert has us so tied up that he doesn't even have to worry about concealing what he's doing.'

‘In my opinion, all we can do is wait,' said Dougal. ‘I'm still digging for proof of misconduct, but it still doesn't look very hopeful. Just think about it, I may be sitting here for the last time. In a day, or a week, or a month, I could be ruined.'

‘You have plenty of property, plenty of insurance.'

Dougal made a face. ‘Most of it's mortgaged through the bank, for tax purposes. If I tried to pay it off outright now – now that I know what might happen at the bank – I'd be as guilty of embezzlement as Robert. I can keep my honesty, if nothing else.'

Effie said, ‘Alisdair's due on the Mauretania in two weeks.'

‘Alisdair?'

‘Your son.'

Dougal looked away. The wind sighed and breathed through the grass on the sand-dunes. When he looked back, there were tears in his eyes. ‘I don't suppose he's mine,' he said.

‘Prudence swore that he was.'

‘Maybe she said it only because she wanted money out of the Watson family. The baby could have been anybody's.'

‘You can look at Alisdair, with that curly hair of his, and that chin, and swear to me that he couldn't be yours?'

Dougal sniffed, reached for his handkerchief, and loudly blew his nose. ‘It's all too damned late,' he said. ‘That's the trouble, I've always been too damned late.'

Effie stayed in New York for the rest of September. She conferred with Dougal regularly, telephoning him every day and meeting him for lunch or dinner at least once a week. Dougal's assistants kept on ferreting for discrediting proof
about Robert's financial arrangements, and about Poind in particular, but as the autumn began to approach, and the air grew colder, they began to realise that Robert was legally invulnerable.

Dougal's lawyers advised him that he could conceivably sue Robert for nitpicking infringements of the loan agreement, such as late delivery of documents, and failure to provide adequate information about the investors involved. Such an action could have the effect of dragging out the larger issues before the court; but it would also be prohibitively expensive, and would probably have only a ten per cent chance of success. Worse than that, it would rattle public confidence in Watson's New York and in the stock market in general, and alienate many of Dougal's closest supporters.

Effie waited for Caldwell to telephone her again, feeling calmer now, and much better prepared to speak to him; but he didn't call. She telephoned Los Angeles herself several times, but Caldwell was never at home. Kitty said that he was staying with friends in Coldwater Canyon. One evening Effie sat down and wrote him a long, tranquil letter, reviewing the happiness and the fun they had shared together, and asking him to get in touch. But she didn't mail it. It stood propped on the mantelpiece for days before she finally tore it up without re-reading it. She guessed, she knew, that Caldwell had worked with Robert for only one reason. Even before they had been married for a single month, he begun to feel overwhelmed by her, and Robert's offer to set up this dubious arrangement of holding companies and bootleg loans had been the most immediate opportunity he had been given to diminish her strength and to restrict her influence, to make her more manageable. She was sure that he had loved her; she was fairly sure that he still did. He had worked desperately hard for her to build up the Commerce Bank. But from the very start he had been unable to accept the idea of living with a woman who was more personable and more influential than he was.

She quoted to herself the lines from
The Ballad of Reading Saol
which Mrs McCreith had once made her learn, ‘Yet
each man kills the thing he loves
… by
each let this he heard … some do it with a hitter look … some with a flattering word … the coward does it with a kiss
…'

Kay helped her through those days, simply by being bright and warm and obviously pleased to be with her. They went for drives together by the Hudson, took afternoon tea at the Plaza Hotel, and walked hand-in-hand in Central Park. One weekend the Rockefellers invited them up to Pocantico, and they spent the whole of Sunday afternoon playing a piano duet in the music-room, pleased with each other's company. Kay was so grown-up now, so poised and so funny; and at night, when Effie went in to watch her sleeping, she prayed under her breath that Kay would never find out how she had been born, or why.

September was a glittering month for the New York stock market. The Dow-Jones average was way up and seemed set to climb even higher. On 3 September, American Telephone & Telegraph, quoted at 179
only a year and a half before, stood at 335
; General Motors had climbed from 139
to 181
; Electric Bond & Share were up from 89
to 203
.