Lady of Fortune (54 page)

‘I'll take you up to the top tomorrow, if it's a clear day,' said Dougal. ‘Fifty-eight stories up! You can see Long Island, and eastern New Jersey, and even as far as the Adirondacks. It's just like flying in an airplane.'

The Peerless took them across town to Fifth Avenue, past rows of old Federal buildings, demolition sites, filling-stations, elegant new office blocks, and the jumble of destruction and construction where the city was tearing down the twisting, brownstone-flanked streets of the West Village to lay down Seventh Avenue South. New office buildings, tall and elegant, stood shoulder-to-shoulder with rows of tattered and neglected tenements. Faded but still superior nineteenth-century houses were flanked by vast placards
that encouraged New Yorkers to eat Washburn-Crosby's wheat bread three times a day; or Wards Cakes ‘imitated but never duplicated'; or Weeds Ice Cream. And there was the noise: instead of the sedate flow of traffic up and down Princes Street – which Effie was used to – or even the polite frustrated jostle of cabs and Rolls-Royces and motor-buses along Pall Mall and Piccadilly, there was a constant hammering of construction work, a tirade of motor-horns, and a terrible echoing whooping noise which Dougal explained were police sirens.

‘New Yorkers don't believe they're alive unless they're making a noise,' he told her.

Nat drove them at last to 57th Street, and then turned south on Fifth Avenue, past the Huntington mansion, until he drew up at last outside a narrow bay-windowed house with black railings.

‘This is it,' said Dougal. ‘Chez Watson. Not quite the Vanderbilt mansion; but swanky enough.'

‘Nat opened the door of the Peerless for them, and they stepped down. ‘King's pawn to knight's one,' he said, without blinking.

Dougal said, ‘The Krausenitch opening.'

‘Yes, sir. I have to get my own back somehow.'

Dougal's house may have been small, by the standards of those American billionaires like the Goulds and the Vanderbilts and the Astors, whose huge chateaux lined the sides of Upper Fifth Avenue like the dwellings of kings and queens in Effie's childhood fairy-stories; but it was very opulent. The carpets were thick and silent; the walls were crowded with oil-paintings by John Frederick Kensett and Jean Baptiste Corot, as well as three sketches by Constable and a silverpoint study by Leonardo for a sculpture of an angel. The living-room was over-furnished in the Victorian tradition: full of glided mirrors and chiming clocks and side-tables, with tablecloths covered by more tablecloths, and then by runners, and then by crochet doilies, and finally topped with petrified flowers in shining glass domes.

Straight away, Dougal introduced Effie to Kitty, a young black girl he had hired as soon as he had heard by telegraph that Effie was coming to America. Kitty was small, big-breasted, and ebullient, a pretty and personable girl who had first been trained in the house of Mrs Hermann Oelrichs, but
had been obliged to leave her employment for six months to nurse her sick father. ‘You come straight upstairs with me. You look tired,' said Kitty, and led Effie without any formalities up to the rooms which Dougal had opened for her: a purple-and-pink-decorated bedroom with a tester bed draped in purple brocade, a small sitting-room crammed with books and framed collections of butterflies; and a bathroom with a bright green Corwith bath with overhead shower.

‘Let me take your coat, Miss Watson,' said Kitty. You must be fairly exhausted after that long sea-voyage. Me, I get seasick just looking at a boat! Would you like to go for a tub now? Miss May bought some dresses for you, so you could change into something fresh before you unpack your trunks.'

Effie sat down on the end of the bed. ‘I'd love a bath. I feel quite dizzy, as a matter of fact. This is all so
different
.'

‘Don't you worry, you'll soon get used to it,' smiled Kitty. ‘My parents brought me here from Red Bank, New Jersey, when I was nine years old and my word I thought I was on the moon! I thought I was Little Nemo, in dreamland.'

‘How old are you now?' asked Effie, as Kitty knelt down and took off her shoes for her.

‘Eighteen, Miss Watson. What my father used to call the
eligible age
. Eighteen, he used to say, that's the age when a girl should be married up, and settled, and ready for her first-born baby.'

Effie smiled. ‘Do you have a young man?'

‘I did, but he went off to work on the Penn Railroad, as a conductor, and I don't see him no more. His name was Eustace. He had a wonderful moustache!'

Effie bathed, and changed into an off-white dress with a tiered skirt. May had also bought her a dozen pairs of silk stockings, and a pair of fancy day slippers.

‘At least May has good taste,' said Effie, as Kitty brushed up her hair for her.

‘She's a clever girl, and she's
really
in love with your brother.'

‘She's in
love
with him?'

‘Sure she is! Don't you see what a fuss she makes of him? And they step out together almost every night.'

‘Well,' said Effie, pulling a face at herself in the mirror.

Dougal spent most of the morning in his study, talking on
the telephone and chain-smoking cigars. A lot of the time he seemed to be shouting very loudly at someone called Horace, and complaining about somebody else called Sherman. But at lunchtime he came out of his study, and into the living room, where Effie had been drinking coffee and reading a copy of Colliers; and said, ‘Let's go for something to eat. I must introduce you to the great American lobster. Cuttle's is probably the best place; unless you want to see Delmonico's right away.'

‘Whichever you prefer,' smiled Effie. ‘I'm an innocent here, don't forget.'

They went out into the bright daylight again, taking a taxi this time for the convenience of it. Cuttle's was on East 56th Street between Park and Madison; a restaurant in the grand Edwardian manner, with acres of starched linen and forests of dark mahogany panelling, and dim stained-glass Tiffany lamps. Giancarlo, the
maitre-d
', was so haughty that Effie could almost see right up his nose. But she and Dougal were beckoned straight past the line at the rope, and taken to a corner table under a large oil-painting of Darien, Connecticut, in summer. ‘Mr Watson,' beamed the
maitre-d
', drawing out their chairs for them. ‘And this must be Miss Effie Watson,'

Dougal smiled at Effie, and said, ‘Giancarlo knows everything about everybody who is anybody. And you're somebody, because they announced your arrival yesterday in the
Globe
.'

‘I didn't realise it was so easy to become famous in America,' said Effie.

‘It helps if you're stinking rich,' Dougal grinned.

‘I only wish I were.'

‘You will be,' Dougal assured her, and then to the waiter, ‘Bring me a bottle of the Dom Perignon ‘89, will you? And put another bottle in iced water for later.'

‘Yes, sir, Mr Watson.'

Dougal reached across the table and held Effie's hands. ‘Effie,' he said. ‘It's so good to see you. I've been looking forward to this for days. I've missed you so much.'

‘You forgive me for sending you off with Henry Baeklander like that?'

‘I forgave you the minute I made my first quarter of a million dollars. And besides, Henry was a good friend, and a
very considerate employer, and he taught me everything I needed to know about American banking.'

‘Where is he now?'

‘Dead, of course,' said Dougal, in surprise. ‘Didn't you know?'

Effie shook her head. At the table next to her, a young girl in diamonds and pearls said, at the top of her shrieking young voice, ‘That's
hilarious!
Oh, Gilbert!'

Dougal said, ‘After the Baeklander Trust collapsed, Henry scarcely ever showed up on Wall Street. That isn't to say that he didn't have plenty of money of his own. He could have lived in affluent retirement until he was a hundred. Maybe not in the style to which he was accustomed. No yachts; and no twenty-bedroom cottages in Newport; but something pretty much better than your average fellow in the street. But that wasn't enough for him. He tried to make an overnight fortune by investing in a silver-mine in Nevada; one of the old James Flood mines; but it turned out that the mine was quartz and nothing else.'

‘And so what happened to him?' asked Effie.

Dougal sat back, as the wine-waiter arrived with their bottle of champagne. ‘He was found in a hotel room, in Chicago, shot dead. Nobody could quite say how or why. He left no letters. Only his will.'

Effie watched as the wine-waiter expertly removed the cork from the champagne, and poured a little for Dougal to taste. ‘You know who was responsible for the Baeklander crash, I suppose?'

Dougal gave a quick grimace. ‘It wasn't hard to work it out. I warned Henry against Robert; but he would never listen. Henry considered himself a judge of character, and he believed that he was capable of handling anybody, no matter how tricky they were. But that deal with Baeklanders and the Deutsche Kreditbank was a marvellous piece of Robertry. Unassailable! I'll give Robert one thing: he has superb timing when it comes to business deals, and a wonderful sense of human gullibility. Whenever he arranges one of his deals, he sets it up so carefully and so obviously that nobody can believe they're going to be caught, not even when it's staring them in the face. He's so good that he's hypnotic.' Dougal shrugged. ‘Henry was caught, and went down for over thirteen million dollars, protesting all the time that he was an
excellent judge of character. Karl von Ahlbeck was caught, despite the fact that he was quite bright enough to know better. And I was caught, too, I'll admit it, although not so badly, because I had already been thinking of leaving Baeklanders for two or three years, and I had excellent credit connections arranged, and quite a bit of money of my own.'

The head-waiter brought the menus. Effie said, ‘You order. As long as it isn't porridge or kippers, I'll eat it.'

Dougal looked at her levelly. ‘We've been out of touch for far too long you and I,' he said.

‘It wasn't my fault,' said Effie. ‘I wrote, but you never replied. Well, scarcely ever; and when you did, you only talked about money, and tariff rates, and railroad issues.'

Dougal ordered New England clam chowder, salad, and broiled Maine lobsters. Then he said, ‘It's different here, Effie. It's like living on a quite different planet. There's so much more opportunity, and so much more money. The week after I left Baeklanders, I lent $58,000 of my own money to an automobile manufacturer in Cleveland, called Willi Humpler. His actual automobiles were never any good: he never styled the coachwork to meet the modern taste. You could have been driving around in a small bungalow, rather than an automobile. But, Humpler was a brilliant engineer; and what I did was to patent his differential drive mechanism, and his gearing controls, and his self-lubrication system; and to licence them to Ford and Marmon and Packard. In all, I think Humpler made $17 million in his first three years, and I was entitled to ten per cent of that.'

Effie said, ‘I think I read about something you did with Goodyear Tyres.'

‘That's right,' Dougal told her. ‘I helped an engineer in Indiana to develop a way of checking uniformity in tyre manufacture. It probably sounds pretty boring to you, but the concept was brilliant. And it meant that Goodyear were one of the first tyre companies to be able to produce tyres of completely reliable quality. If you buy one Goodyear tyre, you always know that the next one you buy is going to last you equally long and give you equal roadholding and performance.'

He looked across at her, proud of himself, but also very pleased to see her. ‘I know I didn't write to you very often. I
wish now that I had. I might have learned a trick or two from you that would have helped me; but whatever failings we've had in the past, let's stick together, you and I, and do something really good, and let's hope that Robert falls head-first down a long dark manhole.'

There was a silence. The waiter brought two huge bowls of steaming clam chowder, and a basket of salted crackers.

‘I wouldn't wish personal harm on Robert,' said Effie. ‘I couldn't. But, there are so many things about him which I can't bear. I can't even stand to think of him now, when I'm so far away from him.'

Dougal said, ‘He hasn't –'

‘No,' said Effie, emphatically. Then, ‘No, he hasn't quite gone as far as that. Although, after everything he's done, I wouldn't put him past anything.'

She put down her spoon, and laid her head on her left hand. ‘He's always
there
. He's inescapable. If I happen to fall in love with somebody, I always wonder whether I'm falling in love because Robert's arranged it that way, or if I'm genuinely falling in love of my own accord. That's the main reason I left Scotland and came here. I couldn't bear the feeling that every movement in my life was being surreptitiously orchestrated for the benefit of Watson's Bank, and for the benefit of Robert in particular.'

Dougal supped two or three spoonsful of chowder. Then he said, ‘You should have married, you know.'

‘Well, perhaps I should,' Effie admitted. ‘Perhaps I should have thrown myself at Duncan Drumm, or William McCann. Do you remember William McCann?'

Dougal grunted in amusement. ‘Of course I do. We used to call him Waefu' Willie. But there were plenty of others. You're pretty, and you're rich; and there's no law that says you have to marry a Scotsman. What about some of the chaps in London? There were some with titles, weren't there? You could have been Lady Effie by now, and dancing with the King.'

They were silent for a little while, and then they both tried to speak together. Dougal said, ‘Go on, after you.'

‘Well, said Effie, ‘I was wondering why you hadn't married, yourself.'