Lady of Fortune (6 page)

The result of this education, combined with the happy and delicate guidance of her mother, had been to give Effie all the havins she would ever need – all the good manners and the common sense. But it had left her empty of real experience. She knew all about China, and South America, and what grew there, and why; she knew how to address a bishop; and what to wear if she were invited to a weekend house-party. But she had never travelled further than Ayr, and the only life she had ever seen was within the boundaries of the city of Edinburgh. A grey, respectable life, of church, and social mornings with her mother, and endless formal teas.

Her father was always asking her mother why she wasn't courting yet; but her mother (although Effie didn't yet know
it) was doing everything she could to protect her from what she saw to be the disastrous consequences of early marriage. Besides, most of the cultured and eligible young men of Effie's age were still at the University, or training to be doctors, or fighting in South Africa. One of the young managers at Watson's Bank, Alasdair Maclachlan, had called on Effie two or three times, twice with flowers and once with heather, but the last thing Fiona wanted for her daughter was to marry a banker, especially from Watson's, and besides, she didn't care for the yellow Maclachlan tartan, or for the red birth-mark on the side of Alasdair's nose.

Effie herself, though, never once dreamed of professors, or doctors, or bankers, or even of slightly-wounded heroes returning with medals from Kroonstad. Effie dreamed of mixing with kings and princes, and living in palaces. It wasn't an unusual dream for any young girl during the heyday of the British Empire, with His Majesty King Edward VII proclaimed monarch and emperor of India only yesterday, and Europe still thick with Battenbergs and Saxe-Coburgs and scores of lesser royalty. But for a girl of seventeen, Effie took her dream unusally seriously. She would sometimes stand in front of the cheval glass in her bedroom, her head draped in a lace shawl, and whisper an announcement for herself, as if she were entering a grand reception. ‘Princess Effie of Edinburgh.' Or, better still, ‘Queen Effie the First.'

Dougal said, ‘We're to leave Albion to founder, is that it, because of our family jealousies?'

‘I said enough,' said Thomas Watson. ‘I warn you, laddie – enough!'

‘Father, I beg your pardon, but if Dougal is to persist, then I'll have to answer him,' said Robert.

‘
Enough
!' bellowed Thomas Watson.

Dougal threw down his fork. ‘That's always the way, isn't it, in this family? If it looks like somebody's coming too close to the embarrassing truth of a situation, then it's always
“enough!” Well, father, enough of your “enough!” Let Robert have his say, and then we'll see whether there's any justification for his denying my loan for Albion, or not. Let's hear if he's got a reason that makes any sense at all.'

‘You stupid taupie!' shouted Robert. ‘I've a bank to run, not a charity for lost causes! The motor-car is going to go the same way as the steam omnibus, and all those other hare-brained schemes for running a vehicle without a horse! I might just as well throw the money into the Water of Leith, and enjoy myself watching it float.'

‘Who's a taupie, you stuffed-up gaberlunzie?' snapped Dougal. ‘You'll take that back, or I'll buff your beef!'

Thomas Watson's temper broke. He threw back his chair, seized the half-carved gigot of lamb, and smacked it around Dougal's head in a splatter of juices. Then he hurled the joint clear across the dining-room, and stalked to the door. His face was grotesque with fury, like a Celtic mask.

‘I'll not sit with wrangling animals!' he roared. ‘Nor with the animals' dame!' And with that, he slammed the door so violently that the walls quaked, and the chandelier jingled, and he stormed off, as he always did when he was in a temper, to the library. The four of them – Robert, Dougal, Effie, and their mother – waited like a wax tableau until they heard the double doors of the library collide and bang shut.

Dougal ruefully nursed his cheek with his napkin. ‘Well,' he said, ‘I certainly received more than my fair apportionment of mutton today, didn't I? Right in the ear, too.'

Robert stood up. ‘Och, you think you're very witty and sonsie, don't you?' he breathed. ‘Well, I can tell you something, brother, you've torn it now, right enough. This is our Sabbath luncheon, not a brawling-pit.'

‘Who was it brought up Albion?' demanded Dougal.

‘Don't start again,' Robert warned him. ‘You should never have talked business to begin with.'

‘When else can I talk business?' Dougal protested. ‘You're always too busy to talk to me during the week, and father's always out, or engaged with his clients, or off to his club. Neither of you will ever give me the chance to speak my mind, ever, and how the de'il can I advance myself and learn to be a banker unless I speak my mind? Tomorrow morning it's the usual weekly policy meeting, and all of your toadies like Mr Cramond and Mr McGillivray will approve anything you
want them to approve, and anything you say. “We cast our vote for Master Robert,” they'll all pipe up, and that will mean an end to Albion and an end to everything else I've been trying to do. You're squashing me down, Robert, and this is the only opportunity I ever get to say so in front of father. So don't go blaming me!'

Fiona Watson rang the bell for Mrs McNab. She was trembling, as if she had influenza, and her face was as grey as gruel. Effie reached across the tablecloth and comfortingly touched her arm.

‘Mother,' she said. ‘Don't you fret. Everything will be all right.'

‘You think so?' asked her mother, hopelessly.

Robert said, ‘I think it's up to me to go to Father and convey our apologies, don't you? You can come along, too, Dougal, if you care to.'

‘I think I'll bide here for now,' said Dougal. ‘I don't know what Mrs McNab's cooked for pudding, but I don't fancy being struck about the head with a treacle roll.'

Robert was about to say something angry in reply, but he took a deep breath to steady himself, tugged down his over-tight waistcoat, and turned to his mother. ‘You'll excuse me from the table, please, ma'am.'

Fiona Watson nodded.

As Robert left the room, with piercingly squeaky boots, Mrs McNab came in, fearful and alert. She had heard the doors banging, and she knew what it meant. The master was in one of his rairing rages again; and for the rest of the day the whole house would be in a state of nervous suspense, from the sculleries to the attic, with the servants speaking in whispers, and Mrs Watson flittering in agitation from the parlour to the conservatory, and back again.

‘Will you clear the dishes, Mrs McNab?' asked Fiona Watson. ‘The master has decided that he has had sufficient for now.'

Mrs McNab frowned, and looked around the table.

‘Is anything wrong?' asked Fiona Watson.

‘I was just wondering where the gigot was,' said Mrs McNab.

Effie looked up at her, and it took the greatest effort of will of her whole life not to burst out laughing. ‘The gigot,' she said, ‘is under the curtains.'

Mrs McNab, her face squeezed up into an extraordinary expression, as if she had taken a mouthful of bitter tangle, walked around the window, and raised the drapes. When she saw the mutton lying there, she uttered a single choked noise. But she managed to control herself long enough to pick it up, and return it respectfully to the carving-dish, and carry it out of the room. It was only when the door closed behind her that Effie heard her let out a whoop of hysterical glee.

Fiona Watson couldn't help giving a faint and faded smile herself. But she said to Effie. ‘You'll forgive me, my darling, but I don't think I can continue with luncheon. Perhaps you'll come for a walk with me.'

‘A walk?' asked Effie, surprised. She knew that her mother loved to walk, even in winter, and that she would often go with Jeanie, her maid, to Inverleith Park, or Calton Hill, and stroll for an hour or so before returning home in the family carriage. But Fiona Watson had never taken any of the family with her on these walks, which she called her ‘refreshment.' They were her own private times to reflect, and to restore her strength, and even Thomas grudgingly respected the need she felt for solitary meditation. ‘Every woman, like every man, should spend a certain time each week mulling over his sins and her weaknesses,' he had said, vigorously shaking out The
Scotsman
before turning to the editorial page. ‘It is the woman who thinks she has no faults at all who is the most baneful influence in a man's life.'

Actually, Thomas Watson approved of his wife's constitutionals more because they got her out of the house for a while, she and that nervous, irritating manner of hers; and because she always seemed to return from them in a state of mind that was always serene and sometimes almost beatific. He liked to think that, as she walked, she dwelt on her magnificent good fortune, being married as she was to a man who had done so well for himself, and that each walk was a minor revelation, like Saul's conversion on the road to Damascus, with his own wealth and position in the rôle of the blinding light.

‘Not even a Nugent-Dunbar,' he had said to himself, with satisfaction, ‘can kick against the pricks.'

Fiona Watson said to Effie, ‘I shall be ready in a quarter of an hour, my dearie. Don't forget to wrap yourself up warmly. Now, excuse me, if you would.'

She left Dougal and Effie together at the abandoned luncheon table. Effie looked around at the plates, with their congealing mutton-fat and limp overboiled bow-kail, and then back at Dougal.

‘You don't ever think of mother, do you?' she asked him.

‘I do,' he said. ‘But I cannot sit quiet while Robert criticizes everything I try to achieve.'

‘Have you thought that he might be right?'

‘Of course I have. I'm not stupid. More often than not, he is right. He's cleverer than me, when it comes to banking. You know what he's done? He's brought in a short-term loan scheme that's set Scottish banking upside-down, on its head. You make sure he explains it to you sometime. It's brilliant.'

‘But?'asked Effie.

‘But,' explained Dougal, ‘he's unsure of himself. He has the same character as father. Aggressive, and windy, all noise and trumpets, but only because he's never truly sure that he deserves what he's got. And part of the way in which he bolsters up his own lack of confidence is to do me down. He's an ink-and-paper banker, and good at it. He doesn't even know, himself, how good he is. But neither does he see that I'm as good as him, in a different way. I like to get out and meet the folk who made the money in person. There's room in the bank for both of us, but he will not see that. Or rather, he does not want to see that. He thinks I'm a joker.'

Effie said, ‘All the same, you've been selfish, haven't you? You didn't think of mother today. Father's going to be furious with her, later.'

‘Well, I'm sorry,' said Dougal. ‘But I don't think I had any choice.'

‘Do you truly think that you're ever going to change Robert's mind?' asked Effie. ‘Or father's?'

Dougal got up from his chair, and walked around the table to the window. He was two or three inches taller than Robert, and broader across the back, but his build was wirier, and leaner. On Saturday mornings he practised weight-lifting in the stables at the back of the house with weights that had been made for him by McLeod, the local burnwind; and during the summer he swam and rode and went scrambling up and down Castle Hill or Salisbury crags. It was one of his favourite tests of his own stamina to run up the 287 steps to the top of the Scott Monument at the head of Princes Street,
and down again. He was very fit, and the tension in his whole demeanour showed it. To him, banking was a social business, a question of winning people's confidence. His looks helped him. He had irrepressibly curly hair, like a bunch of brassy clocksprings, and a wide, well-boned face with a deeply-dimpled chin. His eyes were as pale as his father's, but without his father's coldness. He enjoyed drinking, and dancing, and he especially enjoyed girls; but he was perceptive, and sensitive, and whatever Robert thought about him, he was far from reckless.

The trouble was that many of the inventions that Dougal had wanted Watson's Bank to support were both advanced and eccentric. They would have made Robert chuckle, if only a rival bank had been backing them instead. First, there had been a revolutionary steel alloy which could be smelted at high speed; and then a telephone device which was supposed to work without wires. The definitive Dougal loan, which Robert had recounted several times in the dour Balmoral Room of the Caledonian Society, to the general amusement of his friends, was the ‘Boer War Shield', a heavy contraption of curved steel which was supposed to protect its bearer from sniper fire out on the veld; but which – if it failed as a shield – could promptly be unfolded and used as a stretcher to carry its owner away.

‘Dougal,' Robert had concluded, ‘is nothing but a pygmy-scraper, who's going to fiddle us all into the poor-house.'

Dougal, at the window, said to Effie, ‘It's snowing again. You'll have a chilly walk.'

‘Well, I expect so,' said Effie. ‘But you haven't answered my question.

‘What do you want me to say?' asked Dougal, a little irritably. ‘I know I'll never change things. Father and Robert are both too set in their ways. But I have to try, Effie. Otherwise I'll be nothing but a downtrodden snool.'

Effie said, ‘Did father not tell you once that you could work in the London office if you had a mind to?'

‘I suppose so. He hinted as much.'

Effie looked at him bravely. ‘Then why don't you go?' she challenged him. ‘You'll be away from Robert there, and from father; and perhaps mother will get some peace.'