‘You dreamed about him?’ he asked.
She lifted her head, and nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said, miserably.
‘Can I get you anything? Chocolate? Or a drink?’ He was trying to be very considerate, and mature.
‘I don’t think so. I think I’ve probably been drinking too much anyway.’
There was a pause, and then Alisdair said, ‘You’re very unhappy, aren’t you?’
She was going to deny it, but then she thought, if I can’t tell Alisdair how upset I am, who can I tell? She said, ‘Yes.’
He stroked her back, and around her shoulders.
‘I seem to have taken the wrong course somewhere,’ she said. ‘I seem to have missed reality. Sometimes, when I’m in a room crowded with people, I feel as if I’m seeing them through thick plate-glass, as if I’m always separated from them. They always seem to know things that I don’t know; they seem to be involved in a conspiracy of life which I haven’t been let into. I think I’m attractive. I act pleasantly to people; to men; and yet nothing ever seems to come out of it. Other women find lovers and husbands, and fulfilment, and I never do.’
She held Alisdair’s wrist, and pressed the palm of his hand against her cheek. ‘I’m not trying to sound sorry for myself,’ she whispered, into the darkness where he sat. ‘I’ve been too ambitious to feel sorry for myself. I’ve wanted too much. When I was younger, I dreamed of nothing else but mixing with kings and princes and millionaires. Suddenly, I’m thirty-two years of age, and I have. I’ve met them all. But do you know something? I blink, and think to myself, was that them? Was that actually them? Those empty heads, those rattling little men? Those pompous, conceited women with their diamonds and their swaying bosoms? Because if they are the kings and princes, if they are the highest one can ever go, what can I possibly do now?’
Alisdair said, They’re not the highest. You know they’re not.’
She let go of his wrist, but lifted both her arms and clasped them behind his neck. ‘You’re right, of course.’
She kissed him, on the lips this time. He felt warm and comforting and manly. ‘You’re right. Just like your father, your real father, to be right.’
They sat together for a long time without saying anything. The clock downstairs struck five, but it was still dark outside. Alisdair said, ‘Are you sure you don’t want anything to drink?’
Effie shook her head.
‘I’d better get back to bed now,’ said Alisdair. ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Don’t go. Stay and talk to me. I don’t want to be alone.’
He hesitated. She touched his hand, and a tiny, dark, message – as cryptic as the messages that quickly flow from one nerve to the other – pulsed through her fingers, and alerted him. He stayed on the edge of the bed, not moving. There was an unreality about tonight which might never happen again, a suspension of the real rules of existence. He didn’t know where his mind ended and the night began.
‘Let me tell you a story,’ Effie murmured. ‘Or, perhaps not.’ She closed her eyes, and lay back on the pillow. She knew what she was doing, she knew all the dangers of it, all the fears and the strangenesses; she knew that this was Alisdair and not Karl. But she pretended to herself, or pretended that she was pretending, that she was drunk, or dreaming. She pretended that she was in the highest tower of a complicated Byzantine fortress hidden from the night, hidden from the moon, hidden from the whispers of her courtiers and the disapproval of her viziers.
‘Lie next to me,’ she said, and with her eyes still closed, she drew him down, and kissed his long boyish eyelashes, and his nose, and his lips.
He said nothing. There was nothing he could say which wouldn’t have broken the spell. If he spoke to her, he would have to call her ‘Auntie’; and when you kiss your first-ever woman in the darkness of a winter’s night, you can never call her that. So he closed his eyes, too, and pretended that they were other people, in another place.
Effie unbuttoned the front of her ruffled nightdress, found Alisdair’s hand and guided it towards her bare breast. He felt it cautiously at first, tenderly and carefully, stroking the nipple in mesmerised wonder. Like all public schoolboys of his generation, he knew scarcely anything about women, except some of the fantastic and usually grotesquely inaccurate stories that were whispered around the Remove after dark. One or two copies of Photo Charm had been passed around, and Duncan McCormick had a picture of Eva Tanguay, the American burlesque star, in not very much but a fake harem costume of beads and feathers. He had met girls, of course, in the village; or for Highland dancing, but most of these girls seemed to be indomitably plain, or have braces on their teeth. The black-eyed houris of Photo Charm remained remote and unattainable, except in the fleeting moments of masturbation before they slept – when, in the words of one notably dryhumoured Latin master, ‘the combined calorific expenditure of the Lower Remove between lights out and five minutes past would be sufficient ‘to heat a competition-sized swimming-bath.’
Alisdair kissed Effie again and again; her lips, and her neck, and then her breasts. She thought, the innocence of this is enough. My need for consolation is enough. I don’t care whether it’s wrong or it’s right. She reached beneath his nightshirt for him, and found that he was already hard and slippery with anticipation. His breathing was shallow and quick, and it was obvious to Effie that he was overwhelmed with what was happening, yet still wanted it. She soothed him, whispered silly words in his ear, and guided him downwards and a little across, until the head of his penis was helmeted by the lips of her sex. She whispered, ‘Push … push into me.’
It was fragmented. There were bursts of uncertainty, energy, fright, and intense excitement. She lay back knowing that she had committed herself to a sin; although somehow the sinfulness made it sweeter. She imagined and remembered the oddest moments. John McDonald, with his forearms tanned liked long brown evening-gloves. Karl, naked, standing by the fire with his back to her, and slowly slowly turning to smile at her over his shoulder. A picnic near St Abb’s Head, on the eastern coast, when she was fourteen years old, and how she had suddenly wet herself while down on the beach looking for seashells. Her mother, her dear mother, taking Jamie McFarlane’s hand on the battlements of Edinburgh Castle.
Alisdair gasped, and jerked, and then stayed still, uncertain what to do next, while his penis shrank within her. Then, he withdrew from her, and knelt up on the bed, staring at her through the darkness, although she couldn’t see his face. She said nothing. She wanted him to speak first. But he was quite silent, speechless, even afraid. ‘A man’s character alters so radically after sex that you suddenly find you’re in bed with a different person. One minute he doesn’t want anything in the world but you, then he wants a chicken sandwich.’ That’s what Vera Cockburn had told her one morning, as she tried to decide whether to wear six strands of pearls around her neck that morning, or eight. ‘Men are like motor-cars,’ she had shrilled. ‘Keep on twiddling their little gearsticks from time to time, and they run about quite happily, taking you wherever you wish to go.’
Alisdair said hoarsely, ‘I think I should go now.’
Effie held out her hand for him. ‘Yes,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered.
‘What for? You were a great comfort, and a great pleasure, and you have nothing to be ashamed of.’
He didn’t know how to answer that. He simply said, ‘If we’re going to Stirling –’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I suppose you’re right. You’d better get some sleep.’
He felt embarrassed now, and awkward. What had happened between them, so suddenly and so briefly, had jolted their lifelong friendship off balance. They still loved each other; but now they didn’t know how. Were they aunt and nephew? Friends? Or lovers? Even if they were retreating from each other now, what would happen when they began to feel like having sex again?
Alisdair said, ‘Goodnight, then.’
Effie said, ‘You should ki
ss me, when you say that.’
They kissed, lips against lips, and held each other for a moment that was so tender and close that it brought tears again to Effie’s eyes.
‘Sleep well, my darling,’ she told him.
He stood up, hesitated, and then left her bedroom without another word.
Effie slipped her hand down between her legs, as she had always done with Karl. Warmth and stickiness. The evidence of committed love. The liquid residue of joy. She was never ashamed of her body, and never would be, even though her mind was spinning with uncertainty at what she had just done. Had she seduced Alisdair just to entertain herself, or to seek genuine comfort? Did she love him as a man, or as a fantasy of Karl?
She lay face down on the bed, and thought about what had happened for hours, until she feel asleep from sheer tiredness. The grey winter sunlight touched her tangled hair, and the rumpled nightdress on her back, and the upraised curve of her bare bottom. She looked very pretty that morning, if there had been anyone to see her, prettier than she had for months.
Rosie woke her at eight with a cup of tea and a plate of biscuits. She sat up in bed, propped with pillows, and watched the birds fluttering around the window-ledge. She thought of Alisdair again, and felt content. What she had done with him had been nothing more than simple human loving, and however she thought of it, she could not feel ashamed.
It would never happen again. But it had helped her to get over Karl’s death, and it had helped her realise that she was part of the real world again, and it had done something else, which she wouldn’t discover until much later, that would alter the course of her life for ever.
CHAPTER TWELVE
At ten o’clock in the morning, while they were having their breakfast in the morning-room, Effie received a hand-delivered letter from London, addressed in completely unfamiliar writing. She slit it open with Robert’s gold letter-knife, while Alisdair dipped soldiers in his boiled egg and watched her with eyes that were still shadowed from sleeplessness. He had been lovely to her this morning: affectionate, but still respectful, and he had kissed her hand when he had taken her down to the dining-room.
‘Is it important?’ he asked, as Effie quickly scanned the letter’s typewritten message.
Effie nodded. ‘Very. I may have to postpone our trip to Stirling.’
Alisdair wiped his mouth with his napkin and frowned.
The letter was from Mr Niblets. It was unsigned, and had probably been written on an office typewriter to avoid identification. It said, ‘My dear Miss Watson, You should know that nine and a half million pounds of gold bullion is being loaded at Southampton today for delivery to Brazil. The ship involved is the Uruguayan passenger-liner San José de Mayo. En route to Brazil, the vessel will be intercepted by a German battle-cruiser, which will confiscate its cargo. The gold will be sent directly to Germany, as a disguised war-loan from Watson’s Bank to Berlin. You must destroy this letter as soon as you have read it, since I am now treading very dangerous ground. Signed, Your Admirer.’
Effie put down her napkin and rose from the table. ‘Excuse me, Alisdair,’ she said. She went immediately up to her room, her long pale green skirt whishing on the stairs, locked the door, and picked up the telephone. The telephone-girl said, ‘Aye?’
‘I want the Admiralty, in London. I want to speak to Lieutenant-Commander Horace Dawes.’
Horace Dawes was the only naval man she knew: she had met him at Kew, at a tedious party held by the Wing-Smytons, where they had served stewed duckling with black cherries and made everybody listen for hours to a trio of Magyar glee singers, who had revealed themselves at the end of the evening (to nobody’s surprise) to be three estate-agents from West Ewell.
It took Effie twenty minutes to get through to Lieutenant-Commander Dawes’ office: and when she did, she learned from his adjutant that he was away for the day. ‘Signals,’ he said, mysteriously.
‘I must speak to somebody. There is an illicit arrangment to transfer British gold in mid-Atlantic to a German battle-cruiser.’
‘I see. Did you say gold? As in coast?’
She succeeded at last in having her message transferred to the duty officer, who assured her that the matter would be taken up. She wasn’t at all sure that it would be, so she also rang Sir Godfrey Lelew, the Conservative member for Thornton, who had always quite fancied her. He sounded both drunk and astonished, but he told her seven or eight times, ‘Don’t you worry, m’girl. Dont you worry,’ and she hung up the phone feeling that it would be difficult to do any better.
She also realised, as she sat in her room alone, that it was time for her to leave Britain. She would never be able to defeat Robert at his own game, even if she really wanted to. And there was nothing socially for her here, not unless she wanted to spend the rest of her life emptily laughing at Chelsea parties, and appearing in funny tartan bonnets at Highland games. There was another compelling reason, too. Karl’s death had made her understand that she needed love, as much as she needed her career, and the finest and most eligible of Britain’s bachelors were at war. As a banker, she could understand with dreadful clarity how much money this conflict was costing the Allies. As a woman, she knew how drastically it was cutting a swathe through an entire generation of young men. She wept for them now: if she had known that by 1918 more than eight and a half million young men would be dead, 908,000 of them British, she probably would have stopped weeping. There are some tragedies far too great for tears.
She came downstairs. Alisdair had finished his breakfast now, and was sitting in the living-room, by the newly-made fire, drinking coffee and reading Punch. Effie stood by the door, and said, ‘You will have to go back to school.’
He put down his magazine and stared at her. ‘It’s almost the end of term. Do I really have to? I want to be with you.’
Effie said, as gently as she could, ‘What happened last night, Alisdair … well, you mustn’t ever think that I regret it, because I don’t. When two people are thrown together by fate, and by desire, nothing can come out of it but good … no matter what they did. But, I think you know as well as I do that it can’t go on. I can’t be your lover, any more than you can be mine. You must go back to school and finish your education. There are young men dying in Flanders so that you can do precisely that. You mustn’t let them down.’
Alisdair glanced at his copy of Punch. On the page he had been reading was a cartoon of two dazed soldies, one German and one British, both reeling from a nearby shell-blast. ‘Kamerad!’ the German was crying, throwing up his arms in surrender. That’s funny,’ said the Tommy, ‘I was just trying to think of the same word myself.’
Robert came home at a few minutes after eleven. He was dressed in a tight double-breasted grey suit, and two-tone black and white shoes. He gave his hat to Rosie and tossed his gloves into it.
‘Effie!’ he exclaimed, walking into the living-room. ‘This is a surprise. I thought you were going to stay in London to do your Christmas shopping.’
‘I felt like coming home.’
‘Well, that’s good. You know there’s always a place set for you.’
‘I own a third of this house, Robert, so of course there is.’
Robert went to the drinks table, and poured himself a large malt whisky. ‘You don’t have to be prickly about it,’ he said, with an exaggeratedly affable smile.
‘Alisdair tells me you’ve been seeing a young lady.’
‘Well, that’s right. As a matter of fact, I’m thinking of asking her to marry me. Marion Hetherington, of the Dundee Hetheringtons. Wealthy people; and a good connection for the bank.’
‘That’s good. I’d hate to think of you marrying for anything but profit.’
Robert stared at her. ‘I don’t think I care for the tone of that remark.’
‘You can care for it, or not care for it, as much as you wish,’ Effie retorted.
Robert swallowed whisky, paced up and down, and then said, ‘What’s the matter with you, Effie? You never appro
ve of anything I do. I’ve built this bank up into an international concern that’s pulling in twenty times the profits that father ever dreamed of. You’re enjoying the benefits, just as much as I, and even Dougal’s getting his share, although God knows why that should have to be.’
‘I know about the San José de Mayo,’ said Effie.
Robert, about to sip his whisky, lowered his glass and peered at her carefully. He looked like a man who badly needed eyeglasses; and yet there was something about his myopia which suggested an ability to be able to divine souls, as well as faces. He said, in a voice so quiet that it was scarcely audible, ‘The San José de Mayo?’
‘I’ve informed the Admiralty. The British Navy will probably catch up with it before the Germans.’
‘I see,’ said Robert, quietly. Even if she admired nothing else about him, Effie had to admire his self-control. ‘You realise you might be altering the entire course of the war in Europe? There are £9,780,000 worth of gold bars on board the San José de Mayo.’
‘You want the Germans to win?’
Robert shook his head. ‘I simply want to see an equably-balanced Europe in which Watson’s Bank can expect to make a reasonable profit. This war was caused by Germany’s understandable need to consolidate her Empire. Germans are not so different from Englishmen. At least they’re not darkies. And if they can achieve through war a certain amount of economic stability, that means that Britain and Germany can stand side by side as the political and financial masters of Europe. Our royal families are closely related; our finance systems are intertwined; what better arrangement could there be?’
Effie said, ‘Robert, thousands of Englishmen have died trying to prevent this happening. How can you even talk of supporting Germany – They’re our enemies!’
Robert blew out his cheeks. ‘Effie, that’s nonsense! They’re not our enemies now and they never have been. I get regular letters from Hermann Krauss at the Deutsche Bank, and from Uwe Feldman at the Diskonto. Whatever the politicians say about the war, whatever the war appears to be on the surface, hundreds of yards of territory gained in one big push, hundreds of yards lost in another great defensive, the simple fact remains that we are both on the same side. Political relationships between countries exist on multifarious levels: the level of territory, the level of international influence, the level of race and culture, the level of religious belief, and the level of finance. By far the most important of these levels is finance. The human being exists principally for gain, and everything else is subordinate; whether it’s art or religious worship or what-you-will. Therefore, Britain and Germany can go to war on one level, or even two levels – territory, perhaps, and race – but that does not necessarily mean that they are fighting each other on the question of religion or the question of money. Hermann Krauss and I are the best of friends. Can any military battle alter that? Should it?’
Lady of Fortune Page 40
