Lady of Fortune (12 page)

The headquarters of Watson's Bank were housed in a heavy, uncontroversial building in the neo-Classic style of the early Victorians. It was pillared; and its upper ledges were supported by four sightless goddesses with pigeon guano streaking their cheeks instead of tears. The goddess of pride; the goddess of money; the goddess of sentiment; and the goddess of commerce. On the front of the building was the carved crest of the Watsons, and their motto
Concordia discors
, harmony amidst chaos. At school, a sarcastic scholar had once said to Dougal that his family's motto ought to be
Si possis recte, si non, quocumque modo rem
, which meant, by right means or wrong means, at all costs, make money.

Nathan Cohen pushed aside the mahogany swing doors to allow Dougal and Effie to enter into the bank's lobby. It was similar inside to the Watson building in Edinburgh, with a high domed ceiling, lit with gaslights, and a life-size rosewood statue of a seraphim blowing a gilded trumpet. Bank messengers in tailcoats and tall shiny hats hurried in and out; and there was an extraordinary atmosphere of clubby hysteria. Nathan said cheerfully, in a voice which echoed. ‘It's all been a bit of a cat's breakfast here since the Queen passed on; but we'll get over it. Come up and meet Malcolm Cockburn.'

He guided them along endless dark-dadoed corridors; past offices in which twenty or thirty clerks sat over desks with heaps of paper in front of them, bowed over the business of calculating dividends; and rooms in which paunchy men stood in front of marble fireplaces and stared at them with hostility as they passed. There was a pervasive odour of bee's-wax polish, stale paper, perspiration, and smoky slack.

Watson's Bank, in fact, smelled like a school – inky and farty and close-in, especially on this January afternoon; and even Dougal began to think of the red-peat fragrance of the Edinburgh office with regret.

But Nathan showed them at last into a large gloomy room on the fourth floor, with a grey view outside of the Royal Exchange building, and at the end of a long Cuban mahogany table, bent over his own dark reflection in the wood, sat Malcolm Cockburn.

‘Mr Cockburn? Mr Dougal and Miss Effie Watson.'

Malcolm Cockburn raised his eyes, uttered an odd yelp, and then unfolded himself from his chair as if he were articulated in several sections. He was extremely tall, and extremely thin, and there was a yellowness about his face which was the long-faded suntan he had acquired in India. Effie thought that he looked rather like a stork, with his spindly shanks and his long, downward pointing nose, and indeed he moved rather like a bird, strutting this way and that, and occasionally shrugging his black tailcoat on to his shoulders, the way a bird ruffles up its feathers.

‘Well,' he said, in a tight, precise voice, with an attempt at a smile. ‘Our illustrious founder's offspring.'

Dougal, by the look on his face, didn't take particularly kindly to being described as his father's ‘offspring'; but he clutched Malcolm Cockburn's hand all the same, and said, ‘How d'ye do.'

‘Do take a pew,' said Malcolm Cockburn, turning to Effie and gripping her hand tightly. ‘Did Nathan give you a decent lunch? He didn't take you to Duncan's, did he? Oh, he really shouldn't. The Norwich is so much better, particularly if you like lobster. Do you care for lobster, Miss Watson?'

‘I've never cared for creatures that pinch, Mr Cockburn,' said Effie. Malcolm Cockburn suddenly looked down at his hand, and released his grip on her immediately.

‘You'd, um, care for some tea?' he asked them, in a tone that was obviously higher than he'd meant it to be.

‘Not just now,' said Dougal. ‘Tea doesn't sit so well on roasted game and French wine.'

‘Well, no, I suppose that it don't,' Malcolm Cockburn smiled. ‘But what I've always said is, if you've the stomach for banking, you've the stomach for anything. Dyspepsia adastra! It's a hard business, Mr Watson, as you know: and I think you'll find it even harder here than it was in Edinburgh.'

‘I hope that's not a warning,' said Effie, pertly, although she was looking out of the window at the afternoon traffic.

‘A warning?' asked Malcolm Cockburn surprised, and suddenly cautious. No, of course not. Well – in a manner of speaking, it is. I think you'll find that life in banking is very different here in London; far more
difficult
than it was in Scotland. Dog eat dog, and cat eat cat. There are fortunes at stake here, real fortunes. Hundreds of thousands of pounds can be lost at a stroke.' Effie had picked up a small porcelain statue of a horse and he was watching her nervously. ‘Did you have a good trip down from Scotland, Miss Watson?'

Effie set the horse back on the table. ‘It was tolerable,' she smiled. ‘It was very kind of father to let me come. It was also very kind of you and Mrs Cockburn to agree to put us up, on our first night here.'

‘What else could I do?' said Malcolm Cockburn, uneasily.

‘Indeed,' said Effie. ‘What else could you do?'

There was a difficult moment when nobody quite knew what to say; but then Malcolm Cockburn exclaimed, ‘You must stay tomorrow night, as well! I'm having a little gathering, for some American and German bankers. I'm sure that they'd be delighted to meet the son and the daughter of Thomas Watson himself. Your father is … well, he's very highly regarded in Germany. Especially after we financed Essen Steel. We're hoping now to conclude a deal to build an ocean-going liner, in Hamburg.'

There was another silence. Malcolm Cockburn rubbed his hands together. ‘Well,' he said to Dougal, ‘I suppose you're anxious to meet your colleagues in the trust department.'

‘Mr Cockburn,' said Effie.

‘Miss Watson?'

‘My father and my mother both send you their very best personal greetings; and they particularly hope that you will care for Dougal while he works here in London as if he were your own son.'

Dougal went pink, and looked flustered. But Malcolm Cockburn took hold of Dougal's elbow, and said, with a forced expression of avuncular charm, ‘Of course. That goes without saying. We'll take the very greatest care of him. And, when you write to your father and mother, you must tell them how much I appreciated their best wishes. Very kind indeed.'

‘Shall we go to the trust department?' asked Dougal.

‘Ah, yes,' said Malcolm Cockburn. It appeared to Effie that she had already managed to unsettle him, and put him on the
defensive; although it was plain that he wasn't at all sure what he was being defensive about. Unlike Dougal, Effie had realised at once that as the daughter of the bank's founder and chairman, the London staff would naturally treat her with great respect and considerable caution. It was an advantage over Malcolm Cockburn which she didn't want to lose, not only for Dougal's sake, but for her own. They were here to make their fortunes, she and Dougal, to establish themselves, and mix with queens and princesses. Effie was acute enough to understand that she would never get to mix with queens and princesses unless she behaved like one herself, and that she would never get rich and influential if she didn't conduct herself as if she were rich and influential already.

Thomas Watson had raised no objections at all to Effie visiting her Auntie Maisie in Putney; he had waved his hand in agreement without even looking up from his bank papers. What he hadn't considered, or didn't know, was that Effie, of all his children, had inherited so much of his persistence and his strength of character, that she was scarcely likely to allow her first-ever trip to London to be nothing more than a dreary family bunfight. How could he have known when his own personality overwhelmed every thing and everybody around him, a tidal flow of pomp and bigotry and certitude? Once away from him, however, once away from Charlotte Square, with her ticket to London secreted in her glove, and her portmanteau packed, Effie was able to think clearly about her own opinions, and to choose for herself how she was going to manage her affairs. Her mother had given her the strength. Now she was ready to do with the world what she had always wanted to do. It never once occurred to her that she couldn't.

Through all her childhood years, from the summer days when she had climbed up Calton Hill, or Arthur's Seat, with the ribbons flying from the band of her straw hat; from the winter evenings by the hearth when her. nurse had toasted honey cakes in front of the nursery fire, and then dripped them with thin heather honey; from the spring afternoons that she had whiled away in daydreams, watching the high cumulus clouds sailing towards the Firth of Forth from the Pentland Hills; Effie had never thought that because she was a girl she could not rise to be famous and great. Queen Victoria
was famous and great; so was Queen Maud of Norway and Tsarina Alix of Russia; and Queen Sophie of Greece. Women could be great, and she would be, too. She had always regarded her girlfriends' mimsy efforts to win favour with their brothers and their fathers by baking them cakes and sewing tartan game-bags to be silly, and fatuous. She didn't love her father or brothers any less than her friends, but she had never felt the need to win their affection by behaving like a wifie-wifkie, a little wife-woman.

She was still unsettled and shocked by her mother's revelation that she had been meeting a lover. She didn't yet understand why her mother had let her into the secret. But it had made Effie quite sure that it was not necessary in this world for a woman to suffer simply for the sake of suffering, and that a woman's destiny, if she chose, could lie in her own hands.

This thinking wasn't particularly novel or unusual for the daughter of wealthy and characterful parents, even at a time when women had no vote, and were either forbidden outright or directly discouraged from entering any of the great institutions of the Empire. Women worked as secretaries for the Grown Agents, but there were no women in the Stock Exchange, no women at Lloyd's, no women in the banks, no women in Parliament. But still, if they were born into rich and powerful families, as Effie had been, women could have a significant influence in society, provided they were prepared to exercise it through their husband or their brothers, or, at least, through a sympathetic lover. And their dominion over social affairs – who should come to which dinner, and who should be left out in the cold – gave them a subtle but sometimes fatal grip on the careers of men.

What
was
terribly modern about Effie's thinking was that she wanted to achieve her ambitions by herself, without a husband, or a patronising cousin, or a male puppet. She knew that she would have to work with Dougal in order to establish herself in the City banking community; but beyond that she wanted to make her way on her own. It seemed to her the right and the only thing to do, no matter how much society shunned the ambitious and unattached woman. There was something else, too. She was still young enough and inexperienced enough to be frightened of older men; and too mature, at seventeen, to be impressed by boys of her own
age. So it seemed to her to be emotionally safer to rely on her own courage, and her own hard-headedness, rather than to trust some man with whom she might fall recklessly in love, or who might betray her. Men to Effie were an unknown factor; attractive yet very dangerous. Even ambition seemed more reliable than men.

When she looked back on these first few days in London, she used to say, ‘If only I had known what I couldn't do, I could never have done it.'

‘I want no man's love,' she had written in her diary the night before leaving Scotland. ‘I want only to be famous for myself, and admired for myself, and if a few men happen to love me, well, more fool them.'

This, of course, was before she met Henry Baeklander.

Malcolm Cockburn took them down a floor to a large gas-lit cubicled room, where a dozen clerks were working. On the door, in gold Roman lettering, were painted the words
Trusts & Funds
. Malcolm Cockburn clutched his thin hands behind his back, and smiled tightly, and said, ‘This is your domain, Mr Watson, from now on! This is where man recognises his mortality by investing his money in a future time, by providing for the years when he is long dead and buried. This is where we deny in practice that principle expressed in the Acts of the Apostles, that “thy money perish with thee.”'

Dougal peered around inside the gloomy offices; at the bent heads of the clerks; at the clock on the wall saying twenty past three; and at the portrait of Kitchener in the uniform of Sirdar of the Egyptian Army, which had been presented to the bank after the Battle of Omdurman, three years ago. Malcolm Cockburn beckoned, and one of the clerks pushed back his chair and came forward, a young man in his early thirties, with a wing collar, tortoise-shell spectacles, and hair that stuck up on the crown of his head like a cockerel's plume.

‘This is Mr Niblets,' said Malcolm Cockburn. ‘Mr Niblets is our chief clerk; been with us twelve years now. You should get on. Mr Niblets, this is Mr Dougal Watson; and this is Miss Effie Watson.'

Mr Niblets nervously extended his hand. I'm honoured to know you. Mr Cockburn has said a lot about you.'

Malcolm Cockburn uncomfortably retracted his neck into his collar, and said, ‘Yes, Mr Niblets, that will do. Perhaps
you'd be good enough to show Mr Watson and Miss Watson around the trust department for me. Show Mr Watson the work we've been doing on the De Keyser Trust. A fine piece of financial engineering, the De Keyser Trust. We're rather satisfied with it, though I say so myself.'

‘Well,' said Dougal, turning towards Effie and smiling, I'm sure that's something I can look over later. Right now, I'm much more interested in seeing the main banking room.'

Malcolm Cockburn frowned at Mr Niblets. ‘With respect, Mr Watson,' he said, congestedly, ‘this is going to be your department, and I really would have thought that –'

‘You can think whatever you like,' Dougal told him, quite affably, but with complete firmness. ‘My sister and I would like to see the main banking room.'