Lady of Fortune (16 page)

‘Don't fancy the poor old Khedive's chances,' Cyril Clough Martin put in, and then abruptly came out with a series of sharp guffaws, five of them, which ended as quickly as they had started.

Henry, under his breath, said to Effie, ‘Ride with me, please. I'll call for you at eleven.'

‘I don't know,' said Effie. He held her arm, and she felt dizzy, as if he had seized her arm to prevent her from falling.

‘If you'll come,' said Henry, ‘pin a handkerchief on to your sleeve before I leave tonight. That'll give you time to think.'

‘Very over-rated, your average Egyptian,' said Cyril Clough Martin. ‘Nothing at all like your popular notion of a noble hawk-nosed fellow riding around the desert in a flowing robe. Farmers, most of them, and uncommonly bad ones. Filthy, too. I was talking to Scott-Moncrieff the other day – you know, the chap who built the Aswan Dam – and he said that they were utterly hopeless. Hopeless! Never be fit to rule themselves, not in million years.'

‘Do come and meet the Stanleys', Amelia Clough Martin screeched. ‘Edward has such a hilarious story about the Rothschilds, and you must persuade him to tell it to you before Mr Alfred comes.'

Meeting Alfred de Rothschild was, for Effie, the most significant experience of her first visit to London; and the third most telling experience in the whole of her life. She had been led to expect someone absurdly Jewish, a beaky-nosed caricature of a Zionist, ridiculously rich, and impossibly vulgar. Instead, she met an amusing and cultured man who was able, through the immensity of his fortune, to indulge every one of his tastes for paintings, furniture, music, and beautiful women.

He taught her only one thing that evening: that luxury itself was no vice – that luxury, instead, was a way of exalting the senses, and bringing the deepest desires of the mind into actual being. ‘Many can dream of beauty,' he told her. ‘Even the poorest can dream of beauty. But only the rich man can turn that dream into reality.'

Alfred, at fifty-six was the least Rothschild-looking of all the Rothschilds. He was slight, and bald, with sharp blue eyes and magnificently bushy side-whiskers. He worked with his brothers Natty and Leo at the Rothschild office in New
Court, but he was far more of an artistic dilettante than a banker. He was something of an eccentric, too. At New Court, he kept his feet tucked in a mink foot-warmer, and when his automobile was sent to collect his weekend guests at the station, it was unfailingly accompanied by yet another car, in case of a breakdown.

He was considered to be England's greatest connoisseur of eighteenth-century French painting, yet he was also the owner of the most hideous and showy country house that had ever been built in England. Halton House near Wendover, in Buckinghamshire, was described by Eustace Balfour as ‘badly planned, gaudily decorated … and O, the sense of lavish wealth thrust up your nose! Eye hath not seen nor pen can write the ghastly coarseness of the sight!'

Nobody protested about Alfred's hospitality, though. It was said that guests at Halton House would be greeted in the morning when they awoke by a bewigged footman, followed by another flunky with a trolley, and that the guest would be politely asked:

‘Tea, coffee, or a peach off the wall, sir?'

If the guest replied, ‘Tea, please,' the footman would then enquire:

‘China tea, Indian tea, or Ceylon tea, sir?'

‘China, if you please.'

‘Lemon, milk, or cream, sir?'

‘Milk, please.'

‘Jersey, Hereford, or Shorthorn, sir?'

Alfred, when he arrived at Eaton Square, was almost immediately surrounded by a twittering crowd of the prettiest women in the room. He was over an hour late but he made a point of kissing every one of the women, and inquiring how they were. Dinner was already half an hour later than Vera Cockburn had planned it, and downstairs in the kitchen, cook was complaining in heated language about her ruined béarnaise sauce, and her collapsed potatoes. But Alfred de Rothschild was Malcolm Cockburn's most valuable visitor. Even a crumb of information from New Court was worth a whole loaf of gossip from Barings or Coutts. Dinner could wait; the rest of the guests could wait. New cooks could be found from an agency. New guests could be found anywhere. But there could be no substitute for a Rothschild.

‘Well, Malcolm, you have some particularly beautiful
ladies here tonight,' Alfred said loudly, as he walked into the reception room. ‘English roses, all of them.'

‘One Scottish rose, Alfred,' said Henry Baeklander, loudly, from the far side of the room.

‘Mr Alfred' peered across the room to see who had spoken. ‘Ah!' he said, raising a waggish finger. ‘It's you, Henry. I thought I recognized that uncivilised colonial accent!'

‘Nice to see you awake, Alfred,' said Henry. Alfred de Rothschild was notorious for rising late, getting to the office at two o'clock in the afternoon, lunching between 3.30 and four o'clock, and then waiting until his two brothers left the office at five so that he could stretch himself out on the leather sofa and sleep.

‘Nice to see you alive, Henry,' Alfred retorted. ‘Where's this Scottish rose of yours? I thought Scotland was all kilts and misers.'

Henry held out his arm; and although Effie was in the corner by the cabinet, talking to Edward Stanley and Philomena Daubry, the heiress to the Daubry vineyard fortune, everyone in the room turned to her, and she had to excuse herself and step forward, embarrassed and breathless.

‘Well, my dear,' said Alfred de Rothschild, bowing his head and taking Effie's hand. ‘You
are
a beautiful young Caledonian! Henry, I congratulate you on your perception. Vera, my darling, you must make sure that this gorgeous creature is seated next to me at dinner. This is a pleasant surprise. Almost an adoration dinner!'

Alfred's ‘adoration dinners' were well know. Since he had recently taken over the bankrupt Gaiety Theatre, he had met some of London's most beautiful actresses, and would frequently invite them to dine alone with him, or with no more than three or four gentleman friends.

‘You're very flattering, Mr de Rothschild,' said Effie. ‘Unfortunately I would rather be respected than adored.'

There was a moment of difficult silence. Alfred de Rothschild looked closely at Effie, and then at Henry, and then at Malcolm Cockburn, who managed a dyspeptic grin, and then covered his eyes with his hand.

‘Well, then,' Alfred said, to Effie, with a nod of his head, ‘If it's respect you want, I shall give you all the respect that you deserve. And considering you have spoken so boldly, I would say that you deserve a very great deal.'

The reception room was filled with uncomfortable laughter. Jerome saved the moment by appearing at the door, and announcing, sombrely, that dinner was served.

The thirty guests were seated at a long dining-table spread with a cloth of creamy Irish linen, and decorated with huge silver candelabras held up by silver-gilt slave girls and turbaned Arabs. Alfred de Rothschild was seated at the centre of the table, with Effie sitting opposite – much to the annoyance of Lady Pennington, who had originally been seated there. Mr Alfred talked and laughed throughout the whole dinner, but ate nothing, and drank nothing; even though every course was carefully set in front of him. It was only afterwards that Effie learned that he had a rare stomach condition which none of his doctors could cure.

‘There is something unusual about you,' he remarked to Effie, as she spooned her turtle soup. ‘You have a quality which I don't often see in London women. A clarity, perhaps. A lack of muddle-headed vanity.'

‘I think I'm capable of being as vain as any other woman,' said Effie.

‘Rightly so, my dear,' said Alfred. ‘But you have some inner force; some bright determination. Let me tell you this: you will either make an outrageous success of your life, or you will end up destitute.'

Effie said, ‘Does there ever come a time when money no longer interests you?'

Alfred rested his chin in his hand, and traced a pattern on the table cloth with his thumbnail. ‘Money? Well, money as money has long ceased to interest me. Banking is not the most exciting calling in the world. But, I am still fascinated by
luxury
. I am still amused by the
possibilities
of money. Do you know something, before I go for a carriage-ride in Hyde Park in the morning, the keepers deliberately spread stones in the path of my carriage, and then speedily pluck them out of the way when I approach, so that I will reward them for being so courteous and conscientious. Now that, in itself, is a strange kind of luxury. So was the circus I got together for myself, with performing dogs and ponies. Money enables me to express every desire I have; whether it is material or cerebral, whether it is serious or silly. Niccolini has performed for me, in my private drawing-room. So have Melba and Liszt, and de Roszke. Luxury is the power so to arrange your
world that everything which for most ordinary people can only take place internally, inside their minds, can leap out, and take on reality!'

He paused, and then he added, with a hint of regret, ‘Of course, not everybody's mind would take kindly to translating into reality. Some people hate my country house, for instance, and I suppose they're entitled to. But your mind, I sense, has the right mixture. You are a girl, and yet I sense in you a man's strength.'

‘I want to be a banker,' said Effie, in a level voice. The man sitting on her left, the third Earl of Winslow, peered at her in complete surprise and almost choked himself on a fatty piece of turtle-meat.

Alfred de Rothschild, however, sat back in his chair and smiled at Effie through the swaying candle-flames. ‘A banker! A lady banker! Now, that's an ambition! Here we have a lady, who wishes to be a banker, and never can be; and sitting opposite her, we have a banker, who wishes he were not a banker, and has an equally minuscule chance of getting what he wants. Isn't life ironic!'

Down at the lower end of the table, Henry Baeklander had been talking intently to Dougal; ignoring a large moon-faced lady who sat sadly drinking her soup and repeatedly dabbing her lips, and heaving silent sighs.

‘You should come to work in Wall Street,' Henry was saying. ‘You know what's going to happen here. Your father's going to leave you stranded in the trust department, like a beached dogfish; and the next thing you're going to know, you're going to be sixty years old and ready to be let out to grass, and you won't have achieved anything. You want Dougal Watson to go down as a great name in creative banking, don't you? You'd like a small statue, in your honour? Or at the very least, a plaque?'

‘I'm quite happy with my prospects at Watson's, thank you,' Dougal told him. ‘I don't think somehow that I shall be stranded in the trust department for very long.'

‘Does Malcolm Cockburn know this?'

‘No, and I would prefer it if you didn't mention it to him.'

‘I won't. I won't! I'm a banker. You can trust me. But do think about my offer. You could come and work for the Baeklander Trust whenever you felt like it.' He hesitated, and drank a little white Bordeaux, and then said, ‘I'd expect
you to bring Effie along with you, of course.'

Dougal put down his soup spoon. ‘Effie?'

‘Why, sure. You're not
that
naïve, are you?'

‘I don't think I know what you mean,' said Dougal, intently.

‘Sure you do. Sure you know what I mean. I'm talking about good old-fashioned horse-trading. A job for a bride. That's all.'

Dougal said, baffled, ‘You want to –?'

‘You got it,' said Henry Baeklander, hot but unabashed. ‘You understood me plainly. Your sister Effie is something special. You look at her now, the way she just glows! Mr Alfred can't take his eyes off her, and nor can most of the other gents in the room. I want her, young Dougal Watson. I want her very much for my own.'

The next morning was foggy and damp, and they rode along the bridle paths of Hyde Park as if they were riding through the landscape of a wintry dream. There was a smell of wet grass and wet decaying leaves, and that inescapable sourness of thousands of smoking coal fires. Carriages rumbled by with their lamps alight, and omnibuses rolled behind the trees like the ghostly floats of a forgotten carnival.

London in winter in 1901 was grimy, noisy, and heavy-shouldered. Cab drivers sat hunched under their waterproof capes, with fog sparkling on their bowler hats, swigging Dr Wadhurst's Patent Cough Mixture, which was 42 per cent alcohol, 20 per cent sugar syrup, 5 per cent chloroform, 3 per cent opium, and 30 per cent water. Those cabbies it didn't cure, it killed.

Navvies were digging up the wooden blocks of Oxford Street again; in their cloth caps and their bowlers, and their leather jerkins, and their trousers tied at the knees. The popular magazines compared London's never-ending roadworks to a gigantic jigsaw puzzle, and published cartoons of elated workmen discovering blocks that actually fitted the roadway.

London was a city of staggering opulence and grotesque poverty. While Alfred de Rothschild gradually awoke in his house at Seamore Place, overlooking the pathways where Effie and Henry Baeklander were riding, more than a third of London's population had already been up since daybreak and struggling for their survival. Barefoot children, even in the winter, were a commonplace sight; so were whole families who used public benches as their homes. Will Crooks, a Labour MP who had been brought up in a workhouse, said that ‘the same sun which never set on the Empire never rose on the dark alleys of East London.'

Although few members of the general public ever questioned the rightness of Britain supervising such a varied and sprawling Empire, there were many politicians and economists who were already beginning to question whether the huge sums of money invested abroad could better be spent at home; and there were many who could already detect the cracks in the Imperial façade.