Lady of Fortune (50 page)

Milós Raszboeni said, ‘The Count von Ahlbeck wrote to me just before the war. He said that he intended to join the 1st Regiment of Prussian Hussars, and that he would be delighted to see active service. However, he did not want to go without leaving a message for you. I have brought it with me.'

Out of his coat, the young man produced an envelope, and handed it across to Effie in silence. There was a blue wax seal on the back, embossed with the letter ‘A'. Effie broke it open, and began to read the letter inside.

‘My dearest Effie,

‘It is supposed to be divine to forgive, but it has taken me quite a long time to be divine. I knew that you were not personally responsible for the way in which Watson's Bank betrayed us over the Turkish arrangement, but you and your brother cost me many thousands of pounds, as well as my pride; and I was full of wrath even when I was still full of love.

‘The time seems to have come, though, when the barbarism of the world at large is far greater than the barbarism of one man to another, or one lady to another man. I miss you today as I missed you the first day you left, regardless of what you
did to me, regardless of how often I swore to myself that I would have my revenge on you for your terrible deception.

‘Perhaps you deceived me. Perhaps you didn't. I no longer believe that it matters. All that matters is that I am going off to war; and that I wish you to know that I love you as passionately and as deeply as I did when the entire world consisted of nothing but us, and the
Schloss
von Ahlbeck, and the countryside of eastern Hamburg.

‘I cannot demand that you wait for me, but I beg you to try. The war cannot last for ever, whoever wins; and when it is over, we can be together again, without bitterness, without recrimination, and without betrayal.

‘Respectfully, and lovingly, Karl.'

Effie slowly folded the letter into four, and laid it on the table next to her. Milós Raszboeni watched her cautiously, and then suddenly jerked up his hands, as if he were feinting a catch on a rugby-football field. She looked so white, perhaps he thought she was going to faint. Effie said, ‘I'm all right. It's just that it's been such a long time since I heard from him. I'm a little shocked, as you might imagine.'

‘Of course,' said Milós.

The clock chimed nine. Rodd came in with an oval birdcage tray, set with morning tea. Effie said, ‘You haven't put out any vanilla wafers.'

‘No, ma'am. I thought that the plain might be preferable today.'

‘I must have vanilla wafers!' Effie snapped.

‘Whatever you say, ma'am,' said Rudd, patiently.

When he had hobbled off yet again, Milós Roszboeni said, folding his arms, ‘You have to know that Karl is dead.'

Effie had been lifting the lid off the Worcester teapot, to smell what variety of tea it was. She said, ‘What?' She had known, right from the moment she had seen him in the living-room, and yet she still said, ‘What?'

There was a very long silence. Milós held his forehead in his hands, and bent forward in his armchair, and said, ‘Karl is dead. He died on Friday last week, at Broodseinde, in Belgium. You must know that he was a great character to the very last; he took his dogs with him to the war, and he always wore the full uniform of the Liebhusaren. He said it inspired his men.'

There was utter, utter quiet. Milós swallowed, and then
he said, ‘They called him Der
Verrückte Kolonel
, the mad colonel. But he was not mad. I don't even think that you could call him reckless. His problem was simply that he failed, even after he had experienced it at first-hand, to realise that the Somme is not Waterloo, that the war we are fighting now has nothing to do with chivalry, or military etiquette, or set-piece manoeuvres. He saw the death with his own eyes, and yet he always talked of “Teaching the enemy some manners”.'

Effie said, ‘Do you know how he died?'

‘It was quite quick. Well, that is what I was told.'

‘How quick? I wish to know.'

Milós held himself unhappily in his arms. ‘Miss Watson, what happens to men at the Front – well, many things happen that the people at home do not know about.'

‘Are you an historian, Mr Roszboeni?'

‘I was a student of philosophy at Vienna.'

‘Then, you will know about love.'

Milós nodded.

Effie stood up, her hands clasped tightly together, and walked diagonally across the room. ‘You will know that love can make history, as well as war.'

‘Love can make many things, Miss Watson. Love can divide whole nations; and has done; and will do.'

Effie began to shudder. She felt as if she were feverish, as if her skin were prickling all over and her legs were crawling with fire. Outside the window, a green delivery lorry from Harrods had drawn up on the opposite side of the road, and two men in long brown aprons were lifting a large reproduction sofa out of the back of it. She had to turn away. She thought that she had never seen an uglier piece of furniture in her life. It was like a dead horse on cabriole legs.

‘You must tell me the truth about Karl,' she insisted. ‘He and I were lovers.'

‘Of course,' said Milós. ‘As Voltaire said, “
On ne doit aux morts que la
vérité.” One owes the dead nothing but the truth.'

Neatly, in his textbook English, he described how Karl had been riding, on his horse Tigris, last Friday morning across the corner of a field. He was accompanied by his Weimaraners and followed a little way behind by his adjutant and a captain from the 2nd Hussars. They had just had breakfast, smoked ham, eggs, and coffee, and they were on
their way to talk to the officer in charge of the Silesian Regiment of Landwehr Infantry to discuss a forthcoming withdrawal and regrouping. Without any warning at all, not even a noise, Karl was hit directly by a stray shell from a 4.7 inch British artillery gun; which, although it failed to explode, instantly slaughtered his horse, and tore off both of his legs. They told me that he was lying in the mud, that
half
of him was in the mud, supported in the bare skeleton of his own pelvis like a man sitting in a washbasin. He was extremely shocked, and he died within a minute or two.' Milós hesitated. Then he said, ‘I apologise for being so graphic. But I understand your desire to know. I was his friend, too, and I was compelled to ask. I think I had better leave now.'

Effie said, ‘Your tea.'

Milós sat and watched the steam from the spout of the teapot curling into the pale October light. Effie came over to him, and laid her hand on his shoulder. ‘Mr Roszboeni,' she said, ‘you must stay and drink your tea.'

She had thought that she was over Karl. Perhaps she had been – just as long as she had been certain that he was alive and safe. But she painfully realised now that the only way in which she had managed to get over him was by keeping in the back of her heart the secret hope that one day, in London or Hamburg or Paris, when the war was over, they might accidentally meet, in a restaurant perhaps, or out riding, or in the dining-car of a trans-European train.

‘It will never happen,' she had told herself, about these fantasies. But as long as they were
possible
, the idea that they never would seemed easier to accept.

Now, Karl was gone from her, beyond the reach of fate, or coincidence, or even of carefully manipulated chance.

She spent two more days in London, but at a dinner-party on Saturday evening at the Willis's house in Queens Gate, she became involved in an unpleasant argument with a young colonel of the Northamptonshire Regiment, over the
rightness of going to war. The colonel was stiff, and to Effie, almost unbearably loud, although his loudness and what appeared to be an Indian-army sort of stammering crustiness were both probably the results of having recently witnessed four hundred of his men trapped in mud and barbed-wire and massacred by German machine-gun fire.

‘We have to fight, to preserve the Empire, and to uphold the British way of life as we know it,' the colonel declared.

‘If you think that's what you're fighting for, you're deluding yourself,' Effie retaliated. ‘I agree that we must stop the Germans, but we must think about the cost. How many young men have we lost already? How many millions of pounds of irreplaceable monetary reserves? The campaign in South Africa alone has already cost us £72 million, which is more than the final reckoning for the entire Boer War. And God alone knows what the Western Front is costing us. We must fight, yes! But we must also understand that when the fighting is finished, we will no longer be able to afford an Empire, nor to impose our way of life on anybody; perhaps not even upon ourselves.'

There was a shocked silence at the table. Mrs Catherine Willis, the hostess, attempted one of her famous tinkling laughs, but she soon fell quiet.

The young colonel said, in an irritated stutter, ‘The ladies in
my
family, madam, were brought up to consider that it is a man's duty to take responsibility for war, and for business, and for money; and that it is a lady's place to support her menfolk in all things, and to maintain that meek and graceful decorum which makes the ladies of Great Britain the object of admiration and respect throughout the world.'

‘Where did you read that?' Effie asked him. ‘On the back of a cigarette-card?'

‘Well, really!' the colonel expostulated.

Effie laid her napkin, and stood up. ‘All of you,' she said, in a high and demanding voice, ‘do you even half-understand what's happening to the world? As a banker, I can see it clearly. We're borrowing more and more money from the United States, we're running through our gold reserves and all our raw materials, and worst of all we're running through an entire generation of young men. Do you know how much it cost this country to raise and feed and train those young men? They were a capital investment as great as any precious
metal or any industry; and it takes only one cheap bullet to destroy each of them. We have lost forever their creativity, their potential earnings, and their capacity to work. We must fight, yes. We have to fight. But please don't let's pretend that we can come out of this war anything but very much poorer.'

‘Is that
all
you think about, money?' Lady Landes-Hartley demanded, from the far end of the table. ‘Do you reduce
everything
– hope, courage, and human sacrifice – to pound notes? If you do, Miss Watson, then I am not very happy to share a table with you. I have already lost two sons to this war, and I am proud of them both.'

Effie said, ‘I, Lady Landes-Hartley, have lost a lover to this war, and I regret his death more bitterly than you can ever imagine.'

She took two steps away from the table, and then stumbled over her chair, and collapsed.

Now she was at King's Cross, in her own private suite on the 9 a.m. train to Edinburgh. Mr Niblets had accompanied her from Cheyne Walk to the Marylebone Road, and he had brought her bottles of Rawling's ginger-ale, a box of Charbonnel et Walker mint crisps, which had actually been out of production since the outbreak of war,
The Times
, and a copy of
The Lady
. He waited with her for the train's departure, as he had been instructed, and occasionally tried to make an entertaining remark. Inside
The Times
there was news of terrible losses among the Canadian troops at Menin, as the Flanders Offensive got under way.

‘I trust you'll have a comfortable journey,' said Mr Niblets. He had lost the plume of hair on top of his head which had amused Effie when she had first met him. He was thinning now, and paunchier, and instead of his tortoise-shell spectacles he wore gold pince-nez, which he considered more suitable for senior bankers.

Effie was dressed in a flowing blue day dress, printed with pale cream flowers, which made her look even more wan than she actually was. Her hat and her veil lay on the chair beside her.

She said, ‘I shall probably try to sleep.'

Mr Niblets said, ‘You do understand, don't you, that I feel deeply sympathetic? I hope you'll accept my condolences without thinking that I'm being impertinent.'

‘No, you're not being impertinent,' said Effie. ‘You knew the Count von Ahlbeck, too.'

Mr Niblets was quiet for a moment or two, and then he said, ‘You do know that I was sent along to spy on you, when you were in Germany?'

Effie raised her eyes. ‘It did occur to me.'

‘Mr Robert – well, he always likes to know what's going on. He's a man who believes that knowledge is power, if you understand what I mean.'

There was a pause, and then Effie said, ‘I'm not entirely sure that I do. Are you trying to tell me something, Mr Niblets?'

Mr Niblets took off his pince-nez, and angled the lenses this way and that to see if they were clean. ‘The fact of the matter is, Miss Watson, that the moment you first came into the bank at Cornhill, you found a place in my humble affections.'

‘You're trying to tell me that –'

‘I'm simply saying that I considered you a lady of unusual beauty and outstanding character, and that, in the most respectful of ways, I fell in love with you. I –' and here he hesitated, to give himself a little more courage, because Effie could tell that there was a shrill voice inside his head which was shrieking at him, what are you saying? what are you saying? do you want to sacrifice your whole career?

‘I collected newspaper and magazine clippings of you,' he said. ‘Pictures, and stories, which I pasted into my scrapbook.'

Effie said quietly, ‘That is really very flattering. I am not at all offended, and I thank you for your care.'

Mr Niblets said, ‘Do you mind if I help myself to one of your ginger-ales?'

‘Please. Help yourself.'

Mr Niblets poured himself a drink, and cleared his throat. Then he said, ‘It has been inordinately difficult for me, Miss Watson, keeping up the supply of intelligence from London that Mr Robert has required of me; while at the same time feeling so strongly for your good self. I can't say that I haven't done well out of it. I'm manager of the investment and securities division now, and I've my own house in Wimbledon Common, and a lady who does for me. But I know that your feelings about how the bank should be run are different from Mr Robert's, and I know that you are also a lady of great independence and talent.'