Lady of Fortune Read Online Free Page B

Watson,’ said Carl, although they were both aware that she was only trying to persuade herself that Alisdair hadn’t hurt her more grievously by his careless death than anyone had ever hurt her before; and that Merritt’s sudden desertion from the bank had compounded his father’s sin far beyond an old woman’s emotional tolerance. Only two days ago, Effie had asked Carl, with a smile that was sadder than any weeping he had ever seen, if he was secretly Superman; and if, like Superman, he could reverse time, by spinning the world backwards on its axis.
    Just to be there, when Alisdair was boarding that Fokker Triplane to fly to Albuquerque to catch the train. Just to be there, when Dougal took that corner near Ridge in his Cadillac limousine. Just to save them from themselves, and to save her own future and her own past.
    But time could not be turned back. And when Effie Watsondied, there would be nobody to take care of her affairs but executors and trustees, banks and bureaucrats, attorneys and executives, IRS officials and Treasury Department investigators. She had grown to believe that her money was the sum of her life; that what she actually was, as a person, was $675 million. And now, with Merritt, her whole life would be officially disassembled, and picked to pieces, and every minute of her ninety-seven years would have been without purpose, and without a final achievement.
    As she walked back to the Lincoln on Carl’s arm, Effie felt that Alisdair must have thought nothing of her, to have died like that, and leave Merritt as his only child. He might even have hated her.

CHAPTER FIVE
    In November, the week after Thanksgiving, she had some photographs taken of herself, out of vanity, perhaps, or eccentricity, or simply to shock her friends. She chose a Greek photographer who had once been friendly with Salvador Dali – a short man with a shaved head, a huge Teddy Roosevelt moustache, and a garish Hawaiian beach shirt that was open right down to his hairy navel. His name was Kouris Kyriakou, and he spoke devastatingly bad English. Think of yourself,’ he told her, ‘as a bed. One of whole flock of beds. Bluebeds, maybe. Or wobblers.’
    But he took her down on the beach, and dressed her in fine crêpes and slippery silks, and made her stalk, and dance, and throw back her head, so that he could catch the energy that still twinkled inside her.
    Just before Christmas, Kyriakou telephoned her again and asked if he could photograph her nude, wearing nothing but her jewellery. At first she refused, absolutely. But then Kyriakou sent her a lyrical, dizzy letter that was almost a love poem, begging her to pose, He called her ‘a dragoness of Paradise, scaled with gold’. And so it was in February, six-and-a-half weeks before Effie’s ninety-eighth birthday, that Brinks arranged to send a truck with the finest pieces of herjewellery collection from the vaults downtown; and that Effie and Kyriakou were locked up for three hours, guarded by uniformed security men, in the tiled sunroom of her mansion, overlooking the lawns and the pool.
    The pictures, when they were printed, were strange but stunning. Kyriakou sent Effie a complete set of colour prints, as well as all the negatives. They showed a woman of great age, whose breasts had now fallen and whose skin was white and wrinkled, but who still kept within her a secret beauty that transcended her ninety-seven years, and made her appear to be curiously and magnetically young.
    Around her neck and her wrists she wore the symbols of her life’s financial success: a necklace of diamonds and rubies and sapphires that had once belonged to Catherine of Russia; bracelets of gold and silver and diamonds which Louis XV had commissioned especially for his mistress, Madame du Barry; and loops of pearls which had once been worn by Queen Anne. In one photograph, in which she was standing by the window of the sunroom, her hand raised