‘I have to agree with young Mrs Balfour,’ Alec was saying now. ‘Walburga, was it? – poor girl! It sounds so torrid and mad, she’d have a hard time convincing either the bobbies or docs until he actually strikes. I suppose you’re convinced, are you?’
‘I am but, as to the bobbies, it’s even worse than having to convince them. I’m pretty sure that as long as he keeps to whispered threats she doesn’t have a case. She doesn’t even have a case for divorcing him unless she can unearth one of the philanderees and get him that way.’
‘She can’t divorce him for cruelty when he murmurs about winding her tresses round her little throat? That’s a bit thick.’
‘Apparently not,’ I said, trying to hide my smile. Alec is younger than me and sometimes seems much younger, as when he is troubled and wounded by life’s unfairness, by life’s showing itself so regularly to be ‘a bit thick’. ‘I went to the National Library and looked it up before I caught the train home,’ I told him. ‘Apparently, he can be as cruel as he likes as long as it’s only to Lollie – she doesn’t encourage “Walburga”, for obvious reasons.’
‘Law books in the National Library and grey serge, Dan,’ said Alec. ‘You’re flying all flags on this one, surely?’
‘You haven’t heard the half,’ I said. ‘Here’s what I propose to do next, darling.’ And I told him, to his evident and gratifying stupefaction; when I finished his mouth hung open, his pipe cooling, forgotten, in the ashtray.
‘You don’t stand a cat’s chance,’ he said at last.
‘Well, thanks a lot,’ I said, laughing.
‘But seriously, Dan, how do you hope to pull it off? How can you propose to go in and do what amounts to making a fool of a man who is certainly violent and probably raving mad? And why? Why not say you’re a girlhood friend or something?’
All of these were objections I had put to Lollie hours before, but she had answered them and, besides, I had come around to the notions for reasons of my own.
‘He wouldn’t let her have a friend to stay,’ I said. ‘And he won’t take any notice of me. As long as I dress soberly and keep my head down I’ll be fine. And I’ve decided not to attempt too much authenticity. I shall say I’m gently born and recently come down in the world. That should cover any amount of ignorance and unintended slips, don’t you think?’
Alec nodded rather reluctantly.
‘And most important of all,’ I went on, ‘there’s this question of Lollie being followed whenever she goes out and eavesdropped upon whenever she’s in the house. Do you see?’
‘Ah, of course,’ said Alec, who usually does see; it is one of the most comfortable aspects of our collaborations. ‘It must be one of the servants, doing his master’s bidding. Well, all right, you’ve convinced me.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘Oh, to be a fly on the wall though, Dandy, when you’re… when you’re busy… What exactly does a lady’s maid do all day?’
‘Don’t ask me!’ I said, rolling my eyes in not-completely-mock horror. ‘I have tomorrow and Sunday cramming with Grant – and won’t she adore it! – but for now I can’t imagine.’
‘I’m almost tempted to join you just to watch the fun. Would I make a footman?’ Alec stood up and came to offer me the cigarette box, bending over from the waist like a jointed wooden soldier and clicking his heels together with a beaming smile.
‘You look like a Punch cartoon of a bad waiter,’ I told him. ‘And anyway, there isn’t another opening. The Balfours, if you please, have twelve servants in their Edinburgh house, and goodness knows how many more in the Highlands.’
‘Twelve?’ said Alec, standing up straight again and frowning. He ran Dunelgar on seven and a few locals for the rough work. ‘What does he do, this Pip? Some kind of merchant or something, is he?’ He sat back down again and knocked out his pipe.
‘Well now,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t do anything, but listen to this and tell me if you don’t agree that some earlier Balfour must have sold his soul to the devil.’ I lit my cigarette and sat back to regale him with the history of the Balfours as it had been told to me. (The last thirty minutes of Miss Rossiter’s interview had been taken up with it, almost as though Lollie could diminish the shortcomings of Pip himself by setting them against the triumphs of the Balfours in general.) It was quite a tale.
The first Balfour of any note came to prominence in the early days of the Georgian era, by setting up a bank in his native Edinburgh in 1717: the Edinburgh and Scottish Eastern Merchants’ and Private Clearing Bank, whose name no one – from the founder, James Balfour himself, to the lowliest copying clerk – could be relied upon to reproduce with any accuracy (the pull of ‘Eastern Scottish’ in place of ‘Scottish Eastern’ being a particularly common pitfall) so that it is chiefly remembered among banking historians for the number of notes and drafts it issued with errors upon them. There is many a curio-cabinet which has, in one of its drawers, a family’s famous ‘bad banknote’ folded up and yellowing but still taken out and shown to visitors.
Inevitably, the merchants of the day made life easier for themselves by dubbing Balfour’s pet enterprise with a more descriptive title, and ‘the Silk and Tobacco’ flourished along with the trades which gave it its name. (There is still a public house in a back street of Edinburgh called the Silken Tab, whose hanging sign depicts a wigged and powdered old gentleman with a long pipe in his mouth, but since the associations have become blurred and the etymologies muddled, the current Balfours do not concern themselves about it.)
James Balfour Jr was a less cautious man than his father had been, a man who liked to be in at the start of things, and so it is unsurprising that in 1769 he was among the first to move down the hill, away from the smells and noise of the medieval Old Town, and into the stark majesty of a town house on Princes Street, with a view of the Castle and – once the draining of the old North Loch had finally been resolved, after many attempts and disappointments – as much fresh air as he, his wife and their seven children could hope for.
There was, however, to be little repose for Mr Balfour in his commodious new rooms, for he could not contain his eagerness to be part of the great expansion; new houses outside one’s own window were simply that much more fun than holds of silk and bales of tobacco leaves half a world away and in 1770, when every other financier in the capital was feeling well cushioned and replete with success, Balfour found himself in company not with them but with the rather more hard-bitten speculative builders, who were poised to see if their fortunes would swell with the city or go like tapers up a newly swept flue. Balfour would never have sailed as close to the wind as to endanger his fortune, but he did what was to his peers even more amazing. He sold up his father’s business: the Bank of Scotland opened its door with cold charity as to a waif on its step and the Edinburgh and Scottish Eastern Merchants’ and Private Clearing Bank was no more.
So it was that the Balfour family got out of banking on the high tide just before the beginnings of the great long endless collapse and never had to underwrite a penny of it. And of course the New Town was the success story of the age and grew and grew until there was nowhere in his native city for the old man to put any more of his considerable fortune and his son – Robert Balfour – began to spread it around the land, and most notably to send it underground. From the lead mines of the Scottish uplands to the coal mines of the north of England, the Welsh silver mines and all the way to the tin mines of the West Country, Robert Balfour was chipping out of the earth more and more riches for himself and his own, sending the sons of lesser branches of the Balfour family to manage for him so that the name spread all over Britain and grew synonymous with a kind of far-seeing but hard-working massing of solid wealth.