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lightly to her forehead, her nipples shining a kind of radiant pink, she was wearing over $15million worth of jewellery.
    But the photographs showed, in subtle and suffused light, what Kyriakou had intuitively understood about Effie. It was not her riches that had been her life’s greatest achievement, and so whatever happened to them – whether they were dismantled or preserved – her life would never have been in vain. Her greatest achievement had been simply that she had stayed young, and alert, and that in every one of the years she had lived she had tried to be understanding, and conciliatory, and energetic; and that most of all she had always been prepared to surrender her love to anyone who would take care of it, and ask for nothing in return. They also showed that, for all her wealth, she had recognised herself to be an ordinary person.

CHAPTER SIX
    She had first discovered the unholy bond between love and money when she was seventeen, in Edinburgh. Sometimes it seeemed so long ago that she could scarcely believe it hadactually happened, and that maybe she had read about it in a book, or seen a late-night movie about it on television, with Deanna Durbin playing ‘Effie’. At other times, it seemed as if it had happened only yesterday, and that eighty years had sped through the projector of her life in two or three hours.
    George Sabatini had once told her, ‘My childhood took fifty-five years, while I was living it. When it was over, I realised that it had only taken fifty-five minutes.’
    It was the Sunday on which Mrs McNab dropped the roasted mutton in the hallway – the Sunday after the Tuesday on which the old Queen had died. That Sunday, her brothers argued so ferociously that she was frightened they were going to kill each other. Her father had sworn by the hall Bible that he would knock their heads together and disinherit them both. Her mother had gone from room to room trailing her skirts like a wounded partridge.
    It was particularly dark in the house that day, not only because it was a dark house in any event, an Edinburgh mansion built by Robert Adam but furnished in the monstrous style of the High Victorians; but because the skies above the city had been since dawn almost maroon with threatened snow. It was 27 January 1901, in the tightest and deadest days of an iron winter. The Boer War was at its height. Effie had been taking a stone hot water-bottle to bed with her ever since October (apart from Raggie, her tartan doll), and her father had predicted that the snows would not thaw until May. The very weather is in mourning,’ he had said on Friday, first to Effie’s mother, who had sighed at the thought; then to Effie’s brothers, Robert and Dougal, and then to the postie, Mr Innes, from whose nose in wintertime a permanent drip depended, and who had said, ‘Aye, Mr Watson,’ in a voice as resigned as a pair of collapsing bellows.
    Sundays were never comfortable days in the Watson household. In the morning, there was the chilly procession to St Giles, the High Kirk of Edinburgh, across a landscape of grey swept pavements, and snow-topped railings, and sparse trees. Then, on their return, there was the formal gathering of the family in the drawing-room, under mounted stags’-heads and paintings as dark as coal-holes. Thomas Watson would make some ponderous remarks about the morals ofhealthy investment, or of Christian charity, which in fact he did not hold in particularly high regard. ‘Better tippence in the bank than saxpence in the aumos-dish,’ was one of his favourite mottoes. Robert would drink too much sherry-wine, and Dougal would disinterestedly pick the thread from the arm of his tapestry-covered chair, while their mother sighed from time to time like someone who could think of at least five places she would rather be. Effie would daydream about being rescued by Ivanhoe, and borne away, fainting with ecstasy, on his