Invincible Summer, page 15
‘Um, should be about thirty million euros. So about thirty-five million in dollars.’
The smile that spread across Brad Whitman’s face was far less vacant than the one he’d given her earlier, and he seemed to be looking directly at her for the first time. ‘Good work, Eva. That’s what I need to hear. Did you hear the Exotics desk posted a ten million dollar loss yesterday? Those useless fucks. Thank God I’ve got some traders who actually make money, eh?’
Eva and Paul backed out of the office nodding and smiling and headed back towards their desks.
‘Right, I need a drink,’ announced Paul once they were out of earshot. ‘And if I do, you definitely do.’
‘You need a drink?’ squeaked Eva. ‘You were the one telling me to relax, I thought you were confident it would all pan out.’
‘Yeah well, you’ve got to front it out but nothing’s done till it’s done, right? Four mil down’s not a comfortable place for the guy with the biggest balls in the world let alone a whippersnapper like you.’ He pulled his jacket off the back of his chair. ‘Come on. You need to get me to the boozer sharpish for a medicinal libation to help me recover from the heart attack you’ve nearly given me today.’
‘It’s only four o’clock,’ she protested. ‘We can’t leave now.’
‘Au contraire, my little friend. Today, we can do whatever the fuck we want. We just made the best part of full-year budget on a single deal. Robert’ll forgive us anything once he sees the P’n’L. Angela, if anyone asks we’re with Market Risk,’ he called across to the team secretary as he headed for the door with Eva trailing in his wake.
Chapter 19
Canary Wharf, November 2005
NOT DRINKING? YOU’RE kidding, right?’ Eva looked up at her friend incredulously. She’d been in the pub for several hours by the time Sylvie arrived, and had expected her to be delighted that she was up for making a night of it. Sylvie, though, seemed unwilling to stay for the one-for-the-road that Big Paul was insisting they have before heading off to somewhere they could talk properly.
‘Well…’ said Sylvie. ‘I’m sort of on the wagon right now. And I thought we were going to, you know, go somewhere to do a bit of catching up?’
Robert, who had joined Eva and Big Paul in the bar and was unashamedly eavesdropping on the conversation, gave them a beseeching look.
‘Ladies, you’re not going to make us finish this bottle of champagne alone, are you now? What does it take to make you let your hair down? Thirty million of P’n’L has to be worth a celebration. And anyway, you can’t leave me alone with this fat fuck. He tried to follow me home and climb into bed with me the last time we had a night out together.’
‘You know you love it,’ shouted Big Paul, rubbing his fingers in a circular motion over his nipples and then grabbing Robert’s face in both hands and planting an extravagant kiss on his forehead.
Eva squeezed Sylvie’s hand. ‘Do you mind staying just for one? We’ve had an incredible day.’ She lowered her voice and added, ‘Then we can go somewhere else and talk properly. Robert’s my boss, so I can’t really say no. Plus, it’s no bad thing to celebrate getting your best friend back with a glass of champagne, right?’
Sylvie didn’t look convinced but sensing an opening, Big Paul insistently pressed a glass into each of their hands. ‘Here’s to big P’n’L and commensurately large Edward de Bonos. Ladies, they don’t call me The Whale for nothing!’
‘If you think your P’n’L is the reason they call you The Whale, I’ve got some bad news for you,’ Robert told him, causing Eva to snort the mouthful of champagne she had just taken down her nose and cast around for a napkin.
‘Laugh it up, bossman. But money talks, and our P’n’L is telling you that come bonus time, you gots to make it RAIN.’ He broke into song, tunelessly shouting, ‘Ooh yeah I wish it would rain down, down on me,’ before gyrating rhythmlessly around the table in an approximation of a rain dance.
Sylvie laughed and sipped cautiously at her drink, not wanting Eva to think that she was unwilling to celebrate her success. That would look like sour grapes of the sort that had caused them to fall out in the first place, and in any case, half a glass wouldn’t hurt. They’d stay for one, and then she and Eva could go on to another bar where there would be enough privacy to explain why she was having a break from drinking, which she could hardly do with Eva’s workmates earwigging. It was strange and nice to have a little bit of a drink after so long, anyway. She’d never said that she would never touch another drop. Now that she had her life on an even keel maybe she could do this once in a while, have just the one and then stop.
Robert slid along the bench towards them with his best charming face on until he was inches away from Sylvie, and Eva groaned inwardly at his blatant lechery. Tall and well-built with close cropped dark hair and slightly crooked front teeth, she had to admit he was good-looking enough in a certain light, but she almost felt sorry for him given the certainty of the impending rebuff.
‘So, how come Eva never told us she had such a beautiful friend?’ Robert was saying. ‘Is she ashamed of us? Or of you?’
Eva cringed at his smarminess and prayed that Sylvie wouldn’t cut him down too ruthlessly; after all, she was the one who still had to get up and work for the guy tomorrow. She watched as Sylvie broke into a faintly evil smile and parted her lips to speak, but she never actually caught her reply because the raucous group at the table behind them spilled a tray of drinks, drenching the back of Eva’s shirt with red wine and sending her rushing to the bathroom to wash it out. On the other side of the table, Big Paul was already topping up the glasses and signalling to the waiter to bring another bottle.
From: eva.andrews21@hotmail.com
To: sylvie_marchant_artist@yahoo.com
Date: Friday, 3rd November 2005 08:04
Subject: Please tell me you didn’t
A question. What the TWATTING TWAT do you think you’re doing? We were supposed to be meeting up last night so that we could bury the hatchet, not so you could get pissed and insist we stay out half the night. I’m sorry I ditched you but it was one in the morning and I had to be up for work in five hours. As did Robert. You know, my boss. Who, incidentally, is still not on the desk despite the fact the markets opened more than an hour ago.
Now, I apologise in advance if it turns out that the reason you’re not answering your phone is because you have in fact been dismembered by a serial killer. However, the evidence is all pointing to a far more sinister possibility: that you’ve shagged my boss.
I can think of at least five reasons why you’d better bloody not have:
He’s got a girlfriend (or more likely three or four at any given moment).
He constantly tries to take the credit for my work and thinks it’s amusing to tell me to fetch him coffee.
He will try to get you to tell him things about me to undermine my professionalism.
He’s a complete and utter tool. Trust me on this.
HE’S MY BOSS. Of all the people in the world, only one of them is my boss. Let’s have a rule whereby you’re allowed to shag any one of the three billion men on the planet except for the one that’s MY BOSS.
NOW PICK UP THE DAMN PHONE.
Sylvie’s phone was still going straight through to voicemail at 9am when Robert swaggered in across the trading floor. Even without his dishevelled and triumphant appearance, Eva already knew what had happened. By the time she’d got the wine out her shirt in the bathroom the night before, Robert and Paul seemed to have persuaded Sylvie to stay for another drink, so they did, and then that had sort of segued into the next one because the glasses just kept being topped up and Eva hadn’t been as careful as she usually was, what with having started drinking at 4.30pm and skipping dinner. Sylvie had seemed to get plastered unusually quickly too, and then suddenly it was midnight and they were all still in the bar. There had been no chance to catch up properly with Sylvie because she’d been pinned in the corner by Robert for most of the evening, while Big Paul had monopolised Eva with an endless series of compliments about how gutsy she’d been that day, interspersed with hilarious tales of buccaneering in the markets of yore. She felt both annoyed and guilty. Sylvie had clearly wanted to leave when she’d arrived, but what could Eva do when her boss was virtually ordering her to stay?
In hindsight, it was obvious how it had all come about. Robert had taken one look at Sylvie and got a big toothy smile on his face and Big Paul was his practised wingman, clearly figuring that getting your boss laid could only improve your bonus prospects. She’d watched them in action enough times but had never been close to the receiving end, so she simply hadn’t realised that she and Sylvie were being played. She felt bad about having led Sylvie into the shark pool, especially after what she’d said on the phone about hating herself for sleeping with random guys when she was off her face. But after a couple of drinks Sylvie had acquired her old sheen of drunken recklessness, and then she had been the one resisting Eva’s suggestions that they head off. Eva had spent at least an hour trying to persuade her to come home with her and sleep in the spare room until, exhausted and nauseous, she had eventually given up and left, having extracted a promise from Sylvie that she would get a taxi home when the bar closed.
What had happened was doubly galling because she’d always been so careful not to let the different parts of her life collide, keeping her carefully constructed professional persona well clear of the incompatible aspects of her life. Early on in her career, she’d studied the bomb-proof veneers of her most successful colleagues, noting the relaxed, confident chumminess which spoke of an upbringing that had revolved more around ski trips to Verbier than sitting in the corner at SWP meetings with a packet of Quavers, and concluded that it was best to keep her life firmly compartmentalised. This had been a generally successful strategy, though there had been that one rather excruciating time her father insisted on meeting at her office on a trip to London, no doubt thinking an incursion into the citadels of capitalism would be a good opportunity to size up the enemy. Quite by chance, Robert had chosen the same moment to leave for the evening as Eva met her father in reception, giving her no choice but to introduce them. She’d been distracted for a few minutes by a work call and been mortified to turn around when she finished to find Keith lecturing a smirking Robert on the finer points of socialism.
She should have learned her lesson then, she thought, remembering how, cheeks burning, she’d had to practically drag her father out the building. She’d thought taking him out for a nice meal would temper some of his criticisms of her work and lifestyle but there had followed an awkward dinner during which Keith had managed to make her feel horribly guilty for being part of a financial system that stripped workers of their protections and in which the benefits mostly accrued to a few winners like her. At the end, instead of thanking her for picking up the tab, he snatched the bill from her hands and calculated how many Bolivian peasants could live for a month on the cost of this single meal.
Of course he had a point, she thought, but it wasn’t a straightforward one, and it also wasn’t as if she was single-handedly responsible for global inequality. Keith had at least perked up later that evening after she’d handed over a five grand cheque for cleft palate operations for African orphans, but the next day she had walked onto the trading floor to find a picture of a hammer and sickle stuck to the back of her chair and everyone calling her Red Eva.
It was clear that there was nothing to be gained from allowing the different parts of her world to collide. Why on earth had she told Sylvie to meet her at the bar? It had seemed like a good way to make a polite escape from an evening of work drinks, and the thought that Sylvie and Robert would look twice at each other hadn’t even crossed her mind, since they had nothing in common and each held everything the other stood for in contempt. Ah well, she thought, that was the upside: it wasn’t as if anything would come of it. She would put her life back into separate boxes and not make the same mistake again.
Besides, she had other things to worry about. A nagging feeling had been bothering her since she dragged herself out of bed that morning, and it wasn’t just a function of her ferocious hangover. As the morning passed and she spoke to brokers and other people on the trading floor, she was starting to realise that what she’d done yesterday was being talked about all over the market. With hindsight, she thought, it might have been a little on the aggressive side of things. The line between pre-hedging a client trade by buying what you needed in advance to fill their order, and using your buying power to move prices in the market was a hazy one. On one side of that line was what they did every day, and on the other the murky area of market manipulation, an offence technically punishable with jail. There was nothing glaringly wrong with what she’d done, she reflected uneasily, except maybe that bit right at the end where she’d ramped the price and left it there to force the market to close on a high. It would have left a funny-looking spike in the data, now she thought about it. At that moment one of the sales guys wandered over to her desk and leaned against it.
‘You must have made a fair whack on that Bellwether Trust trade yesterday,’ he remarked casually.
Eva avoided looking up. ‘Yeah, we did.’
‘I mean, that would have been some serious P’n’L, right?’ he persevered.
She frowned and put down the pen she was fiddling with. ‘Yes, Toby. We’re a trading desk. We make money from trading. That’s what we do.’
‘Ooo, touchy.’ He laughed. ‘It’s just that it was a bit ballsy, that’s all I was going to say.’
Calm, she told herself. It wasn’t smart to let people see that she was feeling nervous about it. It was only natural that people were going to make comments on a trade of that size, and she was going to have to brazen it out with a bit more composure.
‘Sorry, look, I’m just a bit busy right now. And maybe one too many drinks last night, you know how it is.’
Mollified, Toby wandered away, but Eva’s heightened sense of anxiety lingered.
Chapter 20
South Kensington, May 2006
ONE FINE MORNING in an office at Imperial College London, Benedict Waverley could be found upending the contents of a small cardboard box onto his new desk and propping a photo of Lydia and the boys against his new computer monitor. He was very happy about the desk, the first he’d ever had that was next to a window. From where he sat he could see an actual living tree and a patch of blue sky. The office would be shared with two other people, one of whom it turned out he’d already met and got on well with at various conferences, and he felt that this was a good sign, a sign that coming back to London had been the right decision. Of course, regardless of whether the signs were good or bad it wasn’t as if he had much choice in the matter, at least not if he wanted to keep his family together. He would be sad not to be around when the Large Hadron Collider went live but at least he would still be involved in analysing the data from it, and he recognised he was lucky to have landed such a plum research and supervisory role when competition for these posts was so stiff.
Yes, he told himself, there was every reason to feel optimistic about the future. Lydia would surely be a lot happier back in London. It hadn’t been a great life for her with him working all hours at CERN, and lately she’d been spending huge swathes of time back in England with her parents. He’d missed them terribly, the kids anyway, though in fact it had been a bit of a relief to have a break from Lydia. It had been a long time since he’d felt as though he could do anything right as far as she was concerned.
It had been a couple of years since their marriage had started to fray around the edges. With hindsight they had rushed into things, but Lydia getting pregnant so quickly had rather clinched matters, and it had been easy to get swept along on a tide of doing the right thing. When he’d voiced his doubts to his mother shortly before the wedding she’d marched him off for a walk on the Heath and talked to him in a new way, a grown up way in which she’d never spoken to him before or indeed since.
‘Your marriage will work if you make it work,’ she told him. ‘That’s something that your generation seems to have lost sight of. A good marriage is not one where both people have spent a decade or more sampling all the delights that the opposite sex has to offer and then suddenly stumble across another person whom they immediately recognise as the missing part of their soul. It’s simply one in which you make a choice and then bloody well stick to it. You get up every morning and renew your decision to be the best husband or wife you can be, and you forgive each other when you fall short, which of course you often will.’
‘That doesn’t sound much like you and Dad,’ he’d responded doubtfully. ‘He’s always telling people how he fell in love the first time he saw you across a crowded room and decided then and there that he would marry you.’
‘Oh, darling. Don’t you know by now that that’s all just so much hyperbole? Daddy and I have had as many ups and downs as anyone else, and God knows there’s been plenty to forgive. You can hardly have failed to notice your father’s roving eye. I was pregnant when we married too, you know. Who knows whether we’d have ended up together otherwise.’
Benedict digested this as they strolled through the grounds of Kenwood House, genuinely surprised. He’d always unthinkingly accepted his father’s fairy-tale version of events, in which the prince swept the princess off her feet and they lived happily ever after. No one had ever suggested that there had been any falling short or forgiving to be done. And what on earth did she mean by his father’s roving eye? Christ, he didn’t want to know. He had enough problems of his own without having to process a bunch of new and unpalatable facts about his parents. Benedict took his mother’s arm and steered her towards the Brew House coffee shop, changing the subject back to his own situation.
