Ayesha’s pulse quickened. She’d read how inventors like Mark were on the cusp of creating the fourth Industrial Revolution.
“If we are successful, and I believe we will be, it will transform the future of the world; it’ll enable computers to supplement and, in many cases, replace the human mind.”
“Will you own the patent?” Ayesha asked.
“I’m not sure if you can copyright progress.”
“Do it and I’ll never leave you.”
Mark sat back and looked at her, unsure whether to be shocked by her avarice or thrilled by her directness.
“This is only the beginning,” he said with quiet authority.
Ayesha squeezed his fingers. A shadow passed over the table.
“Someone said they’d seen you and a man go into the pub.” Blaze loomed above them. Mark and Ayesha scrambled to their feet.
“I’m so sorry, Aunt Blaze,” Ayesha said, flustered.
“Who are you?” Blaze asked Mark.
He put out his hand. “Mark Sparrow, Glenda’s grandson.” Something about this woman made him ill at ease.
“How do you do.” Blaze shook hands. “Your grandmother has been kind to my family.”
Mark nodded.
“Ayesha, we need to go,” Blaze said and, in case there was any doubt at all, added, “now.”
Ayesha turned to face Mark. “Thank you for the tea.”
“Where are you going?” Mark asked. He could not bear the thought of losing this young woman so soon after they had met. Taking a pen from his pocket, he scribbled his telephone number on the back of a beer mat and handed it to her.
Ayesha put it in her pocket and, smiling shyly at Mark, followed her aunt to the door.
* * *
When the port ran out, so did the last guests. Before they left, Windy Swindon and Peter Plantagenet-Parker both offered to “comfort” Jane.
“You’ll be needing to keep things supple down there,” Windy said, looking over his shoulder to check that his wife was out of earshot.
“I’m a fine swordsman, you’ll not complain.” Planty-Pal patted her bottom. Jane slipped away. Carrying a tray of dirty glasses to the kitchen, she realised she was ill-equipped to deal either with heartbreak or lascivious men.
“Here, let me take that.” Toby came down the Great Staircase towards her.
“Thank you, darling.” Jane handed him the tray and picked up the last of the empty serving plates. The house, designed for many servants, was hopelessly laid out for this kind of event. Mother and son had to walk down two long corridors and two flights of stairs to reach the scullery. Toby went ahead, his trousers flapping around his ankles and the long tear in his shirt stretching from shoulder to waistband.
“What happened to your shirt?”
“It tore.”
“I can see that.”
Toby didn’t answer. Jane could see from the slope of his shoulder that her son was upset.
“I’m desperate for a cup of tea. Would you like one?” she asked when they reached the kitchen.
Toby nodded and sat down heavily. Jane put the kettle on the Aga, now working again thanks to Blaze’s patronage. The fridge and cupboards were full once more and all eleven radiators were on. As long as you ran from heated room to heated room, ignoring the icy passages, living at Trelawney during the coming winter would be reasonably comfortable.
“My girlfriend is Mrs. Sparrow’s granddaughter,” Toby said.
“Cross Mrs. Sparrow, our cook?”
Toby traced the grain of the pine table with his finger.
“Did you meet her at school?” Jane hoped that Clarissa wouldn’t find out; she could only imagine the volley of disapproving asides. “Is she nice to you?”
“She’s angry that we didn’t ask her gran to the funeral.”
“She has a point.” Jane carefully took the glasses off the tray and put them into the sink to wash. Filling the basin with warm water, she handed her son a tea towel. “Will you dry, please?”
Toby stood beside her.
“Celia says this house is the tyrant and it’s manipulating all of us. We are living ‘anchrone’ somethings.”
“Anachronisms.”
“Why don’t we just leave, walk away?” Toby asked.
“We may not have a choice.”
“Will Blaze chuck us out?”
“The house is hers until your brother is eighteen—until then she can do whatever she likes.”
Toby put the glass he was drying down and looked at his mother. “What’s going to happen? Now that Grandad’s gone and Dad’s…” He hesitated. “Why did you ask him to leave?”
Jane looked out of the window, as if the answer lay in the distance. It was a question she asked herself repeatedly.
“I was hurt and angry.”
“That ‘thing’ happened ages ago, before you were married.”
“He should have told me.”
“He didn’t know.” Toby’s voice rose and broke slightly. Jane reached her hand across the sink to touch his but he shied away.
“Do you miss him?” she asked.
Toby didn’t answer.
“I miss him dreadfully,” she said.
Toby snorted derisively. “It’s your fault: you’ve got to sort it out.”
“I’m trying.” Jane knew how pathetic she sounded.
“Try harder.” As Toby ran out of the kitchen, he knocked two chairs over and didn’t stop to pick them up.
Jane righted the chairs and sat down at the table. Pooter nudged her leg and rested his head on her knee. Absently she stroked behind his ears. He whined slightly and looked at her with kindly brown eyes. At least someone loves me, she thought. He nudged her firmly; all he wanted was an evening walk. Rising stiffly to her feet, she took her coat from a peg on the wall and headed out into the rain.
15
Picking Up the Pieces
MONDAY 27TH OCTOBER 2008
Looking into the mirror, Blaze saw a white-faced woman with deep lines around her eyes. This, she thought, is what a “banker” looks like. She and her ilk had become objects of hate and vilification; their effigies were being burned on the streets and caricatures disembowelled and bloodied in newspaper cartoons. It was hardly surprising. Contagion had spread from the city to the countryside; from Iceland to Asia. Bailouts seemed to be given to large financial institutions rather than cash-strapped individuals. The economy was shrinking; the pound was falling further. Few seemed safe. Even the great Swiss banks UBS and Credit Suisse needed help. Hong Kong stocks were crashing; Russia, South Africa, Pakistan and Argentina were unable to raise money. But no one was prepared to take responsibility for the crash, nor were there any apparent consequences for those in the world of finance. Small investors were losing their houses and savings, while leading financiers boarded private planes bound for exclusive estates to conduct secret conversations.
Tying her hair back into a ponytail, Blaze put more foundation on her scar and applied a dab of colour to her pale lips. Imagining an increasingly angry mob demanding retribution on Wapping’s streets, she changed into jeans and a T-shirt. She didn’t blame anyone for resenting her privileges, particularly when her own fortune was riding the rapids of the financial turmoil with relative ease. Her portfolio had been liquid and largely unaffected by the collapse in share prices. With many stocks now undervalued, she had the opportunity to buy at rock-bottom rates. Banks were unlikely to lend; and for those, like her, with reserves of cash, it was a buyers’ market. Some companies’ value had plummeted; others, with strong underlying assets, would recover. If Blaze got the timing right, she’d make a fortune. Her only issue was what to buy.
She took the Tube and stopped at the gym on her way to the office. The place, normally full of City types, was empty. The attendant handed over a towel an
d a bottle of water.
“Bloody ghost town. Most of the businesses round here have gone under,” he said.
As she ran on the treadmill, she imagined the deathly quiet of Sleet’s offices and, for the first time, allowed herself to feel a frisson of superiority; let him laugh at and mock her now. All her predictions had come good.
At 7:20 a.m., Kerkyra Capital’s reception area was deserted. An unknown security guard checked her pass and let her through. Neither her PA nor TiLing was there to meet her. Blaze took the lift to the seventeenth floor. The doors opened and she gasped. The floors were littered with empty champagne bottles and, in the centre of the office, there was a huge paddling pool full to the brim with something that looked like Vaseline. Cigarettes were stubbed out on carpets, walls and furniture. Desks were smeared with the residue of white powder. Empty glasses were strewn across tables. There was an eerie silence, broken only by the ticking of falling stocks shown in red on the huge television screens. A government minister was being interviewed on breakfast news: “We will never appreciate how close we came to a collapse of the banking system.” On the monitors, stocks and currencies fluctuated as investors shifted their investments between markets. Blaze looked up at a sea of red figures and saw that the Far Eastern prices were tumbling.
Hearing a noise behind her, she turned to see a young man, tie loosely around his neck, suit dishevelled, playing a computer game. He looked familiar but she couldn’t immediately place him; he had her hair colour and, as he looked up, she saw a rough-hewn version of her brother’s face and realised it was her nephew.
“I know who you are,” Ambrose said. “I’ve seen you around.”
“What are you doing here?” Blaze asked, confused.
“I’m Sir Tom’s assistant,” Ambrose puffed with pride. “Didn’t you come to the party? It was epic, four days non-stop.” He hesitated and laughed. “Come to think of it, you weren’t invited.”
“Why aren’t you at school?”
“Sir Tom says school’s a waste of time.”
“He went to school,” Blaze pointed out.
“Sir Tom says—”
Blaze had heard enough. Ignoring him, she walked up the corridor and into the Chairman’s office, a cavernous room with large picture windows on three sides. At the far end, sitting behind a huge desk, Sleet was looking at a computer screen. Glimpsing Blaze, he raised a hand but didn’t bother looking up.
“Scott, I presume,” he said. “Why haven’t I made that joke before?”
“What the hell’s going on?”
“I had a little celebration,” he said, tapping his keyboard. “Thanks to you, I made an absolute killing—I’m up 34 per cent and rising. I’ve been buying all sorts of bargains at rock-bottom prices and selling the dogs that won’t bark.”
“What?” Blaze couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
“The funny thing is, your presentation made sense. I couldn’t say that out loud or people would have taken their money out of the Kerkyra funds, but I mirrored your portfolio exactly. On the day of the crash, I shorted some bank stocks, building societies, CDOs. The more the market went down, the more cash I made.”
“So you deliberately misled our clients while privately following my advice?”
“I didn’t want to risk losing their fees, did I?”
“That’s outrageous.”
“It’s called business: I was hedging my bets. If you’d been wrong, I’d have made money on fees on their portfolios. Win-win, baby.”
Blaze tried to keep her voice level. “Do you have any scruples at all?”
“Let me think about that for two seconds—one, two, no.” He laughed loudly and leaned back in his chair. “Boy!” he called. “Piece of scum?” Ambrose came hurrying through the door. “Have you said hello to Aunty Blaze?”
Ambrose turned red.
“Why do you let him address you like that?” Blaze asked her nephew.
He didn’t reply.
“Get me a coffee. Fucking run and get me a coffee,” Sleet shouted at the young man. Ambrose turned and ran up the corridor.
“Why humiliate someone like that?” Blaze’s face burned with indignation.
“Don’t you remember how old we were when you did the same to me?” Sleet grimaced. “I can’t tell you how sweet revenge feels.”
Blaze looked at him. “That was different.”
“How is she?”
“Who?” Blaze wondered if Sleet had gone mad.
“Anastasia.”
Blaze could hardly believe it. The living Anastasia had been containable, a figure in a far-off country, but in death she was all-pervading, affecting every area of Blaze’s life.
“She died.”
“Died? What do you mean?” Sleet rose from his chair.
“Dengue fever.”
“No!” Sleet advanced towards her, his arms waving.
Blaze, alarmed, took a step backwards. “I didn’t know you kept in touch.”
“I thought about her every day.” Sleet’s shoulders slumped and his bottom lip quivered. The tip of his small, bulbous nose had turned red. “Leave, now.” He pointed towards the door.
Blaze walked across the trading floor. Reaching her office, she stepped gingerly over two used condoms and swept several cigarette stubs off her keyboard. Hoping to find calm and clarity in market indices, she turned on her computer.
“Blaze?” TiLing stood in the doorway. “I tried to warn you but your work mobile was switched off.”
“Were you part of all this?” Blaze looked at the detritus on the floor.
TiLing shook her head. “I wasn’t invited.”
“Come in and sit down, if you can find anywhere.” Blaze couldn’t keep the weariness from her voice.
Carefully removing two pieces of pie and a glass from a chair, TiLing did as asked.
“I’m finished here.” Blaze gestured around her office.
“Things are getting better. Congress has guaranteed $700 billion of toxic debt. The British government is introducing packages worth £500 billion,” TiLing said. “We’ll clean up this room and get back to normal.”
Blaze was staggered by her colleague’s naivety. “The FTSE has just had its biggest ever fall, down 21 per cent. The Dow’s had its worst week in history. Iceland’s three largest banks have collapsed. Goldman’s and Morgan Stanley have had to change their status just to stop the flow of redemptions.”
“The Americans will never let the global financial systems collapse. I hear they’re pumping money into the European market.” TiLing stood her ground.
“They feel responsible—for now. But the Fed can’t maintain this course politically.”
“It’s not in America’s interest to let the world burn.”
“They’ll save a handful of banks and their hundred best companies; the rest will be hung out to dry.”
TiLing shook her head. “It’s a blip.”
Blaze looked at her, dumbfounded. “How can you be so sure?”
“I read history at university; everything is cyclical.”
Blaze didn’t answer immediately, but rearranged the pencils on her table into neat lines. “It’s not just the crash, TiLing. I’ve had enough.”
“Is this about your father?” TiLing asked. “My mum died last year and the whole family went a bit mad.” She fought back tears, remembering her mother.
“I’m sorry, you should have told me.” Blaze had no idea about the personal life of her closest associate.
“I did and you gave me a week’s compassionate leave.”
“I did?” Blaze vaguely recalled a feeling of irritation when TiLing wasn’t around.
TiLing wondered if Blaze knew that she lived with her father and extended family in a small flat in London’s Chinatown. That her elderly parent worked in a dim
sum bar although his arthritis was putting his job in jeopardy. TiLing’s salary paid for three younger brothers’ fees at university or business school. One day, hopefully not too far off, her siblings would repay her investment in their future, but for now she desperately needed Blaze to carry on. Standing up, she took a folder from her briefcase and put it in front of her superior. “I’ve come up with a plan, a way for us to get out of here and start again.” TiLing ran around the desk so she was beside Blaze. “I’ve got it all worked out. We’ll start a hedge fund, build on your extraordinary reputation. People are longing to invest their money with you.”
“It’s not that simple,” Blaze said.
“It is! All we need is a name, a few desks, an attitude and an area of specialisation. We’ll need some private equity and then we’re off.”
Blaze hesitated. “For the first time, I’m having doubts about staying in finance. This used to be fun, making money for its own sake, but now I’ve seen the destruction, the damage caused by this mayhem, I don’t think I can do it again,” she said, thinking of Kitto.
“You are a conviction investor. You’ve been proved right,” TiLing urged, trying to keep her voice level. “I have a line of hopefuls waiting to invest with you; there’s £400 million on the table.”
Blaze got up and went over to the window. “I have a young woman staying with me, the daughter of a friend. The other day she suggested we did something together. I couldn’t think of a single thing to do in London, a place I’ve lived for most of my adult life. In the end I took her to the Tate because we’d had an office party there last year.” She turned back to her colleague. “How old are you, TiLing?”
“Thirty-one.” TiLing paused. “Next birthday.”
Blaze laughed. “So young.”
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