Like all the great questions in life, there is no right answer, at least as far as they’re concerned. But just to cause further consternation, I invite all those who’ve changed to red shirts to go off with Charles Butler – who they didn’t even know was coming – for a surprise outing.
When we get back for dinner, they still haven’t made it back from whatever it was they were doing, and there are gaps in the dining room where the reds would have been. The wine flows, around midnight girls appear – don’t ask me who organised them – and the evening ends in a relaxed, hedonistic atmosphere of marijuana smoke and the sound of mating tree frogs coming from the gardens around the resort. It certainly sounds like tree frogs.
The next morning I’m walking from my bungalow to the breakfast room and spot a few of my guys peering at me from around the corners of buildings and palm trees. Today is a green-shirt day, but I’m wearing yellow. Mobiles and Blackberries are out, and by the time I reach the breakfast room, a third of them are in yellow.
I finish breakfast and we all head over to the conference room. On my way, I pop into the men’s room, slip out of my yellow shirt and put the green one on. By the time I appear on the podium, nearly half are wearing yellow, and there’s a groan as they see me, but I make a joke of it and send the yellows off with Charles for a separate group break-out session.
This leaves me with less than half of the original complement. I step forward to the microphone and very obviously ditch my prepared speech.
‘Gentlemen.’ Naturally, these being the most senior members of the firm, there are no women present. ‘Investment banking is all about connecting talent with capital.’ I smile self-deprecatingly. ‘A bit like hiring hookers.’ They look around at each other, not wanting to go first, but then decide it’s safe and dutifully laugh on cue. ‘Sadly in these difficult times, our capital is constrained by market forces, by difficult trading conditions and by increasingly tight regulatory oversight. So there’s not enough to go around, just as there isn’t going to be enough in the bonus pool either.’ Now I’ve really got their attention. One mention of the B word and every banker within a mile stops what he’s doing and pays attention. ‘But the good news is that for all of you sitting here now – ’ at this point I finger the cloth of my green coloured Grossbank Hawaiian shirt ‘ – for those who showed they can stick with the programme, not go off-piste, brown-nosing to please the boss, there will be at least a bonus close to last year’s level.’
Strangely, where there should be disappointment at a cut in the bonus, there’s relief. An almost audible sigh. That shows how bad the markets really are. And how out of touch I’ve become.
‘That’s the good news. The bad news is that your colleagues who went off for a separate break-out session with Charles have either been fired or told they’re getting what used to be called a doughnut – a zero bonus. In fairness, those who have not been fired straight away are getting ninety days to prove what they can do. I expect them to be tigers when they get back to London.’ I glance at my watch. ‘Which some of them from yesterday’s session will be doing shortly when their flights touch down. It may seem cruel, even arbitrary, but it’s quick, it saves a lot of time, and I think I’ve sorted the men from the boys. Thank you.’
I step down and wait. For a moment there’s silence. Then slow applause from one or two of the audience. At first I think it’s going to be a slow handclap, but it speeds up. They’ve survived. They didn’t even realise they were at risk, and now it’s already over. And the other guys are toast, not them. They had no idea there was even going to be a cull. Other firms have been firing left and right, but not Grossbank. Normally everyone knows and it lasts for weeks of uncertainty, backstabbing and politicking, but now it’s over in one fell swoop. Like leaving the dentist’s surgery before you even know you’ve been there. The applause picks up and before I know it they’re actually cheering me for not firing them and for reducing their bonus to below last year’s level. Oh, my beloved sheeple. But I suppose in their position I’d do the same. Though not for much longer.
‘DAVE, HOW could you do this?’
I’m back in London, sitting in my office, and strangely enough Paul and Two Livers do have time for me all of a sudden.
‘You’ve fired some of our best people. Most of them in fact. And you did it so … randomly. Do you know what you’ve done to the business?’ Paul is visibly incensed. He built up the markets side of the business, targeting, poaching and growing the talent we needed to expand until we were a top-three firm in everything we did. It was his creation.
‘What I’ve done is cut our overhead dramatically. We’ve lost a lot of senior people, which gives a big opportunity to their number two’s, who incidentally are a lot cheaper, and a lot of others we haven’t lost, but unless they raise their game they won’t get paid this year. So they’re motivated. Everyone’s motivated. We haven’t tinkered around the edges and started off by just firing a few graduate trainees and cutting back on business class travel, the way other firms have. They’ll suffer death by a thousand cuts, one step at a time, until eventually, months down the road, when they’re drowning in red ink and may even be terminally ill, they’ll finally do what we’ve just done. And you know what? I feel as if I’ve taken a half-dead corpse, wired it up to some electrodes and jolted it back to life. The buzz out there on the floor this morning is amazing. It feels great.’
‘It feels desperate.’
‘That’s what I said. It feels great.’
‘I guess that’s one opinion.’ It’s Two Livers, and she won’t even look at me as she talks. I’m actually starting to get used to people not looking at me now when they talk to me. Much more of this and I’ll start to get freaked out by eye contact.
‘Dave, why didn’t you at least consult with somebody before just doing this?’
‘Consult with whom? Where were you? Sulking in London? Plotting? Don’t bother to tell me. I’m not interested. Anyway, it’s the latest management theory – managing through chaos.’ I point to a row of management books on the shelf behind my desk. All pristine, none of them actually opened, but at least I own them. Two Livers and Paul both look gratifyingly gobsmacked. Or I think that’s how they’re looking. Never underestimate the boss. And don’t ever be tempted to find out how it is he got there. I smile, friendly, unthreatening, my fresh-faced boy-next-door smile.
‘Guys, you will both be very well paid this year.’
At this Two Livers does make eye contact, and it’s a vicious ‘I’d bloody better get paid’ that appears in a thought bubble over her head. I nod in acknowledgement of her unpaid claim. I haven’t forgotten.
‘Very well paid indeed. Cuts are not for people like us. We lead by example. We inspire the troops to want to be up here with us, and the best way to do that is to reward ourselves in line with our contribution. Even in hard times. In fact, especially in hard times. Am I right, or am I right?’
I have a feeling I am right, but neither of them wants to acknowledge it. Or maybe they have views on what my pay might be if it were in line with my contribution. But fear can be as great a motivator as greed, and after the slaughter in Mauritius there’s a lot of it about. Certainly enough to keep these two quiet. For now.
I’M GOING to a dinner party in Chiswick. I normally avoid dinner parties like the plague. The whole Chelsea set use the dinner party as a form of competitive sport – ‘Come to dinner, darling, so you can admire my latest art, new kitchen, handwoven rugs skilfully acquired from Nerdistan or even, God forbid, the fucking extension on the back of the fucking house.’ As if I give a shit.
The men you meet at dinner parties are bad enough – tired, shallow, socially competitive in ways I can’t relate to – but at least I’m used to them, and these days a lot of them work for me – but their wives are truly horrible. All they talk about is kids – their own kids, because they have no real interest in anyone else’s except as a way of benchmarking how well their own are doing – and their wond
erful, amazing houses.
Houses bore me. My flat in Whitehall Court has everything I need, with minimal effort, and I can close the door and disappear any time I want to. Which might come in handy one of these days.
As for kids, I have little enough interest in my own daughter, though I do buy her lots of presents, and I’m sure we’ll get closer when she’s older – yes, honestly – but my interest in other people’s children is so far below zero as to be off the scale. This is heresy to the pushy parent whose universe centres on little Harry or darling Olivia, but it’s true. I really don’t think I’m any different from any other guy who sits patiently wondering what on earth he’s doing wasting a precious evening listening to them drone on about how year three have started ballet and that means they can’t make it to tennis classes any more, and how they’ve started riding lessons at their cottage in the country, and the children so look forward to packing up all their shit every Friday night and fucking off with all the other middle-class families piling into the traffic jams on the M4 to spend the weekend having an authentic rural experience.
And then there are the medical conditions they all have. Every middle-class child these days is suffering from one of those fashionable disorders that no one had ever heard of when I was a kid. If they don’t have a real one, then they suffer from AMCD – Acute Middle-Class Disorder – which is the new, very latest designer condition invented by private doctors for the sake of pushy, obsessive mothers who need to account for any form of even mild underachievement on the part of their beloved children, which in modern parlance means anything other than exceptional overachievement.
In fairness to boring middle-class mothers at dinner parties, it’s not as if they actually do anything that they could talk about. They don’t have jobs, because they live off their husbands in their capacity as ‘full-time mums’. But being a full-time mum Chelsea-style means outsourcing the housework to a cleaner, the children to a nanny, and just keeping the retail therapy and the endless, useless lunches, beauty treatments, sessions with the tennis coach or personal trainer for themselves. They don’t work, clean, cook or sew. They just spend. For Christ’s sake, what are these women for? They are female drones.
If they only realised it, most of them have unwittingly outsourced what should go on in the bedroom to their husbands’ attractive, younger female colleagues, or their P.As, or the escorts they use on business trips overseas or even in London when they are feeling particularly bored or neglected.
And why shouldn’t they? These women must have been sexy once. Presumably they even used to have opinions and be able to talk about stuff. But once they got their man their brains shrank and they morphed into … what? No wild sex in the hallway, tearing each others’ clothes off, no sending him off to work in the morning with a mile-wide smile on his face, no blow jobs in a lay-by at the side of the road on the way to see his parents, in fact no blow jobs at all, except maybe on his birthday or when he shrugs off a particularly extravagant item of credit card abuse at Harrods or Harvey Nics.
And why do the guys put up with it? Well, the divorce law of course. I’ve been through it myself, so believe me, I know. It’s surely the ultimate feminist triumph in the quest to dominate and emasculate mankind. Once the wife pops a couple of sprogs, she’s got him. They may be hugely expensive to keep, but Chelsea wives are even more expensive to get rid of. And so their useless lives go on. Indulgence and gossip and pampering and spending. They’re even more useless than bankers, although unlike bankers the odd one is definitely jumpable.
But enough ranting. Tonight’s going to be different. That’s not just me being optimistic. I’ve been promised an interesting evening by my host, whom I trust implicitly. Tonight I’m going to dinner with the Silver Fox, and I’m actually looking forward to it. It’s another part of my exit strategy.
THE SILVER Fox is concerned about telling my story. This is good, because he’s my PR adviser and it’s what I pay him for. But it’s bad, because the fact that he’s concerned worries me. What’s wrong with the Dave Hart story as it is, and why should I go to any special lengths to tell it?
‘Get your version in first,’ he tells me when we speak about it on the phone.
‘But why? Who’s interested? And why should I care?’
‘Dave, you need a book. A big, fat hardback book by a well-known biographer, where you tell your story your way – our way – and pre-empt anyone who may be lurking in the wings, waiting to bring you down.’
Bring me down? This really freaks me out. Why would anyone want to bring me down? And how could they?
‘Have you heard anything? What have you picked up?’
‘Nothing specific …’
‘Nothing specific? Well, what non-specific things should I know about?’
‘Nothing to do with you, Dave. But right now, with the economic crisis and the fallout from the financial markets, bankers aren’t exactly the flavour of the month. Most firms – most senior individuals – are keeping their heads down. Politicians, the Whitehall machine, the Bank of England: they’re all out there looking for targets. Don’t be a target, Dave. Part of the way we deal with this is to get your story out there first, and tell it our own way. That’s why I want you to meet an old friend of mine, Kim Clark.’
‘Kim Clark? Do you mean the Kim Clark?’
He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t need to. Even I’ve heard of Kim Clark. She’s in her mid thirties, beautiful, intelligent, socially dazzling, and she’s written a dozen or more bestselling biographies of famous people. Not bankers, but really famous people – Oscar-winning actors, rock stars, presidents and prime ministers – people that everyone’s heard of. Her latest book is called ‘Live Now, Pay Later’, and the title could be a metaphor for my approach to life. In fact it’s a biography of a pop star, the lead singer in GoodHead, the trendy girl band of the moment.
‘So Kim Clark would write my life story?’
‘Yes. Obviously we’d need to tone it down a bit.’
‘Obviously.’
‘Quite a lot in fact.’
‘Sure.’
‘And you’d have to be careful what you said to her.’
‘Definitely. I always am.’
‘What did you say?’
‘Well … mostly.’
So the Silver Fox explains that he’d first like me to meet Kim without her knowing the real agenda, see how we gel and whether I spark her interest, and then take things from there – softly, softly and all that.
Which is why I’m going to dinner, and why, instead of expecting to be bored, I feel as if I’m on trial, which in turn gives me a curious buzz.
THE SILVER Fox has a large Edwardian house which stands back from the road and manages to look imposing in a nicely understated way. His butler lets me in – hired for the evening or permanent, I really can’t tell – and I barely have time to glance at the Francis Bacon in the hallway before my host appears and I hand over a magnum of ’86 Mouton Rothschild.
‘Dave, you shouldn’t have.’
He’s right. It’s a hopelessly extravagant gift for a guest at any dinner party to present to his host, and many would see it as going overboard, but luckily the bank’s paying, so I really couldn’t care less.
‘I didn’t. It was the shareholders. They insisted.’
He slaps me on the back. ‘Then we’ll toast them later. Now come in and let me introduce you to people.’
‘People’ turn out to be his twenty-five-year-old squeeze of the moment – and yes, she’s really only twenty-five – who works for Sotheby’s in the jewellery department, a television newsreader called Toby something – a monochrome homunculus in his early forties, whom I instantly forget – and Toby’s girlfriend, Clarissa, a brunette in her late twenties, who plays the cello for the London Symphony Orchestra and equally instantly sparks my interest. I’ve always had a thing about female cellists, possibly something to do with the way they sit. And finally there’s the principal attraction of the evening, for
me anyway, standing alone at one end of the drawing room, sipping champagne and gazing at the Silver Fox’s well-stocked bookshelves.
Kim is wearing a pale purple cashmere poncho-type pullover, which shows her bare midriff and arms and gives me a tantalising glimpse of her naked sides beneath her top as she reaches up for a book, and cream-coloured, tight bell-bottomed trousers, all I believe by Chanel. She appears to be braless, though it could just be a very clever natural effect created by an exceptional lingerie designer. Either way I’m impressed and I want her. Never have I so envied a cashmere sweater. I’d checked her out on Google Images, but nothing had prepared me for the reality. No wonder guys open up to her.
‘Kim, I’d like to introduce you to one of my closest friends, Dave Hart …’ The Silver Fox smoothes his way through the intros, leaving everyone with a pleasantly relaxed, warm glow. He’s a player, a mover and shaker with the best Rolodex in town, and yet here he is, the solicitous host, taking care of us, making sure we’re having a good time, and we feel flattered and privileged. Which we are. And if he ever needs a favour, we’ll help him. Or, in my case, pay his fees. Because we’re all friends. It really is an art, and he’s a past master.
His house is impeccably tasteful and stylish in an anonymous way. The art is wonderful, the décor superb, the furniture classic and elegant, the books fascinating, yet it could all belong to anyone. Nowhere is there a picture of him, or his family or his loved ones. It’s as if he’s as anonymous and self-effacing at home as he is in his work, the puppet master pulling the strings beyond the view of the audience.
When we sit down to dinner I find I’m strategically opposite Kim. I watch her lifting her fork to her mouth, sipping wine, bringing her napkin up to her ever-so slightly pouting, perfect lips, and I try to imagine her lying next to me in bed, turning to me with half-closed eyes and purring, ‘Dave, you’re a sex god.’
When she speaks to me, I almost jump.
Dave Hart Omnibus II Page 13