‘Well done. Yes, we would. Want to switch?’
‘Yes,’ she decided. ‘Fraser’s Hill is really overpriced.’
‘Broker’s commission will knock your profit down, of course …’
G. W. made a tent with his fingertips and watched her indulgently.
‘Shall we stay where we are, then?’
‘It’s your money, my dear.’
‘OK, let’s stay.’ Cathy looked more happy than she had at any time in the months since she had first entered the Migatto building. G. W. thought it odd that a young girl should bloom because she was making money, and only look wretched if she were wined, dined and paid compliments, but in the weeks that followed there was no denying the lightness of her step and the smile on her lips, the way the sheen on her hair returned and her complexion became ripe olive instead of a dull yellow, the fact that she grew bored with her demure print dresses and bought a bright-red wool frock instead. Little by little he introduced her to other markets – commodities, currencies and metals – and she almost always made a profit, except when she decided on a property company which immediately went bust.
‘Could you have told me it was going to do that?’ she asked G. W.
‘Yes, my dear, I could. I got a whisper at the bar in the Athenaeum last week. That’ll be a problem for you, of course. It’s not only who you know that’s important in the City, it’s what you know, who tells you, how close they are to the action and how up-to-date the information is. Never forget, money is only information in motion. I’ve made thousands over lunch when things were moving fast. You, my dear, can’t stand at the bar at the Athenaeum,’ he said in tones of gentle regret. Then he looked at the gold watch which lived in his waistcoat pocket, its thick Georgian chain festooned across his stomach. ‘Now where shall we go for lunch?’
Miss Finch was by now in a permanent, hostile sulk.
‘She thinks I’m gambling my money away,’ Cathy told G. W. as she helped him into his car as they returned from lunch. ‘She keeps saying “a penny saved is a penny earned” and telling me about her pension.’
‘Typical female attitude. Can’t see beyond the end of the housekeeping money. Vision! Imagination! Courage! That’s the stuff millionaires are made of!’
This seemed the perfect moment to show her hand. ‘G. W., will you help me?’ He beamed at her with satisfaction.
‘What with, my dear?’
‘To leave you?’
‘Ah, women – they always leave me in the end,’ he joked.
‘I’m sick of being a secretary. I desperately need to make money, G. W., so I can apply for custody of my son. I need a real job, a career.’
His watery eyes looked startled. ‘What – you mean, a career in the City?’
‘Yes.’ Cathy smiled hopefully.
‘Good heavens. Well, why not? A few women have done it. But why ask me? Why not ask Lord Shrewton?’
‘Of course I could, and he’d probably find me something, but he’d be doing it out of kindness and feeling guilty and because it would be embarrassing for him to have to refuse me. And everyone would resent me, and I’d never get promoted on my own merit because they’d think I was just the boss’s daughter-in-law.’
‘I see you’ve given it some thought. Well now, let’s see. You’re quick-thinking, good with numbers, cool in a crisis – maybe they should try you down in Metals. These young metal traders make a pile if they’re any good. But it’s a gift, having the right temperament. You’ll soon find out if you aren’t any good. But if you want quick money, the Metal Exchange is the place.’ He appraised her thoughtfully, getting accustomed to the idea that she was serious. ‘I’ll have word with Henry Rose who runs the dealing room tomorrow.’
They walked back to their office around the handsome sweep of Finsbury Circus, enjoying the summer sunshine. In the little white-painted bandstand in the gardens a brass ensemble was playing a cheerful medley of tunes from The Mikado. For the first time in a very long while, Cathy felt happy.
As usual after lunch, G. W. was pleasantly drunk but not quite so far gone that he needed help up the stairs. He waved his cigar at the portrait of Samuel Migatto. ‘He never had a pension, did he? In his day, you could buy your gold and never know if you’d lose it to the Spanish Armada or the Barbary pirates the next week!’ His free hand grabbed inaccurately at the banister rail.
‘Make no mistake, my girl. If it weren’t for Jewish bankers, there’d be no English history to learn!’ He paused for breath on the second-floor landing. ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie was seen off by a British army paid by a Migatto loan. Napoleon cost this country 400 million pounds, most of it found right here in the City by Jews and Quakers!’
With a sigh of relief G. W. reached the top floor and headed for his office. Cathy opened the door and helped him take off his jacket. ‘Money’s nothing to do with housekeeping and your pension. If you’d been taught history properly, dear girl, you’d have realized that. Money’s about power and freedom and the future.’ His eyelids closed blissfully and in a few seconds he was asleep. Cathy took off his shoes and tiptoed back to her office to while away the time until 4.30, when she would make G. W. his tea and call his chauffeur to take him home.
The next day she arrived at the Migatto building to find Miss Finch bustling in and out of G. W.’s office.
‘It’s all over,’ she announced, ‘he died at home last night. Merciful release. You’re to help me clear the room and then you’ll be working downstairs for young Mr Migatto and Mr Mainwaring.’
Sadly, Cathy collected her belongings from her desk, and packed the small collection of Mr Gibson-Wright’s personal things into a crate ready to be taken away by his family. She felt sad again, not only because she had lost the amiable, kind-hearted old man who she had hoped would be her mentor, but because she knew that without him it would be that much more difficult to break out from behind her typewriter.
Mr Migatto, a fifteenth-generation descendant of Samuel, was a Conservative Member of Parliament who very seldom appeared in the office. Mr Mainwaring was bald and self-important. He patted her bottom on every possible occasion and Cathy started opening doors for herself whenever she could, to avoid giving him an excuse to get close enough to touch her.
Like G. W., Mr Mainwaring did very little work. He also took her to lunch.
‘My wife and I have led separate lives for some years,’ he announced on the first occasion.
‘My position involves a considerable amount of entertaining,’ he said the second time. ‘Do you go out much at all, in the evening?’
‘Quite a lot.’ This was a lie, told to repel the man. Since Rupert had regretfully drifted away, Cathy seldom went out except to keep Monty company on evenings when Rick was out raising hell with Cy.
‘The gay divorcee, eh?’ She moved her knee just in time to avoid his hand. Vengefully, Cathy ordered the most expensive dish on the menu. He took this as a sign of encouragement.
‘I’ll be off to Brussels on Thursday,’ he said, during their third lunch. ‘Might stay over the weekend. Nice trip – perhaps you’d care to come?’
‘No, thank you,’ said Cathy.
‘I suppose you think that because you were once married to Lord Shrewton’s heir, you can behave how you please.’ He glared at her through his heavy spectacles.
‘I don’t see what my marriage has to do with it,’ she said. ‘Surely, I can behave how I please whoever I am?’
‘If I were you, I wouldn’t rely too heavily on your connection with your former husband’s family. In my experience such connections mean very little.’
Cathy sipped her wine and tried to think of a way of making Mr Mainwaring leave her alone without making him into an implacable enemy. She wanted very much to tip her bowl of moules marinière down his detestable shirt-front, but restrained the impulse, reminding herself that she intended, somehow or another, to be his equal around a boardroom table one day and it would be foolish to earn his hostility now by humiliating him
in public. Already the men at the next table had stopped talking about the prospects for a Conservative victory in the imminent general election and were making small talk while they waited for the confrontation between her and her attacker.
‘Tell me something,’ she turned the wine bottle round and looked at the label, ‘why did you choose this? ’62 was the worst year they had since the war. And St Eustache is always on the thin side – that’s why it’s so cheap.’
Mr Mainwaring looked thunderous. ‘You’ll find it doesn’t pay to get clever with me, young lady. What are you, one of those women’s libbers? Burned your bra, have you?’
There was a splutter of smothered laughter from the next table. ‘Take care, old boy, this animal bites!’ advised a bibulous voice. Its owner was a tall plump man with a young face belied by his sober grey suit and shirt with wide blue stripes. From the many hours she had spent demurely taking minutes in Migatto’s boardroom, Cathy recognized him as Henry Rose, a junior director of the firm in the Group which traded in metals and oil, and the man to whom G. W. had promised to speak about a job for her.
Giving Cathy an amiable wink, Rose whistled up a waiter and had the two tables amalgamated, putting an end to the persecution of Cathy for the rest of lunch. They split the bill four ways and Mr Mainwaring slunk away to an appointment which Cathy knew was fictitious, leaving Henry to walk back with her through the narrow City streets.
‘Good line, that, about St Eustache. Must remember that. How do you come to know so much about wine?’
‘My father taught me.’
‘Lucky girl. You must teach me, all I know is how to drink it. You used to work for old G. W. on the top floor, didn’t you? Terrible shame – we shall all miss him.’
It’s now or never, Cathy told herself. ‘I’ll miss him, too. As a matter of fact, he promised me he was going to come and see you about me, but I don’t suppose he had the chance before he died.’
‘Oh? Tell me more.’ The expression on his face was frank and friendly. Cathy noticed that he was happy to let her walk on the outside of the pavement, a technical discourtesy to a lady which none of the older men would have permitted themselves. Somehow it made her feel more comfortable. She felt that she was at last out of Lady Davina’s sham world where men ruled and women manipulated.
Cathy took a deep breath. ‘I’d like to try my luck on the Metal Exchange,’ she told him as they approached Migatto’s pillared entrance.
He stopped and looked at her in silence for a few moments. ‘There’s never been a woman on the Metal Exchange before,’ he said lightly, ‘but why not? It’s a pretty tough place – do you think you’re up to it?’
‘Of course I do, or I wouldn’t have asked you.’ Damn, Cathy thought, now I’ve blown it. Why couldn’t I have been more tactful? But he did not seem offended.
‘Tell me,’ he looked her carefully up and down without a hint of lechery, ‘were you listening to my conversation in that restaurant while Mainwaring was making an ass of himself?’
Cathy nodded. ‘You were talking about the election and you said that if Harold Wilson wasn’t thrown out, inflation would hit the sky and the country would be totally washed up.’
He threw back his head and laughed, an uninhibited bellow of jocularity which echoed from the curved façade of Finsbury Circus. ‘You didn’t miss much, did you?’
‘I couldn’t help …’ began Cathy awkwardly as they entered the building and headed for the staircase.
‘Don’t apologize, that’s just what I hoped. You’ve got the right ear, and the ability to concentrate on two things at once. At least two things at once. That’s excellent. The ability to do that’s the first thing you need to survive on the Metal Exchange. And you gotta be loud, sharp, quick and confident, good with figures …’ His voice had slight Cockney nuances, and from other details of his manner and clothing, which for English people amount to an encoded system of class recognition, Cathy placed him socially higher than the barrow boys G. W. spoke about but definitely not from the upper classes, although his gold signet ring and solid gold cufflinks indicated his aspirations.
They paused on the first floor by the double doors to Migatto’s dealing-room. Inside she could hear the cacophony of fifty men shouting numbers into telephones.
‘And you’ve got to be super-cool in that mad-house, and that’s it, that’s all you need.’ Henry Rose pushed the dealing-room door open a few inches to let her hear the frantic voices and clatter of activity. ‘You don’t need breeding or education on the London Metal Exchange. Most of’em burn out before they’re thirty. But there’s no rule says you have to be wearing trousers before you go on the floor. Anyone who can do that job, can have it – but if you can’t cut it, I’ll fire you so fast you won’t touch the sides on the way out. What d’you think? Still interested?’
‘You’re not trying very hard to discourage me.’ Cathy tried not to smile too widely, but it was difficult. Henry Rose was appealingly direct. She liked his cynicism, his energy and the fact that he was looking her over in a totally different way to the way any man had appraised her before. She felt herself standing straighter as she talked to him, and sensed the door to her future opening wide.
‘Well you’ve got the primary requirements, including brass bloody nerve,’ he told her bluntly. ‘Mainwaring won’t let you out of his sweaty hands so easily, and he outranks me, as it were, so you’ll have to have a word with that ex-father-in-law of yours, get him to lean on the old creep from a great height.’
He was correct. Mr Mainwaring protested in the nastiest terms.
‘You girls today, you’ll chase anything in trousers. Certainly not. I won’t allow it. A girl on the Metal Exchange – ridiculous. Oh, there are a few that’ve tried it, not a nice sort of girl at all. I know you’re just dying to get down there with all those boys and have a good time, aren’t you? It’s out of the question, my dear. You’ll thank me one day.’
So Cathy spoke to Lord Shrewton at Coseley that weekend.
‘Young Rose has already had a word with me,’ he told her, his pale eyes behind their spectacles glinting with approval. ‘One of his better ideas, if you ask me.’ This was his idea of a witticism. Lord Shrewton had many fine qualities, but his sense of humour was vestigial.
‘Mr Mainwaring says it’s out of the question,’ Cathy told him.
‘It’s none of Mr Mainwaring’s business, is it?’ Lord Shrewton stood with his back to the drawing-room fire, enjoying the heat. ‘If Rose has offered you a job you can take it, can’t you?’
The next week Henry Rose took her up to Whittington Avenue and into the Metal Exchange building, to the Visitors’Gallery. They looked down on a square, pillared room with a grimy skylight above a circle of worn, red leather benches which was pierced by four gangways.
‘That’s the Ring,’ he explained. ‘Thirty-six places, one for a dealer from each of the member firms. We trade the base metals – copper, tin, lead, zinc, silver, aluminium, and nickel. Each metal is traded for five minutes at a time. You can tell which metal is being traded by the symbol on the board up there.’ He pointed to a display of signs above the calendar on the wall opposite them. ‘The mid-day session is just starting.’
With a quiet bustle the room began to fill up with men – young men, mostly, wearing light-grey suits or dark-grey suits. Some had wide ties, some had narrow ties. Some had long hair, one or two were balding. Most of them had small notebooks, and all had an air of intense concentration.
Some of the men took seats around the Ring, the others manned the telephones against the walls, and a large proportion of them stood behind the seats. There was a lively buzz of conversation which died away the instant the crescent moon symbol on the signboard glowed with a red light.
There was intense activity at the telephones, and the men standing at the back of the chairs began gesturing like bookmakers in fast, idiosyncratic deaf-and-dumb language. The seated men leaned forward, calling out numbers in loud, urgent voices.
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br /> They spoke louder and faster until they were shouting, and the clerks behind them gesticulated as if they were going mad. Finally the dealers were yelling against each other at the tops of their voices. Then a bell rang, the red light died, the shouting stopped, and the men started making notes in their books.
‘It’s called dealing by open outcry,’ Henry told Cathy.
‘I can see why. It sounds like a riot in a lunatic asylum. How on earth do they hear what they’re saying to each other?’
‘You just pick it up – you tune into the guy you’re interested in, tune out the others. This is a quiet day – it’s usually twice as loud. There’ll be a break now and then they’ll start the next metal – aluminium. They go right through twice, then there’s a free-for-all when you trade the lot together. That’s really noisy.’
Cathy considered the possibility that she had made an error of judgement. She could already imagine her ladylike voice being drowned by the frenzied yelling of the other dealers.
‘Of course, this is a tea-party compared to what goes on in America,’ Henry Rose was saying. ‘In Chicago, where the traders all stand jam-packed together in a small room, a man died of a heart attack in the middle of a session and nobody even noticed until they’d finished.’
Cathy at once recognized his strategy. ‘Are you trying to scare me, Henry?’ she asked with her sweetest smile.
‘Of course I am,’ he announced, giving her a hearty slap on the shoulder which almost knocked her over. ‘If you can’t take a little kidding from me, the guys down there will shred you. Seriously, you’ll have plenty of time to get used to it. I’ll start you on the telephone. Just listen to what the client wants and pass it on to the tic-tac man – you can count your fingers, I presume?’
Despite the startled looks of the men in the Ring, Cathy’s hesitancy left her as soon as she stood at the wall, surrounded by the peeling, ineffectual soundproofing of the Migatto booth with the telephone in her hand, waiting for the red light.
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