If I blow this I’ll lose them thousands, she realized – so I can’t possibly blow it.
By her second day she was starting to enjoy the rhythm of the Ring and gaining confidence in her ability. Both her ears were sore from the telephone, and her shoes pinched unbearably by the afternoon, but as Henry had told her there was little difficulty in the job as long as you could think quickly and clearly and not get flustered.
‘It’s a bit like skiing,’ she told Monty at the end of her first week. ‘You just have to let go and do it, and trust that you’ll still be standing five minutes later.’
‘What are the blokes like with you?’ Monty looked with envy round Cathy’s apartment; with the cool white furnishings, most of which Cathy had made herself, it had a soothing elegance and a homeliness which was missing in the house where she and Rick lived. Luxurious as it was, Monty’s own home still looked both bare and untidy. The Juice were touring twice a year and spending six months in recording studios. There never seemed to be time for Monty to get anything done about the house.
‘The guys are OK.’ Cathy considered. ‘We all go to the pub at the end of the day and I buy my round just like they do and it seems fine. They all look at me as if I were something from outer space, of course. I’m not the first woman to do the clerking jobs, but there’s never been a woman trader before.’
Monty’s eyes widened. ‘Is that what you’ll be?’
‘Well, why not? Since I can do it, why shouldn’t I?’ Cathy was still uncomfortable with knowing how much of a thrill she got out of joining the stream of purposeful men who crowded the City’s pavements, each one taking part in running the world. She tried to explain.
‘Suppose I was the first woman trader? They’d remember me, I’d have really done something, something important. And I’m making money, Monty. Not a pile, not yet, but more, and I’ll be coining it when I’m a trader. Three or four years, I reckon, and I’ll be able to get Jamie back.’ Cathy, in her red wool dress, lay flat on the sofa; she had kicked off her hand-made, black patent shoes, something she only ever did when she was alone or with Monty because she was conscious of her sad shortened toes.
‘Then what?’ Monty looked in the mirror, a Georgian relic of her sister’s married days, and teased her hair absent-mindedly with an Afro comb. She saw one square of pasteboard tucked into the frame. ‘The Belgravia Symphonia,’ she read. ‘Is this from Rosanna?’ Rosanna Emanuel, who now had three children, was also a tireless promoter of her husband’s career, and organized the lavish functions which were connected with the work of his firm’s charitable trust.
‘Yes, she’s always asking me to things, but I’m too tired to go most of the time.’
Monty sighed. ‘It’s crazy, isn’t it? I feel as if I’ve hardly touched the ground on some days. We’re still doing two albums a year and two tours a year, and it’s killing me. Do you know, they nearly cut our electricity off last week, because I hadn’t had time to open the bill and send it to Dennis to get it paid? Isn’t it absurd that we’re supposed to be making millions and still can’t pay our bills? I sometimes think it was easier when we were broke and Cy just fiddled the meters.’
‘What’s happening to your money?’
‘Dennis takes care of everything. If we need money for anything we just ask him.’
‘Who does your accounts?’
‘Oh, some accountants.’ Monty noticed her sister’s serene expression curdling with exasperation. ‘Honestly, Cathy, don’t worry, it’s all being taken care of.’
‘I think you ought to check up and see some balance sheets. Do you know the Rolling Stones are leaving the country because there’s no way they can pay their tax bill, even if they stay at the top the rest of their lives?’
‘Well, when you’re fed up with the Metal Exchange, you can go into business and manage money for superstars, starting with the Juice – OK?’
Cathy sat up and pushed a stray wisp of hair out of her face with impatience. ‘That’s a great idea, Monty. That’s just what I’ll do. People like you and Rick will never get on with a straight City type who can’t speak your language, and you’re in real danger of getting ripped off because of it – not to mention the fact that you don’t make the best use of your money. You need a financial consultant who’ll take proper care of you.’
Monty yawned, indifferent to her sister’s criticism. Money did not interest her, and now that she had, she believed, more money than she could begin to count, even spending it seemed unexciting. ‘I think making money is the only thing that really turns you on,’ she told Cathy without malice.
Her sister smiled. ‘You could be right. Now I want you to teach me something. All the other women on the Metal Exchange didn’t make it as traders because no one could hear them in all the shouting. Teach me how to develop my voice, Monty. There must be some exercises I can do.’
Monty made her sister lie on the white wool rug on the floor.
‘Now take a deep breath.’ Cathy gulped in as much air as she could. ‘Now let it out, and do it again, and feel yourself here.’ She put Cathy’s hands over her ribs. ‘Feel your ribcage go in and out? That’s what you don’t want. You want to feel this go in and out.’ She prodded her sister’s concave stomach.
Cathy breathed in and out again. ‘That’s it,’ Monty approved. ‘Now practise that. You can’t make a good sound if you don’t breathe deeply. It calms you down too. Men breathe that way naturally. Women usually just breathe from the upper chest.’
‘Vive la différence.’
‘Louder – say it louder.’
Six months later, Cathy moved up to doing the tic-tac signs which transmitted the message to buy or sell from the telephone to the clerk, who in turn shouted into the trader’s ear from behind the red leather bench. At the day’s end she had aching arms and an intoxicating sense that she was getting closer to the real action.
Her life, apart from Jamie, was lived between the Metal Exchange and the long, narrow Migatto dealing room where two banks of positions faced each other in the centre of the room and Henry Rose’s cheerful bellow occasionally sounded above the hubbub from his desk at the far end. High on the wall opposite him were four brass clocks which recorded the time in London, New York, Tokyo and Penang. A Reuters printer chattered to itself in a corner, spewing out reams of paper printed with the world’s news and prices. The long windows were obscured by vertical strips of a white synthetic material which allowed in light but obscured the view outside.
Sometimes Cathy felt as if the dealing room were a noisy, overcrowded, untidy space-ship thousands of miles away from the everyday life of planet Earth. In her wounded emotional condition the all-consuming, high-pressure work was a relief.
Cathy was in the dealing room every morning at 7.00 am, for an hour of relative calm in which to catch up with the paperwork. Every transaction was recorded on a sheet of thin paper, colour-coded according to the metal involved, from white for aluminium to yellow for zinc, and a heavy day’s trading would generate a small mountain of multicoloured paper. At around 8 am the pre-market trading would begin and the fifty telephone switchboards became a mass of urgently winking lights. Shortly after eleven the traders and their clerks would hustle down the windswept pavements of London Wall and stream across Gracechurch Street and into Whittington Avenue in time to take their places for the morning market at 11.45.
Shortly after one o’clock, after the last session on silver and the announcement of the official metal prices for the day, Cathy would join the stream of men leaving the Ring and concluding ‘kerb’deals as they emerged from the Metal Exchange building. In thirsty crowds they dispersed to the restaurants and drinking clubs in the adjoining streets of the City’s Square Mile. Most of the Migatto people favoured the Black Cat, a club which was almost an extension of the Metal Exchange. It was an establishment with no pretensions, existing simply to cool the throats of men who had been yelling themselves hoarse, while successfully meeting the idiosyncratic criteria necessar
y to escape the tyranny of the British licensing laws.
The Black Cat was one of those rare enclaves where class did not count. Its wines were unremarkable, its food was hearty and its decor smoke-stained and dilapidated. Every new member went through a ritual in which the club committee cut off his tie and pinned it to the wall with a card on which he had to write a joke. Here the golden-haired sons of the great banking dynasties rubbed shoulders with boys from East End dockers’families. Savile Row stood at the bar with Carnaby Street, and pure Cockney ordered at the same time as voices like cut glass.
‘Once you’ve been in the markets it’s hard to keep out,’ Henry told her, clutching a glass of claret in one fist and looking round the crowded basement room with satisfaction. ‘There’s a camaraderie between the guys who do this job which is like nothing else. It’s a killer, the Metal Exchange, we all know that. It’s something you can do when you’re young and tough, something we’ll all get out of in a few years – then everyone goes their separate ways.’
Cathy enjoyed relaxing with the men for an hour or so after work, but was mystified by their liking for drinking contests and infantile mock fights. She felt accepted now, and was enjoying making friends, especially with Henry whose acute ambition she admired. It was, she discovered, pleasant to keep company with a man and feel no need to seduce him; and it was enjoyable not to have to pretend she knew nothing about money or politics.
Lord Shrewton noted with approval that she thrived in this harsh but rewarding milieu, and for the first time in his life felt somewhat consoled for the disappointment which his son’s inadequacy had caused him. At first tentatively, then with greater confidence as Cathy showed enthusiasm, he began to talk business with her at the weekends and show her, as he had once hoped to show Charlie, her way forward in the Group.
These developments flummoxed Lady Davina, who could conceive of no man who would invite a woman into his world and no woman who would welcome such an invitation. For Christmas, she gave Cathy a box of embroidered lace-edged handkerchiefs and a blue Delft vase.
‘If you’re determined to stay at work, darling, you ought to have some little feminine touches about your office,’ she advised, trying to invoke Cathy’s gratitude in place of the steely question in her granddaughter’s chestnut eyes. ‘Why not have fresh flowers on your desk – the boys will soon get the idea and start bringing you little bouquets. And you can just drench a little hanky with scent and tuck it into your sleeve so the teeniest scrap of lace peeps out – never let them forget that you’re a woman, darling.’
‘Lovely, Didi, super idea,’ Cathy said quickly, trying not to laugh as she imagined the vase being smashed in the first ten seconds of panic trading and the handkerchiefs engulfed in the jetsam of the dealing room. The old woman glowered, bitterly angry that her granddaughter was now beyond her influence forever and jealous that the young woman had opportunities which had been denied to her.
‘Your father would have died of shame if he could see you now,’ she said in a low, vicious voice. ‘You and your sister. You think you’re very clever, don’t you? I suppose it’s the modern way but it’s not what he would have wanted for his daughters, all this running around the world making fools of yourselves.’
‘Surely our father died of shame anyway?’ Cathy returned calmly, suddenly hating the old woman and her insatiable need to make pawns of all her offspring. She wished Monty were there to side with her, but Monty now had endless excuses why she could never come to family gatherings at Bourton. Cathy gave the vase to Jamie, who broke it at once, and the handkerchiefs to Nanny Barbara.
Henry moved Cathy up to the clerk’s station behind the red leather bench, and then, two years after she first set foot in the noisy room, Henry said, ‘Ready to go into the Ring, are you?’
‘I thought you’d never ask me.’
‘There’ll be quite a fracas, I should imagine. Press, and so forth.’
By now, she knew his mind in intimate detail. Henry Rose was an accomplished self-publicist who was blatantly encouraging the press to paint him as a bright, dynamic operator who was oriented fearlessly to the future and not afraid to make waves in a traditional City establishment. That very week he had achieved a few lines in the. Financial Times by announcing formally that men would no longer be required to wear jackets in his dealing room, an innovation which had alarmed the older Migatto directors.
‘You mean you’ve called up a few of your friends in Fleet Street?’ she enquired.
‘I might have done.’
‘Maybe I should get my hair done?’ For the past three years, Cathy had worn her hair long, but held back at the nape of her neck with a bow. She had ceased to be concerned with how it looked, and was mostly interested in keeping it out of the way. She decided, with a pang of guilt, to stay in London on Saturday and get her hair cut into a short, severe bob – which, perversely, made her look more beautiful and almost girlish.
Cathy did Monty’s deep breathing exercises as she waited for her first session to begin. You can do this, she repeated over and over, it’s easy, if those guys can do it, you can do it. She smoothed out the skirt of her clinging dress of burgundy crépe, which she had selected for its discreetly slit skirt, knowing that when she sat on the red leather bench it would reveal a tantalizing glimpse of thigh.
She was trading tin. There was a hierarchy, even among the metals; the traders started with tin and moved up until they were seniors and could trade the most prestigious metal, copper. Feeling calm, Cathy walked into the circle of red leather and sat down at seat number 27, Migatto’s position. Thirty-three men also sat down. The red light glowed around the alchemist’s symbol for tin, and one or two of the men spoke at once.
The nasal voice of Maurice, the clerk, sounded in Cathy’s ear.
‘Three hundred thousand at five.’
Cathy drew a deep breath and opened her mouth to speak.
‘Th …!’ she got no further. Instantly there was a storm of cheering, shouting, stamping, and cat-calls. Men twirled football rattles, rang bells and blew whistles. Someone had a toy trumpet and somebody else was sounding calls on a beagling horn.
Cathy froze with shock. She felt paralysed with embarrassment, straightened her shoulders, looked around the Ring, and smiled. The noise died away to a few cheers, and then, as if nothing had happened, the men carried on trading.
Maurice was speaking again. ‘Buy three hundred thousand,’ he said.
It was a put-on, another test. Nobody could possibly be looking for such a colossal quantity of tin, or any other metal. They were trying to kid her. It was another of their infantile, all-boys-together jokes. Cathy smiled and kept her mouth shut.
‘Three hundred thousand,’ Maurice said, his voice rising with panic. Cathy did not respond. I’ll show them they can’t fool me, she thought with satisfaction.
‘You s-s-s-stupid bitch – three hundred thousand!’ Maurice, stammering in agitation, spoke loud enough for his voice to carry into the ring. Several of the men looked at her with alarm and Cathy realized that she had made a mistake, this was not a joke.
Two men offered fifty thousand at six.
‘Five,’ she said, almost whispering with relief and dismay that she had wasted precious minutes ignoring an order. I’ve got forty-two seconds to get the deal, she realized. Just before the bell rang, she bought her last fifty thousand to make up the three hundred, at five. She felt ten pounds lighter and ten years older as she got up and walked out of the Ring. As she stood on the pavement outside finishing a couple of kerb deals she was blinded by a flash of light as a press photographer took her photograph.
In the Black Cat, when the afternoon market had finished, Henry poured champagne over her head and the men slapped her on the back, shook her hand, kissed her. The club committee decided to make her a member.
‘But I haven’t got a tie for the wall,’ she protested.
‘We’ll find one for you.’
‘No, wait. Give me a card.’ She drew th
e outline of a tie in a dotted line on the card and wrote beside it, ‘You don’t miss what you’ve never had.’ Then she signed underneath, ‘The Invisible Man.’ There was more cheering.
‘Better drink some of that champagne,’ Henry suggested. ‘I don’t want you catching cold in wet clothes. You’ll lose your voice.’
The next day, Cathy woke at 5 am with a thundering hangover and an irritating idea which would not leave her mind. In spite of knowing the other traders like friends – almost the only true friends she had now – she had been shocked by the noisy outcry with which they had welcomed her into the Ring. The cat-calls, the hunting horns and the football rattles – it had seemed like innocent horseplay, but underneath she sensed real hostility to a stranger who had dared to penetrate the group. Suddenly Cathy remembered Rosanna Emanuel’s first dinner at Benenden, when another girl had called out something about all Jews having horns. She remembered seeing her friend at first stunned then defending herself with a submissive, placatory smile. That incident had the same scent of mob prejudice, of people swayed by an emotion so violent that they had broken their own rules of behaviour in order to express it.
Cathy deprived Jamie of her company for another Saturday and went shopping. She bought herself a grey suit with a faint white stripe, a blue shirt and a bow tie. Thereafter her flowered dresses and colourful sweaters hung in the back of the wardrobe all week, as she tried to look as much as possible like the men with whom she worked. She traded her handbag for an Asprey briefcase and started drinking scotch – with a lot of water.
‘It worked for Rosanna, it’ll work for me,’ she told herself. ‘I’ll just blend in, until people forget I’m different.’
Cathy had been trading for a year when she knew she had nothing more to prove to the men of the City of London. As she came up to the Visitors’Gallery before the morning market, she heard her old boss, Mr Mainwaring, showing some guests the Metal Exchange. ‘Of course,’ he boasted, ‘Migatto have always been the most forward-looking of the Metal Exchange’s members. Why, just recently we put the first woman trader in the. Ring down there. Bright girl. Used to work for me, as a matter of fact.’
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