by Ashly Graham
The only downstairs member of the household who was never unwell was Sanders the valet: Sanders inhaled so many chemical fumes in the dry-cleaning plant in the basement—it was hermetically sealed and there was a decontamination zone at the entrance—that anything trespassing upon his system was annihilated.
Stace’s formal education had ended early and his business career begun before his character had had a chance to mature. He was unable to make social chit-chat or express himself in other than professional terms. But his lack of people skills had not held him back from becoming a renowned entrepreneur. His balance sheets had always shown huge profits. Amongst the companies in his financial empire a number had received King’s Awards for Industry. He prided himself on his uncanny ability to assess the viability of a commercial venture as accurately as the barometers registered the atmospheric pressure at his premises and the thermometer did his own temperature.
If one thought about it, and it would have been a sad fact that so few did, had it not brought him such advantage over them, adherence to his methods was a guarantee of success. So many people envied his lordship, and yet if only they were to imitate his work ethic they could not fail to prosper—not to the degree that he had, of course, but enough to ensure their financial security and independence. Knowing this would have made Stace feel positively charitable, had he not regarded philanthropy and those who practised it so negatively.
All of the baron’s operational outposts, naturally, bristled with computer and telecommunications equipment. Satellites beamed life-size holograms of his lordship’s corpus into his London headquarters, so that his minions should never think that he was not in control, and monitoring their activities on his behalf; and sometimes what they did with their leisure time as well. A former chief executive who was yukking it up with a hostess at the Miranda Club off Carnaby Street in Soho at two o’clock in the morning had been dismayed to find Lord Stace sitting in his lap and informing him that he had just joined the ranks of the unemployed...though at the time his boss was verifiably in Argentina.
To maximize the output of the general staff, all employees from senior vice president to janitor were educated in their chairman’s precepts and operating techniques. Although the cost of these classes and seminars was deducted from salary, Stace regarded it as a testament to the value of the lessons learned that nobody complained.
Stace was inordinately proud and protective of his only daughter and youngest child, who was streaks ahead of the rest of his brood in intelligence and capability. The three boys had left home as soon they could, intent upon setting out upon the road that they believed would lead to even greater glory than their father had achieved, were such a thing possible. Which it was not, and they quickly lost heart and, unable to support themselves, accepted positions in their father’s companies; where, in the absence of any undeserved preferment, none of them had risen higher than middle management.
Arbella was different. As bored and listless as she appeared to be most of the time, she had as strong a will as her father when she cared to exert it. Lacking his idiosyncrasies, she was not only spirited but sensitive and imaginative. There was a hint of her true character in the bantering way with which she reproved him, when he had gone on too long and boringly about some topic, or organ, close to his heart…the vital pump itself…panaceas for industrial unrest…his pancreas.
‘Now then,’ said Arbella. ‘I think we’ve had enough on medical subjects for today, Daddy, if you don’t mind, fascinating as they are to hear about over the breakfast table.’
Stace smiled indulgently. ‘These are no mere bromide theories, my dear. The truth bears any number of repetitions, that is his lordship’s nostrum.’ (His lordship never considered that by ruthlessly editing such recapitulative pronouncements, which made the utterances of the novelist Henry James seem Neanderthal by comparison, he might have added even greater productiveness to his day.)
Arbella looked out of the window at the teeming rain. ‘Papa, though it’s only a few steps to the car you must promise to wear the heated lining in your raincoat today, and your thermal scarf and gloves and broad-brimmed waterproof hat. It’s not just wet but very cold. And don’t forget your inhaler. See to it, Garforth, would you? You know how careless he is.’
Stace’s smile broadened. The family pheromones were in fine fettle, that was clear, and it was time to go to work. As usual he saw his daughter to the door: she insisted on walking every day to Sloane Square Underground station, rhinoviral Mecca and Petri dish of micro-organisms though it was, come rain or shine.
Shortly after waving goodbye to her from the window with a silk bandanna, Stace—encased and muffled to the eyeballs—exited himself, the Bentley made its glissando away from the curb, and his lordship turned his mind to the minutiae that would occupy him for the remainder of the day.
*
Her eyes her nose her hair her lips her teeth
Were all special order, very top-drawer,
And as we worked she glowed from underneath.
You had demanded not a single flaw,
Down to construction of the tiniest
Feature, each detail of her perfect frame.
You called yourself a human Architect,
And said You had endowed us with
A gift to rival the talent of Pygmalion.
We were amazed to hear such praise for
Our steady hands and modest skills,
As if we could be capable of such artistry.
No: that je ne sais quoi of hers that grew
And grew crossed all our lines, and came from You.
Chapter Two
Arbella said more during her early morning colloquies with her father than the entire rest of the day. It did not seem that way to the rich and trendy Sloane Ranger set that constituted her social network, and her business circle too, given that so many of her acquaintances worked in the same industry that she did as a broker at Lloyd’s of London.
Although she was not sociable by nature, attending drinks parties and dinners only to keep her ennui and youthful Weltschmerz at bay, it seemed to all that Arbella Stace was the most eloquent and communicative of women. The language of her presence was enough to convince each male in a crowd that she had eyes and ears for him alone. A flicker of her eyebrow...neither of them flickered very often, and then only infinitesimally...when combined with the attar of roses of her body amidst the haze of sweet smoke that issued from the oval cylinder of her Sullivan & Powell Turkish and Virginia cigarette, was enough to convey an illusion of intimacy that transcended the need for speech.
Arbella worked as a Marine broker on the ground floor at Lloyd’s of London’s premises in the “New” Lloyd’s building on Lime Street, the one that succeeded the “Old” Lloyd’s opposite it on Leadenhall Street, which in turn had replaced the one in the Royal Exchange...and it went back further than that and would go further forward.
For Lloyd’s, as an institution that owed its existence to all the probable improbabilities in the world except those of a religious or philosophical nature, was a Venice of impermanence even as it specialized in insuring and reinsuring accidents waiting to happen. At this time it was still at its zenith as an institution renowned throughout the world for its stability, reliability, and imperviousness to change.
The name of Lloyd’s Underwriter was a byword for staunchness, honesty and probity in a man. Adherence to the highest moral standards, tradition, and old-world courtesy…these were the principles that the institution that it had been founded upon, and which allowed it to manage its own affairs unsupervised by Government authority.
From the second floor up within the great edifice of Portland stone, above the trading levels with their arched floor-to-ceiling windows of plate glass, there were long passageways of mahogany doors with numbers on them. These were the offices that the Corporation of Lloyd’s leased to the underwriting syndicates.
The only communal rooms were the Adam Room, where the Committee of Lloyd’s
held its meetings, and the Captains’ Room. The Adam Room had been assembled, rather than constructed, by the celebrated eighteenth-century architect Robert Adam, in that it had been moved piece by piece from Bowood House, the Lansdowne family’s historic home near Chippenham in Wiltshire. It contained, in addition to a lot of fancy furniture, a carpet which might or might not have been the largest ever to have been woven in a single piece.
And in the Captains’ Room one could get a halfway decent cup of coffee—Lloyd’s had originated in a coffee house, so it had to be freshly made—served by waiters so rude that they made their Parisian counterparts seem hospice nurses; and a curled sandwich, sausage roll, or dry slice of cake or pastry.
The waiters in the Captains’ Room were not the same as the Waiters in the Underwriting Room. The latter were named after the men who served in the coffee house that Edward Lloyd had opened in 1688, around the time of the Glorious Revolution, the overthrow of King James II of England; and which, as the über cybercafé of its day, became the haunt of shipowners and merchants who came there to share with each other the financial risks of losing their vessels and cargoes at sea, and the emotional trauma that they experienced when it happened. The difference between the original waiters and their successors was that the modern species, instead of serving coffee, kept the Underwriting Room’s operations running by posting notices, and collecting and dropping things off around the syndicate “boxes” on the trading floors. Instead of aprons they wore smart red and black uniforms, and the doorman at the main entrance on Lime Street also sported a top hat.
The original Lloyd’s Coffee House had so thrived on the appetite for caffeine and risk, the one perhaps fuelling the other, of the seafaring types who adopted it that Edward Lloyd found himself as proprietor of a premises considerably more important than the non-alcoholic watering hole he had envisaged: one that was as metonymic as Smithfield was for meat, Billingsgate for fish, Covent Garden for flowers, Spitalfields for fruit and vegetables, and Hatton Garden for jewellery.
On the ground and first floor of New Lloyd’s, the upper level of which was open to view from below like a racecourse around an encircling balcony rail, were the two kidney-shaped trading floors of “The Room”. The Marine, Aviation, and Motor syndicates were downstairs and the Non-Marine syndicates upstairs. The Room was “open-plan” (there was little planning involved, it was just a matter of squeezing as much in as possible as the market continued to grow) with no internal walls. Each underwriting syndicate’s wooden “box”—the boxes were the equivalent of the stalls and vendor stations in any other market—were where the risk-accepting or -declining underwriters and their assistants received the placing brokers who brought them their offerings on long concertina-folding documents known as “slips”.
Because it was required that all Lloyd’s business be transacted on the trading floors, underwriters only retired to their offices on the upper levels of the building to reckon up their accounts, and either rejoice at the luck that often passed for sound judgement in their business, or lick their wounds, preparatory to either celebrating the luck or anointing the wounds in the City’s pubs and wine bars.
The rectangular boxes were custom-built hardwood units with solid bases and high-backed settles on either side facing each other. The whole of the centre of the desk area was occupied by a wooden tower, open at the base for passing things from side to side, with tiered shelves above for reference books; pigeon holes and nooks for the paraphernalia of underwriting and the premium and loss advice cards that were delivered by the waiters; and little brass-handled drawers or shuttles in which were filed the three-by-five-inch index cards on which the details of each risk were recorded by the entry boys (some of whom were sixty years old and had been sitting buttock to buttock with the same colleagues all their careers).
Below the desk platform and underneath the seat lids were cupboards and hidden compartments like the hidey-holes that children leave in building blocks; no space was wasted. Behind the seat were bin receptacles for the files that were dropped off by the claim brokers for review by the claims underwriters.
The boxes were very varied in design and construction. They ranged from sophisticated structures resembling Skylab, built to accommodate half a dozen underwriters, plus their assistants and entry boys, to simple two-seaters equivalent to the “horseboxes” at public schools where boys did their evening prep. The biggest boxes were constructed in irregular shapes, and strewn around the floors like discarded building blocks. They had central carousels for the information cards, which could be spun around to save one the trouble of getting up and past those next to one. The smallest were occupied by only the underwriter and his deputy. On the record cards underwriters handwrote key details of the “material underwriting information” that brokers supplied for every risk that the syndicate wrote, renewed or turned down.
The underwriting slips themselves contained only the bare-bones contractual details of a risk—the rest, which was taken on trust, was communicated verbally supported by “exhibits” typed on white cardboard. Underwriters made up their minds as to whether to participate on a risk or not based on the oral testimony of the broker and what was on the slip. That the full contract wording of terms, conditions and clauses was rarely processed until the contract was long expired, did not matter: the founding principle of Lloyd’s was that of Uberrima Fides, or Utmost Good Faith, and anyone who was discovered to have breached the highest standard of honesty and truth was banned from the Room, his name vilified for ever more.
For ease of access by the brokers, underwriters sat at the corners of the boxes, and the claims underwriter at the other as far away as possible from the men who had put the loss-making business on the books. In between were the entry boys who received the stamped and signed slips that the underwriters tossed at them. There were no fat entry boys: owing to the lack of space, they had to be not clever but thin, and were expected to keep their weight down like jockeys.
In the middle of one side of the marine floor was the Rostrum, or Podium: a mahogany pulpit under a canopy that housed the world-famous symbol of Lloyd’s of London, the ship’s bell that had been salvaged from the wreck of HMS Lutine after she sank in 1799. The rostrum was where the waiter-on-duty, or Caller, sat and, at the request of any broker mounting the step to either side, would announce over a Tannoy system the name of an associate he wished to make contact with. The waiter would call each name three times at intervals as if he were auctioning him off. The sound reached the farthest corners of the Room, and brokers’ ears were attuned to hearing themselves being called above the din, even when they were “in” with an underwriter. As soon as they were free, they would either rush to the rostrum to meet their colleague, or stand at the balcony and snap their fingers until they were spotted.
The area around the podium was busiest at one o’clock, when those who had arranged to have lunch together met there. At Lloyd’s, seniority of tenure counted for everything; in proof of which there was an informal society called the Three Rooms’ Club, of which the unelected members were those who had worked in all three of the last trading locations.
There was a highly charged atmosphere about Lloyd’s that thrilled even grizzled veterans of the market, as they pushed through the heavy revolving doors of brass and reinforced glass at the corners of the Room and were engulfed by the roar within. The mettle of the most glib and well-prepared brokers was tested as they made their presentations on behalf of their clients to underwriters who depended for their survival on an ability to assess and rate risks, and make informed decisions on whether or not to subscribe to a slip In this they were guided both by their professional assessment of the information submitted by the brokers, and the intuition bred of long experience.
Underwriters would decide on rates and whether or not to subscribe to a risk, irrespective of its size, and for how much, on the spot. Risk assumers did not ask to take information away to review in their offices, or consult with other parties on, or sleep on a
possible commitment; to habitually suggest such a thing would so stigmatize their reputations that brokers would endeavour to complete their placements elsewhere.
Each risk was “led” by a one of a small number of quoting underwriters who specialized in the relevant class of business, and with whom the broker, or intermediary, negotiated a rate that he was able to sell to his client. When the broker was successful in obtaining a “firm order”, he returned to the lead, who would put down his stamp, which was personalized with his initials and syndicate number, at the top of the slip underneath the terms and conditions, write a percentage share against it, and sign it on behalf of the “Names”, or Members, of the syndicate that he represented.
This was known as “taking a line”, and once a line had been written the syndicate was “bound” to the terms and conditions of the contract. The broker would then proceed to see the other syndicates of his choosing around the rest of the market, “show” the slip to them, and continue around the “following” market until one hundred per cent of his order was complete.
In the village that was Lloyd’s each underwriter was nothing on his own. But when massed together with dozens of other syndicates pooling their expertise and financial backing, all of which came from the net worth of private individual, not commercial, investors including the underwriters themselves they had the clout of a mighty institution. Underwriters were expert in sussing out the merits of a risk as it went round the market. Each knew his position in the food-chain, and that he would be visited at a certain stage in a placement according to the classes of business that he wrote, his syndicate’s size, and the esteem in which he was held by his peers.