by Ashly Graham
As Arbella stepped to the balcony the Lutine bell rang twice, and an immediate hush fell upon the Room. It was extraordinary how instantly such a cacophony of commerce, such a babel of barter, such a natter of negotiation, in the heart of the City could be silenced. It was so quiet that the gentlemen farmers amongst the underwriters might have expected skylarks to start trilling above.
Then there was the sound of tapping on the microphone and several puffs of wheezy breath.
‘Announcing: A two per cent lead from Mr Carew. Marine placement by Chandler Brothers. Slip to be dropped orf the balcony in three seconds after second reading of this message. Miss Arbella is the broker. Every lee-gible marine syndicate will get a line. Placement to cease immediately upon landing, no excuses, no ’ard luck stories. To repeat…
‘...upon landing.’
Unfolding the slip, Arbella held it horizontally over the railing, counted to three and let go.
Slowly, very slowly, the length of grey cardboard began its see-saw drift. As it wafted from side to side, it was buffeted by the turbulent air set up by hundreds of sharp exhalations and inhalations and gasps of disbelief and amazement around both levels of the Room.
Non-marine underwriters, cursing the dryness of their portfolios that disqualified them from participating in the ruckus and mêlée below, stampeded to the railing for a birds’-eye view and the vicarious thrill of witnessing triumph and defeat. Each risk-assumer was on his feet and thrusting aside the brokers who had been standing or sitting next to them, who reciprocated with interest as respect for authority was abandoned and bodies scrambled to action and viewing stations.
While the celestial instrument blew through the heavens above the mercenary throng, every eye was drawn to the divine dispatch of the goddess on the balcony, and every heart yearned to be united with it. As the pitch and clamour of excitement rose higher and louder, the decibels rose to levels matched only by those of gladiatorial contests at the Roman Coliseum, bullfights in Seville, and Triple Crown rugby union football matches at Twickenham, Cardiff Arms Park, Murrayfield, and Croke Park.
In the pandemonium below men hurtled about and cannoned into each other, gripped by remembrance of schoolboy cricket fielding practice. Training their eyes on Arbella’s slip, they estimated where that risk of risks, that grail of every underwriter’s career, might land. The chaff of lesser contracts and mundane paper was swept off desks, in hope that the airborne artefact might select one of them to alight upon, for the men of Lloyd’s to smother it with kisses from their stamps.
No one knew nor cared what class of business the contract was and what the limit, terms and conditions might be; all that mattered was that Carew’s line was upon it. Gladly every man would participate sight-unseen, for the glory of getting his syndicate numbers on this, the most illustrious piece of business ever to have been offered at Lloyd’s of London, and to hell with the Names.
The film star Betty Grable’s million dollar legs, by comparison, were mere drumsticks to be gnawed and thrown away.
Boosted by the shocks of air from below, the slip seemed to have taken on a life of its own and be in no hurry to come to rest as if, like an albatross, it might plane about the Room indefinitely.
From their indoor shooting butts, the competitive underwriters quickly determined that there was no time to wait for the slip to come down, and that they would have to hurl their well-inked dies at it and ravish it aloft. Determined to stain that bright virginity, the blood vessels of every Orion in the Room swelled with lust, and, irrespective of their firmity and fitness to do so, underwriters clambered onto their boxes so that they might direct their missiles to better effect.
To steady their masters in their great endeavour, entry boys grabbed their legs to brace them, and other hireling heads were pressed into service as footstools. Not for nothing had these bewhiskered individuals spent the weekends during the season at their country estates massacring pheasant and partridge and duck. Those who had been wartime gunners and marksmen recalled their training, in sending up tracer fire and flak from the batteries and blasting away, and picking off targets. Not since the Last Show had the call to arms been so urgent, or the need to remain clear-headed under pressure so great.
Factoring in the stream of data being shouted up to them by deputies and staff, they fine-tuned their calculations of the slip’s trajectory and momentum and adjusted their aims accordingly. Some grabbed slide-rules and began feverishly plotting altitude and speed and wind resistance, and angles of declivity, and ordered their youngsters to take sighting shots by shooting paper pellets with rubber bands.
Such ballistic deeds were in the making, with so little time in which to perform them! The Evening Standard would be the first to break the story, displacing that day’s World Cup loss, the latest royal indiscretion, outbreaks of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, or Mad Cow Disease, bird flu, grim news about the economy, and the weakness of the pound on the foreign Exchanges.
After tomorrow’s national coverage in tabloids and broadsheets, Lloyd’s List, the oldest surviving newspaper in the country, would publish a commemorative edition, with a limited number of copies available on framed vellum inscribed and illuminated by speechless monks.
The name of every man, the imprint of whose stamp was found to grace the placement when it landed, would be recorded on a roll of honour. Next to the Nelson Room a larger space would be created where the holy document, like the Turin Shroud but with its authenticity unchallenged, would be enshrined in pride of place. Lined on the walls to either side would be portraits of each scoring underwriter: a flattering picture commissioned from the John Singer Sargent of the day, not an ugly one from Graham Sutherland for Lady Churchill wives to destroy; the underwriter’s impressive stamp; and a push-button audio-video of him explaining with the aid of computer graphics how he had accomplished the feat, and how he felt about it afterwards.
Books would be written about the event. Trainees would be required to recite the terms of the placement and the sequence of lines, and its subscribers’ personal backgrounds. They would be tested on the facts in their Chartered Insurance Institute exams.
Elderly members who had long ago ceased to be active underwriters, but still put in appearances at the box when they were not either at their clubs or using them at the links, discarded the pornographic literature that they had been perusing, and inhaled the ozone of combat. Their handlebar moustaches twirling, their mutton-chop whiskers and beards bristling, they grabbed the rusted articles of their former trade from the backs of dusty drawers, and banged them on the inking pads.
‘Stand aside, you duffers!’ they cried to their sixty-year-old successors, ‘and keep your heads down. It’s all in the wrist, me boyos. Let an old pro show you how.’
And the few, the happy few of this King Henry the Fifth’s St Crispin’s Day speech Band of Brothers: those members of the Three Rooms’ Club who today had not held their manhood cheap but shed their last drops of ink, when at last they went to the great Underwriting Room in the sky, their obituaries in The Times would run to a full page, and St Peter would quiz them eagerly on What It Had Been Like.
But that would all come later, for still the apple of each William Tell-ian eye was in the air and untouched. The straining jellies of each person’s sight were bulging so much that the celebrated cartoonist Walter Bateman, had he been present, would have accepted that his skills were inadequate to represent the scene, and ground his teeth to stumps with frustration, and his charcoal pencils to dust under his heel. There was danger that the magnifying lenses of everyone’s vision might focus together so concentratedly upon the slip as to cause it to burst into flame.
Afterwards there was heated debate as to who was responsible for the first strike. The fire from the boxes was very accurate, and that spotless Shelleyan skylark bird that never wert, bearing the precious cargo of the rarest of underwriting monograms, began to take hit after hit and sing of its mortality.
As multiple stamps darke
ned the air like flocks of Hitchcockian starlings, the awestruck brokers who were massed around the balcony above, and behind the backs of the boxes below, applauded and cheered and urged on their favourites and bosses as they strove to clap their sealing lips upon the slip in a single brief passionate embrace.
Each underwriter let loose the stamps for his main syndicate; his second, third, and fourth syndicates, if he had them; his “baby” syndicates, and his cousins’ syndicates, and those of any other relative he could lay his hands on.
Even Granny Blandblind joined in: unable to find the key to the cupboard containing the special stamp that was forever associated with the disastrous Inuit blubber harvests, she kicked it open with the steel-reinforced toe of her boot.
Time after time Arbella’s contract was further buoyed by solid contact from below, just as the bounty hunter Lee Van Cleef, in Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Western For a Few Dollars More, kept Mr Clint Eastwood’s hat airborne with his sharpshooter’s skill.
Arbella herself continued to survey the scene from above; but there was so much going on, such a multitude of vignettes to absorb, that she could not take it all in. One thing in particular, however, she did notice. As her gaze travelled around the Room in search of something to dwell upon, it registered a single figure who was only now rousing himself from an untypically languid position.
It was Bullion Bill Goldsack! and for once he was alone, on his tod, solitary, deserted, abandoned, detached from his usual comet’s tail of brokers, and eclipsed by an aura of gold-rush greed that exceeded his own.
Standing and stretching as if he had just awoken from a nap, Goldsack took down a very old edition of A.M. Best’s compendium of United States insurance companies from a shelf in his box’s superstructure. Opening it, he removed some item from a hollowed-out space, which he put in the right pocket of his jacket.
Then he got up and, ignored, strolled into the empty space away from the action towards the revolving door at the south-west corner of the Room, the main entrance to Lloyd’s of London. His glasses, instead of being on top of his head and flashing like a beacon as usual, were on his nose, and he was rubbing and flexing his arm and fingers like a fast seam bowler preparing for a run-up to the wicket.
Now that she had spotted him, Arbella, fascinated, attended only to Lloyd’s most famous underwriter. She was drawn by his leisurely motion, which contrasted so greatly with the frenetic activity surrounding the eye of the storm, her contract.
But as detached as Goldsack was, exit-bound and with head bowed, it was clear to her that there was some mysterious connexion between him and the slip, as it continued to swoop and loop above the Floor.
Just as Bullion Bill was about to disappear into the shadows under the balcony by the exit, his body language and demeanour changed. He stopped and bent at the knees.
What he did next took no more than a few seconds; then, without a flicker of emotion, he walked out of the Room without a backward glance. In a single fluid movement, he removed the hand that he had not taken from his jacket pocket since he put whatever it was in it, raised his arm in a high curve behind him, pivoted a hundred and eighty degrees on his leading leg, and flung what he was holding forward in a motion that—so far as Arbella could tell from her distance—appeared to involve no expenditure of energy.
As Goldsack followed through on his throw, a gleaming object flashed to the spatial midpoint of the Room in a trajectory-neutral line so arrow-like and speedy that it seemed to Arbella that it lighted its own golden cometary path. Then the revolving door spun and Bullion Bill was gone.
There were two unusual things about Goldsack’s stamp: that it was bright yellow, and spinning as fast and aerodynamically as a football thrown to a wide receiver by an American quarterback on top of his form.
Everyone was agog, and those huddled around the balcony leaned even farther over the rail to catch the moment of impact. Though they all swore that they had, it was impossible to see it volley through the other heavier, drossy, objects that were clogging the air and knocking each other out of contention like bowls or croquet balls.
No Hail Mary pass, this: the hit was palpable, and although other underwriters continued to send up their ambassadors of desire, no one doubted that it was the Goldsack’s golden bullet that brought the bird’s aerial display to an end, and caused it to fall to the ground with a velocity that would have given Sir Isaac Newton conniptions and caused him to swear off his mother’s apple pie and discontinue his gravitational research in disgust.
When the shouts of acclamation had settled down to a mere hubbub, Mr Archibald, wearing a smug expression and looking like Black Rod leading the King into Parliament, cleared a path so that Arbella might make a stately progress down the stairs to view her prize. The sea of suits parted respectfully, the heroine stepped onto the floor, and a steady clapping and chanting of “Ar-bell-ah, Ar-bell-ah”, and stamping of feet, broke out. There were more rounds of cheers, and imitations of Mr Archibald’s inventive calls summoning the Room’s most glamorous intermediary to the rostrum.
There on the floor, surrounded by onlookers wondering at it from a dozen feet away while the caller from the podium rounded inside the circle like a policeman or referee with his arms spread wide to keep everyone back, lay the slip at rest.
Arbella had to wait as a clerk, who had wriggled on his stomach through the legs of the assembly with a stamp clenched between his teeth, and the intention of adding a late and unauthorized line on behalf of his underwriter who had missed, to cries of “Shame! Shame!” was lifted by the arms and legs, passed backwards over the heads of the crowd and ejected headfirst by the waiters onto Lime Street. Then, pale but composed, she approached and gingerly picked the slip up.
Underneath it was Bullion Bill’s stamp, which Arbella gave to Mr Archibald to return to him. The solid gold block, carved with Goldsack’s initials and his most recognizable syndicate number, was so heavy that Mr Archibald, as he hefted it and tried to guess its weight, marvelled at how its owner had been able to throw it so far and straight.
That its power was not quite spent was evident from the way that it glowed and vibrated in his hand. The Head Waiter felt a frisson of electricity run up his arm, and the static made the few hairs on his scalp stand up.
Without looking at the slip herself, Arbella stretched it above her head like a victorious boxer showing off a championship belt, and revolved for all to view the morass of differently coloured template inks all lopsided, upside down, and lying across each other. Although the impressions were imperfect, uneven and smudged, on a good many the syndicates’ distinguishing acronym and numbers were distinct enough to be identified. Now that the spell was broken, everyone closed in and yelled out the names, to hurrahs from whichever underwriting group was responsible.
There was much clapping of backs amongst the successful parties and their supporters, and around the room hunched and arthritic veterans of the market, who under normal circumstances walked with the assistance of canes, jigged and bopped.
Imperfect, that was, except for one. For the greatest discovery, and the only thing that could have caused the brouhaha to subside as word was passed around, was the presence at the top of the slip—where Arbella knew it would be beneath the blank and sacred space that was reserved for Mr Carew’s leading line, when he had found his stamp and cleaned it and put it down and entered it, presumably with a numeric reference of zeros ending in one if he considered a lapse of a hundred-plus years worthy of starting afresh—of the glistering imprint of golden ink.
It was the right side up and as straight and even as if it had been aligned with a set square and put down by a jeweller, the pride of Goldsmiths’ Hall.
Pre-cast in the precious metal was Bullion Bill Goldsack’s signature flourish of overweening presumption; and against it, by way of asserting the impossibility of anything less, was the auric legend in emphatic capitals: ONE HUNDRED PER CENT.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Trust Bullion Bill
to have upstaged everyone else! The man had flair and charisma and panache and chutzpah and cojones to spare, the attributes that at Lloyd’s were respected more than any, so long as they were combined with a modicum of intelligence and good judgement.
To demand a hundred per cent...even allowing for the “signing down” process whereby, in the event of oversubscription, underwriters’ lines would be reduced pari passu to percentages of one hundred…that was not just unreasonable but irrational and irresponsible—not least because it would deny the leader, Mr Carew, a share.
But Bullion Bill was not reasonable, rational, or responsible in his expectations; none of the fairies who had passed by his crib had come bearing such qualities.
Although the size of line that an underwriter wrote was up to him, he was expected not to be greedy on a popular slip, where there were other mouths to feed. It was not a question of security: the liability of each syndicate and the Names that it comprised, who had to show a minimum net worth or wealth before they were accepted by the Managing General Agents, was not only unlimited but backed by Lloyd’s Central Guarantee Fund.
As a courtesy, “following” syndicates did not take a bigger share than the leader, unless that leader was a small syndicate and had limited capacity; in which case, because reputation counted for more than size of line, as quality might be preferred to quantity, writing more than the leader was considered a compliment to his sagacity and insight, a recognition of his superior knowledge of the class of business and ability to make money out of it.
Even a half per cent line from certain underwriters was enough to ensure that the order was filled. Carew, for example, had taken only a two per cent share on Arbella’s risk, which would garner him very little premium on such a small contract; but Carew was in a one-man league—he could have kissed the slip and written nothing and it would be oversubscribed.