by Ashly Graham
‘It’s not as much as I should like to write, my dear. But you can always come back at the end, if you need a little more to finish.’
‘Thank you very much, sir, I’ll bear that in mind,’ said Arbella, knowing that she would never impose upon him by doing such a thing. ‘That’s very kind of you.’
Mr Nysely took off his reading glasses and squinted at Mr Duesitt as if he were a whale blowing on the horizon. ‘Have you already seen the gentleman over there? I’m not sure what he writes, but he might take a fancy to this one.’
‘What a good idea. I’ll go and see him right away.’ As Nysely went into a trance, Arbella turned to where his neighbour had been optically touching up a few spaces on the ceiling that the artist, in his haste to complete the commission, had left blank.
When she coughed gently, Mr Duesitt started and greeted her with equally friendly courtesy. She repeated her summary word for word, and received the same contribution to her slip as she had from Duesitt’s unacknowledged colleague.
Next she visited the underwriter known as Cadger. Cadger begged, “borrowed”, and stole personal items from everyone, and brokers had to resign themselves to giving up something in return for a line every time that they went to him.
Objects that were most at risk were valuable accessories that they had forgotten to remove, such as rings, tie-pins and ties, cuff-links, watches, and pens. Those who had not taken precautions to leave them locked in the safe, which was provided for the purpose, in the office, and had only recalled the peril as they approached the box were quickly found out: flapping French cuffs, for example, or those secured with paper-clips, or the sight of a white strap-shaped patch on a broker’s wrist—even a similar line where a wedding band had been—would prompt a reprimand and a request that one empty one’s pockets onto the desk, so that Cadger could shroff the contents for the missing links or items.
Because Cadger wrote a substantial account, his larcenies were reluctantly regarded by the brokerage houses as a cost of doing business. Firms permitted their employees to submit their inadvertent losses, up to an amount determined according to a sliding scale formula with a maximum per single item, and per occurrence in the case of multiple objects, less depreciation, expressed as a ratio in proportion to the size of line secured and the premium and the contract limit, with one annual reinstatement only, for reimbursement on their expense reports.
The taking of a piece with an appraised value above a certain amount, or one that was irreplaceable, or an heirloom, or of sentimental significance, meant that an executive had to sign a personal letter to Cadger requesting its without-prejudice (i.e. it would be deemed not to create a precedent) ex gratia return in exchange for a complimentary dinner for two at the five-star restaurant of his choice.
More immediately recompensed was the short-sighted Chandler broker whose tortoiseshell Armani spectacle frames Cadger so admired—though he did not wear glasses himself, he knew someone he could flog them to—who, when he stumbled back to the office with a large line, en route sending a lorry on Leadenhall Street swerving into a lamppost, though the broker was in breach of the no-fault rule because he had unthinkingly taken his glasses off and twirled them as he was broking, was taken by a company driver to Visioncraft—Specsavers was undergoing refurbishment—fitted with a pair of National Health-quality frames and in-stock lenses, which roughly (this was pre- the Sight Testing Regulations 1989) compensated for his acute myopia and double astigmatism, and dropped back at Lloyd’s to continue the good work.
Broker-sympathetic syndicates in Cadger’s vicinity hung cloth bags on the backs of their boxes, where pedlars could park their wallets, watches, Hermès handkerchiefs, cigarette cases, hip flasks, and fountain pens, obtain a receipt from the entry boy, and reclaim the items afterwards. Cadger, however, was wise to the tricks that were played to deprive him of his dues. He made one spotted-in-the-act offender, whom he had never been able to relieve of so much as a pencil stub, remove his Turnbull & Asser shirt; and the individual was only able to avoid a debagging as well by promising to bring a leather travel humidor full of Havana cigars by the box the following day.
Cadger’s eyes were as bright as searchlights when he picked Arbella out on her way to see him, and roamed her person with greater than usual thoroughness as lust and avarice compounded within him.
‘Aha!’ he said, ‘and to what do I owe the pleasure? Not that I owe anything to anyone. I am debt free and it is the world which owes me, what a pleasure it is to be sure, to be sure. (Cadger was Irish) Tell me, young lady, you wouldn’t happen to have a cigarette about your lovely person, would you? I know you smoke. I could help you look, if you like, it would only take me an hour or so.’
Wisely Arbella had left her monogrammed cigarette case, which had been a present from her father, in the office; but she perched on the deliberately small amount of seat that Cadger made available next to him and insisted that she use, delved into her shoulder-bag, took out a box of handmade cigarettes, opened it and proffered them.
‘Well, well,’ said Cadger, cosying up as close to her as possible; ‘Morland Specials, not your usual brand. Very Double-O Seven.’ He closed the box and put it in his jacket pocket on the other side.
‘Do keep them if you want.’
‘Now then, darlin’, how about ten per cent in return for a kiss?’
The grapes of the petitioner’s lips became prune-like as she turned away. ‘You haven’t seen the slip yet. I’m sure your Names wouldn’t be happy to know—sir—that you’re prepared to play as fast and loose with their fortunes as you are with your morals.’
‘That’s a lovely blouse you’ve got on, but I’m not sure it’s my colour...what do you think, Sean?’ Cadger looked at his deputy, who affected to think before shaking his head.
Arbella mimped again. ‘From what I hear about your after-hours activities, sir, I gather you already have a sizeable wardrobe of women’s clothing. If you like, I’ve another I could bring you tomorrow which might suit you. It’s pink and frilly, the gift of a maiden aunt. You could wear it at one of your parties, with a short skirt and fishnet tights.’
‘Miaow!’ said Cadger, scratching the air. ‘That’s no way to get a line from me. And I’ll have you know I’m a happily married man.’ Those on the box laughed: their underwriter’s permanent state of marital disharmony was well known.
‘How many is it now?’ said Arbella, ‘I understood your last wife, the fashion model, got the house and you took her clothes and footwear in the settlement. It might have been an equitable split: you need the brassieres and you have dainty feet.’ Simon the entry boy, who was in love with Arbella, snickered, reddened, and went back to inventorying the day’s unofficial takings.
Cadger, aroused, gave Arbella a crafty look. ‘Come on, sweetheart, gimme a kiss. You can’t deny it to me now, it’s not like you to say such things. Better still, let me kiss you, just once, and I’ll write you a big line.’
‘Okay, for seven and a half per cent. But you must put the line down first, without reading the slip.’
‘Hm.’ Cadger’s eyes shifted from side to side. ‘Very well... there can’t be too much wrong with my agreeing to that. You only get small non-contentious stuff to place, don’t you, Arbella?’
Arbella unfolded the slip and covered the text with pads of A4 and blotting paper off the desk, and Cadger wrote his line. As soon as he was done, she snatched the document and presented it to Simon, who took it with reverence as if she had given him a love-letter. So faint did Simon feel at the slight scent arising from it, that he had difficulty focusing on the writing.
‘All righty then.’ Cadger obtruded his loach-like lips towards Arbella. ‘Pucker up.’
‘I’d rather be osculated by a frog. You may kiss my hand, briefly. I agreed to a kiss, that’s all, we never said where. Good underwriters understand the importance of definitions. Our word is our bond, but today it’s the back of my hand.’
A sick smile of defeat crossed Cadger�
��s face. Arbella held out her arm and looked away, as if she were about to have blood drawn, and when she pulled it back she took a bottle of Purell sanitizer from her shoulder-bag, squirted it on the affected area, and wiped it with a lace handkerchief.
Simon the entry boy, who had covered his eyes during the ghastly performance, uncovered them and found that he could see again sufficiently well to read.
‘What is it, damn you?’ Cadger, perplexed, was still trying to understand why Arbella should want to oscillate with a frog as Simon, who was looking at her more lovelorn than ever, had nudged his boss.
‘I think you’d better read this, sir.’
‘Why? Her business is so uncontentious that even a moron like you could deal with it.’
‘Oh, cool! Thank you, sir. I’m already allowed to do scratches and put down promised lines, so my initials and signature are already registered with the Bureau.’
‘Don’t be so bloody stupid,’ said Cadger, ‘she’s far too attractive to hand over to you. Anyway, what the hell are you talking about?’ He grabbed the slip.
After he had scanned it, Arbella plucked it from his nerveless fingers and went on her way. Her hand was clean, but she wished that there was time to go home and take a shower.
Chapter Thirty-Three
That was as much of the marine floor as Arbella could take. After a sandwich at the greasy spoon in the Fenchurch Street railway station forecourt, she returned to Lloyd’s and went upstairs, a maid on a mission. She saw immediately that the individual known as Ego, was open at his box.
Ego had one “lazy” eye that wandered independently of the other’s normal movement, and higher; so that, unless one could stay with the predictable one when addressing him, without getting distracted, one could not be sure whether Ego was looking at his interlocutor, the slip, out of the window, or at the ceiling or floor.
“Understandably the I-Man’s very sensitive about it,” said the Chandler broker who had been charged with introducing Arbella to the market when she joined; “so it’s important to act naturally with him, and to watch…well, you know…what you say.”
Ego was practising origami when Arbella arrived, but he put paper and scissors aside to give her his divided attention, goring himself slightly in the process. He did not seem to notice the injury, and judging from the many hairline scars on his hands, it happened a lot. By the time that Arbella had concluded her narrative, his unpredictable iris was crisscrossing the frying-pan of his face like an egg yolk on Speed.
‘I thought, sir,’ she said tentatively, ‘that someone like you who has a reputation for being so commercially farsighted...I mean, that is to say, who always has an eye to the main chance, might like to…
Ego’s nomadic earthbound orb, circling fast, initiated a sympathetic but opposite motion in its lower, sublunary, stay-at-home twin, sibling, or partner. Arbella, dizzy from trying to follow one and then the other, as she was supposed not to, looked down at the design that Ego had been working on. It was intricate and well executed. Had Henri Matisse seen it, and been impressed, it might have influenced his conceptualizing of the interior of the Dominican Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence on the French Riviera by using gouaches découpés, or paper cut-outs.
‘Sir, there’s another aspect to this. If you would care to eyeball...to look at it as a…if you could focus for a moment on….I mean, one doesn’t have to be the prophet Isaiah or gifted with second sight to understand that it’s possible, under certain admittedly far-fetched circumstances, for…’
The I-Man made a series of inarticulate noises, and Arbella felt a twinge of annoyance that he should be making things so difficult for her. Lloyd’s underwriters were supposed to be inured to the unusual; and Ego, as an examiner for the Chartered Insurance Institute, or C.I.I., was expected to set an example of professional behaviour.
Arbella’s exasperation coarsened further the indelicacy of her approach, like Basil Fawlty trying not to mention the War to his German guests. She wondered whether Ego’s secretary’s name was Iris.
‘In your view, sir, it may be a rather cross-eyed notion, but if ever a risk deserved your maximum commitment, this is it. If you can’t see your way to giving it that, then, instead of just sitting idly by, taking a watching line would enable you to spice up your See-Eye-Eye lectures by giving you something unusually interesting to tell your pupils about your underwriting portfolio.
‘You’ll have them asking themselves how they ever could have thought insurance was dull, when visionaries such as yourself are in the market. It’s your opportunity to sock it to them, and lash them into such a frenzy of enthusiasm that they’ll all pass their exams first time. And from my perspective, without wanting to subject you to the glare of publicity, I must say that support from a man held in such high regard by those formerly in your orbit of influence would add no end of kudos to the slip.
‘Are we seeing eye to eye on this, sir?’
Ego’s need to get to a basin as quickly as possible and bathe his reddened eye with Optrex, was sufficiently urgent to overpower the nausea that Arbella’s offering had induced in him, and he put down his stamp. Unfortunately he used his errant eye to aim with, and it landed on her arm. He did better on the second attempt, and though his signature jolted off the page at the end, thankfully both it and the five per cent it was written against were legible.
Arbella watched people swerving to avoid him as Ego legged it, the long way round the balcony (as if he were to take the M25 motorway ring road—or London Orbital—westbound or clockwise to get from Heathrow to Staines) to the Members’ cloakroom, the heavy brass and reinforced glass swing doors to which were only a dozen yards from his box.
Herman Agrippa Pardoe, dubbed Happy, or the Pardoner because he resembled the androgynous character in Chaucer’s The Pardoner’s Tale—“I trowe he were a gelding or a mare”—was an orchidaceous individual. He glowed as if he had just emerged from a hot bath, smelling of French hand-milled soap, and with his skin exfoliated and hydrated with fragrant essences.
Happy’s glabrous face was both cherubic and as chilling as that of the cruellest of the Caesars, his hair a sleek coating that purred as he ran his hands over it, like the white cat stroked by the arch-villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld in the James Bond film You Only Live Twice.
Pardoe was immaculately tailored with red silk linings to his suit jackets, and his small feet were encased in well-creamed patent leather shoes. He wore shirts in pale shades of mauve or pink with monogrammed French cuffs, embroidered with his initials and secured with platinum links, which slid easily as he shot them over the wafer-thin Patek Philippe wrist watch. Although in cold weather he sheathed his body in a tailored brown covert coat with a velvet collar, when it was wet he had no need of an umbrella because his clothes were as impervious to water as an otter.
The Pardoner was an important underwriter who could write big lines; but the still and attentive heron-like manner, with beak ready to stab, that accompanied his easy and accommodating responses to everything the brokers told him in the course of their presentations, creeped them out.
Pardoe’s body language bespoke a character that was both sadistic and masochistic. It was said that in the office he kept his staff chained naked to their desks, filthy and unfed, and whipped them when they whimpered. Although at the box his fingers, with their half-moon cuticles and graded oval nails, handled everything with nitroglycerine caution, his reputation was that of a vulture who, after the market leaders had done all the work in bringing a risk down and killing it, and had taken their shares, descended to pick the carcass clean.
Happy was as impervious to the blandishments of senior executives, as he was to the unspoken threats of the oiks who placed internal reinsurances of underwriters’ lines, laying off their excess liabilities to guarantee a profit by “trading on the differential” between contract rates covering the same business: brokers who stuck their hands out at their sides like penguins in the approved wide-boy gesture, tugged at their lapels, e
ased their index fingers around the neck inside their shirts, and were constantly adjusting their neckties, and looking over their shoulders as if they were about to have their collars felt by the law.
Nonetheless, Happy used their services extensively himself, to protect himself and make still more money, perhaps rewarding the spivs with invitations to witness a flogging at his home in Chelsea.
Catching the Pardoner mid morning as he glissaded to the box after partaking solo of a leisurely cup of coffee, with a lot of sugar in it, in the Captain’s Room, Arbella moved in as Happy was lowering his bottom to be kissed by his red-upholstered foam rubber seat cushioning. He had been a little later than usual to the office that morning, after an extended nocturnal viewing of other parties coupling, and had forgone his usual plate of sausage rolls and English mustard upstairs—which he ate with a knife and fork, and a napkin tucked into his collar—so as not to dull the luncheon appetite.
‘Yes…yes…I see…I see,’ said the insightful Pardoe, as he attended to her story. You could inform Happy that his pants were on fire, Arbella thought, or that there was a knife in his ribs, and the response would be the same. Happy did always see, he saw everything.
Arbella could tell from the moistness of his pores that the Pardoner was very turned on by the masculinity—or was it the femininity?—of the riches on offer; and that he was burning with prurient desire to ask probing questions. He seemed not to care about the fabulousness of the risk. His eyeballs and neck bulged, his lips engorged with blood, his breaths shortened, and his nether regions squirmed with exquisite pleasure.
But after a struggle his self-control asserted itself. ‘Yes…yes…it shall be six per cent, I believe. Yes.’ And without waiting for Arbella to say anything, Happy picked up his stamp, the tool of his daytime trade.
The way that Pardoe wrote his line was mesmerizing. First he inked the die thoroughly until it glistened an almost obscene cherry red, a colour so inviting that one was tempted to lick it off one’s finger like icing from a cake. When he put the stamp down, the impression was straight and the corners distinct. After positioning a pad of blotting-paper under his hand to avoid smudging the slip with oily secretions, and shooting his cuff to keep it out of the way and clean, he wrote the line laboriously, pressing hard with a medium ballpoint pen—fountain-pen ink was too easy for the unscrupulous to doctor.