Melanie, one of the secretaries, stopped behind his desk. “Coffee?”
“I’ll get you one. I need a walk anyway.”
For Syed, thought Harry, as he headed for the coffee machine, the City is like Star Wars. A cosmic battle. He sits there on the trading floor in front of all the live screens—Bloomberg, instant messaging, information updated second by second—and it’s everything he could possibly want. It’s competition, danger, money, power, and the best interactive digital game anyone has ever invented.
Maybe that’s why he’s so good, thought Harry, watching the jet of coffee squirt into his cup. I work with graduates from Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge. But none of them has Syed’s nose for the market. He sniffs out change before it even happens. He smells it in the air.
Harry put a white Styrofoam cup on Melanie’s desk. “What happened to Phillip?”
Melanie looked up, surprised. “I thought you knew.” She hesitated. Then her forefinger traced the air across her neck from ear to ear.
It was only when Harry glanced across to Phillip’s desk that he realized it had been stripped. There was nothing there—no papers, no pens, no files, no photographs. It was as if he had never existed.
That’s how it works in the City. Maximum gain. Zero security.
• • •
Kim went white. “He can’t do this.”
They were sitting in the kitchen of the ramshackle house in Nunhead. It was a room that had seen better days—last decorated in 1991 when their father, in one of his odd bursts of enthusiasm, had bought several tins of yellow paint from a street market in Peckham. It made you feel, said their mother wearily, as if you’d been drowned in a vat of custard.
Open on the table was a creased piece of white A4. The paper had been handled so often it was going thin and wispy at the edges.
“I didn’t show it to you before now,” said Eva, “because you were doing exams.”
Dear Eva,
I have just come off the phone after speaking to your mother in Nice, and she requested that I write to you.
As you know, Kim will graduate from university this summer. This means that neither you nor she is any longer in full-time education. As such, you are now adults and responsible for making your own financial arrangements.
This letter is to give you notice that I intend to sell the house in Nunhead as soon as you can make alternative arrangements.
Jia tells me that it can be difficult to find affordable property to rent in London. I am, therefore, prepared to set the end of this year, that is 31 December 2006, as an appropriate date by which I will expect you to have vacated the property.
Best wishes,
Dad
Kim’s eyes were big with shock. “He’s making us homeless.”
“We’ll never be homeless,” said Eva. “As long as Christine’s next door.”
Christine, who took in all south London’s waifs and strays. “What if we refuse to go?”
“It’s his house. He can sell if he wants to.”
“What about Mum? Isn’t it hers as well?”
Eva shook her head. “He bought her out when they divorced. She used the money to buy the flat in France.”
“But why’s he doing it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he thinks we don’t need it anymore.”
“But we do.”
“We’ve been lucky in a way. He could have sold it years ago.” Eva always defended their father. It wasn’t just that she was trying to be fair. She didn’t want to hate him.
“I don’t feel very lucky.”
“I know, but look at it from his point of view. He’s got a new family to support.”
“Oh yes,” said Kim. “The lovely Jia.”
“I wonder what she’s like.”
“I don’t.”
“Really? Ever?”
“Why would I?” She broke up a family. She stole our father. I try not to think about her.
“Don’t be too hard on her.” Eva sounded weary. “From the sound of it, she persuaded him to let us stay on for longer than he wanted us to.”
You’re too reasonable. It’s irritating. “So what are we going to do?”
Eva leant across the table and took her hand. “Harry said he’d help.”
Kim snatched her hand back. “No.”
“Just as a friend.”
“I’d rather starve.”
Eva, who normally treated Kim’s furious dislike of Harry as a huge joke, looked defeated.
“We can manage,” said Kim. “We’ll find somewhere. I’ll get a job. Maybe you could look for something part-time as well as your teaching—”
“I sent a reply,” said Eva, “asking him to reconsider.”
Kim was surprised. Eva wasn’t usually so assertive. “What did he say?”
Eva’s expression was unreadable. She held out another folded sheet of A4.
Dear Eva,
May I offer my congratulations.
I do not feel that your news should alter the decision I have already communicated to you in my previous letter.
You have sufficient time to find alternative accommodation. I believe that I am under no obligation to offer financial assistance as you have made an independent, adult choice to keep the baby.
Yours ever,
Dad
The letter fell to the floor.
“I always knew he’d make a good grandfather.” Eva’s smile was sad.
Kim was too stunned to breathe.
“It was your finals,” said Eva when the silence got scarily long. “I thought I shouldn’t tell you about the house. Or this. In case it freaked you out.” She bent down, picked up the letter, and folded it back into the envelope, smoothing it carefully so that it lay quite flat.
“So you’re—”
“Fourteen weeks.”
Kim swallowed.
“It was a relief, in the end, when I found out. I thought I’d got some terrible disease that was making me throw up every day.”
“So was it—?”
“Planned?” Eva shook her head. “No. But I’m OK with it now. It seems a good thing to do when you’re twenty-five. Have a baby.”
Kim’s whole body felt heavy, as if someone had filled her with wet cement. So that’s why Eva’s so calm about the house being sold. She’ll move in with Harry.
“What did Mum say?”
Eva pulled a face. “That my pelvic floor would never be the same again.”
You can’t believe how much I suffered having babies.
They sat at the wooden table, pitted and pockmarked from years of family meals and teenage experiments with henna and leg wax and burning incense, and looked at each other.
“So I’m going to be an auntie.”
“Auntie Kim.”
“I’ll be brilliant.”
“I know you will.”
Kim tried a smile. It was a bit wobbly, but it was better than nothing. “So when’s it due?”
“The New Year. A January baby.”
“Boy or girl?”
“No idea.”
“Can you feel it?”
“Not yet. They say you don’t always, the first time round. Another month maybe.”
They used to call it the quickening, when the baby first starts to move. The thought of Eva having a child was so huge that Kim had to take a deep breath to calm herself. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Eva shouldn’t be tied down like this. Eva should be free. Sitting by a campfire, the light red and gold on her face. Traveling, her guitar slung over her shoulder, weighed down by nothing more than an old canvas bag.
After a while, Eva said, “So you’ll let Harry find somewhere for us?”
Kim looked at her in horror. “For all of us?”
Eva frowned. “For the two of us. You and me. You don’t want to live with Harry, do you?” When Kim still looked puzzled, she said, “Kimmy, Harry and I aren’t together.”
I know. He’s been cheating on you for years. I saw him once w
ith that girl with red hair who’s been all over the magazines. “What do you mean?”
“We’re not a couple.”
Kim felt the pressure of all the words she couldn’t say. “But you’re always together.”
Eva smiled. “How would you know? You’ve been away for three years.”
“He hasn’t been living here?”
“He’s my friend. My best friend.”
Not me. Harry. Treats my sister like dirt and ends up with her devotion.
“This is my baby. My decision. Nothing to do with him.”
Kim was hot with confusion. “So he’s not the father?”
Eva’s face was calm. “I’m not going to say who the father is. Not even to you. I promised myself I wouldn’t.”
“You can say whether or not it’s Harry.”
“All right,” said Eva. “OK. It’s not Harry. Of course it’s not Harry.”
Do I believe her? Or is she just saying that to shut me up? “Is that true?”
“You see? You won’t stop. It’s not fair, Kim. You’re not trying to understand. You’ll go on and on and on until you get what you want. So it’s better if I don’t say anything at all.”
After a while, Kim said, “Why won’t you say?”
Eva shook her head.
“Because you won’t? Or you can’t?”
“You’re not listening.”
A rush of fury—or possibly grief that was being screwed down so tightly that an explosion was inevitable—made Kim say, in a very loud voice, “But we don’t have any money.”
Which, roughly translated, meant: If this is Harry’s baby, he should pay for it.
Eva looked over to the window. Outside, the leaves of the sycamore tree were bright green. “We’ll manage.”
“How?” said Kim in a small voice.
“We always do,” said Eva.
• • •
Harry rolled out of bed and killed the alarm. He always woke before it went off. But last night he hadn’t slept much anyway. A July heat wave. Thirty-six degrees at Gatwick. The senior vice presidents had already disappeared to Tuscany or Provence, spending their days dozing in hammocks, or half-asleep under olive trees, or swimming in private infinity pools. But the bank’s less important employees carried on as usual, emerging late in the evening from the ice-cold fridge of air-conditioning to the dark, smelly sweat bath of London’s streets.
At night, in these record-breaking temperatures, there was a frenzied party atmosphere. Everyone spilled out onto the pavements from the bars and cafés. You stayed up until the heat left the brickwork, until the early hours brought air that felt, by comparison, soft and new. And only then did you head for home, with the carnival still alive around you, through crowds laughing and singing and shouting.
Which made getting up even harder, thought Harry, looking out of the window. He yawned. This high up, in the clouds, you couldn’t see much. Mist, or perhaps pollution, meant the city was still shrouded in gloom. But he knew the great, wide river was down there somewhere. Although even the Thames had lost its cool. It wasn’t so much gray and aloof as boiled to a kind of khaki.
When Harry got back from the shower, there was a message on his phone. R u free Sat lunch? At my brother’s.
He had a mental picture of Titania with her long legs and carefully tousled blond hair. Titania, named after the queen of the fairies. (“I can forgive my mother for loving Shakespeare. But what was wrong with Rosalind? Or Miranda?”) An English rose, complete with thorns, she survived in the male-dominated world of investment banking by behaving with the brisk detachment of a boarding school headmistress. She treated most of the traders as silly little boys. In retaliation, they called her the Iron Lady.
Syed was terrified of her. “She’d have me for breakfast.”
“She wouldn’t want you for breakfast.”
“That makes it worse.” Syed shot him a sideways glance. “And how do you know what she likes for breakfast?”
“I’m telling you nothing.”
“Very wise. It would be all over the bank by lunchtime.”
“You have no discretion, do you?” said Harry, grinning.
“None at all,” said Syed with satisfaction.
Titania usually wore silk shirts in soft blush colors like oyster and pink, fastened to a point just above her cleavage. Fund managers fantasized about missing buttons.
Harry, in the cool, sleek modernism of his recently renovated flat—white walls, full-length mirrors, white blinds over the floor-to-ceiling windows—looked again at her message. He texted back, Sorry, no. Busy.
The last time they’d had dinner (two Michelin stars, an extraordinary wine list, and a chef so keen on deconstruction that it was amazing any food ended up on the plate at all), Titania had said casually, over coffee, “What do you do at weekends?”
“What do you mean?”
“All the times you’re busy.”
He shrugged. “Working.”
She flashed him an icy glance from her gray-blue eyes. “Harry, this is me you’re talking to. I know you work at weekends. We all do. But when you’re not working, what do you do?”
“What’s brought this on?”
“I just don’t feel I know you any better than I did a year ago.”
He picked up a coffee spoon and turned it round between his fingers. “What do you want to know?”
“Anything. Everything. Where you were born, where you went to school, brothers and sisters, parents . . .”
“Childhood illnesses? Phobias? Dead pets?”
“I’m serious.”
“I’ve had a very boring life. There’s nothing to tell.”
“Try me.”
Harry smiled. But the light had gone from his eyes. It was a relationship with no commitment. He had always made that clear. “There’s no mystery. What you see is what you get.”
“But that’s the point, isn’t it, Harry?” She gave him the kind of direct stare that would have had Syed backing off in terror. “There isn’t that much of you on show.”
The conversation replayed in his head as he got dressed. He liked Titania. She was beautiful, funny, clever. He didn’t want to lose her.
Damage limitation, he thought. Weekend in Paris? Flowers? Her favorite restaurant? He picked up his phone and texted, Friday night Sauterelle at the Royal Exchange?
I might be busy.
Harry laughed.
• • •
Kim, late for her interview, leapt onto the bus. She pressed her Oyster card against the yellow reader. Nothing happened. She tried again. The bus driver, hands on the wheel, stared straight ahead.
“I put five pounds on it just now,” said Kim.
Rain lashed against the windows.
“Try again,” said the driver.
Behind her, the squashed queue of wet people with useless umbrellas was getting impatient. Kim pushed her card against the reader. She rubbed it round and round in circles. Nothing registered. There was no cheery little bleep.
“You have to get off.”
“I put money on it just now. A few minutes ago. At the newsagent.” Kim fumbled in her pocket. “Here’s the receipt. Look. Five pounds.”
“It makes no difference. It’s not on the card. You have to get off.”
Kim walked forward into the body of the bus and sat down. Behind her the queue, released, surged forward. Commuters distributed themselves onto damp seats. But the bus doors stayed open.
“You have to get off,” said the bus driver for the third time.
“Are you talking to me?”
Some of the passengers groaned.
“I’m talking to you. You haven’t paid. You have to get off.”
“But I have paid. I showed you the receipt.”
The bus driver turned off the engine. Someone at the back shouted, “Get off!” A young man with a red beard frowned at her. Kim glared back.
“You got no cash, love?” said an elderly woman in a tweed coat.
&n
bsp; “I’ve got cash. But I’m not paying full fare. There’s five pounds on my Oyster.”
“Some of us have got to get to work, though,” said a young woman with eyebrows plucked into such fine arcs she looked astonished.
Kim stared straight ahead.
“Are you getting off or what?” shouted the bus driver.
“Look, I’ll pay for you,” said a man in a suit with a nose stud.
“Sit down.”
“But I—”
“Sit down!” said Kim in a voice of such ringing authority that the man cringed backwards as if she’d hit him.
“Oh thank you,” said a woman, breathless, running onto the bus through the open doors in the mistaken belief that the driver had waited for her.
No one spoke.
The driver swore unintelligibly. The engine labored into life. There was a small cheer from the less stressed commuters. Steam covered the windows so thickly you could have been floating in a cloud.
The young man with the red beard leant forward. “You know, I normally use a bicycle. But the chain broke.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Kim, “but I really don’t want to talk to you.”
“No,” said the young man. “Right.”
The bus grumbled on towards Brixton.
• • •
“Is Wales always this bloody cold?”
Harry grinned. “Didn’t bring your thermals?”
“Did I, fuck. I came here for the fine dining. Not hanging around in a howling wind freezing my bollocks off.”
If someone had tried to come up with a cartoon version of a posh English banker, they would probably have drawn Giles. He was tall but fleshy, as if way too fond of strawberry jam, sweet tea, and port. Cold weather and excitement made his cheeks burn red, like someone had slapped him. In his late twenties, he already had the beginnings of a paunch, a bald spot on his crown, and a face that was beginning to droop into jowls at the jawline. Despite this disappointing appearance, Giles was brimming with confidence. He took center stage wherever he went. In a crowded bar you could hear his voice booming out across the banter and bravado.
Years ago, Harry had found people like Giles intimidating. It was the way they slotted into positions of power and privilege as if born to rule. But these days it didn’t bother him. He had learned how to play the game.
They were in north Wales, guests of a multinational health care company that had invited a select group of City analysts to see their new research laboratories. The two-day visit, planned for the summer to make the most of the breathtaking scenery, included luxury accommodation in a five-star hotel and the chance to try traditional country sports like clay-pigeon shooting. So far, thunder and lightning had limited the time they could spend outdoors. Luckily, no one really cared. The meal the night before—oysters, white truffles, champagne, chocolate fondant with gold leaf—had drifted on into shots of single malt by the fire. Harry dimly remembered getting to bed around four a.m.
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