was demonstrating something with the side of his foot, as if showing how to balance or control a ball on it, while various men beneath him in the hierarchy of the bank gave him their full, devoted attention. But Roger didn’t mind. A bank had to have a hierarchy, and a hierarchy had to have a boss, and as bosses went you could do much worse than Lothar. The only person apparently not joining in the general rivetedness was Mark. His weirdo deputy was looking down at his feet and scowling, as if he’d suddenly realised that he was wearing the wrong shoes. Roger thought nothing of it; he had long since given up any effort to work out what was going through Mark’s mind. It was lucky that he didn’t know, since a lot of what was on Mark’s mind was very dark, and was focused on Roger.
‘This is my friend Matya Balatu,’ Roger said to the general company. The moment in which he might have offered an explanation of who she was passed without taking place, and Roger noticed it pass: ha ha, he thought. He could feel his male colleagues rearranging their self-presentation, shifting from joshing-with-males mode to presence-of-unknown-attractive-female-with-potential-to-be-impressed mode.
‘I don’t think we’ve met,’ Lothar began. Matya, looking demurely not-quite-at-him, said, ‘I’m sure we haven’t.’
Good girl, thought Roger. At the same time, the wives counter-attacked.
‘Arabella well?’ said Carmen, who was married to Peter in contracts. She was a dumpy woman in her middle forties, less like a Carmen than anyone Roger had ever met, though in fairness not as dumpy as her husband. She hated Arabella, so this was a win-win for her: she got to be bitchy about the presence of a pretty girl on Roger’s arm, and for all she knew, perhaps Arabella was ill or had been dumped, so she could be unpleasant to him and celebrate Arabella’s misfortune at the same time.
‘In cracking form,’ said Roger. Instinct told him that to offer an excuse, even a triumphant one – she had to go to an investiture, she had to stay in to show the
‘How’s Heathcote?’
This was Carmen and Peter’s notoriously troublesome son; the previous week, he had been suspended from Rugby for putting what was supposed to be his headmaster’s penis on sale on eBay. The listing was accompanied by a photo. The ‘Buy Now’ price was set at 50p. Roger knew all this because Peter had told a colleague and the colleague had immediately betrayed his confidence by telling Roger. Carmen must assume that Roger was very unlikely to have known that, so he was almost certainly making a genuinely friendly, well-meaning enquiry, which should be taken in good faith, but with the faintly perceptible possibility that he was indulging in an exquisitely calculated piece of malice. In the film
‘He’s well,’ she said, her eyes flicking sideways towards her husband. A waitress arrived with more Taittinger, and they all took refills. Then a gong was sounded, and someone called out, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, dinner is served.’
After the main course, a few things were auctioned. One of the prizes was supposed to be given away by Freddy Kamo, the African footballer who lived in Pepys Road – the charity, it turned out, was to do with Africa and clean drinking water in villages. His club had had a certain amount of tabloid newspaper trouble over players’ sex lives, and as part of a PR counter-offensive was encouraging its players to do token charitable activities. Roger had been keen to see the African boy – his working hours were such that he’d never seen Freddy in the street. But Freddy had been injured a few days before and instead his prize was given away by a weaselly man called Michael Lipton-Miller, representing the club.
‘That was a little disappointing,’ said Lothar when Mickey sat down.
Looking back on the evening, Roger realised that there was no single definitive moment when he realised he had fallen in love with Matya. It was something to do with the way she looked in his colleagues’ eyes and it was not just her looks – though it had to be admitted that her long, very dark, only just off-black hair, worn down tonight over her vivid jade gown, emphasising her height and her shapeliness and her slightly too large, meaning exactly perfect, bum – well, Roger would be the last person to say that her looks weren’t an important factor. He would defend those looks to the end; he wouldn’t hear a word against them. He would pick up the standard for those looks and charge towards the foe, axe swinging, ready to die, ready to kill, ready for… Roger didn’t follow through on the thought. Let the record show merely that he fancied Matya. But the thing which had made him fall for her, fall properly, was the way she seemed so calm and so quiet and so sad. Surrounded by noisy bankers showing off, and their variously pushy or beady or anxious or competitive wives, she seemed to be from somewhere else; a place where people carried their own burdens; a grander and realer and more honourable place. Roger didn’t know that Matya spent a lot of that evening thinking about home, but he could tell that she was thinking about something, and it was that other thing which, for him, did it. She was like a countess; and that became his private, only-to-himself nickname for her, the countess. His countess.
Roger had taken the precaution of booking a taxi for half past midnight. He knew too well how a scrum of pissed City types could fight over late-night cabs. He had had enough to drink to spend the ride home thinking about how nice it would be to take her straight to bed and give her the seeing-to of her life, her hair spread over the pillow, face-up, then face-down, then face-up again… then roses and champagne in the morning, and start all over again the next day. Following this train of thought, he found himself with a huge erection as the car turned into the corner of their street, and had to fumble, pretending to look for his wallet, to give it a chance to subside, while he tried to think about things other than how good she would look in nothing but her knickers. So he thought about work for a few moments – something he found himself increasingly reluctant to do, these days, especially when he was actually at work, but a few seconds contemplating the prospect of collating the weekly figures to run past Lothar, and bingo, no erection.
Roger got out of the cab, handed the driver three twenty-pound notes, and gave him Matya’s address. He didn’t trust himself to kiss her goodnight.
‘I hope you had a nice time,’ he said through the open window as the cab rattled in the otherwise silent street.
‘It was wonderful,’ said Matya.
‘See you tomorrow,’ said Roger, who in fact probably wouldn’t – he would be gone before she arrived and back after she had left. Then he went upstairs, got into bed beside his deeply sleeping wife, and lay awake for a long time.
60
Everyone at Pinker Lloyd was at work by eight in the morning. Many were already at their desks by seven. If you wanted to be on your own in the building, you had to get there well before six.
At half past five, when Mark came into the foyer, the night guards were still on duty. He had got home from the charity dinner at quarter to one, and slept for four hours; it was a sign of his strength of will that he had been able to train himself to not need much sleep. In the dark, the atrium looked warm and inviting, much more so than it did in daylight, when the vast expanses of glass made it seem overheated and airless. Today the security desk was occupied by an unspeaking, unsmiling Caribbean man in his fifties. He checked Mark’s ID and signed him in. Mark went through into the lift. He looked at his reflection in the stainless steel. He said:
‘I’ve come in to get a jump on the weekly figures, before the meeting with Lothar.’ His voice, bouncing back off the metal walls, sounded sincere. It was good to practise; this was something he always did, when he had a lie he knew he was likely to have to tell: say it out loud, to check how it sounded. ‘Got to get ready for the meeting,’ he said. ‘It’s like they say in the SAS. The seven Ps: Proper Planning and Preparation Prevent Piss-Poor Performance.’
He was fine. There would in all probability be no one in before six o’clock or so. Certainly no one was in yet; he had checked the out-of-hours sign-in sheet when he came through security.
Mark liked being on his own in the trading room. There was something creepy about the empty space, the blank monitors and the dark outside, the uncanny stillness in a room designed for a crowd, for noise, for shouting and anxiety and action and looking at three screens while talking on two phones while juggling a dozen trades; but that unsettlingness was what he liked about it. Most people could not do this. They would be too freaked out. But he
