When the policeman arrived, I gave my best smile and wound the window down one inch.
“You know you can’t park here, miss. Where’s the driver?”
I looked puzzled and shook my head.
“You speak English?”
“Sorry?”
“Driver inside?” He spoke loudly and pointed at the bank.
“Inside?”
“Right. Sure. Of course, you wouldn’t speak English, would you? You’re a wog and can’t understand a word I say.” He retreated a few yards and spoke into the radio on his shoulder.
I watched dumbly as Ismael emerged from the BCCI, smiled, danced past the policeman and jogged around to the driver’s door with his pantomime of hurrying as much as he could out of unlimited respect for everyone.
“Hey!” called out the policeman, moving towards us.
“I know, I know, I have to go. I’m gone. Thank you, officer.” Ismael slammed the door and set the car in motion. To me, he said, “Good! One more stop, then lunch. You know they can’t tow a car with someone in it.”
“That’s my job?”
“It’s important if we want to move around.”
“But they have our number.”
“The owner lives abroad.”
The lunch was nothing, just chatter and an exchange of papers among nicely dressed Middle-Eastern men who were charmed to have me there. They did business in Arabic and I was bored, but late in the afternoon we pulled into the gated driveway of a house in St John’s Wood that looked so expensive that I was immediately nervous. Zareen, a tall, beautiful Pakistani woman, took me to meet her two children while Ismael talked to her husband in another room. “It’s so nice to have someone new to talk to,” she said. “I was a stewardess with Pakistan International before I married. I was free like you.” We were served tea and played Scrabble with the eleven- year-old boy, who beat me but said I was a good opponent, better than mummy and daddy, at which his mother laughed and ruffled his hair. The boy and his naughty younger sister were sweet, like little grown-ups in the white shirts and ties of their British school uniforms. When Ismael returned I did not want to leave my gentle new friend, her nice children and her calm, luxurious home. “Bring Marcella again,” she told Ismael as we left.
“Good,” said Ismael in the car. “The wife liked you. Do you know whose home that was?”
“No.”
“That was the home of a great man. High up in the BCCI. It is the bank that is helping people in Asia and Africa and South America. It is changing the world.”
I looked over at him. He was intense and reverent, his pretty features comically stern. I could tell this was not the time for joking, but nothing serious was coming to mind. I managed, “Is it French?”
“French? Why? Not French. Everything. European, African, Arab, Asian—everything. Pakistanis and Arabs started it, but now it’s global. Global. The fastest expanding bank in the world. It has freed the whole world from the Western banking system and the Zionists. This is something wonderful.”
“Yes,” I agreed, and looked down at my knees, finding them bare and wondering at their role in something so wonderful.
“So, tomorrow?” said Ismael when he dropped me at Hereford Road. “It was useful today.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“You did something. "You made things better.”
“'You mean with parking your car illegally?”
“Not just that.”
Well, every part of the day had been more interesting than staying at home with no money. And Ismael, who was so neat and humourless that I could find nothing of interest in him, also seemed to have no interest in me. For the next weeks I became a regular poodle: make-up and long earrings; cars, restaurants and casinos. I noticed the other girls waiting in other cars. We were a profession. One or two of the policemen in the Edgeware Road came to know me by sight and even tried to flirt. Whatever our route for the day, it always included an office of the BCCI.
I wondered if I was learning about London business by osmosis because I could not put my finger on anything specific. The conversation usually turned to Arabic for serious talk, and no one ever asked for my opinion. The names of countries—Pakistan and Panama, Nigeria and Liberia, Saudi Arabia and Oman (causing a brief pang for Ali, my jilted fiance), Brazil and Mexico, Syria, Iraq, China, Indonesia—dotted the conversations as if the countries of the world were listed on the restaurant menus.
“Isn’t there something more I could do to help?” I asked Ismael one morning, causing a surprised look in my direction. “I’m good at figures.”
“Maybe something. I don’t know what. I’ll talk to Adnam.”
This promise kept me in the passenger seat for another week. All I had learned about Ismael and Adnam’s business so far was that it involved many countries, large loans, no office and agreements that depended on handshakes over restaurant tables.
They never did find a more substantial job for me and of course I was foolish to hope for it. I had nothing to offer, no contacts, relevant experience, education, useful knowledge. I had a bit of wit, some looks and a false cosmopolitan gloss that did not bear close investigation. I was female, foreign, youngish and
