She herself was shaking slightly with what still looked like anger but was more probably a release of tension, because she suddenly sobbed, twice, and said ‘Oh God,’ and wiped crossly at her eyes.
‘I was so frightened, when you told me,’ she said, half apologetically. ‘And when I rang the surgery I got that damned obstructive receptionist and had to argue for ten minutes before she let me even talk to the doctor.’
After a brief sympathetic pause the chairman, going as usual to the heart of things, said, ‘Did the doctor say how long it would take to get the dosage right?’
She looked at him with a defeated grimace. ‘He said that as Gordon had reacted so strongly to an average dose it might take as much as six weeks to get him thoroughly stabilized. He said each patient was different, but that if we would persevere it would be much the best drug for Gordon in the long run.’
Henry Shipton drove me pensively back to the City.
‘I think,’ he said, ‘that we’ll say — in the office — that Gordon felt ‘flu’ coming on and took some pills which proved hallucinatory. We might say simply that he imagined that he was on holiday, and felt the need for a dip in a pool. Is that agreeable?’
‘Sure,’ I said mildly.
‘Hallucinatory drugs are, after all, exceedingly common these days.’
‘Yes.’
‘No need, then, Tim, to mention white-faced clowns.’
‘No,’ I agreed.
‘Nor Parkinson’s disease, if Gordon doesn’t wish it.’
‘I’ll say nothing,’ I assured him.
The chairman grunted and lapsed into silence; and perhaps we both thought the same thoughts along the well-worn lines of drug-induced side effects being more disturbing than the disease.
It wasn’t until we were a mile from the bank that Henry Shipton spoke again, and then he said, ‘You’ve been in Gordon’s confidence for two years now, haven’t you?’
‘Nearly three,’ I murmured, nodding.
‘Can you hold the fort until he returns?’
It would be dishonest to say that the possibility of this offer hadn’t been in my mind since approximately ten-fifteen, so I accepted it with less excitement than relief.
There was no rigid hierarchy in Ekaterin’s. Few explicit ranks: to be ‘in so and so’s confidence’, as house jargon put it, meant one would normally be on course for more responsibility, but unlike the other various thirty-two-year olds who crowded the building with their hopes and expectations I lived under the severe disadvantage of my name. The whole board of directors, consistently afraid of accusations of nepotism, made me double-earn every step.
‘Thank you,’ I said neutrally.
He smiled a shade. ‘Consult,’ he said, ‘whenever you need help.’
I nodded. His words weren’t meant as disparagement. Everyone consulted, in Ekaterin’s, all the time. Communication between people and between departments was an absolute priority in Henry Shipton’s book, and it was he who had swept away a host of small-room offices to form opened-up expanses. He himself sat always at one (fairly opulent) desk in a room that contained eight similar, his own flanked on one side by the vice-chairman’s and on the other by that of the head of Corporate Finance. Further senior directors from other departments occupied a row of like desks opposite, all of them within easy talking earshot of each other.
As with all merchant banks, the business carried on by Ekaterin’s was different and separate from that conducted by the High Street chains of clearing banks. At Ekaterin’s one never actually saw any money. There were no tellers, no clerks, no counters, no paying-ins, no withdrawals and hardly any cheque books.
There were three main departments, each with its separate function and each on its own floor of the building. Corporate Finance acted for major clients on mergers, takeovers and the raising of capital. Banking, which was where I worked with Gordon, lent money to enterprise and industry. And Investment Management, the oldest and largest department, aimed at producing the best possible returns from the vast investment funds of charities, companies, pensions, trusts and trade unions.
There were several small sections like Administration, which did everyone’s paperwork; like Property, which bought, sold, developed and leased; like Research, which dug around; like Overseas Investments, growing fast, and like Foreign Exchange, where about ten frenetic young wizards bought and sold world currencies by the minute, risking millions on decimal point margins and burning themselves out by forty.
The lives of all the three hundred and fifty people who worked for Ekaterin’s were devoted to making money work. To the manufacture, in the main, of business, trade, industry, pensions and jobs. It wasn’t a bad thing to be convinced of the worth of what one did, and certainly there was a tough basic harmony in the place which persisted unruffled by the surface tensions and jealousies and territorial defences of everyday office life.
Events had already moved on by the time the chairman and I returned to the hive. The chairman was pounced upon immediately in the entrance hall by a worriedly waiting figure from Corporate Finance, and upstairs in Banking Alec was giggling into his blotter.
Alec, my own age, suffered, professionally speaking, from an uncontrollable bent for frivolity. It brightened up the office no end, but as court jesters seldom made it to the throne his career path was already observably sideways and erratic. The rest of us were probably hopelessly stuffy. Thank God, I often thought, for Alec.
He had a well-shaped face of scattered freckles on cream-pale skin; a high forehead, a mat of tight tow-coloured curls. Stiff blond eyelashes blinked over alert blue eyes behind gold-framed spectacles, and his mouth twitched easily as he saw the funny side. He was liked on sight by almost everybody, and it was only gradually that one came to wonder whether the examiner who had awarded him a First in law at Oxford had been suffering from critical blindness.
‘What’s up?’ I said, instinctively smiling to match the giggles.
‘We’ve been leaked.’ He lifted his head but tapped the paper which lay on his desk. ‘My dear,’ he said with mischievous pleasure, ‘this came an hour ago and it seems we’re leaking all over the place like a punctured bladder. Like a baby. Like the Welsh.’
Leeking like the Welsh... ah well.
He lifted up the paper, and all, or at least a great deal, was explained. There had recently appeared a slim bi-monthly publication called What’s Going On Where It Shouldn’t, which had fast caught the attention of most of the country and was reportedly read avidly by the police. Descendant of the flood of investigative journalism spawned by the tidal wave of Watergate, What’s Going On... was said to be positively bombarded by informers telling precisely what was going on, and all the investigating the paper had to do was into the truth of the information: which task it had been known to perform less than thoroughly.
‘What does it say?’ I asked; as who wouldn’t.
‘Cutting out the larky innuendo,’ he said, ‘it says that someone at Ekaterin’s has been selling inside information.’
‘Selling...’
‘Quite so.’
‘About a takeover?’
‘How did you guess?’
I thought of the man from Corporate Finance hopping from leg to leg with impatience white he waited for the chairman to return and knew that nothing but extreme urgency would have brought him down to the doorstep.
‘Let’s see,’ I said, and took the paper from Alec.
The piece headed merely ‘Tut tut’ was only four paragraphs long, and the first three of those were taken up with explaining with seductive authority that in merchant banks it was possible for the managers of investment funds to learn at an early stage about a takeover being organised by their colleagues. It was strictly illegal, however, for an investment manager to act on this private knowledge, even though by doing so he might make a fortune for his clients.