The other costs, when you began to think about them, added up too. Pilar the nanny was £20,000 a year out of net income – more like £35,000 gross once all the pissy employment taxes were allowed for. Sheila the weekend nanny was another £200 a time, adding up to about £9,000 (though they paid her in cash and they didn’t pay her for holidays, unless she came with them, which she often did; or they would get another nanny from an agency). Arabella’s BMW M3 ‘for the shops’ had been £55,000 and the Lexus S400, the principal family car, which was used in practice by the nanny on the school run and play dates, was £75,000. Roger also had a Mercedes E500 given him by the office, and on which he paid only the tax of about ten grand per annum; though he hardly ever used it and made a point of preferring the Tube, which, leaving the house at 6.45 a.m. and returning at about 8 p.m., was bearable. Other things: £2,000 a month on clothes, about the same on house stuff (shared between the two homes, obviously), tax bill of about £250,000 from last year, a need to make a pension contribution ‘well into six figures’, as his accountant put it, £10,000 for their annual summer party, and then the general hard-to-believe expensiveness of everything in London, restaurants and shoes and parking fines and cinema tickets and gardeners and the feeling that every time you went anywhere or did anything money just started melting off you. Roger didn’t mind that, he was completely up for it, but it did mean that if he didn’t get his million-pound bonus this year he was at genuine risk of going broke.
3
It was late afternoon. Roger sat on one of the sofas in his office, opposite the man who more than any other was going to help him earn his million-quid bonus, and the man who was going to play the single biggest role in deciding whether or not he was paid it.
The first man was his deputy, Mark. He was not quite thirty, a full ten years younger than Roger and pale from all his time indoors sitting in front of a screen. Mark had the habit of constantly, and almost invisibly, shifting: he moved his weight from foot to foot, touched his watch, checked that something was in his pocket, or made small twitching facial movements, as if to adjust the way that his glasses were sitting on his nose. The effect was a little like that produced by people who in conversation constantly use the first name of the person they are speaking to: you can go years without noticing this but once you do it is hard not to become distracted by it – hard, in fact, not to feel that it is specifically intended to drive you mad. That was how Roger felt about Mark’s fidgeting. At that very moment he was fiddling with a Montblanc ballpoint pen.
In many respects Mark was a perfect deputy. He worked hard, never made a mistake, was not too obvious about wanting Roger’s job, and if you left aside the question of his non-stop fidgeting, never seemed flustered. There was a slight sense that he kept things too tightly under control, and he was the kind of person who might turn out to have a secret vice: if he turned out to be a paedo or bondage freak or to have a chopped-up body under his floorboards or something, Roger would be surprised, but he wouldn’t be all that surprised. He would have been very surprised indeed if he had known what Mark really thought of him, and also what a close and personal interest his deputy took in his boss’s life – in where Roger lived and where he’d gone to school, in his children’s names and birthdays, in his wife’s spending habits and in the way he spent his free time. Roger would have been completely freaked out by that, but he didn’t know anything about it, so that wasn’t why Mark made Roger uneasy.
Roger’s discomfort with Mark was based on the fact that he, Roger, had come to work at Pinker Lloyd in the time when the City was more about relationships and less about maths. He had prospered, thrived, in the intervening decades but it was no longer true that he had kept up entirely with the changes in the underlying nature of the work. Foreign exchange trading was based on the manipulation of immensely complicated mathematical formulae, which allowed the bank to take subtle, lucrative positions that amounted to betting on both sides of the trade at the same time. As long as anything not too wildly untoward happened – anything outside the parameters and predictions built into your bets – and as long as your algorithms were correct, you were guaranteed to make money. It was a law of the business that you could not make money without taking some risk, but it was also true, thanks to the wonders of modern financial instruments, that you could manage the risk almost out of existence. And of course the bank did every little thing it could to help itself. Some of the trading was algorithmic, done on a purely mathematical basis to benefit from the way prices had momentum: when they moved in any direction, they were more likely than not to move in the same direction the next day. So they had traders using software to profit from that. Some of the trading was ‘flash’ trading, done to profit from the split seconds between an order being placed in the markets and the order being executed. Some of the trading drew on databases of what customers had paid in the past, and used that to predict what they would pay in the present, in real time, so that the bank could quote a price that the customer would accept, but which would also lock in a guaranteed profit for Pinker Lloyd. That was all fine, and the broad principles were well understood by Roger – but it was not the same thing as understanding the maths itself. That was by now well beyond him. Mark, on the other hand, did understand it; he had abandoned a Maths PhD to come and work at Pinker Lloyd. Roger did not love the fact that his footing was no longer entirely secure, and that he could no longer explain, right the way down to the finest grain of detail, exactly what was going on in the trading his department supervised. But then, hardly anyone else could either. That was just the nature of the work that went on in the City these days.
‘OK to bring up one more issue?’ asked Mark, putting down the first set of figures he’d brought, and picking up another file. ‘I’ve got the next run at that software thing. I thought you might like to have a look?’
Mark here was using upspeak, ending on an upward inclination, making what he said nearly a question but not quite. He held the file aloft in a way which invited the third man in the room to take a look at it if he wanted to. That man was Roger’s ultimate boss, Lothar Billinghoffer. Lothar was a forty-five-year-old German who had been headhunted from Euro Paribas a couple of years ago. Companies have styles in personal comportment; the style at Pinker Lloyd was calm and level, and no one embodied that better than the German Chief Executive Officer. He looked super-fit and uncannily healthy for a man who worked twelve to fourteen hours a day, though when you got close up he seemed older than he did at a distance. Lothar was a fanatic about outdoor sport, and spent his weekends walking up mountains or skiing down them or hanging off the sides of yachts. His face was often reddish with a touch of sunburn or windburn and his eyes were lined from outdoorsy squinting. Lothar beside Mark was like a colour chart for men’s faces: this is what happens when you go orienteering in the Black Mountains v. this is what happens when you never voluntarily look up from a screen.
Lothar would not normally be here. Dropping in on people was a new thing he did; he’d read some book about ‘deconstructed’ management techniques. Since no one in the world was less deconstructed than Lothar, he had formulated a strict policy of spending half an hour a week wandering around the building talking to people and going into meetings at pretend-random. So here he was pretend-randomly at Roger’s daily check-in with his deputy.