Pinstripes (6 page)

Chapter Five

Ella’s week was getting better. She felt tired and a little headachy from last night – she and Jackie had talked well into the small hours – but still in control. The markets, once again, were doing exactly as she had predicted.

“
Nice one, Ella.” John smiled at her. They had debated a position last night and, on Ella’s judgement, had sold the stock before the price fell.

“
Hey, it’s nothing,” Ella joked.

“
I may ask your advice more often.”

Ella felt her face go warm. Sh
e basked in the compliment; and didn’t know how to react to it.

“
John, boy, why don’t you ever ask my advice?” Liam had joined the growing crowd around Ella.

“
Because you don’t know shit, I ask you which way a stock is going, you toss a coin.”

“
Yeah, but then I have a fifty-fifty chance of getting it right.” Liam laughed loudly and returned to his desk. “Hey, I know, let’s go out tonight,” he suggested. Now he was juggling with two plastic rugby balls.

“
OK. Where?” John asked.

“
We’ll go to the Met bar, I’ve got membership.” Liam threw one of the balls at John’s head. John caught it and threw it straight back at him.

“
How the fuck did you get membership there?” Trevor, one of the more senior members of the desk, asked.

“
I’m a classy guy, of course I have membership. Anyway, you coming?”

“
Count me in,” John said, returning to his seat.

“
Me too,” Trevor agreed.

“
I’ll be there.” Jimmy indicated although he was still on the phone.

“
And me.” Bob, who sat next to Ella, smiled.

“
Come on, Ella, what about you?” Liam asked.

Ella looked at him. She only socialised with them at official desk dinners, and felt panicked about the idea of them and her outside the office.

“No, I don’t think so. Five disgusting men and me? I’m not sure I could cope.” She giggled in an attempt to make her refusal sound inoffensive.

“
Ella, you’re one of us. Come on, we insist,” John said.

Ella realised that it would be rude to say no. She remembered what Jackie had said about moving on. Perhaps one night out wouldn
’t hurt.

“
You’re on,” she said, smiling widely.

“
And I promise we won’t go to any lap-dancing clubs,” Liam finished.

Ella flashed him a look of fake disgust, and they got back to work. Well, almost work.

Ella surveyed the schoolboy scene, always in evidence when the markets went quiet after a good morning. The traders would throw things, make paper aeroplanes, tell jokes, dance, sing, and generally act as if they were in the playground. When the day was bad, they sat at their desks sulking and cursing quietly. When nothing was happening, they played practical jokes on team members and caught up with Internet porn. Ella thought that there was nothing as bad as a bored trader.

She often thought that the trading desk resembled the most glamorous school in existence. The pupils wore Armani, Gucci, Savile Row, the teachers the same. The behaviour, however, reflected the spoilt, rich kids that they were. But you couldn
’t help having fun in such an atmosphere.

When the bell rang to signify the end of trading, John and Liam were exchanging high fives, and Jeff was beaming like a proud father.
“Fabulous day. Great work. This is the way it should be,” he said.

Everyone voiced their agreement.

At five thirty Ella excused herself to go and put on her makeup in the ladies” room. She didn’t wear much: clear mascara that lengthened her lashes, a subtle lip-gloss, a tiny amount of eye-shadow. Her look was understated but professional. It was an image Ella had taken pains to cultivate, and now it was like second nature to her.

When she walked back in, Liam wolf-whistled and she hit him. She went back to her desk to finish up, but the guys had already started telling jokes so she found it impossible. Looking at each of them, she felt that they had finally accepted her, they had included her, which they didn
’t often, they had complimented her, and they were treating her as one of the guys. It had only taken three years.

Ella remembered the terror she had felt when she first walked on to the trading floor. She had been training with Human Resources for two months, in which time she had taken her regulatory exams. That morning she was so full of nerves and excitement that she spent it being sick.

Everyone turned to look at her. She was not just the new girl, she was the new black girl, and in an office that was full of white faces, she felt conspicuous. Jeff, whom she had met at the interview stage, soon put her at ease, and when he introduced her to her fellow traders her knees had almost stopped knocking.

The rest of the desk all eyed her with mild interest. They were civil, they were polite and sometimes they were even kind. However, until she could prove that she was good, they did not accept her. As soon as she started making money, they thawed slightly, but still they whispered that this might be beginner
’s luck. Her ‘beginner’s luck’ lasted three years, which culminated in her getting the biggest bonus and making more money than anyone else. Their attitude turned to respect and now they were even offering a kind of friendship.

She felt that although initially she had perhaps not deserved to get the job, she had justified herself.

They piled into a cab, and Ella knew that, whatever happened, tonight would be a long one. They had dinner at Indigo before moving on to the Met bar. Ella enjoyed the food, the wine, the champagne. They were all drinking as if Prohibition were to be introduced the following day. The guys were getting through twice as much as she was, but that was because they were animals. The jokes were blue, the language was unrepeatable, but they were courteous towards Ella.

She, however, was more than able to handle anything they threw at her. At the Met bar, she was fascinated by the handful of celebrities they encountered. Although most were wannabes, there were people that Ella recognised: a few music stars and a couple of sexy actors whose names she wasn
’t sure of. Liam was ordering champagne and smiling suggestively at anyone female. Trevor’s tongue was hanging out – he was standing near some girls who looked like models. Bob was asleep on a table, and John and Jimmy were taking care of Ella.

She got home at some time in the small hours and fell into bed. When her alarm clock went off at 5 a.m., announcing that it was a gym day, she mumbled,
“Fuck the gym,” and reset the clock for an hour later.

***

On Wednesday Virginia kept her head down, and worked twice as hard as usual. She completed Isabelle’s tasks efficiently, and was thankful that due to ‘hangovers from hell’ the desk were too ill to ask her to do anything apart from get them bacon sandwiches in the morning. She logged into her directory of investment banks, looking for any to which she could apply.

She made an alphabetical list, then looked at it despondently.
2Change career,” a voice in her head told her.

“
No,” she replied. “No, no, no.” If anyone else on the desk noticed her talking to herself, they didn’t say anything.

Virginia went through the list again. She knew she didn
’t want to work for anyone as much as she wanted to work for SFH. But her loyalty to a bank that made her miserable and gave her no opportunity to advance was inexplicable. Except that it wasn’t SFH, it was Isabelle. If it weren’t for Isabelle she would get somewhere. For a moment Virginia felt faint: her grip was going, as was her reason and rationale.

How can you carry on when you have nothing? Virginia rubbed her temples, she felt like she was going mad, and there was no way she could go mad.

She left the desk, rushed to the ladies”, and sat on the loo seat with her head in her hands. She had to think. She knew that today was Wednesday. Right. Her routine had been as usual: she had got up, she had had her tea, she had come to work, it was quiet, and she would go for lunch in twenty-seven minutes. That was OK. Everything was OK. She wasn’t going mad.

She washed her face and went back to her desk. Everyone seemed to be leaving for lunch and they told Virginia not to expect them back for a while. Isabelle had already left for her afternoon meetings; Virginia could expect a quiet afternoon.

She left for lunch exactly twenty-five minutes later. She went to her usual sandwich bar; she walked past the banks she always walked past. She returned at the same time she always did, she sat at her desk, she ate her sandwich. She had her composure back.

In the afternoon, Virginia made lists. Her first list was her work list. Then she wrote a shopping list for the weekend, which was unnecessary as she bought the same things every week. She followed with a list of clothes that needed washing and a list of clothes that had to go to the dry-cleaner
’s. Then a list of shoes that needed polishing, a list of household items that would run out soon – washing powder: one more week; shoe polish: two months; shampoo: three weeks. Her final list was her dinner menu for the following week – Monday: pasta; Tuesday: tuna salad; Wednesday: soup; Thursday: chicken and vegetables; Friday: fish and chips (takeaway). She made a separate menu list for the weekend. Then she filed her lists in her Filofax and felt better. How could she be going mad when her life was so well organised?

Virginia
’s routine was military. She could not cope if she didn’t know what she was doing and when. If she broke it, as she had a couple of times recently, it unnerved her – if she went to bed half an hour late, if she got up even minutes late, if she didn’t watch the news. She wasn’t a control freak, she knew she wasn’t, but what she did know, her big secret, was that due to her many failures her grip on her life was so fragile that if her routine was disrupted she would lose that grip altogether. The only way she made it through the day was by behaving like a robot.

Virginia often told herself that she had failed at getting a personality as well as failing at everything else. She often wondered if her life had purpose, but the one thing she was certain of was that she would prove her parents wrong. One day they would no longer call her a failure.

She had been an unpopular child, a gawky teenager, and was now a boring adult. She had had one boyfriend in the whole of her life, Noel, a fellow economics student and member of the group she went round with. Noel was a committed Christian, and she was still a virgin. But she quite liked kissing him and having him hold her. With Noel, for the first time, Virginia had affection. He would hold her hand, hug and kiss her.

Noel was very bright, very bossy, and spent hours preaching either the Bible or economics at Virginia. She didn
’t mind; she would sat for hours listening to him, and she felt wanted. Noel got a place at Stamford to do a postgraduate course. He had flown to the States where celibacy before marriage was fashionable and Virginia had gone where the prospects of having either sex or marriage were slim.

Virginia left work at a reasonable time. That evening she had a French class. She brightened: for once she could escape spending the evening in her depressing room. Her French class routine involved leaving the office at six, driving home, changing into her casual uniform of jeans and jumper, eating dinner, leaving at a quarter past seven and arriving, by scooter, at the local adult education centre at half past.

Virginia had thought long and hard about what evening class she would do. When she first moved to London she took classes to help her get a social life: she had tried pottery, art history and badminton. She had not made a single friend, or motivated herself in any way. The French class was as unsophisticated as the language was sophisticated. Its intellectual demands were few, and Virginia was nowhere near being fluent, but she believed that, one day, she would be if she kept going.

There were seven people in the group, which was taught by a
frazzled
middle-aged Frenchwoman. Virginia sat next to Pat, a housewife who had ideas of moving to France when her husband retired. She was plump and grey, and Virginia often wondered if she really had a husband. Two girls were taking extra lessons to help with their GCSE’s. A man of about fifty, called Graham, wanted to learn French to go with his Spanish and German conversational skills. Completing the group were the Trout sisters, two women of about eighty as far as Virginia could tell, who giggled through the lesson and had so far never uttered a word of French.

Virginia applied herself to the class with the determination she applied to everything and she was good. Madame often said that she was the best in the class and she was a natural. Virginia basked in the pleasure of such a compliment and she tried harder and harder each week. The reality of the class made being the best quite easy, but at least she was the best somewhere.

After the class, Virginia hung back. The two girls rushed out of the classroom then Pat picked up her massive tote bag and trundled off, buckling under its weight. The Trout sisters collected their walking sticks and moved slowly out of the room, while Graham, the international conversationalist, stopped to ask the teacher something.