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By Root 607 0

became sexy in financial circles after the big scandals of the nineties—Baring Brothers, Metallgesellschaft, Orange County, Sumitomo—demonstrated the degree to which the growth of financial derivatives could expose institutions to enormous losses. The ease with which a single trader could lose over a billion dollars and bring down the oldest private bank in London was very scary, and led a lot of people to become interested in how such risks could be managed. My research area was on the computational side, examining case studies using variants of the Black—Scholes—Merton model and Monte Carlo simulations. I tried to explain all this to Luce, but she found it unreal and, I suspect, rather silly. She was amused, though, when I told her that Nick Leeson might have got away with it, had it not been for the Kobe earthquake, which caused a sudden drop in Japanese equities. She seemed to think there was some sort of natural justice in that. After Frenchmans Cap I had a finer appreciation of sudden drops and natural justice, and could see what she meant.

But by the following June, my master’s almost completed, things weren’t going so well for Luce and me. I blame myself entirely now, although at the time I found all kinds of reasons and rationalisations for my discontent. I was becoming restless, feeling unreasonably restricted and tied down. Perhaps it was a character flaw on my part, something more intractable than even the experience on Frenchmans Cap could cure. One telling symptom of my malaise was a creeping sense of that feeling that Groucho Marx identified when he said that he didn’t want to belong to any club that would have him as a member. It’s more common than we like to admit, that feeling, but made invisible because we don’t seem to have a name for it. We need to borrow one, as we did with schadenfreude, literally harm-joy. Perhaps selbsthassfreude, self-hate-joy. I began to think that there must be something wrong with Luce, something inadequate and unworthy, simply because she loved me.

One weekend Luce went back to see her father in Orange. I didn’t go, and after finishing at the restaurant on the Saturday night I called in at a student party we’d been invited to. There was a girl there, quite a pretty little thing, who took a great fancy to me. I couldn’t shake her off, and didn’t really want to. I slept with her that night.

The next day I tried to tell myself it was a trivial thing and didn’t matter. I chased the girl away and told her I didn’t want to see her again, and tried to put the whole thing out of my mind. But when Luce came back and I watched her unpack her bag, talking about her trip, I felt sick with shame. Of course she wouldn’t see it as trivial, no more than I would have done in her place. I wondered how long it would take for her to find out, and thought I should tell her first, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t brave enough. I had a poisonous secret now, and hated myself for it. Every time she came into the room, every time she looked at me, I scanned her face for the knowledge. It became a void between us, a thousand-foot drop that I couldn’t cross.

Then I got an email from a friend who’d been a year ahead of me at uni. Gary McCall was a New Zealander who, like me, had been steered into quantitative finance by our tutor. Now he was in London, working for the BBK Bank. They were running an innovative new in-house program for their staff, he said, rotating them through a number of the bank’s departments in both London and Frankfurt to get a thorough practical grounding in risk management strategies. He was very enthusiastic; the program was highly regarded and the bank was recruiting. He had been specifically asked by his boss, Lionel Stamp, if he knew of any more like him who might be interested in coming over. Without telling Luce, I said I was definitely interested, and received an application form by return.

So I decided that I had to leave. I had always assumed that I would have a spell working abroad after I’d finished uni, but now this vague ambition became focused into a compulsion. I had to