Bright Air - Barry Maitland [86]
As if she was listening to my thoughts, she said, ‘I had the impression that Marcus wanted to get rid of you. That he didn’t want you coming here with Luce.’
‘I feel terrible, Anna. So ashamed.’
‘That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?’ She put a cold hand around mine and squeezed it tight.
‘Me, maybe. But you’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.’
‘Haven’t I?’ She hesitated.
‘Of course not. You were always her truest friend.’
‘Maybe not. She was very upset after you left for London, and finally came to tell me that she’d decided to withdraw from the course and take a year’s leave of absence, to go over to be with you. I persuaded her not to.’
‘Oh …’ I wiped water out of my eyes. ‘Well, that was sensible advice. She was so close to finishing her degree.’
‘No, it wasn’t that. I was jealous of you two. I was just the same as Marcus. I wanted to climb with her over here. I was being very selfish, and because of that she died.’
‘But you didn’t come.’
‘No. I met someone—a man.’ Another surprise. It wasn’t that Anna wasn’t attractive, but she had always seemed rather diffident around men, and her occasional dates and encounters never seemed to come to anything. ‘He wanted me to stay with him. It would have been difficult anyway coming over here so close to my end-of-year exams. I thought he was wonderful. When Luce and the others came over here I moved in with him and I felt I’d never been so happy. Then we got the terrible news. He helped me a lot, getting through the first shock—but I was inconsolable. I couldn’t think about anything else, and with the inquest and everything … I was obsessive, I suppose, pretty impossible to be around. Anyway, one day he told me that when we met he’d just split up with this other girl, and now he was going back to her. I didn’t eat for a week, and then one day I was standing at a bus stop, and I saw this truck coming and I just walked out in front of it. It wasn’t a big decision or anything—I just did it. The poor driver … He almost managed to stop, but I was sent flying. I spent five weeks in hospital getting patched up, then two months as an in-patient in a private psychiatric clinic in Waverley.’
‘Oh, Anna …’ I put my arm around her shoulder and pulled her close.
A blast of cold wet air, more vicious than the rest, slapped us so hard it sucked our breath away. ‘Oh!’ Anna gasped, gripping me tight. ‘This is terrible.’
‘Yeah, marginally worse than working at the Walter Murchison Memorial Nursing Home, I should imagine.’
She dug me in the ribs with her free hand, then said, ‘So, go on then, tell me about your bank.’
‘It’s very boring. You wouldn’t be interested.’
‘Try me. I think we’ve got all day.’
So I began to tell her about credit derivatives and risk management. It seemed quite surreal in such a setting, and as I spoke I found it hard to believe that I had once found that stuff incredibly interesting. It was all so remote now, so utterly devoid of real meaning. Yet in the city, where the real world rarely set foot any more, it had seemed close to the vital essence, the purpose of life. It was sexy. I was doing what every young man wants, to be involved in something clever and important that hardly anyone knows about.
It became sexy, as I said before, after the Barings Bank and other disasters.
In the post-Barings wisdom, the essential principles of risk management require a separation of powers within an organisation between the front-of-house traders and dealers, who are greedy for contracts and commissions, and senior management, with its more sober perspective on risk. Between these two groups should sit the RMU, the Risk Management Unit, assessing the dangers of promised deals and ensuring that the policies of the board are implemented on the shop floor. No longer would it be possible for a rogue trader