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By Root 521 0

is a real one sitting across from him called Arun, the chief financial officer of England’s third-biggest manufacturer of dental equipment. The conversation is halting. The first course has not even arrived yet, and the men have already covered cricket, Lake Como, Formula One racing, the relative ineffectiveness of solar panels and London pigeons. Mark is feeling especially tired today, for he returned home late last night from an oil-industry conference at the Marriott Hotel in Aberdeen, on the mechanics of using forward swaps and options to collateralise loans and advance cash flow to fund development costs. At least there is an impressive view out the window, and several more minutes can be devoted to sorting out which is the Lloyds Building. There is also art on the wall. The company likes art, and when it first moved into its new headquarters, it gave a firm of art-buyers a brief to equip almost every space with provocative and intriguing pieces by young artists. The dining room accordingly sports a large photograph of a cow who appears to be throwing herself into a muddy brown river. The setting may be India; the cow may be committing suicide.

Meanwhile, Guilherme is doing the rounds. Forty-two years old, from Bagé in southern Brazil, he has been employed by an outside catering company to wait tables during the lunchtime and evening sittings. He has in his day met with chief executives from the Axon Group, Braveheart Investments, Dana Petroleum, Indago Petroleum, the Omega Diagnostics Group and Zytronic PLC – though it might be fairer to say that he was in the same room with them for a brief period of time, for they are likely to have no particular recollection of this handsome, brown-eyed father of six, who once bestowed upon them a flour-dusted bread roll from a silver basket.

Today there is a starter of crab linguine, followed by a tuna steak with rösti potatoes. Hiring Mark to think on your behalf will cost you five hundred pounds an hour, whilst Guilherme can be had for just seven pounds – a difference explained not only by the history and relative prosperity of the two men’s native countries, but also by Mark’s three years of studying for a legal degree, a further two years spent at BPP college in King’s Cross to acquire command of PAR (Principles of Auditing and Reporting), his membership in the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants and fifteen years’ worth of graft, as he ascended from associate to partly qualified executive, from qualified executive to assistant manager, from manager to senior manager and finally from partner to senior partner.

Many months later, with the help of tickets to Così fan tutti and the opening of a show of Renoir’s landscapes, Arun will at last respond favourably to Mark’s carefully couched entreaties for money. For his part, Guilherme will have been unwillingly repatriated after the expiry of his visa.

7.

The period after lunch is strangely quiet, as if an ancestral memory of the siesta were muffling the normal energies of the day. On the seventh floor, workers sit at their desks, concentrated over keyboards and documents. Printers occasionally whirr into life, ejecting pages which give off preternaturally the intense and lingering heat of newly toasted bagels.

Defying the expansive regularity of the open-plan arrangement, where desks are identified only by stark acronyms like ML6W.246, employees have succeeded in imposing a subtle individuality on their work stations. There are family photos pinned to felt boards, and occasional mugs and trinkets honouring sports teams and holiday destinations. Crouching on the floor, one can see how many people have removed their shoes and are rubbing their stockinged feet back and forth on the carpet, a motion which produces not only the intriguing friction of nylon-rich fibres felt through cotton but also the impression of having in a minor way broken the rules and brought a hint of the intimacy of home into the working realm.

The office veterans are adept at domesticating their environments. They know where to hide their