The Hopeless Life of Charlie Summers

by Paul Torday

  Now I had met Bilbo it was hard to imagine him at work with tent pegs, either setting up camp or in more sinister applications. For the time being, he was charm itself.

  ‘I wonder if you’ve found yourself a job since leaving the army?’ he said, after we had reintroduced ourselves and sat down at a table. ‘It isn’t easy, is it? They spend all that money on training us, we have to learn to take split-second decisions in circumstances that would render most chief executives speechless, and then what do we find is on offer? Underpaid jobs working for a charity or a boy’s club. That’s what the general population thinks we’re capable of, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m still looking for something,’ I admitted.

  ‘Quite,’ said Bilbo. ‘Unemployed and unemployable. It’s a very unfair world. Once you’ve done your time in the services, people just don’t want to know. I’m told you were good at your job as a soldier until that friendly-fire incident. Why the hell did you quit: because a few Pashtun were shot up? Christ, they wouldn’t have lost sleep over it if it had been the other way around.’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t proud of what happened,’ I said.

  Bilbo poured a glass of white wine for each of us.

  ‘There never was an official inquiry, was there? It never made the press, did it?’

  ‘No, thank goodness. Anyway, all we know is that they weren’t the people we were after. That doesn’t mean that they were innocent civilians, not in that part of the world.’ ‘Ah well,’ said Bilbo, ‘the presumption is that if they aren’t obviously against us, they must be for us. These things happen. Have some more wine?’

  We sipped our wine and Bilbo smiled at me in a fatherly sort of way.

  ‘When I left the army, I was lucky enough to be offered a helping hand by a friend from my regiment who had family connections in a merchant bank,’ Bilbo told me. He seemed to be leading up to something. ‘Now I run a hedge fund,’ he explained. ‘A hedge fund is just a high-performance investment fund, but we’re not as tied down by rules and regulations as the big mutual funds. We can invest in more or less anything we like: bank debt, high-yield derivatives, fixed-income straddles, all that sort of thing.’

  I knew Bilbo was speaking to me in English, but it might as well have been Korean.

  ‘I know none of this means anything to you at all,’ said Bilbo. ‘I was the same a few years ago. When I came out of the army, I hadn’t any idea what to do. Then my friend rang me up - just as I got in touch with you - and offered me a job. The pay wasn’t much, but it was a start. Banks in those days were always looking for “good chaps” like me: presentable, decent background, someone who might know the right way to hold a knife and fork. So I joined up. It turned out to be much more interesting than I had expected. After a while I saw that for every ten people who worked there, one made the money and the other nine sat around writing reports about it. Once I saw how it worked, I borrowed some money, lured a couple of particularly bright young traders with MBAs to join me, and set up on my own. That was five years ago. Now we’ve got several hundred million pounds under management.’

  Bilbo poured some more wine. I wondered how his friend had felt about his new employee walking off with his best and brightest staff. I thought I had better try to find out why Bilbo was interested in me.

  ‘What could I do for you?’ 1 asked. ‘I know nothing at all about investment. I’ve never had any spare money of my own to invest.’

  ‘Oh, it’s not very complicated. The back office does all the technical stuff. But we need people with some personality and what my mother used to call “background” working in the front office. Our clients need to be kissed and cuddled before they’ll part with their money. That would be your job: introducing us to high-net-worth individuals you might know, or you might get to know, giving them lunch and dinner and taking them to the races and so on. You know lots of people, Eck. Even at school, you knew everyone and everyone knew you. People seem to trust you. We need someone like you to be the public face of our little firm. We’re concentrating on developing the private-client side of the business at present. And it’s not exactly work.’

  ‘What’s the catch?’ I asked.

  ‘You have to take a few exams. Don’t worry: we’ll help you through them, and we’ll put you on a salary from Day One, as long as you pass them. That’s just to make you legal. After that, your job is to make people feel good about Mountwilliam Partners. Get them in front of me and some of my traders - we know how to get their attention. They don’t really care about the detail. They’ve all heard about hedge funds. They want to believe we’ll make them richer than anyone else can.’

  ‘And can we?’ I asked Bilbo.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Bilbo. ‘It’s all about trust. Once you get them through the front door, they’ll be happy to part with their money when they see our returns.’

  The pizzas arrived and Bilbo attacked his with gusto.

  ‘I remember your parents. Are they still alive?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘So you’ve got that nice house near Middleton-in-Teesdale all to yourself. Won’t you rattle around in it on your own?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m sure you will, you know. That’s why you ought to come and work for me. What else are you going to do with your time? Learn flower arranging?’

  Bilbo put down his knife and fork. The pizza in front of him, which had started out the size of a mini-roundabout, had now been cut down to manageable size. I chewed on a corner of mine. He said, ‘You need to have money in this world. When I bought back my family home it had practically fallen down. You might know of it?’

  I nodded.

  ‘My ancestors were coal miners in the eighteenth century. Their children became mine foremen. The third generation had its own collieries. After that, no one did a stroke of work for the next century. All the money was spent by the time I came along. We had our own crest by then, and family plate, but absolutely no cash at all.’

  Bilbo held up the little finger of his left hand, and showed me the signet ring he wore there. It was hard to make out the engraved figure on it, but it looked like a cat, or dog, sitting and licking its paw.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘The cat that got its cream,’ said Bilbo, ‘and we had a family motto to go with it. Semper Plus: “always more”. It’s my motto, too.’

  *

  That is how I started working for Bilbo and Mountwilliam Partners. The Company was co-owned by Bilbo and a group of investors, and had modest offices in a maze of anonymous streets somewhere south of the British Museum. The registered head office was in the Cayman Islands. The converted terraced houses that contained Mountwilliam Partners were located next door to a Greek restaurant, and there was a cafe a few yards farther down the street, which ran to all-day breakfasts and quite good cups of coffee. It was not a bad place to work: inconvenient but with an eccentric charm of his own. I think I would have liked working in a large, soulless office block much less.

  Beside the front door, a brass plate bore the legend Mountwilliam Partners’. When you rang the bell, you were inspected by a small remote camera, and then buzzed in. Through the front door one was confronted by a steep staircase, with doors off to the right and left of the minute entrance hall. On this floor were the trading desks: soft commodities, gold, oil, fixed income, distressed debt - those were some of our specialities. The traders started work at six or seven in the morning and were often at their desks until eight or nine at night. They were expected to keep their mobiles beside their bedsides in case Bilbo wanted to reach l hem. If Bilbo rang, you talked to him. That was the house rule.

  When you entered the trading room, there was always a buzz about it, a sense of adrenalin flowing, a hum of raised voices that could be heard even before you opened the door. Inside were two rows of desks, each with its own set of screens: a Bloomberg terminal, a couple of trading screens, a PC linked to the network. Over the entrance to the room was a printed sign that read:
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  rule 1: We are here to make money

  rule 2: We are here to make money

  rule 3: Don’t forget Rules 1 and 2

  The top floor was accessed only through a door with a keypad: this was where the rocket scientists lived, the people who developed the strategies, expressed in complex mathematical language, that were the lifeblood of the trading department. I didn’t know any of this elite except by name, but I had a few friends among the traders: Doug Williams, a thin, cynical man who traded in commodities; Alan McNisbet, who bought and sold bank debt; and one or two others. There was not much time for socialising given the hours everyone worked - except for me - but occasionally Doug and I might have a drink together. I don’t suppose most of the traders thought much of me: I was just the man who walked the clients through the front door; they were the people who made them rich.

  The people who worked at Mountwilliam Partners were an interesting mixture. I was the only other person apart from Bilbo with an army background. There were a few ferociously bright graduates with degrees in mathematics or economics; and a number of slightly older, hard-bitten-looking traders, with nails gnawed down to the quick and nicotine-stained fingers. There was, of course, no smoking in the offices and therefore everyone met on the pavement outside during fag breaks, where traders and salesmen happily shared information they would never have been allowed to talk about upstairs.

  The first year or so was a challenge: going to the office for several hours and then, in the afternoon or early evening, attending lectures, or nodding off over textbooks. But I managed it, somehow. I was not paid much to start with but I knew my salary would be on a steep upward curve as soon as I was qualified, and that was sufficient incentive to keep me at it. In retrospect, the work was not so hard, considering I was now licensed to take people’s money away from them.

  Once I had passed my exams, my new career started in earnest. I found that the job suited me. The present and future clients I mixed with were people I sometimes already knew, and even liked. My job involved organising endless drinks parties and receptions, sponsoring various minor sporting fixtures where potential clients might gather, and taking investment roadshows around the country. More often it was simply a question of spending time with the right sort of people. I was paid to entertain potential clients and if they ever asked me any difficult questions about what Mountwilliam Partners actually did, I simply arranged for them to meet Bilbo. I could not really believe my luck. The principal disadvantage of my new life was living in London during the week; but I reasoned, if ten million other people could put up with that, so could I. So I bought myself a small service flat in West Hampstead with the remains of my capital and a large mortgage, and became used to the weekly commute: catching the six o’clock to Darlington from King’s Cross on Friday nights, the train known by habitues as ‘the Vodka Special’, and commuting back down on Sunday evenings.

  Of course, we were all encouraged to invest our substantial earnings in the firm. Bilbo called it ‘putting your money where your mouth is’.

  ‘You have to be able to tell people you’ve bought into the story,’ he told me. ‘We’ll help you take some equity out of that flat of yours - you could raise fifty thousand from that without any problem, couldn’t you? And there’s an investment savings scheme we invite you to contribute to from your salary.’

  If I had any doubts about investing in things I still didn’t quite understand, it was made easier for me when I was told that an investment in the firm’s funds was automatically deducted from one’s monthly pay cheque. But I couldn’t complain about this additional taxation: I was grateful to Bilbo for setting me up. I had no need to think too hard about my life, or what I was going to do next. I saw Bilbo himself most days, but less of the other people who worked for him. He liked to keep us in different compartments, I think. He - and, no doubt, his partners, whoever they were - were the only people who knew everything that was going on.

  And so my new career as a junior financier was launched. I was interested, even absorbed by it all. The work was sufficiently demanding that I didn’t mind the absence of any social life outside it. Too many evenings were spent entertaining people anyway, and the little free time I had during the week was spent mostly in my flat, catching up on my sleep. I had achieved peace of mind at last, after Afghanistan. Except that it wasn’t peace of mind: it was numbness of mind. The dream of Gholam Khot stayed with me: perhaps once a month I would awake perspiring and moaning, the sound of gunfire in my ears.

  *

  For a while this numbness of mind suited me well. I did my job, and earned money, and spent it as fast as I earned it, because the following year I was expecting to raise even more. Spending money is a good way of avoiding thinking about anything, I have found. Then, one day, I had to go to Bob Matthews’ funeral.

  It was in the middle of an intense phase of the war in Iraq and I was concentrating very hard on shutting out painful memories of my own. Bob Matthews’ funeral was when I saw Harriet for the first time since her engagement party a few months earlier. When I saw her, I was struck by how ill she looked. Never very substantial, she had lost weight, and her skin was the colour of parchment. Dressed in a dark coat and black hat, she was the living embodiment of mourning, a testament to the power of grief. One could see that she had once been a very attractive girl: or perhaps I was superimposing over her strained features the image of a remembered Harriet, Harriet at her engagement party. Whatever it was, as I looked at her I became conscious of a lump in my throat so big I could scarcely swallow. I spoke a few words to her after the service. She touched my arm and said, ‘Thank you so much for coming. Bob would have appreciated it.’

  I’m not convinced she even knew to whom she was speaking.

  ‘Of course I had to come, Harriet. Please let me know if there is ever anything I can do for you.’

  She focused on me then and said, ‘Thank you, Eck. It was good to see you.’

  I was dismissed, in the most kindly fashion, as she moved away from me to thank some of the other mourners.

  From that day, my peace of mind - or the numbness I had become accustomed to - was gone. I started to think about

  Harriet and, once I’d started, I forgot to stop, as they say in my part of the world. I began to imagine what I knew would never happen: a life together with Harriet. I knew it would never happen because I felt that she was one of those girls for whom there is only ever one man: they still exist, even in this polygamous age. And the more I told myself it would never happen, the more I thought about it happening.

  The odd thing was that I started to think about the relevance of my present mode of life in the context of that imagined world. I couldn’t quite see myself standing at the front door of my flat in West Hampstead and kissing Harriet goodbye in those fond daydreams of some improbable connubial bliss. I couldn’t imagine Harriet accompanying me to the jolly lunches and dinners and race meetings that constituted much of my daily life. If we had a future together, which of course seemed unlikely, it wasn’t in the world of Mountwilliam Partners.

  As a consequence of these thoughts, bit by bit I began to realise that working for Bilbo was not as desirable a way of life as I had first thought. The money was good; if I was honest, I was being paid much more than I thought I was worth. My investments in various Mountwilliam funds were doing well. When we received the report sheet, twice a year, it looked to me as if my money had gone forth and multiplied, although how or why was harder to say. If you read the papers, you might be forgiven for believing that the most demanding part of making money these days was remembering to get out of bed each morning. House prices were going up by ten per cent or more a year, so if you owned your home, perhaps you didn’t even need to get out of bed. The stock markets around the world soared. The newspapers published a story nearly every week about some new entrepreneur, or fund manager, who had made an unimaginable amount of money, all because he had the foresight to go and borrow an amount from the bank.
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  Even I, good old Eck, was on this new, unstoppable, global gravy train. I couldn’t imagine why I was paid to do what I did, but somehow, once I started to have money, it was never quite enough. One discovered new needs. Once I had got by with one pinstriped suit for funerals, regimental reunions and drinks parties; and one tweed suit for racing or Sunday lunch in the country. Now it seemed important to have at least a dozen suits, run up by a tailor in the City whose address had been given to me by Bilbo, and an infinite number of shirts and ties from Jermyn Street. One had to look the part: prosperous, natty, smart - but respectable. Bilbo, I knew, had innumerable suits hanging in a walk-in wardrobe at his London home in Kensington Gate. Lie had shown me his dressing room on one occasion when I had brought him some documents just after he moved into his new house. You might have seen fewer clothes in the men’s department at Harrods.

  I had also bought my Audi sports car, when once an old Land Rover had been all that I needed or owned. The only thing this purchase achieved was to accumulate parking fees.

  I drove about ten miles a week in it, but still, I had to have it. I joined a couple of clubs, to amuse myself while I was in London. The firm helped with my subscription, because men’s clubs were where you met friends, and brought up the subject of Mountwilliam Partners’ stellar performance as you stood at the bar chatting. 1 bought expensive wine and ate in expensive restaurants, even when I was on my own. No matter that I was being paid more than I had ever been paid in my life, I still spent most of it.

  One day, a few months after I had been to France with Henry Newark, I received a phone call. To my astonishment, it was Harriet. After a few polite greetings were exchanged she said, ‘Have you heard about Aunt Dorothy?’

  ‘Aunt Dorothy’ was Dorothy Branwen, Harriet’s maternal aunt: a spinster, reputed to be well off, who used to turn up at family weddings and funerals. She had been a great friend to my parents when I was very small, and I had distant memories of her staying with us from time to time. These visits had stopped when I was still quite young, although Pm not quite sure why. I don’t remember that there was any falling out: I think Aunt Dorothy simply became more reclusive.