The Marketmaker

by Michael Ridpath

  We were sitting in the small square dining room in the flint cottage that my parents had bought in Norfolk after my father had retired. Even though it was the end of April, it was cold. When the wind came from the north or east, it was always cold; there wasn’t much between the cottage and the North Pole. Both my mother and I were wearing thick jerseys, and my father an old sports jacket.

  I had inserted this remark into a pause in the conversation. Although it wasn’t really a conversation, more a monologue as my father droned through his staple topics: Europe, old friends from the City, Lady Thatcher (always with the ‘Lady’), and cricket. The subjects hadn’t changed much since my youth, although he had substituted Europe for the unions as his principal object of hatred. He would eat and talk at the same time, his large florid face bulging as he chewed. These conversations required no participation at all from my mother and me. I sometimes wondered whether they occurred when there was just the two of them. I concluded something much more depressing. Days, months, years of meals eaten in silence.

  ‘So, what are you going to do?’ my father demanded.

  This was the bit I wasn’t looking forward to. I chewed some more, and finally managed to swallow the lump of pork, and felt it force its painful way down my throat.

  ‘I’m going to work for a company called Dekker Ward,’ I said.

  ‘Dekker Ward! Not the stockbroker?’ My father put down his fork, and broke into a huge grin. ‘Well done, my boy! Well done!’ And then, much to my embarrassment, he leaned over and shook my hand. ‘Know them well. Old Lord Kerton was a pal of mine. Must be near retirement age by now. They specialized in plantations, I think. Now there was plenty of money to be made there if you could get the timing right. Oh, yes. Plenty of money.’

  ‘I think the old Lord Kerton died, Father.’ He liked to be called Father. ‘It’s his son, Andrew, who’s chairman now.’

  My father tucked into his burnt pig with renewed gusto. I had made his day. ‘Don’t remember a son. Probably still at school when I knew him. Sorry to hear about old Gerald, though.’ He took a gulp of the tap water in the glass in front of him. ‘Well, old man! Whatever made you finally do it?’

  ‘Money, Father. I needed the money.’

  ‘Well, you should make plenty of that. The City’s rolling in it, these days. A smart young man like you will make a fortune. Let me get a bottle of wine. We need to celebrate.’

  My mother had been watching me all this time, wearing a slight frown. ‘Why?’ she mouthed.

  ‘I’m skint,’ I mouthed back. She nodded. She understood that. When we had lived in Surrey, we had lurched from having plenty of money to having very little. For a while I had thought it was my fault. I had gone to a local grammar school that had become independent. I had enjoyed it. The teachers were excellent, the rugby team won more often than it lost, I made some good, like-minded friends, and it got me into Oxford. But somehow I was made to feel guilty that I was there. It was to do with the fees. The termly demands for payment were met by frowns and barbed comments from my father. I was never quite sure why: he was a stockbroker, like many of the other boys’ fathers, fees should not have been a problem. I’m pretty sure now that my father’s distress was a result of inept stock-market speculation, but at the time he left me in no doubt that the family’s money worries were down to me.

  He returned with a bottle of Argentine red. Very appropriate. He prattled on, talking a lot about the old colonial stocks in which Dekker Ward used to ply their trade.

  After several minutes I decided to correct him mildly. ‘Actually, Father, they concentrate a lot on Latin America now. And they’re thinking of doing business in Russia. That’s why they want me.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Jolly good.’

  My father talked on, about the deals he’d done, the people he knew, and he trotted out some aphorisms such as ‘Sell in May and go away,’ and ‘Never trust a man whose tie is lighter than the colour of his shirt.’ I studied the surface of the dining table, where the imprint of my school homework could still just be picked out. ‘Oct 197’ and ‘= 5X + 3’ were the most prominent marks.

  After coffee, I asked my mother if I could look at her latest paintings. She smiled and led me to her studio. We left my father behind with the washing-up.

  The studio was a large room that took up half the length of the cottage. It had big windows that provided plenty of natural light. But to walk in there was like walking into a hurricane.

  Five years ago her pictures had been open landscapes of the Norfolk shoreline, in an impressionist style. Since then they had become steadily darker, wilder, swirls of cloud enveloping lonely figures on beaches that never ended. Individually they were highly unsettling. When surrounded by dozens of them at once the effect was downright frightening. The nearest thing I had felt to it was walking through the Edvard Munch exhibition at the National Gallery several years before.

  My mother’s painting worried me. It was probably brilliant, but it had taken over her life.

  ‘Have you tried any more galleries, Mum?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve told you, dear, none of the galleries round here will touch them.’

  ‘How about London?’

  ‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous. They wouldn’t be interested in this.’

  I wasn’t so sure. I suspected that someone somewhere would jump at her work. But these pictures were for herself, not other people.

  We were looking at a particularly haunting painting of the blackened shell of a wreck being slowly sucked down into the sand flats off Brancaster beach.

  ‘I’m sorry you’re giving up Russian literature, Nick,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not. I’ll still read. And, once I’ve made some money, I’m sure I’ll go back to it in some form.’

  ‘Hmm. Just promise me one thing.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Don’t marry a banker.’

  I couldn’t answer. The sadness of it wrenched my gut. I glanced at her profile. She had a broad, intelligent face, beneath thick hair only now beginning to go grey. She was still attractive, and was striking in the wedding photograph that had been in the sitting room for as long as I could remember. They must have been in love when they married, although I could only remember sniping in my childhood that changed to major rows in adolescence. Then, since I had left home, this had lapsed into silence.

  My father gave me a lift to King’s Lynn station. Just as I was getting out of the car at the station entrance, he called after me, ‘Oh, Nick?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘If you hear any good tips, don’t forget to let your old man know, eh?’

  He winked.

  I smiled quickly and slammed the car door shut. It was with a huge sense of relief that I felt the train lurch away from the platform.

  As the fens dashed past the grimy train windows, I thought of the City as my father saw it. Lunch, drink, talk, helping out old pals, getting on to a good thing. It was a long way from the efficient activity of the Dekker machine, high up in its gleaming tower, whisking billions round the world. But there were some shared assumptions. In both the deal was all. You helped out your friends and screwed your enemies to get the best deal. And then you felt clever about it.

  A heavy shower scurried across the fen, and hit the train in a tantrum, splattering the window with angry raindrops. I slumped back into my seat, and didn’t feel very clever at all.

  14

  It was a slow cycle into work on Monday. The weather was still foul, and my heart wasn’t in it. By the time I made it up to the fortieth floor, still dripping, the meeting was already well under way.

  As if on a signal from my arrival, Ricardo cleared his throat. ‘I’m sure you all read the article in last week’s IFR,’ he began. ‘The content of the article itself doesn’t concern me, it was obviously rubbish, and a gross insult to Martin and his family. What does concern me was that one of us spoke to a journalist, and gave him information that was highly detrimental to the firm. This person ha
s been fired.’

  There was a murmur from the gathering. Everyone looked round at everyone else to see who was missing. Quickly, the murmurs took shape into a recognizable word. Dave. Dave! Why had he done it? What had he said?

  ‘This person will not only not work for Dekker again, but he will also not work in the bond markets,’ Ricardo continued in a clear voice. ‘He has breached the confidentiality agreement you all signed as part of your contract when you joined Dekker Ward. As a result he has lost all of his interest in the employee trusts. He has been warned not to talk to the press any further. The market will be told that he made large trading losses, and that he covered them up. I expect all of you to back this up if asked.’

  We were all silent now. Dave was a popular member of the team. The mood of the room felt finely balanced between sadness at his dismissal and shock that he had betrayed the rest of us.

  ‘Some of you may think this treatment is harsh. But we’re all a team here. If you’re not with us, you’re against us. There are many people out there who don’t like Dekker and what it has achieved. Together we can win. But if any one of us betrays the others, as this man has, then we’re all vulnerable. I will not allow that to happen.’

  Ricardo glanced round the room. His eyes, which were usually so cool, were angry now. But even his anger drew us in. We were all angry.

  The meeting broke up, and we exchanged glances. Many eyes rested on the empty desk where Dave had worked. Alberto, the sixty-year-old ‘coffee boy’, was putting his belongings into a couple of boxes. Under Ricardo’s stern gaze, we returned to our desks and picked up phones, but over the course of the morning the room buzzed with speculation.

  And so did the outside world. Word had already gone round the market that Dave was one of that most dangerous of animals, a trader who not only made losses but lied about them. The rumour echoed back into the Dekker trading room, where to my surprise it was confirmed. Even Jamie told Chris Frewer it was true.

  ‘Why did you do that?’ I asked him, shocked. ‘Couldn’t you just say you don’t know why he left?’

  Jamie sighed. ‘In these situations you have to follow the party line. Ricardo will be watching. This is a test of loyalty for all of us. And he’s right. We’ll only succeed if we stick together.’

  I listened in mounting disgust to what was happening around me. The initial shock and sadness at the loss of a friend was already changing, as Dave’s character was rewritten. Just as the Dekker machine could persuade itself that a lousy bond issue was the investment opportunity of the year, so they came to believe that Dave was an incompetent fraud. They did it with determination and purpose, and without looking each other in the eye.

  I watched, stunned. I had no idea whether Dave was a good or bad trader, but I knew that he was not what these people were portraying.

  The man leaning against the bar lifting his second pint of bitter to his lips seemed very different from the boy I had known at Oxford. First he was a man. He had a grown-up suit and briefcase, but then so had Jamie and I, and that didn’t mean anything. But he also had a receding hairline poorly hidden with wisps of blond hair, a wife and baby, and a way of talking that made him sound closer to forty than twenty.

  Stephen Troughton had studied PPE with us. He had always been precocious, capable of discussing knowledgeably mortgage rates, house prices and unit trusts, when the rest of us would have nothing to do with such bourgeois concerns. He had talked his way into the City with no difficulty, and had been one of the lucky few that Bloomfleld Weiss had plucked from British universities during the 1988 milk-round. He had taken to Bloomfield Weiss like a duck to water, and had done very well. Even though he was the same age as Jamie and me, he looked thirty-five at least, and used this to his advantage. Stephen Troughton had gone far.

  Jamie saw him once or twice a year for a drink, to ‘catch up’. I had tagged along this time, even though I hadn’t seen Stephen since university. We were in an old pub in a mews in Knightsbridge, touristed by day, besuited in the evening.

  I was beginning to realize that ‘catching up’ meant comparing careers. I watched them at it.

  ‘Did you hear about that big Brady trade we did last week?’ asked Jamie, at the first opportunity.

  Stephen laughed. ‘Oh, that, yes. We were just dipping our toe in the water.’

  ‘Got a bit wet, didn’t you?’

  ‘A little, but we can take it. We’re the biggest trading house in the world. That kind of loss just gets hidden in one day’s profits.’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Stephen. He lowered his voice, as though he were about to impart something of great importance. ‘You’d better watch yourselves, Jamie. Bloomfield Weiss are serious about the emerging markets. And when we get serious about a market we tend to make our mark. Don’t get me wrong, Dekker are a clever little firm, but when a market matures, then it’s only natural that the big boys will take over.’

  Stephen said this in a tone full of fake reasonableness designed to irritate Jamie. It succeeded. He rose to the bait. ‘And there’s that big Mexican mandate that you lost,’ he said. ‘That must have been a bit of a blow.’

  ‘We do those kinds of deals every day for the likes of the World Development Fund. It won’t be long before we’re doing them for Mexico as well.’

  Jamie snorted.

  ‘So, tell me about this trader you sacked,’ Stephen said. ‘Dave Dunne, wasn’t it? He must have lost you a packet.’

  Jamie shrugged.

  ‘He asked for a job at Bloomfield Weiss,’ Stephen went on. ‘We didn’t give him one, of course. We can’t be seen taking Dekker cast-offs.’

  ‘He was a good trader,’ I said. It was my first foray into the conversation. Jamie threw me a warning glance.

  Stephen ignored my comment as though it had no validity, given my short experience. Which was, of course, true. But I had drawn attention to myself.

  ‘Well, I never would have imagined you in the City,’ he said. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘I need the money.’

  ‘Fair enough. And I suppose Dekker wanted your Russian expertise?’

  ‘That’s right. Although Ricardo wants me to see how they operate in South America first.’

  ‘Russia’s a huge growth area for us at the moment. We picked up your Russian team, of course.’ Stephen shot a glance at Jamie when he said this. Touché. ‘Actually, that’s something I’m curious about,’ he went on. ‘A couple of them are suddenly having problems with their visas. Ricardo doesn’t have anything to do with that, does he?’

  Jamie spluttered into his beer.

  ‘So he does?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Jamie. ‘But serves ’em right, that’s what I say.’

  Stephen raised his eyebrows and turned to me again. ‘Tell me, Nick, what’s this guy Ricardo Ross really like?’

  This was the question I had been asking myself ever since the first time I met him. I decided to give Stephen a straight answer. ‘I honestly don’t know.’

  ‘He has quite a reputation. All this stuff about being “The Marketmaker” and everything. Is he that good?’

  ‘Oh, he’s good. And he does treat the market as if he owns it. That’s why he’s so pissed off about you guys muscling in. He has great judgement. He always seems to know exactly what to do when things get tough. Don’t you think?’ I turned to Jamie, who was watching me closely.

  ‘Absolutely,’ he said. ‘He’s easily the most astute person I’ve worked with in the City.’

  Stephen was watching me. He had blue watery eyes, but they were intelligent. ‘So, if he’s that good, why did you say you didn’t know? What’s wrong with him?’

  ‘I’m not sure. He might be a bit too aggressive. Sometimes I wonder if he goes just a bit too far, but then later it turns out he’s judged it just about right.’

  Stephen clapped my shoulder. ‘Quite honestly, it’s hard to go too far in this business. As long as you don’t get caught.’ He p
ut his glass down on a nearby ledge. ‘I’ve got to go. Nice to see both of you again. Cheers.’

  ‘Cheers, Stephen,’ Jamie said. Stephen left, but Jamie and I stayed for another.

  ‘Jerk,’ said Jamie.

  ‘I don’t know why you bother seeing him.’

  ‘He’s not always as bad as that. And he’s bright. It’s good to stay in touch. You never know.’

  ‘But he’s such a grown-up. Balding, wife, kid.’

  ‘But I’ve got a wife and kid.’

  ‘Jamie, you are a kid. And you don’t look forty.’

  ‘It’s funny getting older,’ said Jamie. ‘I mean, I do feel it sometimes. I’ve got a big mortgage. I do have a wife and kid to look after. And I’ve got to take my career seriously. Things have changed.’

  ‘I suppose they have.’

  ‘Whatever happens, I don’t want to turn into my parents.’

  ‘Why not? They’re nice people.’

  Jamie snorted. ‘They might be nice but they’re broke, aren’t they? My grandfather was a big landowner. And now my father drives a mini-cab. If I carry on the great family tradition, Oliver will have a career in McDonald’s.’

  ‘Anyway, you will become your father. You’re just like him. You can’t avoid it.’ I meant it as a joke, but Jamie shot me a dark look.

  ‘I’m serious. It’s about time somebody made some money in my family.’

  I had visited Jamie’s parents a number of times over the years. I was always made to feel welcome as Jamie’s intellectual friend from Oxford. The first couple of times I’d stayed it had been at a lovely farmhouse, which presided over a livery stable. Shortly after Jamie had left Oxford this had gone, and now his parents lived in a rented lodge at the bottom of someone else’s grand drive.

  Jamie’s grandfather had owned a small estate at the foot of the Quantocks, and the after-tax remnants of this were still farmed by his uncle. His father had tried to make money out of horses and failed. Jamie told me he now drove a mini-cab, but I wasn’t to mention this to anyone, especially to him.

  Whatever their past glories or future worries, Jamie’s parents were unfailingly hospitable. His father was the old rogue that Jamie might one day become, with a winning smile, rugged features and a twinkle in his eye. His mother was tall and striking, even now, and had not lost any of her charm. Jamie was the apple of their eye. He could do no wrong. His every pronouncement was met with rapt interest, his minor successes with applause, his major successes with studied indifference, as if his parents never doubted that he would achieve great things.