I recalled a summer holiday in Wales, staying with Nonna and Nonno in Cowbridge. My grandparents would drive us to Ogmore-by-Sea for fish and chips and we would stop en route to climb the ruins of Ogmore Castle and dare to cross the Ewenny River on a series of close-set stepping stones just before it joined the River Ogmore only a mile from the sea. A memory came to me of Nonno and me on the stepping stones and of Nonna and Seamus on the bank and her shouting, ‘Be careful!’
‘One stone at a time, bring your feet together on the one stone before you step to the next, regain your balance, that’s right, take it easy,’ instructed Nonno.
It was easy. I grew confident. I slipped. I fell between two stones and gasped with the grip of the ice-cold water on my chest and the grasp of Nonno’s fingers on my wrist and with the not knowing whether to laugh or cry. By the time we had returned home, with me stripped of my sopping clothes in the car park by the castle and swaddled in an assortment of clothes my grandparents had spared, I thought the discomfort and fright quite worth it for the attention I received; Nonno got the ticking-off from Mum.
There was something of the time of year, the quality of light that brought this back to me as I crossed St James’s Park lake; maybe it was the crossing of the footbridge with Whitehall’s buildings to my far right, a visual echo of Ogmore’s castle in its relation to the stepping stones. I was unaware I had stopped until a tourist bumped into me and excused herself. She was saying something else to me. Would I take a picture of her and her friend together?
They stood, their bags at their feet and their backs to Buckingham Palace in the middle distance and the low sun behind; their faces would appear dark in the picture, I knew.
I returned the camera and thought, this is what my life will be like, a series of memories like a series of photographs with nothing to connect them. A join-the-dots life in which the dots remain forever unconnected, as in the pages of Seamus’s join-the-dots books he never got around to completing. A sequence of stepping stones with no guarantee that anyone would be there to save me by the wrist when I slipped and fell.
The bank was a circus, its trading floor a tumultuous riot of voices raised in excitement and exuberance when not lowered in despair and frustration. I sat across from Curtis and Kate and between Jonathan and Guy, my designated mentor, who showed patience when he needed to and trusted me sufficiently to leave me to my own devices when I said I’d understood something. Behind me sat the Japanese team: a loud, arrogant man called Yuuto and a rotation of his timid, terrified team assistants who never managed to stay for long.
On my first day, Kate stood by my desk; she was shorter than I’d remembered her to be. She said, ‘You might as well hear it from me: I didn’t want you hired. But I was outvoted. Anyway, as you’re here now…’ She held out her hand and I shook it. ‘You’d better be good.’ She padded back to her desk. To my surprise, I saw that she was barefoot; she’d kicked her heels off. That detail made her seem more approachable, less aloof, and I vowed that I wouldn’t let her down.
As a matter of priority, I read the compliance manual’s entry on expenses and I learnt who her clients were, the cities they were located in and the names of the best hotels and restaurants. I learnt how to complete trading slips in triplicate and who to take them to. Gradually, I learnt the names of the traders and of the salespeople in the other teams. Over a period of months, I learnt the names of all our clients too, and how to keep them on the phone until one of my team was available so that they wouldn’t go to a competitor.
‘Sharon,’ asked Jonathan one day. ‘Did I hear you flirting with my client?’
I blushed.
‘Good. Let’s hear more of it, please!’
‘Kate, call for you on line five.’
‘Who is it, Sharon?’
‘Call for you. On line five.’ I waved the handpiece.
Kate stood, one hand over the mouthpiece of the phone she held in the other, and shouted, ‘Sharon, how many times do I have to tell you? You don’t just say, Call for you. You say who it is, where they’re calling from and what they want.’
‘Kate, just please pick it up,’ I begged.
‘No!’ shouted Kate. ‘Who is it? And what do they want?’
Resignedly, I said, ‘It’s the department store. The toilet roll holder you ordered has arrived. They want to know if you’ll pick it up or want it delivered.’
Kate’s face turned crimson as she jumped on line five. ‘Laugh all you want, you bastards,’ she shouted to the trading room before relaying her instructions down the telephone line.
‘Nice one!’ said Jonathan, delighted with Kate’s discomfiture.
I learnt everything, everything but what the team and the bank actually did. The mechanics of it interested me. I was part of the execution process, one cog of many, albeit a small one. I knew that the money was made by buying bonds at one price and selling them on at a higher one, but why or when anyone wanted to buy or sell was beyond me. The eager, desperate talk about inflation, GDP, interest rates and unemployment left me nonplussed. They were the terms of an extraterrestrial language.
A year after starting with the bank, I had found a new home, a place where I was appreciated and valued. My team was supportive, even protective, of me. Kate had softened and accepted me. Even Yuuto, who I had considered brutish initially, had no bite to his very loud bark and would lean back in his chair to share jokes with me that I could rarely understand.
The aisles were my catwalks. I would walk them with trading slips, memos and various errands and would greet traders by name and stop to chat when they weren’t too busy. The traders were chauvinist, sexist, but, to me, more endearing than threatening, even when they howled like dogs if a woman they considered ugly was shown onto the trading floor. Pity the poor salesperson showing a female client around who got howled at – he had to think of a believable story to explain the canine noises away.
Sebastian traded options on bonds and he sat at the very limit of my universe, just before the equities desk. He kept his eyes on his screens and would extend a hand for the three slips I held. He would examine and sign them and hand two of them back. It was a year before he spoke to me at all and when he did, as I turned from him to begin my long walk to the back office, it was just, ‘Hey.’
I had only just had my first-year appraisal. Jonathan and Mr Self had barrelled me into the conference room off the trading floor and had been very complimentary. They had said that I had surpassed all expectations, that my performance had been error-free and that I brought good cheer to the desk. I was a pleasure to work with. I would get a pay rise.
‘Why on earth are you crying?’ Jonathan had asked.
‘That’s quite all right,’ Mr Self had said, whether to me or Jonathan I wasn’t sure. ‘This happens quite often, you know.’
Jonathan had reached onto the sideboard behind him, grabbed a box of tissues and slid it across the table to me. ‘Quick! Dry your eyes,’ he had said in mock panic, ‘before people think we’ve fired you!’
‘Thank you,’ I’d said.
‘For the tissues or the pay rise?’ had asked Jonathan.
For the kindness, for the words, I had wanted to say, but I hadn’t trusted my voice enough to reply.
I had left the meeting room and snatched a trading slip from a waving Curtis without breaking my step.
‘So, what’s up?’ asked Sebastian.
For the second time that morning, I was speechless.
‘Your eyes seem to have that extra sparkle this morning.’ He leant back in his chair and surveyed me critically, maybe even approvingly, openly and confidently.
Sebastian’s sudden, unexpected attention, his having noted my mild emotional agitation, his bright, bright blue eyes, the unexpected flash of a canine tooth when he smiled, the mane of fair hair, the long fingers that held trading slips out to mine – something about him threw me. I was, all of a sudden, the young girl I had once been, the girl who wouldn’t say no to boys, the girl who was eager to please.
I slalomed back to my desk, swinging my hips as I skirted the chairs, desk drawers and gesticulating people that formed a gentle obstacle course, Sebastian’s eyes on my back like two hands on my hips, steering and warming me.