Trading Futures (5 page)

This was the world I sprang from. That London had been stolen now. I no longer owned it, and I didn’t much care for the new proprietors. Just before I left school, they showed the sixth
form films on possible career choices. The one on the City was called ‘My Word is my Bond’ and no one laughed when it was screened.

I had a meeting at Tate Modern. I would find an executive from our PR company at the main entrance, and we were to see the director. He was trying to sell us on becoming corporate sponsors and
our PR company thought this a good idea. These days, PR people think any idea a good one if it appears to associate a financial institution with humanity. We are trying to accustom ourselves to
this concept. We grew up thinking that only profits should accrue. With the current reputation of profits, self-certified humanity has become the preferred alternative.

It was three months since my conversation with Rupert Loxley. My presence in the office no longer caused surprise, even to me. Early June now seemed like a surreal blip in my seemingly seamless
career. I had enjoyed my job, but large parts of every job are tedious, so it was rather satisfying to sit with my feet on the desk, reading the newspaper, with no need to do anything. A few times
during the summer I had taken myself off to Lord’s or the Oval for a day’s cricket. It couldn’t last for ever, of course. It was a fool’s paradise, but I was a fool and this
was, if not paradise, then the next best thing on offer.

I kept to the terms of my parole, for the most part, although some of the bottles of mineral water on my table might have contained vodka. I believed Rupert’s threat and had no intention
of triggering it. Sometimes former colleagues would drop in for a chat over coffee, and sometimes they would try to engage me in a discussion on the merits and, more especially, the demerits of
Rupert Loxley as a boss. I never rose to the bait. I wouldn’t have put it past him to despatch a few fifth-columnists to my office. As a result, he began to trust me. He asked if I would be
interested in taking on a few light duties, and I said yes. The deal was the same: no pay. But my unpaid job started to take on a life of its own.

When, at what had turned out to be my last board meeting, we had discussed a role in the company for unpaid interns, it hadn’t occurred to me that I would become one of them. There were a
number of minor jobs that needed doing and which everyone else was too busy to do. This meeting was a case in point. It may sound grand, but I was there to listen and to report back, not to make
decisions. Still, they couldn’t have sent a twenty-year-old intern to meet the director of Tate Modern, so I was saving someone expensive an unproductive afternoon.

I knew nothing about art. Neither did anyone else in the company. We have large abstract pieces of something or other, by someone or other, decorating the white walls of our offices, which our
finance director has deemed a sound investment. I used to keep a copy of a Turner on my wall,
Rain, Steam, and Speed
. It was probably one of the idiosyncrasies that made me suspect as a
corporate man. It now appeared to qualify me as a connoisseur. I told Rupert I was happy to attend the meeting as long as the PR woman did the talking, as she would have done without such
stipulation.

The director was Spanish, I think. I felt sorry for him. It’s hard to maintain integrity with a begging bowl in one’s hand. He had been well briefed, was courteous without being
obsequious, and spoke to me as if to a foreigner, in more than the obvious sense. He was not the one to conclude a deal, any more than I was. The pimps in his finance department would do that. His
job was to spread his legs and show us what was on offer. I seem to remember a time when not all of us were tarts. It’s what comes of not making things, of only buying and selling them. Very
hard to distinguish that from selling oneself, and most of us no longer try.

It came down to money, as it always does. This amount would buy a listing in the small print; that amount a lasting testament. All amounts would in the end depend for their value on the threads
of news spun round them by the PR company. We talked as though such sordid considerations did not apply. Our generosity and our aesthetic sensibility were the sole agenda items, and the director
and the PR woman had a mutual interest in conflating them. In due course, a proposal would come to a board meeting, along with a proposal to sponsor a wind-turbine project in Dorset, which
I’d also been asked to evaluate. And the directors would debate whether our humanity was best advertised by investing in art, or by investing in wind, and whether they could tell the
difference.

When the meeting ended, the PR woman needed to rush away. The director murmured polite goodbyes and departed. There was little point in my returning to the office, and I had no great desire to
go home. Other, more salacious, options had once filled tight holes in tight timetables. They had lost their appeal as middle age advanced. So I was left, at the director’s invitation, to
roam the gallery.

When I saw her, I cannot say that I recognized her immediately. She was standing quite still, head tilted one way, then the other, hair up, a pair of rimless glasses perched on her nose,
regarding what seemed to be a painting of two wind turbines on the seashore. She stepped backwards, knocked into me, turned to apologize. Something about her seemed familiar, only faintly, nothing
more.

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘My fault for standing so close,’ I said.

‘I wanted to see from a distance. I should have looked.’

‘What are they?’ I asked. ‘Wind turbines?’

‘I don’t think so. It was painted in 1936.’

‘Oh.’

She wandered off to another part of the gallery. I stayed to look at the wind turbines. The painting was called
The Promise
, and the caption advised me that the title referred to the
coming dawn, heralding possibilities of birth and growth.

I ambled round for a while longer, impersonating the art lover I might have been. Then it occurred to me that wine might be available in the café. Standing at the plate-glass window, an
indifferent Beaujolais in hand, I was watching the reflections of the visitors superimposed on the sullen London skyline, when I saw her again. She was sitting at a table, on her own, stirring a
cup of coffee. I walked up to her.

‘Hello again,’ I said.

‘Hello. Are you following me or am I following you?’

‘Neither, as far as I know. Do you mind if I join you?’

‘Please do,’ she said.

I sat on the plastic chair facing her and put my wine on the table.

‘I feel a little guilty watching you drink coffee. Do you fancy some wine?’

‘No thanks. It’s a little early for me.’

‘My body clock is set to European time,’ I said. ‘At least, it is at this time of day. At other times, it’s set to New York or Tokyo.’

‘How cosmopolitan you must be.’ She was smiling.

‘Not really,’ I said. ‘My name’s Matthew, by the way.’

She took off her glasses, removed the clip holding her hair, so that it fell straight and true over her shoulders.

‘Anna.’

That was when everything came back. Not everything. Not what might have been. I do not know how you recall an absence, what never was. And not what was, either, because that had never been
absent, the little and everything that it was. What came back were remembrances of things beginning, of buds about to blossom, of stems snapped off, to be stored unbloomed in clouded jars.

The long fair hair was still long, and still more fair than grey. Make-up, which had been superfluous to her teenage face, was applied as sparingly as God spares his mercy. The blue-grey eyes,
half fixed on me, half elsewhere, half humorous, half melancholic, were unchanged in their contradictions.

She wore faded blue jeans, tucked into long brown leather boots, and a loose-knit, loosely worn jersey in harlequin colours that on another woman would have obscured a perfect figure. On her it
accentuated it.

There is never the measure of time we believe there to be. We fail to do things, confident there will be time later, to find the moment gone. We do things impetuously, fearing the opportunity
will be lost, to find the moment for them not yet arrived. We are considered in our actions, and wish we had been spontaneous. We are instinctive, and regret our instincts. Never exactly the
perceived measure of time; seldom the required response.

I had a choice. Anna seemed not to remember me. Or she did, and was concealing the fact. Either I could remind her that we had met before, forty-one years earlier. Or I could treat today on her
terms, as an encounter with a stranger. I chose the latter.

‘I don’t think I understand very much of this stuff,’ I said.

‘You don’t need to. Feel what it’s saying to you.’

‘It hasn’t been speaking today.’

‘Perhaps you don’t know how to listen,’ she said.

‘Perhaps it has nothing to say.’

‘What are you doing here? Killing time?’

‘I had a meeting.’

‘With?’

‘With the director,’ I said.

‘What about?’

‘What every meeting is about. Money. We were discussing corporate sponsorship.’

‘You must be a banker.’

‘Certainly not.’

‘Something close to it.’

‘I trade futures.’

‘I could have done with you once,’ said Anna.

And I could have done with you once, I thought. But you didn’t want me and I never knew why. I said nothing. We looked at each other.

‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘that you’re one of those men who hang around art galleries, looking cultured and hoping to pick up strange women.’

‘Are you a strange woman?’

‘About as strange as you, I should think,’ said Anna.

That was another chance untaken. I could have told her she was not a stranger; that, in July 1967, we had spent a summer afternoon together, lying in a field on Blackdown Hill in Surrey. I could
have reminded her that, at the end of the afternoon, she had invited me to go to France with her.

But once I hadn’t admitted to knowing her upon the first recognition, by default I had decided in favour of artifice. If I told her now, or later, or never, it would still be artifice.
Nothing could undo the first concealment. And having made that decision, if you can call it a decision, I was beginning to enjoy the thrill of the deception.

For, with Anna, to start a game on level terms was to lose it. She enticed you a long way, further than you had dared hope, and at exhilarating speed. I had discovered that in ’67. Yet if
you were in a court of law, little in the transcript of your conversation with her would convince the jury of such an assertion. The justification lay in the difference between the words spoken and
the same words written down. It was founded on inadmissible evidence. It was unarguable. To start with a cheat’s advantage might change the odds.

It could be that I would lose this game again. It could be that if Anna had wanted me to win, she would have let me win the first time we played, that there were men with whom she did not play
this game, or with whom she threw it. I didn’t think so. My considered opinion, forty years in the cask, was that Anna played this game with every man, and only one smart enough to beat her
at it would win her. I wondered whether she had been anyone’s prize for long.

It was quite absurd of me to think like this. I barely knew her. I had barely known her at the time, and that was half a lifetime ago. I had felt then as if I knew her, as if I had known her
since long before I met her. Which was the reason, one of the reasons, why the pain of losing her was so great, why I had spent hundreds more hours thinking about Anna than I’d ever spent
being with Anna. All those hours thinking about her had made me believe that I knew her. Perhaps the truth was that I didn’t know her at all. Perhaps that was why I had lost her.

I tried to make myself forget these preconceptions. I told myself that Anna would have changed, as I must have changed, that we were not the same two people. I tried to ignore the fact that it
was Anna, to persuade myself I would have behaved the same way that day had she been a stranger, as I well might. In other words, I tried to take the past out of Anna. I couldn’t do it. Anna
had once seemed my entire future and, in failing to become that, she had become my entire past. Now here she was again.

‘I do hope you’re not as strange as me,’ I said. ‘For your sake.’

‘What is strange?’ She smiled and looked at her watch.

‘I’m sorry. Am I boring you?’

‘Not yet,’ said Anna. ‘I have a train to catch at some point.’

‘When is it?’

‘Not for a little while.’

‘I don’t know about you,’ I said, ‘but this place reminds me of a staff canteen. Would you like to go for a drink somewhere else, if there’s time before your
train?’

‘Yes, all right. Why not?’

‘What’s your station?’

‘Paddington.’

‘We could walk across the river. I know a bar near the Mansion House. How about that?’

‘If we’re having a drink, a bar seems an inspired choice.’

We walked across the Millennium Bridge, a light rain now falling. Mine was the only umbrella, shielding the two of us, close together, locked in step. I did most of the talking, busking an
improvised solo about London, how it had changed, how it was better but I liked it less and no longer loved it, and did that make any sense, and Anna thought it did make sense. In the bar, divested
of her coat, ruffling the harlequin sweater to distress her appearance, she sipped slowly on a white wine and moved imperceptibly away from me each time I moved imperceptibly closer to her. Just as
she had in 1967.

‘Where does the train from Paddington take you?’ I asked.

‘It could take me to many places. Almost as far as my imagination. On this occasion, I hope it’ll take me to Somerset.’

‘Is that where you live?’

‘Yes.’

‘On your own?’

‘That’s quite an impertinent question after barely an hour, wouldn’t you say?’ But she was smiling. She didn’t really think it impertinent. ‘Anyone would
think you were a teenager.’