triremes, and Mr Dreiser, the college at Wheaton, the black stuff gown and the grey-haired man who would call her ‘Ruth’ and ‘My dear’ and the company who would call, who would certainly call, on Sunday nights hanging above their heads like the sailing white birds.
—2013
‘I t’s still quite light outside,’ Clive said soberly. ‘We could go and have coffee in the garden.’
It was half-past nine in the drawing room of the Allardyces’ house in Wimbledon. Above her head Lucy could hear the rhythmical progress of someone – child? au pair? grandmother? – padding from bedroom to bedroom. Mark, either taking this as a subtly coded instruction, or simply wanting to be polite, got up and began stacking the bowls that had contained the kiwi-fruit mousse into a neat, unwavering pile.
‘What’s happening, in a sense,’ Clive went on seriously, gathering up the fragments of a conversation that Lucy assumed had perished a course and a half back, ‘in a very real sense, is that for the first time you’ve got a squeeze at both ends. In the centre as well. In the old days you had simple rules: cut costs, diversify, watch the margins. This time the top of the market’s getting smaller and the bottom’s splintering. Mega-mergers and fragmentation. Global saturation and niche players. And there’s no middle market any more. You either get larger or you get smaller or you die.’
‘You could draw a political parallel,’ Mark went on with, if anything, even greater seriousness. ‘Huge alliances all banding together – Europe, South-East Asia, wherever – but at the same time every half-dead barony out of the HolyRoman Empire wants its own set of postage stamps and a seat at the UN.’
Not consciously bored with these exchanges, but feeling over-familiar with an argument that surfaced regularly at dinner parties of this kind, Lucy stood up and went to look out of the French windows. Above, the sky was blue-black, touched up at the corners with crimson streaks. Beyond, the garden stretched out for twenty or thirty yards into the gloaming. You could not afford a garden like that in south-west London on less than half a million a year, Lucy knew.
‘I got a call the other day,’ Clive went zestfully on, ‘from an insurance broker, financial intermediary, who wanted to know how e-commerce was going to affect his business. And I had to tell him – God, Lucy, I felt like a doctor with a cancer patient – the chances were that in eighteen months he wouldn’t have a business.’
Henrietta, Clive’s wife, yawned and put her hand guiltily over her mouth. Inspecting the three of them from her vantage point by the window as the blue light fell over her hands, Lucy was reminded of a tableau she had once seen in a medieval book of hours: the nobleman dispensing wisdom to his dutiful squire, the nobleman’s wife fatly asleep in the corner. Looking at Clive as he sat back in his chair, the candlesticks on either side of his plate framing him in a way that was faintly sinister – he looked like a portrait in a ghost story that might be about to leap down out of its frame – she wondered what it was about him that Mark, inherently sceptical when presented with a newspaper article or a balance of payments forecast, found to admire. Expertise? Panache?Intellect? Having had several opportunities to observe Clive at close quarters, she didn’t think he was particularly bright or particularly astute. Perhaps, in the end, it was a kind of instinct for self-preservation, knowing how to play a game whose rules were being made up as you went along and where your opponent was liable to collapse out of sheer terror.
‘I thought those seminars,’ Mark said, accepting his coffee from Henrietta without looking up, ‘the ones where Gavin and Fred talked about the practical impact of that Far Eastern stuff, were really useful.’ Looking at him as he said this in what had started off as a spirit of moderate scepticism
—2013
‘I t’s still quite light outside,’ Clive said soberly. ‘We could go and have coffee in the garden.’
It was half-past nine in the drawing room of the Allardyces’ house in Wimbledon. Above her head Lucy could hear the rhythmical progress of someone – child? au pair? grandmother? – padding from bedroom to bedroom. Mark, either taking this as a subtly coded instruction, or simply wanting to be polite, got up and began stacking the bowls that had contained the kiwi-fruit mousse into a neat, unwavering pile.
‘What’s happening, in a sense,’ Clive went on seriously, gathering up the fragments of a conversation that Lucy assumed had perished a course and a half back, ‘in a very real sense, is that for the first time you’ve got a squeeze at both ends. In the centre as well. In the old days you had simple rules: cut costs, diversify, watch the margins. This time the top of the market’s getting smaller and the bottom’s splintering. Mega-mergers and fragmentation. Global saturation and niche players. And there’s no middle market any more. You either get larger or you get smaller or you die.’
‘You could draw a political parallel,’ Mark went on with, if anything, even greater seriousness. ‘Huge alliances all banding together – Europe, South-East Asia, wherever – but at the same time every half-dead barony out of the HolyRoman Empire wants its own set of postage stamps and a seat at the UN.’
Not consciously bored with these exchanges, but feeling over-familiar with an argument that surfaced regularly at dinner parties of this kind, Lucy stood up and went to look out of the French windows. Above, the sky was blue-black, touched up at the corners with crimson streaks. Beyond, the garden stretched out for twenty or thirty yards into the gloaming. You could not afford a garden like that in south-west London on less than half a million a year, Lucy knew.
‘I got a call the other day,’ Clive went zestfully on, ‘from an insurance broker, financial intermediary, who wanted to know how e-commerce was going to affect his business. And I had to tell him – God, Lucy, I felt like a doctor with a cancer patient – the chances were that in eighteen months he wouldn’t have a business.’
Henrietta, Clive’s wife, yawned and put her hand guiltily over her mouth. Inspecting the three of them from her vantage point by the window as the blue light fell over her hands, Lucy was reminded of a tableau she had once seen in a medieval book of hours: the nobleman dispensing wisdom to his dutiful squire, the nobleman’s wife fatly asleep in the corner. Looking at Clive as he sat back in his chair, the candlesticks on either side of his plate framing him in a way that was faintly sinister – he looked like a portrait in a ghost story that might be about to leap down out of its frame – she wondered what it was about him that Mark, inherently sceptical when presented with a newspaper article or a balance of payments forecast, found to admire. Expertise? Panache?Intellect? Having had several opportunities to observe Clive at close quarters, she didn’t think he was particularly bright or particularly astute. Perhaps, in the end, it was a kind of instinct for self-preservation, knowing how to play a game whose rules were being made up as you went along and where your opponent was liable to collapse out of sheer terror.
‘I thought those seminars,’ Mark said, accepting his coffee from Henrietta without looking up, ‘the ones where Gavin and Fred talked about the practical impact of that Far Eastern stuff, were really useful.’ Looking at him as he said this in what had started off as a spirit of moderate scepticism
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