The Banker's Niece 21: Cupidity and lust

1974

Cupidity and lust are on the prowl

            In Princes Street and Moorgate, cheek by jowl;

            While on the Stock Exchange and other marts,

            The talk is partly money, partly tarts.

Mr Turner was different from the other men working at the Bank. His name was ‘Mr’ for a start, rather than Kelvin or Rob or Neil. He was older and quieter and only worked two days a week. He asked Jane about herself instead of whistling at her or ogling her or trying to grope her. So when he gave her a copy of a poem he’d written comparing the West Country and London it occurred to her that he might be trying to warn her.

    She had to look up the meaning of ‘cupidity’ and was surprised to find that, while it did derive from Cupid the god of love, it meant covetousness in general, or even avarice – the desire for money. She supposed that this was the meaning Mr Turner intended.

She’d arrived at the Bank after six months as a temporary secretary, trudging from one dingy basement to another, being bossed about by dingy depressed women and doing all the jobs that no one else wanted to do, like sorting out twenty years of dusty box-files or making three hundred photocopies of five-hundred-page documents.

    The building was so new that she could see workmen’s hobnailed footprints in the chalky dust outside the lifts and when she arrived at the Bank’s offices on the fourteenth floor she could hear drilling in the floors above. She almost expected the carpet to unroll in front of her.

    She walked into one big space painted white and flooded with light from floor to ceiling windows. From such a height London looked almost colourful: she could see dabs of brown and even green in amongst the grey. In any case, the metropolis didn’t need to concern her any more. It was a different world.

    A stick-thin woman with staring eyes, dressed like a man in charcoal pinstripes, marched up to her.

    ‘Are you the temp?’ she demanded.

    Jane nodded.

    ‘This way.’

    The woman weaved her tiny hips between desks and chairs, many of them still being shunted into position, and Jane scurried after her.

    ‘Here,’ she said, pointing to an empty desk pushed against two other desks at which sat two young men, one with long blond hair and the other with short dark hair.

    ‘Good luck,’ she said, and vanished.

    ‘Well hell-ohhh,’ said the men in unison.

The Bank kept asking her back, and she kept going back. And now they wanted to give her a permanent job as a Trainee Research Analyst.

    ‘I don’t know what to do,’ she wailed to Fiona, gulping from a large glass of Dubonnet and bitter lemon.

    Alcohol and food kept her going these days. Chocolate punctuated her days at work. She went to winebars at lunchtime. She bought sticks of orange-wrapped smoked cheese to accompany her on the grisly walk back from Fulham Broadway tube station in the evening. As soon as she arrived at the house she dived for her bottles in the fridge. When she was at home in the evenings she couldn’t stop eating – toast, cereal, biscuits.

    The only time she didn’t eat was when she went to parties, so she tried to do that as often as possible. There was no shortage of invitations, given that she had relatives of all shapes and sizes living in the capital, as well as acquaintances from home (the children of friends of her parents whom she’d met at parties in the holidays), and even the occasional schoolfriend. Sometimes she managed three parties in one night. Men did ask her out on her own as well, but she tried to avoid accepting those sorts of invitations. They were too complicated.

    ‘Why’s that?’ asked Fiona.

    Fee, as Jane called her, was tackling a mound of washing-up left by the other tenants, Jane included. Because the house belonged to Fee’s parents, she occasionally took responsibility for it, which usually meant storming up and down the stairs shouting at them all that the place was a pigsty and they were a load of lazy slobs, both of which statements were true. It also meant that she did most of the housework.

    Jane was standing next to Fee holding a tea towel and making sure her glass was safe.

    She’d spent most of the night writing down all the arguments for and against the job. The lists had taken pages and pages of her reporters’ notebook. It was a good thing Fee knew her so well. She didn’t have to repeat everything to her

    ‘I know I should take it,’ she said. ‘I know my father would think it was an opportunity,’

    Even as she said the words, everything inside her was screaming ‘No!’ But what did she know? What sort of a success had she made of her life so far?

    She tipped her glass up and downed the second half of its contents.

    ‘OK,’ said Fee, hands in sink, scouring violently. ‘So why don’t you want to?’

    Fee wasn’t conventionally pretty but her features were always doing something and that made you want to look at her. Jane’s mother called her ‘jolie laide’. She certainly had a stream of boys telephoning her, visiting her and taking her out. But none of them lasted, and Jane knew why.

    Fee had fallen in love with a New Zealand businessman (how they’d met Jane didn’t know) with whom she spent mad weeks on his visits to London two or three times a year and to whom she then had to say goodbye each time he went home, back to his wife and children. She was plotting a visit to his country. He wasn’t going to get away.

    Because of that – because of the parallel with Jane’s life – and in spite of Fee being two years older than Jane, Jane could talk to her. She’d never had a close girlfriend before.

    Jane went to the fridge and sloshed more Dubonnet into her glass, topping it with a smidge of bitter lemon.

    ‘The people terrify me,’ she said.

    Fee looked up. A small wrinkle had appeared between her eyes. ‘How d’you mean?’

    Jane’s first thought was of daleks. She remembered nightmarish shots of the robots rolling through London – places she knew – in one of the Dr Who stories. Both she and Ollie as well as their mother had watched the television through their fingers. But daleks were too slow and not at all charming. She thought of ‘ravening hordes’, but they were too hairy and badly dressed. She thought of zombies, but they were too stupid.

    ‘All they think about is money,’ she said at last.

    ‘Well it is the City,’ said Fee, reaching for a black-encrusted frying-pan and dumping it in the greyish water.

    ‘I know,’ cried Jane, twisting her tea-towel, and thinking of her father who also worked in the capital’s financial district. ‘But it’s what they do with the money.’

    ‘What do they do with it?’ asked Fee.

    From what Jane had gathered over her year working there, the Bank lent money to businesses and most of those businesses ‘developed property’ and that appeared to mean building office blocks. But where did they build them? No one ever asked that, or any other question related to human health and happiness. All they ever asked was, ‘Will this project be profitable?’

    And she should know, seeing as Kelvin and Alan, the blond man and the dark one she’d met when she first arrived, were Research Analysts, writing reports about the companies to whom the Bank might lend money, and she typed their reports.

    ‘They build,’ wailed Jane, ‘and for all I know they could be building on the countryside. They could be destroying nature and I could be helping to make that happen.’

    She downed her drink in one.

    Fee took her hands out of the filthy water and dried them on Jane’s tea-towel. She took a few minutes to answer. Jane waited by the fridge.

    ‘I suppose’, said Fee slowly, as if thinking while she spoke, ‘if you’re already part of the system, it doesn’t really matter what part that is.’

    Relief washed over Jane. She didn’t quite understand what Fee meant, but somehow she saw that she didn’t need to take the whole weight of the world on her shoulders. Not everything was her fault.

    Sometimes she wondered if Fee was the only reason she stayed in London.

The trouble was, it wasn’t only her work at the Bank that made her feel bad about herself.

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