Allison Pearson: I Don't Know How She Does It

“Katharine Reddy, always in such a hurry,” she scolds. As head of Human Resources, Celia is effortlessly one of the least human people in the building; childless, charmless, chilly as Chablis, she has this knack of making you feel both useless and used. When I went back to work after Emily was born, I found out that Chris Bunce, hedge-fund manager and EMF’s biggest earner for the past two years, had put a shot of vodka in the expressed breast milk I was storing in the office fridge next to the lifts. I approached Celia and asked her, woman to woman, what course of action she suggested taking against a jerk who, when confronted by me in Davy’s Bar, claimed that putting alcohol into the food intended for a nine-week-old baby was “’Avin’ a bit of a larf.”

I can still remember the moue of distaste on Celia’s face, and it wasn’t for that bastard Bunce. “Use your feminine wiles, dear,” she said.

Celia tells me she is delighted that I can talk to the trainees at lunchtime. “Rod said you could do the presentation in your sleep. Just slides and a few sandwiches, you know the drill, Kate. And don’t forget the Mission Statement, will you?”

I make a quick calculation. If the induction lasts an hour including drinks, say, that will leave me thirty minutes to find a cab and get across the City to Emily’s school for the start of the nativity play. Should be enough time. I can make it so long as they don’t ask any damn questions.

1:01 P.M.“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, my name is Kate Reddy and I’d like to welcome you all to the thirteenth floor. Thirteen is unlucky for some, but not here at Edwin Morgan Forster, which ranks in the top ten money managers in the UK and in the top fifty globally in terms of assets, and which, for five years running, has been voted money manager of the year. Last year, we generated revenue in excess of &Bembo.xa3;300 million, which explains why absolutely no expense has been spared on the fabulous tuna sandwiches you see spread out before you today.”

Rod’s right. I can do this sort of stuff in my sleep; in fact, I pretty much am doing it in my sleep as the jet lag takes hold and the crown of my skull starts to tighten and my legs feel as though someone is filling them with iced water.

“You will, I’m sure, already be familiar with the term ‘fund manager.’ Put at its simplest, a fund manager is a high-class gambler. My job is to study the form of companies round the world, assess the going rate in the markets for their products, check out the track record of jockeys, stick a big chunk of money on the best bet, and then hope to hell that they don’t fall at the first fence.”

There is laughter around the room, the overgrateful laughter of twentysomethings caught between arrogance at securing one of only six EMF traineeships and wetting themselves at the thought of being found out.

“If the horses I’ve backed do fall, I have to decide whether we shoot them right away or whether it’s worth nursing that broken leg back to health. Remember, ladies and gentlemen, compassion can be expensive, but it’s not necessarily a waste of your money.”

I was a trainee myself twelve years ago, sitting in a room just like this one, crossing and uncrossing my legs, unsure whether it was worse to look like the Duchess of Kent or Sharon Stone. The only woman recruit in my year, I was surrounded by guys, big animal guys at ease in their pinstriped pelts. Not like me: the black crepe Whistles suit I had spent my last forty quid on made me look like a Wolverhampton schools inspector.

This year’s bunch of novices is pretty typical: four guys, two girls. The guys always slouch at the back; the girls sit upright in the front row, pens poised to take notes they will never need. You get to know the types after a while. Look at Mr. Anarchist over there with the Velcro sideburns and the Liam Gallagher scowl. In a suit today, but mentally still wearing a leather jacket, Dave was probably some kind of student activist at college. He read economics the better to arm himself for the workers’ struggle while morally blackmailing all the kids on his corridor into buying that undrinkable Rwandan coffee. Right now, he’s sitting there telling himself he’s just going to do this City shit for two years, five tops. Get some serious dough behind him, then launch his humanitarian crusade. I almost feel sorry for him. Seven years down the line, living in some modernist mausoleum in Notting Hill, school fees for two kids, wife with a ruinous Jimmy Choo habit, Dave will be nodding off in front of Friends like the rest of us, with a copy of the New Statesman unopened in his lap.

The other guys are pink-gilled landed types with prep-school partings. The one called Julian has an Adam’s apple so overactive it’s practically making cider. As usual, the girls are unmistakably women, whereas the men are barely more than boys. Between them, EMF’s two female trainees cover the spectrum of womanhood. One is a doughy Shires girl with a kindly bun face and a velvet headband, the daytime tiara of her class. Clarissa somebody. Glance down the list of potted biographies and see that Clarissa is a graduate in Modern Studies from the University of Peterborough. Pure back-office material. Must be a niece of one of the directors; you don’t get into EMF with a degree like that unless you’re a blood relative of money.

The girl next to her looks more interesting. Born and brought up in Sri Lanka but educated at Cheltenham Ladies and the London School of Economics, one of those granddaughters of Empire who end up more English than the English — the sweetness of their courtesy, the decorum of their grammar. With catlike composure and remarkable leaf-shaped eyes that gaze steadily out through tortoiseshell specs, Momo Gumeratne is so pretty she should only enter the Square Mile with an armed guard.

The trainees return my appraising stare. I wonder what they see. Blondish hair, decent legs, in good enough shape not to be pinned for a mother. They wouldn’t guess I was northern, either (accent ironed out when I came to study down south). They may even be a little scared of me. The other day Rich said I frightened him sometimes.

“Now, I’m sure everyone here will have seen that line they put in tiny bottom-row-of-the-optician’s-chart print on your bank and building society accounts? ‘Remember that the value of your investment can go down as well as up.’ Yes? Well, that’s me. If I pick ’em wrong, the value goes down, so at EMF we do our very best to ensure that doesn’t happen and most of the time we succeed. I find it useful to bear in mind when I’m selling three million dollars of airline stock, as I did this morning, that ours is the only flutter in the world which can leave a little old lady in Dumbarton without a pension. But don’t worry, Julian, trainees are limited in the size of the deal they can make. We’ll give you fifty grand for starters, just to get some practice.”

Julian’s cheeks flush from smoked trout to strawberry and the doughy girl’s hand shoots up. “Can you tell me why you sold that particular stock today?”

“That’s a very good question, Clarissa. Well, I had a four-million-dollar holding and the price was up and was continuing to rise, but we’d made a lot of money already and I knew from reading the trade papers that there was bad news coming about airlines. The job of fund manager is to get our clients’ money out before the price weakens. All the time, I’m trying to balance the good things that might happen against the Act of an Almighty Pissed-Off God that may be lurking just around the corner.”

In my experience, the biggest test for any Edwin Morgan Forster trainee is not the ability to grasp the essentials of investment or to secure a pass for the car park. No, the thing that shows what you’re really made of is if you can keep a straight face the first time you hear the firm’s Mission Statement. Known internally as the five pillars of wisdom, the Mission Statement is the primest corporate baloney. (By what freak of logic did hard-core capitalists of the late twentieth century end up parroting slogans first chanted by Maoist peasants who were not even permitted to own their own bicycles?)