Tom McCarthy: Remainder

The office turned out to be slightly to the station’s north, facing the gardens of Buckingham Palace. The receptionist here made Olanger and Daubenay’s Sloanette look like a supermarket checkout girl. She wore a silk cravat tucked into a cream shirt and had perfectly held hair. It never once moved as she lowered her mouth towards the intercom to let Matthew Younger know that I was there or walked into a small kitchen area to make me coffee. Above her, also sculpted into frozen waves, mahogany panels rose up towards high, ornately corniced ceilings.

Matthew Younger came in before she’d finished making me the coffee. He was short, really quite short-but when he shook my hand and said hello his voice boomed and filled up the whole room, billowing out to the mahogany panels, up to the corniced ceiling. It struck me as strange that someone who physically filled so little space could project such a rich sense of presence. He shook my hand heartily-not as cheerfully as Daubenay had, but more assertively, with a firm grip, bringing his transverse carpal ligament into play. Most handshakes don’t involve the transverse carpal ligament: only the really firm ones. He gestured out of the reception room towards a hallway.

“Let’s go upstairs,” he said.

I made towards the hall, but hesitated in the doorway because the receptionist was still preparing the coffee for me.

“Oh, I’ll bring it up,” she said.

Matthew Younger and I walked up a wide, carpeted staircase above which hung portraits of men looking rich but slightly ill and into a large room that had one of those long, polished oval tables in it which you see in films, in scenes where they have boardroom meetings. He set a dossier on the table top, slipped off the elastic band keeping it closed, slid a piece of paper from it which I recognized from the heading as coming from Marc Daubenay’s office, and began:

“So. Marc Daubenay tells me you’ve come into rather a large sum of money.”

He looked at me, waiting for me to say something in response. I didn’t know what to say, so I just kind of pursed my lips. After a while Younger continued:

“Over the last century the stock market has outperformed cash in every decade apart from the thirties. Far outperformed. As a rule of thumb, you can expect your capital to double over five years. In the current market conditions, you can reduce that figure to three, perhaps even two.”

“How does it work?” I asked him. “I invest in companies and they let me share in their profits?”

“No,” he said. “Well, yes, that’s a small aspect of it. They give you a dividend. But what really propels your investment upwards is speculation.”

“Speculation?” I repeated. “What’s that?”

“Shares are constantly being bought and sold,” he said. “The prices aren’t fixed: they change depending on what people are prepared to pay for them. When people buy shares, they don’t value them by what they actually represent in terms of goods or services: they value them by what they might be worth, in an imaginary future.”

“But what if that future comes and they’re not worth what people thought they would be?” I asked.

“It never does,” said Matthew Younger. “By the time one future’s there, there’s another one being imagined. The collective imagination of all the investors keeps projecting futures, keeping the shares buoyant. Of course, sometimes a particular set of shares stop catching people’s imagination, so they fall. It’s our job to get you out of a particular one before it falls-and, conversely, to get you into another when it’s just about to shoot up.”

“What if everyone stops imagining futures for all of them at the same time?” I asked him.

“Ah!” Younger’s eyebrows dipped into a frown, and his voice became quieter, withdrawing from the room back to his small mouth and chest. “That throws the switch on the whole system, and the market crashes. That’s what happened in ’29. In theory it could happen again.” He looked sombre for a moment; then his hearty look came back-and, with it, his booming voice as he resumed: “But if no one thinks it will, it won’t.”

“And do they think it will?”

“No.”

“Cool,” I said. “Let’s buy some shares.”

Matthew Younger pulled a large catalogue from his dossier and flipped it open. It was full of charts and tables, like some kind of tidal almanac.

“With the kind of capital you’ve got earmarked for investment,” he said, “I think we can envisage cultivating quite a large portfolio.”

“What’s a portfolio?” I asked him.

“Oh, that’s what we call the spread of your investments,” he explained. “It’s a bit like playing a roulette table-with the important distinction that you win here, whereas in roulette you mostly lose. But with a roulette table, there are sectors, clusters of numbers you can bet on, then rows, then colours, odds/evens and so on. The wise roulette player covers the whole board strategically rather than staking all his chips on just one number. Similarly, when playing the stock market you should cover several fields. There’s banking, manufacturing, telecommunications, oil, pharmaceuticals, technology…”

“Technology,” I said. “I like technology.”

“Good,” Younger said. “That sector’s one we’re very well-disposed towards as well. We could…”

“What was the one you mentioned just before that?” I asked.

“Pharmaceuticals. The big drug companies are always an…”

“No: before that.”

“Oil?”

“No: signals, messages, connections.”

“Telecommunications?”

“Yes! Exactly.”

“That’s a very promising sector. Mobile telephone penetration is increasing at an almost exponential rate year after year. And then as more types of link-up between phones and internet and hi-fi systems and who knows what else become possible, more imaginary futures open up. You see the principle?”

“Yes,” I said. “Let’s go for those two: telecommunications and technology.”

“Well, we could certainly weight your portfolio in that direction,” Younger began-but paused when the perfectly-held-hair receptionist walked in. “Ah, here’s your coffee,” he said.

She was carrying it on a small tray, like the ones stewardesses use in aeroplanes. As she set it down on the polished table I noticed that it was a two-part construction: the cup itself, then, slotted into that, a plastic filter section where the coffee grains themselves were. It made me think of those moon landing modules from the Sixties, the way the segments slot together. There was a saucer too, of course: three parts. The receptionist lowered the whole assemblage gently down onto the table’s surface, set a small jar of cream, a bowl of rough-hewn blocks of sugar and a spoon beside it, and then blasted away again with the tray.

“We could certainly look at weighting it that way,” Younger continued. “But my point in putting forward the roulette analogy was that it’s best to cover several sectors of the…”

“Yes, I understand,” I told him. “But I want to know where I am. To occupy a particular sector, rather than be everywhere and nowhere, all confused. I want to have a…a…” I searched for the right word for a long time, and eventually found it: “position.”

“A position?” he repeated.

“Yes,” I said. “A position. Telecommunications and technology.”

Now Younger looked flustered.

“While I view both these sectors as most promising ones, I feel that this degree of localization, and especially given the great sum we’re proposing to invest, does represent an excessive level of exposure to contingencies. I’d much prefer…”

“If you won’t do it,” I said, “I’ll go to another stockbroker.”