Alice Adams - Invincible Summer

A silence.

‘You’ll think I’m a monster, but sometimes I think. . I think about getting up and walking out the door. Just keeping on going. Starting a new life somewhere else. Or just walking until I reach the sea. And then carrying on walking.’

Eva sighed and rested a hand on Sylvie’s arm. ‘Of course you do. You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t. It’s okay to have those thoughts. But here’s a thing my father used to say to me: you are what you do. Not what you think, not even what you say you’ll do, but what you actually do. So every mother of a disabled baby who plunges into despair in the middle of the night and thinks about walking away, or even darker thoughts, if only my child had died instead of this , and then gets up in the morning and loves and cares for that child, that’s who she is. She’s a mother who gets up in the morning and loves and cares for her child. The rest means nothing, nothing at all.’ Allegra stirred in her cot and Eva lowered her voice back to a whisper. ‘Go to sleep now. I’ll be here in the morning, and every other morning that you and Allegra need me, I promise.’

It had been a strange meeting and Eva wasn’t entirely sure what to make of it. Brad Whitman had called her into a side room at the end of the day, and Eva had approached with a feeling of trepidation. It was unlikely to be good news; though it had been a relief when Robert had taken a job in the States — since it had been all Eva could do to remain coldly civil to him after he’d left Sylvie and Allegra — he hadn’t yet been replaced. That had meant she couldn’t be cut any more slack at work, and balancing the long hours with the need to support Sylvie, let alone spend time with Julian, had left her exhausted and stretched to the limit. As she entered the meeting room she saw that Brad was already sitting there with a man and a woman, whom she vaguely recognized as being from HR. They talked briefly about a compliance audit of old trades and produced some printouts from the booking system.

Her stomach sank when she realized they were from the Bellwether Trust trade from a couple of years back. At the time she had been nervous that she’d ramped the market a bit too conspicuously, but as the months passed it had seemed as though nothing would come of it and she’d eventually stopped looking over her shoulder. Could it really come back to bite her after all this time? Apparently the answer was yes. The HR man had used words like ‘market manipulation’ and ‘internal review’ and ‘formal warning’. None of them would meet her eye, and after he had finished speaking Brad stood up and held the door open, leaving her in no doubt that the meeting was over.

As she walked back to her desk with her heart pounding, her phone started to ring in her pocket. Julian. He’d rung several times today and each time she’d put him straight through to voicemail. She just didn’t have time for it.

Alert as ever to anything out of the ordinary, Big Paul turned round as she sat down.

‘What’s up?’ he asked.

‘I’ve just been given a warning,’ she said slowly.

‘How do you mean, a warning?’

‘A formal warning from HR over a trade. Do you remember that Bellwether Trust one I made all that money on a couple of years back? The one I pre-hedged by buying all those bonds in the market? They’re saying what I did was market manipulation, that I deliberately ramped the market. I mean, you could argue it either way, you always can. But apparently there’s a regulatory review going on.’ She spoke the words as if feeling her way through a fog.

Big Paul swivelled his chair so that he was facing away from her and looked at his bank of screens as he spoke.

‘Listen. Meet me downstairs in five. Not in reception. In the coffee shop by the dock.’

‘What? Why? I need to start closing the curves. I guess I could come out for ten minutes if it’s important. But why don’t we just walk down together now?’

‘Christ, you really don’t get it, do you? Seriously, wait five minutes, and then come and meet me, understand?’ He stood up and pulled his jacket off the back of his chair, walking away towards the lift before she had a chance to say anything more.

*

When she reached the cafe he already had two cups of coffee on the table in front of him and he pushed one towards her as she sat down.

‘Here you go. I’m doing you a favour by being here and I don’t want to stay long enough to risk being seen by anyone, so sit down and listen up. I’m about to explain a few things that you clearly haven’t been around long enough to work out for yourself. That HR meeting you just had? That’s the start of the dismissal process. You’re out.’

‘Out? What do you mean, I’m out?’

‘You’re out of a job, one way or another. They’re going to take whatever they’ve got on you, and believe me they’ve got stuff on you the same as they have on all of us, and they’re going to use it to force you out of the bank. How you handle the next few weeks will determine how nasty this gets for you. Worst-case scenario, they fire you and you leave with no pay-off and a revoked FSA authorization so that you’ll never work in the City again. But if you play it right you should be able to swing it so that they make you redundant with a severance pay-off, or at least let you leave by mutual agreement with all your deferred stock from your previous bonuses.’

She stared at him. ‘What? But why would they want to get rid of me? For fuck’s sake, look at my P’n’L, it’s as good as anyone else’s.’

He leant back in his chair. ‘Shit, I can’t believe you’re still this wet behind the ears. This is just the game, Eva. It’s a regulatory review and you got caught in the net. They’ve got to throw someone to the wolves and this time it’s you. You’re a dead man walking. I can’t be seen to be associated with that, but you’re a good kid and I don’t want to see you get screwed over too badly. Don’t take it personally, it happens to everyone sooner or later.’

‘It hasn’t happened to you.’

‘Yeah, well, I’m different. I’m a lot better connected than you are, and I know where more than a few bodies are buried.’ He sat back in his chair. ‘Anyway, it has happened to me. At a different bank, a long time ago, and the reason I’ve still got a career is that I handled it right. That’s not common knowledge, so don’t go shouting it about.’

She rubbed her temples with her fingertips. ‘What am I going to do if they fire me? This is the only thing I’ve ever done. It’s who I am.’

‘Yeah, well. You need to hold your shit together. Here’s what you’re going to do. Don’t talk to anyone about this, you don’t want to taint yourself. You got that? You don’t want anyone to know this is happening. You come into the office every day and you act exactly the same as you always do, but every free minute you have, you call all the contacts and headhunters you know and try to wangle another job offer pronto. That way you can just resign with your reputation intact and everybody’s happy. Apart from that, you need to position yourself internally so that HR and Brad know they can’t just sack you without a fight. They don’t like unfair dismissal lawsuits, especially from minorities and women, so you need to hire yourself an absolute fucking hellbeast of a lawyer and take him along to the rest of your HR meetings so they know you won’t just roll over. That won’t be cheap, but it will be worth every penny.’ He stood up to leave. ‘That’s about as much as I can tell you. Good luck.’

As he turned to go, she asked, ‘Paul? Why me? Do you know why this is happening to me?’