On the Floor (10 page)

When Stephen introduced us I soon realised Zanna practises secret arts that no other woman working in the City knows: how to tie a scarf so it doesn't look like a dog collar, how to achieve that ‘no make-up'
look in under five minutes, how to sculpt hair into an effortless French plait. In short, Zanna knows how to present a structured package of feminine beauty and formidable intellect that is guaranteed to catapult her past the Cuban-heeled pack of Women Who Have Made It in the City, the lone wolverines who think that a slap of lipstick and a pair of tits will stop them being taken seriously and that being generally ungroomed in a dykish dark suit is the best way of cracking your head through the glass ceiling.

When I called round to admire her remodelled master bedroom before Christmas, she flung open the towering wardrobe doors to reveal a compartmentalised nerve centre of order: ghettoised cashmere jumpers alongside horizontal double height rails, a battery of drawers in descending widths, suits cascading into a row of individually bagged party frocks. I breathed in a trace of cedar, and looked down at the row of shoe bags that stretched across the base – Charles Jourdan, Salvatore Ferragamo – thinking this is a wardrobe that could streamline your whole life with the perky announcement that WHATEVER might happen, you would never be inappropriately dressed. Or find yourself at 5 a.m. on a winter morning, holding two stockings under a naked light bulb to check if they are both black, or effing and blinding your way through the cavernous darkness of an overstuffed wardrobe for that blue suit that seems to have vaporised.

English women
, sighed Zanna, closing the wardrobe door,
do NOT understand grooming. Hair. Nails. Careers
.

Rosanna P. Vermont is a thirty-year-old Europhile Yank whose mother concordes between her antiques shop on the New Kings Road (where she spends a fortnight crying bravely on her daughter's shoulders and bemoaning the impossibility of getting a decent latte in this town) and her clapboard divorce settlement in the Hamptons. Zanna's father, meanwhile, spreads his middle-aged wings in a new pad on the Upper East Side, calling her to say,
Honey, haven't you spent enough time in Europe now? You could have anything you want at my firm, you know?
But what Daddy doesn't see, as he surveys his giant banking kingdom through
a glass partition, is that his daughter wants the thrill of pioneering, of doing it her own way in a European banking system that's still in its infancy compared with what he is offering.

When he's not begging her to come home, he's begging her to send a birthday card to his new girlfriend who is old enough to be her younger sister and – to judge from the photo I saw, bears a remarkable resemblance to Zanna – although she has never mentioned this and I don't think it's necessarily constructive to make that kind of connection. I mean, you could argue that Zanna looks very like her mother, in which case it's just Daddy doing a normal guy thing and trading in his wife for a younger model. In the end, Zanna did, in fact, relent and send a card to the girlfriend, because
Daddy needs me to be inclusive
.

Zanna's favourite movie is
Glengarry Glenross
.

Her favourite sayings are:

Always be closing.

Never stand in a queue.

Repeat after me.

Most people do not see the kindliness in Rosanna P. Vermont, what they see is the chilly veneer. But I know her to be generous in gesture, which I realised only too well 174 days ago when she called me up after Stephen dumped me.

‘Geri, are you there?' Her voice on the answerphone stopped me and my vodka refill halfway across my living room and I was convinced that she could somehow tell I was home. I stood there with the freezer-fresh bottle dripping in my hands, but I couldn't see a way of talking without sounding like I was cracking up, and I couldn't bear to see my distress reflected in Zanna's eyes. ‘You're there, aren't you?' she said when she called again a few hours later. ‘We're going out. We're going to get you through this.'

So we went out and got blasted, after she'd dragged me round Sloane Street, through a jungle of frantic females fingering anything black, shoving me into changing rooms with dresses that I would never have picked off the rails myself. ‘Retail therapy. It gets you through the first
wave.' I capitulated over the red and black Balenciaga, because it was easier than arguing, because the only way to move was forward and because Stephen wasn't the one sitting at home alone with his mouth impaled on a bottle of Absolut.

That night we went to the LA Café, brushing past swarms of girls in puffball skirts, and Zanna let me sit at the bar lining up the sea breezes and amusing myself and the barman by composing a Rule Book for Wannabe Female Bankers (subtitle: How to Get On Without Getting Fucked), reading my napkin scrawl aloud to both of them:

1. Don't even blink when someone says ‘Cunt'. Better still, say it yourself.

2. There is NEVER a good reason to cry in the office.

3. Always remember that two women standing together on a trading floor can only be gossiping; therefore treat all female colleagues with total contempt.

4. Learn how to drink copiously. Know the point at which you are likely to keel over or shag someone you shouldn't.

5. Keep your sexual playground OUTSIDE your office unless you want your performance to become the topic of discussion over the bar.

6. Never get period pains in the office. Adjust your contraceptive pill cycle so that you menstruate at weekends.

7. If you absolutely MUST have a baby, avoid a pregnancy and arrange a secret adoption during your summer vacation.

When Zanna decided enough was enough, she hauled me out onto the street and hailed a cab, gripped me in a cheery hug.
Congratulations, Geri, you've done your grieving
. And sure enough when I woke the next morning and saw Rex curled up on my dress on the floor I realised it had been thirty-five hours since I had cried and that was progress.

One hundred and fifty-seven days ago she pulled me off the trading floor and into the loo and put her arm around my shoulders in a manner that resembled something approaching the distant kindness of strangers.
Never ever on the floor
, she said, dabbing at my cheeks. But people lose patience with a grieving that should be over and I soon
became a project that did not proceed as planned.

So in late September Zanna pitched up at my door in loafers, jeans and a French nautical T-shirt like she was an advert for spring cleaning. A renovation of the heart. ‘You should move, trade up, Geri.' She thrust a Savills brochure into my hand. ‘South Ken is more happening. Kensington is full of Armenian widows droning on about their dead husbands.'

‘What is happening to me, Zanna?'

‘It's taking longer than I thought,' she admitted, a thoughtful sadness about the way she nodded her head.

‘I will never give my heart again.'

‘Bullshit. This is not a bereavement, Geri, this is a break-up.'

‘Because I will have no heart to give.'

‘It's never the same the second time. You will be better protected.'

‘How?'

‘I just think you endowed the relationship with more than was there.'

‘You're saying I made it all up?'

‘I'm saying you invested the relationship with way more than it had.'

She stood in the kitchen and watched me fiddling with the lid of the kettle. Rex slunk past her to settle on my bare feet.

‘So everything I know is wrong.'

‘It was a symptom, not a cause, of what's wrong with your life.'

‘And what's that?'

‘You haven't got a plan, Geri. You've got the world at your feet, but you act like you don't
want
it. You won't decide where you are going with your life. And Stephen, like the rest of us, knows what he wants.'

‘And it's not me.'

‘And it's not you.' Zanna patted my cheek. ‘Repeat after me: he is never coming back.'

‘He is never coming back.'

‘It is so over.'

‘It is so over.'

By November she had switched to a strategy of tough love, frustrated by my extended convalescence. ‘Your breasts look starved,' she frowned over my shoulder at the mirror at Harvey Nicks where I stood encased in a pearl-boned bodice with thirty-five intricate hooks and eyes.

‘This is not me,' I said to my reflection.

‘That's good,' she nodded grimly. ‘Because the old Geri is gone. This is the new one.'

I fingered the crepe puffball that stood stiff like black meringue. My bare feet seemed a long way down. ‘What's she like, this new me?'

Zanna gripped my shoulders as if taking the measure of my skeleton. ‘She knows what she wants and goes out and gets it. And she never looks back.'

I shrugged her off and she grabbed my arms. ‘OK, so tell me your other great idea, Geri. Your other great plan.' Her thumbs pressed hard into the bone. ‘That's right, you haven't got one. So quit wallowing, grow up. Don't be so female about it. Don't get stuck in the victim role.'

She sighed and released me so suddenly that I swayed a little and scrunched my toes on the carpet. ‘You want to know the truth?' Zanna folded her arms. ‘It was never going to work out with you and Stephen. I never thought it would. But you were the only one in the world who refused to see it' – and for a fleeting moment I wanted to smack her in the mouth right there in the changing room, rip the fucking crepe off my body and stuff it down her throat till she gagged. Instead I just smiled and croaked, ‘Thanks.' She hugged me so fiercely that the bodice dug into my ribs and then said, ‘Now go pay for that dress.'

The Grope shoulders his way through the crowd up onto the podium and the powercluster parts spontaneously to accommodate his presence. Back in October '87 when the markets crashed there was a morning just like this when he assembled the whole floor to say this would be
something to tell our grandchildren about,
If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs
, and all of us shuffling to attention, none of the usual pushing and shoving at the back, the guys up front lip-chewing with folded arms and quite a few of us nodding at what the Grope said. Like we knew what was happening. Like we understood. Trooping back to the trading floor to man our posts, waiting for the FTSE to limp out of the box and drip blood all over the Topic screens.

We sat breathless in front of the flickering monitors, watching the Dow struggle to even reach an opening, shuddering through a spiral as the programs puked all over it. Watching a new little twitch in the Grope's temple as he stalked the floor, stopping to study each trader's position like he was in a hospital visiting casualties.
There is always a price at which we do business and the phones will always be answered. Not like some British banks I could mention
. The credit spreads blew out like volcanoes, the black hole that was Rob's mouth just after taking down some BBB+ bonds at 60 that he could only knock out a few minutes later at 45.
This market is disappearing up its own asshole
. So they flew in some fire-fighters from New York to show us how to behave in a crisis and they sat around squeezing little American footballs, mispronouncing the names of European companies and going
yeah yeah uh huh
, putting into practice risk-containment strategies they learnt at business school. Schlepping home in the October evening to watch the TV action-replay of our day, where other people in other banks sat staring at screens, everyone looking to everyone else for an answer.

Day 2, the Dow was off 22% when someone whispered
buying opportunity
in the morning meeting and the Grope looked like he was going to machine gun the whole room. Rumours of people jumping off buildings, chickens coming home to get axed, the day that God left the storm-ravaged City and everything spun out of control.
When the dust settles, someone is going to pay for this
, said Rob. Then the Red Adair hand-holders showed up at the office in their travel suits and shook our hands.
Good luck, you guys
, like we'd been in the trenches
together, took their little leather footballs and jumped in a cab to get the Concorde back to their guaranteed promotions, leaving us with collapsed premiums on all their inherited hedge positions and Rob swearing down the phone to New York for months.

It all ended in a universal fight about who had predicted this, who understood it and who knew what to do. A big scramble to lay the blame. Saying things like:
The markets have a life of their own
, which really just means that nobody has an overview, nobody is in charge. Talk about how the index shouldn't be able to fall like that, blame it on the futures and those smartasses in Chicago, blame it on the champagne, blame it on the arbitrageurs, and then suddenly everything that was good before became bad. Strolling through the debris, picking up the pieces, reconstructing the business, putting toes back in the water and getting philosophical over margaritas about the excesses and how every cloud has a silver lining. Turn disaster into opportunity, seize the chance to get rid of the walking wounded who shouldn't have had jobs in the first place, get lean and mean down the gym, run a red pen through the expense accounts, cut out the dead wood. Only the fit will survive. Out there in the limbo world of non-banking are the souls of a lot of people we used to know.