The Triple Goddess (3 page)

As if we could be capable of such artistry.

No: that
je ne sais quoi
of hers that grew

And grew crossed all our lines, and came from You.

Chapter Two

Arbella said more during her early morning colloquies with her father than the entire rest of the day. It did not seem that way to the rich and trendy Sloane Ranger set that constituted her social network, and her business circle too, given that so many of her acquaintances worked in the same industry that she did as a broker at Lloyd’s of London.

Although she was not sociable by nature, attending drinks parties and dinners only to keep her ennui and youthful Weltschmerz at bay, it seemed to all that Arbella Stace was the most eloquent and communicative of women. The language of her presence was enough to convince each male in a crowd that she had eyes and ears for him alone. A flicker of her eyebrow...neither of them flickered very often, and then only infinitesimally...when combined with the attar of roses of her body amidst the haze of sweet smoke that issued from the oval cylinder of her Sullivan & Powell Turkish and Virginia cigarette, was enough to convey an illusion of intimacy that transcended the need for speech.

Arbella worked as a Marine broker on the ground floor at Lloyd’s of London’s premises in the “New” Lloyd’s building on Lime Street, the one that succeeded the “Old” Lloyd’s opposite it on Leadenhall Street, which in turn had replaced the one in the Royal Exchange...and it went back further than that and would go further forward.

For Lloyd’s, as an institution that owed its existence to all the probable improbabilities in the world except those of a religious or philosophical nature, was a Venice of impermanence even as it specialized in insuring and reinsuring accidents waiting to happen. At this time it was still at its zenith as an institution renowned throughout the world for its stability, reliability, and imperviousness to change.

The name of Lloyd’s Underwriter was a byword for staunchness, honesty and probity in a man. Adherence to the highest moral standards, tradition, and old-world courtesy…these were the principles that the institution that it had been founded upon, and which allowed it to manage its own affairs unsupervised by Government authority.

From the second floor up within the great edifice of Portland stone, above the trading levels with their arched floor-to-ceiling windows of plate glass, there were long passageways of mahogany doors with numbers on them. These were the offices that the Corporation of Lloyd’s leased to the underwriting syndicates.

The only communal rooms were the Adam Room, where the Committee of Lloyd’s held its meetings, and the Captains’ Room. The Adam Room had been assembled, rather than constructed, by the celebrated eighteenth-century architect Robert Adam, in that it had been moved piece by piece from Bowood House, the Lansdowne family’s historic home near Chippenham in Wiltshire. It contained, in addition to a lot of fancy furniture, a carpet which might or might not have been the largest ever to have been woven in a single piece.

And in the Captains’ Room one could get a halfway decent cup of coffee—Lloyd’s had originated in a coffee house, so it had to be freshly made—served by waiters so rude that they made their Parisian counterparts seem hospice nurses; and a curled sandwich, sausage roll, or dry slice of cake or pastry.

The waiters in the Captains’ Room were not the same as the Waiters in the Underwriting Room. The latter were named after the men who served in the coffee house that Edward Lloyd had opened in 1688, around the time of the Glorious Revolution, the overthrow of King James II of England; and which, as the
über
cybercafé of its day, became the haunt of shipowners and merchants who came there to share with each other the financial risks of losing their vessels and cargoes at sea, and the emotional trauma that they experienced when it happened. The difference between the original waiters and their successors was that the modern species, instead of serving coffee, kept the Underwriting Room’s operations running by posting notices, and collecting and dropping things off around the syndicate “boxes” on the trading floors. Instead of aprons they wore smart red and black uniforms, and the doorman at the main entrance on Lime Street also sported a top hat.

The original Lloyd’s Coffee House had so thrived on the appetite for caffeine and risk, the one perhaps fuelling the other, of the seafaring types who adopted it that Edward Lloyd found himself as proprietor of a premises considerably more important than the non-alcoholic watering hole he had envisaged: one that was as metonymic as Smithfield was for meat, Billingsgate for fish, Covent Garden for flowers, Spitalfields for fruit and vegetables, and Hatton Garden for jewellery.

On the ground and first floor of New Lloyd’s, the upper level of which was open to view from below like a racecourse around an encircling balcony rail, were the two kidney-shaped trading floors of “The Room”. The Marine, Aviation, and Motor syndicates were downstairs and the Non-Marine syndicates upstairs. The Room was “open-plan” (there was little planning involved, it was just a matter of squeezing as much in as possible as the market continued to grow) with no internal walls. Each underwriting syndicate’s wooden “box”—the boxes were the equivalent of the stalls and vendor stations in any other market—were where the risk-accepting or -declining underwriters and their assistants received the placing brokers who brought them their offerings on long concertina-folding documents known as “slips”.

Because it was required that all Lloyd’s business be transacted on the trading floors, underwriters only retired to their offices on the upper levels of the building to reckon up their accounts, and either rejoice at the luck that often passed for sound judgement in their business, or lick their wounds, preparatory to either celebrating the luck or anointing the wounds in the City’s pubs and wine bars.

The rectangular boxes were custom-built hardwood units with solid bases and high-backed settles on either side facing each other. The whole of the centre of the desk area was occupied by a wooden tower, open at the base for passing things from side to side, with tiered shelves above for reference books; pigeon holes and nooks for the paraphernalia of underwriting and the premium and loss advice cards that were delivered by the waiters; and little brass-handled drawers or shuttles in which were filed the three-by-five-inch index cards on which the details of each risk were recorded by the entry boys (some of whom were sixty years old and had been sitting buttock to buttock with the same colleagues all their careers).

Below the desk platform and underneath the seat lids were cupboards and hidden compartments like the hidey-holes that children leave in building blocks; no space was wasted. Behind the seat were bin receptacles for the files that were dropped off by the claim brokers for review by the claims underwriters.

The boxes were very varied in design and construction. They ranged from sophisticated structures resembling Skylab, built to accommodate half a dozen underwriters, plus their assistants and entry boys, to simple two-seaters equivalent to the “horseboxes” at public schools where boys did their evening prep. The biggest boxes were constructed in irregular shapes, and strewn around the floors like discarded building blocks. They had central carousels for the information cards, which could be spun around to save one the trouble of getting up and past those next to one. The smallest were occupied by only the underwriter and his deputy. On the record cards underwriters handwrote key details of the “material underwriting information” that brokers supplied for every risk that the syndicate wrote, renewed or turned down.

The underwriting slips themselves contained only the bare-bones contractual details of a risk—the rest, which was taken on trust, was communicated verbally supported by “exhibits” typed on white cardboard. Underwriters made up their minds as to whether to participate on a risk or not based on the oral testimony of the broker and what was on the slip. That the full contract wording of terms, conditions and clauses was rarely processed until the contract was long expired, did not matter: the founding principle of Lloyd’s was that of
Uberrima Fides
, or Utmost Good Faith, and anyone who was discovered to have breached the highest standard of honesty and truth was banned from the Room, his name vilified for ever more.

For ease of access by the brokers, underwriters sat at the corners of the boxes, and the claims underwriter at the other as far away as possible from the men who had put the loss-making business on the books. In between were the entry boys who received the stamped and signed slips that the underwriters tossed at them. There were no fat entry boys: owing to the lack of space, they had to be not clever but thin, and were expected to keep their weight down like jockeys.

In the middle of one side of the marine floor was the Rostrum, or Podium: a mahogany pulpit under a canopy that housed the world-famous symbol of Lloyd’s of London, the ship’s bell that had been salvaged from the wreck of HMS
Lutine
after she sank in 1799. The rostrum was where the waiter-on-duty, or Caller, sat and, at the request of any broker mounting the step to either side, would announce over a Tannoy system the name of an associate he wished to make contact with. The waiter would call each name three times at intervals as if he were auctioning him off. The sound reached the farthest corners of the Room, and brokers’ ears were attuned to hearing themselves being called above the din, even when they were “in” with an underwriter. As soon as they were free, they would either rush to the rostrum to meet their colleague, or stand at the balcony and snap their fingers until they were spotted.

The area around the podium was busiest at one o’clock, when those who had arranged to have lunch together met there. At Lloyd’s, seniority of tenure counted for everything; in proof of which there was an informal society called the Three Rooms’ Club, of which the unelected members were those who had worked in all three of the last trading locations.

There was a highly charged atmosphere about Lloyd’s that thrilled even grizzled veterans of the market, as they pushed through the heavy revolving doors of brass and reinforced glass at the corners of the Room and were engulfed by the roar within. The mettle of the most glib and well-prepared brokers was tested as they made their presentations on behalf of their clients to underwriters who depended for their survival on an ability to assess and rate risks, and make informed decisions on whether or not to subscribe to a slip In this they were guided both by their professional assessment of the information submitted by the brokers, and the intuition bred of long experience.

Underwriters would decide on rates and whether or not to subscribe to a risk, irrespective of its size, and for how much, on the spot. Risk assumers did not ask to take information away to review in their offices, or consult with other parties on, or sleep on a possible commitment; to habitually suggest such a thing would so stigmatize their reputations that brokers would endeavour to complete their placements elsewhere.

Each risk was “led” by a one of a small number of quoting underwriters who specialized in the relevant class of business, and with whom the broker, or intermediary, negotiated a rate that he was able to sell to his client. When the broker was successful in obtaining a “firm order”, he returned to the lead, who would put down his stamp, which was personalized with his initials and syndicate number, at the top of the slip underneath the terms and conditions, write a percentage share against it, and sign it on behalf of the “Names”, or Members, of the syndicate that he represented.

This was known as “taking a line”, and once a line had been written the syndicate was “bound” to the terms and conditions of the contract. The broker would then proceed to see the other syndicates of his choosing around the rest of the market, “show” the slip to them, and continue around the “following” market until one hundred per cent of his order was complete.

In the village that was Lloyd’s each underwriter was nothing on his own. But when massed together with dozens of other syndicates pooling their expertise and financial backing, all of which came from the net worth of private individual, not commercial, investors including the underwriters themselves they had the clout of a mighty institution. Underwriters were expert in sussing out the merits of a risk as it went round the market. Each knew his position in the food-chain, and that he would be visited at a certain stage in a placement according to the classes of business that he wrote, his syndicate’s size, and the esteem in which he was held by his peers.

The most respected syndicates were conspicuous by their absence from a slip, and the most difficult question a broker could be asked, by underwriters who looked to others to guide them in their decisions, was why so-and-so was not on it. The assumption was that he had turned the thing down, or had been holding out for a higher rate, or that he considered it a certain loss-maker. Another tell-tale sign of difficulty in the placement was if weak syndicates were in an unduly prominent position.

Underwriters who were nonetheless prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt, or were less than gung-ho about the deal on offer, might express their caution by writing a small or “watching” line, otherwise known as “giving the thing a tickle”. This earned them the right to see the renewal twelve months later, and assess from the updated information and loss experience whether or not they had been right to be wary. If not, they might increase their line; if so, they would come off altogether and admonish themselves for not heeding their instinct.