The High Flyer Read Free

blunt-featured good looks such a glitzy sheen.
    “Going far?” he said as I sat down.
    “Only three thousand miles.”
    “The New York flight?”
    “Uh-huh. You too?”
    He nodded. “Staying at the Pierre?”
    “Not this time.”
    “Too bad!” He smiled again. His teeth were slightly uneven but I liked that. I was bored with capped teeth which had had all the individuality tortured out of them. By this time I was aware that although he spoke with a faint American accent there had been something European about the way he pronounced “Pierre.”
    “Business or pleasure?” he was asking idly.
    “Both, I hope!”
    He finished his Scotch and gestured to my glass. “What are you drinking?”
    I told him. He snapped his fingers. The harassed waiter stopped dead in his tracks and took the order for another round.
    “Well, thank you,” I said, “Mr.—”
    “My name’s Joachim Betz, but you don’t have to get your tongue around that first name—or the last. Kim will do.”
    “German?”
    “Not exactly. I’ve been English for a long time now.”
    “So have I.”
    “You’re not English?”
    “Not exactly.”
    We smiled, savouring our inexactness, before I said: “I’m British but not English. I’m a Scot. My name’s Carter Graham, Carter as in President Jimmy.”
    He asked no questions but accepted the odd first name as if it were commonplace. “I was born in Argentina,” he said. “My father was smart enough to escape from the Nazis before the war.”
    “Your parents were Jewish?”
    “Only my father. So by Jewish rules I don’t qualify, but I confess that in New York it often suits me to let people assume I’m a Jew.”
    “I’ve never found there’s much mileage in being a Scot in London.”
    “How about all those Scots who have made it to the top of the British Establishment?”
    “Yes, a great bunch—and all of them men!”
    He laughed. “
Res ipsa loquitur?
”
    “
Res ipsa loquitur!
”
    It was as if we had exchanged the password which signalled membership of a secret confraternity. That Latin tag, “the matter speaks for itself,” is one of the first phrases any lawyer learns.
    “What’s your field?” he demanded.
    “Tax. And yours?”
    “Investment banking . . . But is being Scottish really such a handicap for a woman practising law in this enlightened day and age?”
    “What enlightened day and age?”
    “Well, since we now have a female prime minister—”
    “She’s a goddess. That’s different.”
    “Explain!”
    I sized him up and decided to risk a touch of satire.
    IV
    “The English dinosaurs who roam the City of London,” I said, “divide women into four groups: trash, tarts, girls and goddesses. Trash is anything which fails to speak with a Home Counties accent, and Scots trash, if it aims to be a lawyer, should qualify in Scottish law and stay north of the border. Trash can’t be taken seriously. Tarts, on the other hand, can be taken seriously, but dinosaurs only do one kind of business with them— if indeed they do business with them at all. The women in the third category, the girls, speak with a Home Counties accent and are allowed to be businesswomen (a) because they look sweet with their briefcases, and (b) because they can’t possibly be a serious threat—they remind the dinosaur of his mother and sister, and all dinosaurs know how to control the females in their families. Goddesses alone are beyond control, but that’s all right because they appeal to the dinosaur’s primitive need to worship the powerful, and when worshipped the goddess is usually benign towards males and indifferent to females. Very occasionally tarts and trash can be reclassified as girls who may one day be goddesses, but only if their speech is flawless, their manners impeccable and their looks fit to qualify them for the frontispiece of
Country Life
.”
    My companion was clearly amused. “And how would you define the dinosaurs?”
    “They can be any age between forty and