Young Wives' Tales Read Free Page B

that a date has freed up in November. It would be nice to go somewhere different for Sunday lunch. Daisy and Simon come to me about once a fortnight and Connie and Luke invite me to theirs reasonably frequently. Luckily, Luke is a far superior cook to Connie. But they have busy lives of their own and I can’t impose myself on them all the time. The boys are often with Peter on a Sunday and those Sundays are the worst. Relentless. Evil.
    Yes, I’ll call Lauren.

2
Monday 4 September

Lucy
    I am at my desk by 7.45 a.m. I check the Dow, the FTSE and the Nikkei. I linger on the Bloomberg site to get a measure of what the markets have been doing overnight. The US Stock-Index Futures are little changed ahead of rumours that consumer confidence is down and there’ll be a slowing of personal spending. There’s always rumours, most of which are initiated by traders. The important thing is to be able to effectively, efficiently and faultlessly separate fact from fiction. I keep reading and soon find what I’m hoping to see.
European stocks advanced, led by semiconductor makers, including Infineon Technologies AG, and Micron Technology Inc. – in the US – unexpectedly posted a fiscal fourth-quarter profit after markets closed
.
    Unexpectedly for some, maybe, but I’d seen it coming and had taken a punt. I can almost smell my bonus. I calculate that the pleasantly surprising earnings from Micron signal good news for tech stocks, there’s demand out there and the companies could perform better than the market had previously thought. Iimmediately check my clients’portfolios and decide what to sell and what to hold on to.
    I feel I’m on rock solid ground in the office. I adore my job, everything about it. I like numbers and I like money, which is a good start. But I also relish the fact that I’m a bloody excellent trader and I wield enormous respect among my colleagues; all the more glorious as it is grudgingly given.
    I started as a graduate trainee with Gordon Webster Handle, one of the City’s most respected and established institutions. I soon discovered that respected and established are euphemisms for ball-breakingly tough and sexist, but oddly that environment didn’t intimidate me, I found it challenging. Eight graduates started together. All, except me, were Oxbridge graduates. All, except me and one other, were men. The other woman trader no longer works. She married one of the few dotcom multi-millionaires who managed to turn his idea into hard cash just before the dotcom dream turned into a nightmare. One of the other guys has had a breakdown and I understand that he spends his time on a Buddhist retreat in India. The other five are all still trading, although I’m the only one still at Gordon Webster Handle. A couple of them live in NY now, which by all accounts is amazing – pure adrenalin the entire time. Sadly, not a rush I’m ever likely to experience. A move abroad isn’t an option for me now, as Peter needs to live near his sons. Still, I like it here. They appreciate me.
    When we used to keep track of such things I regularlyearned the highest bonus among my original gang of trainees. A fact none of us has ever got over.
    As Jeremy (the self-appointed cocky bastard in the group) pointed out the first time it happened, ‘Thing is, Lucy, it’s unexpected. You might be the best trader among us but you still have a vag. I thought that alone would cost you twenty or thirty grand.’
    ‘It is rare to see a case of best man wins,’I laughed, ‘especially when the best man is a woman.’
    Although admittedly things have changed. Since I had my daughter, Auriol, my bonuses have regularly been ten to fifteen per cent lower than my
lowest
bonus pre-Auriol. It appears I was able to hide my gender until I actually gave birth, then it became impossible, which is not surprising. However, I clearly remember the days when our bonuses were announced and I was the acknowledged hot-shot. Best days of my life. Up