For The Love Of Money, Brian Doswell [books for students to read .txt] 📗

from John Betjeman’s poem about her home town.
She remembered an afternoon spent in a class of girls, most of whom were far more interested in live boys than dead poets. The teacher had tried hard to generate a discussion around why Betjeman might have penned those prophetic thoughts in 1937, a full two years before the start of the Second World War, but she had failed at every attempt. It had been the last class on a warm summer’s day with a dozen or more romantic trysts arranged along the main avenue of the marble floored shopping mall in town. The girls needed time to make those subtle, but oh so necessary, adjustments to their school uniform before the appointed hour. A double fold-over on the waistband would turn the regulation pleated grey skirt into something a bit shorter and far more fashionable. School ties could be loosened to let the knot rest between budding breasts, or merely discarded by those with enough shape of their own to not need the added attraction.
Lia would have dearly liked to be among those girls but she knew her father would never approve. She knew he would be waiting at the door knowing exactly how long it should take her to walk from the school to the house and ready to question her in the finest detail if she were more than a few minutes late.
Unlike most of the girls in her class, Lia also remembered the second verse of Betjeman’s poem;

Come, bombs and blow to smithereens
Those air-conditioned, bright canteens,
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans,
Tinned minds, tinned breath.

In those distant, teenage school days, it had seemed to Lia that being the daughter of Doctor Arvindra Patel meant that she was doomed to live in a tinned body, subject to the tinned mind of a foreign culture and condemned to breathe the tinned breath of a past, anachronistic generation.
Her mother, a traditionally obedient Indian wife, never questioned her husband’s rules for the household. Lia watched her mother go about the business of the day, washing clothes, cooking food, cleaning the house. She rarely went out except for routine shopping trips, and never learned to drive the family car. Lia tried hard but continually failed to understand why her father had worked so hard to bring his family to this brave new world and yet was so determined to live in the old one, it was a lost argument. It was as though her father was hard –wired to behave in the old ways of a country that she barely knew. He simply could not change and her mother simply would not. Out of sheer frustration, Lia escaped the contradictions of the house by retreating to her bedroom and burying herself in school work.
Lia’s world began to change when she was accepted onto a business studies course at The London School of Economics. The LSE faculty was in central London, a comparatively easy commuting distance from Slough but a tiring and expensive journey when student accommodation was on offer with her bursary at a cost no more than the train fare.
Doctor Arvindra Patel found himself in a quandary. On the one hand, his plans for a carefully arranged marriage for his most special daughter, and on the other, his pride in the notion of a daughter who would, one day, be entitled to call herself Doctor Lia Patel. A fleeting image crossed his mind, the scene was of his own father, seated on a low wooden stool on a dirt floor, endlessly swatting flies and chewing betel nut. The old man’s voice echoed in his head;
“Every father is the platform from which his son strides into the world.”
Arvindra strode from his father’s village and went to the university in Calcutta to study medicine, now it was time for him to let Lia go.

§§§§§

Lia gazed out of her bedroom window at the wall of the adjacent house. She supposed that there had once been a view of sorts but the infill building had replaced any notion of what that might have been. In four years at the LSE, her room had hardly changed. She smiled at the Spice Girls poster on her wall. Why were there no Indian girl singers in the pop charts, only the crazy dancing characters in the incredibly similar Bollywood films? On the dressing table in front of the poster sat the obligatory framed photograph of Lia in cap and gown, clutching her MBA degree certificate. She smiled at the photograph because she knew her father saw the certificate as a token of his pride in her achievement. Lia saw it as a passport out of Slough to a brave new world of her own. The trouble was, she had no real idea what that brave new world was going to be. Her first challenge would be to convince her parents that she should move out of the family home that had sucked her back in when her college days were over.
She did know that if she was ever to escape her old bedroom in Slough, she would need to be independent. She needed money. Step one of her journey was to join the Slough High Street branch of Andersons Bank as an assistant financial advisor, and today would be the first day in her new job.

§§§§§

She also knew that during her years at the LSE, she had become the sort of girl who confused her male colleagues. The first year had been difficult for her in so many ways. She knew from her own mirror that her face and figure were equal to any of those models whose photographs lined the magazine pages. She had inherited her father’s tall lean figure and her mother’s wide dark eyes. Her long straight, jet black hair came from deep in the Indian sub-continent but her light creamy complexion was a mystery. She often supposed there might have been some European blood in the family, somewhere long ago in the past, maybe during the time of the Raj. It amused her to think of her father’s strict family morals being bent, ever so slightly, by an imagined Indian Army Colonel in bright red coat and plumed hat.
That first year out of school uniform and away from the structured regime of the family home had been for Lia, like an amateur gardener planting seeds without knowing what to expect when they grew. Grateful for the generous allowance from her father, Lia had experimented with a variety of fashion and life styles in equal measure. There were boys in her life, several of them, but none that she ever considered as a long term partner. Her allowance was not exorbitant but it placed her in the category of being both good looking and rich enough to buy the drinks in the Uni bar, a lethal combination.
Free from parental view, she drank too much on some occasions and danced till dawn on others, but always in the back of her mind lay the certain knowledge that one day, her father would introduce her to a complete stranger with the dreaded words.
“Lia, come and meet your future husband.”
For most of those first months, Lia existed in a state of confusion. She dearly loved her parents and, in spite of their old fashioned ways, she tried to live her life as she thought they would wish her to. Above all, she was determined to remain a virgin. Her virginity was as important to her as it was to her father although she could never really understand why. She supposed it was an ingrained reaction to the shame that her father would feel if his carefully selected future husband were to complain about damaged goods or demand the return of her dowry.
Over the years it had been Lia’s habit to avoid these thoughts by total immersion in her studies and her second year had been spent in exactly that way. She had earned good grades in each of her prime subjects but her favourite, by far, had been commercial finance. The complexity of the basic mathematics teased her mind and the application of the numbers to investment funding brought some sense at last to the industrial landscape along the M4 corridor that was her home. She began to see the endless rows of square featureless buildings between Slough and Heathrow as money generators. You plant a little venture capital and wait for the seeds to grow. If you get it right, the rewards can be enormous, if you get it wrong you might lose your client’s money but you take your commission and move on. If you work for the bank, managing other people’s money, there’s no way you can lose.
Year three was even better. Lia’s project work included a long work-experience session with the London Stock Exchange. She fell instantly in love with the inside-out Lloyds building in Leadenhall Street. To her, the extravagant service ducts that enmesh the outside of the building represented arteries pumping the life fluids of the City of London around its beating heart. Every day that she spent in the building drew her deeper into an enchanted web where the open plan central floor buzzed from dawn till dusk, alive with small clusters of men and women brokering deals for amounts of money that Lia had only ever dreamed about.
Her third-year assignment meant that she was attached to a small maritime insurance group who oversaw the list of supposedly anonymous Names who shared the income from the premiums and also the charges when insurance claims were paid out. Lia shadowed the work of the team leader, Lawrence Earnshaw, who readily shared with her the rationale behind the group’s business decisions day by day. Lawrence became her mentor and friend while she, in turn, became his conjoined twin. Wherever Lawrence went Lia followed and when he invited her to join the group at a celebratory session in their favourite watering hole in Leadenhall Market, she naturally agreed. They were celebrating the final completion of an insurance contract for a fleet of luxury cruise liners that had taken close to a year to negotiate. Lawrence and his team of four brokers stood to earn significant bonuses once the premium payments started to flow through their team account and although that would not be for another six months, they were in the mood to spend their first payment in advance. Bottles of red wine were delivered to their table in pairs. Lawrence argued that there were six glasses in an average bottle and there were six of them round the table so each bottle represented one glass each, barely one good toast to their success in a bottle. They were in the mood for several toasts.
Leadenhall Market is one of those places, unique to London. During the day, it is principally a covered food market with some of the best meat and fish stalls in the city. In the evening, it becomes the place of choice for the financial sector housed in the streets around the market. From six until eight the bars overflow onto cobbled streets, every table eager to out do the next with stories of their successes of the day. Between seven-thirty and eight o’clock, the assembled throng head for their preferred stations to begin their commute home. The market closes at eight. Sometimes, a particularly successful team are loathe to go home at the witching hour and, for them, there are a variety of less well appointed bars in various adjacent side-streets, only too pleased to continue to serve until dawn.
Lawrence, Lia and the team moved from bar to bar throughout the evening until they arrived at a club, better known for its hostesses than its wine list. Under low romantic lighting, the team danced with scantily