At the next desk, Adrian was getting into an awful tangle with the Deutschmark, while Imogen had washed her hands of the yen and was having a quiet sit down and a cup of lemon tea. In fact, virtually all the occupants of the glass tower that housed Marshall Price Butterworth were behaving like ants whose queen has just died; there was a great deal of activity and absolutely no unified purpose. And over the whole organisation hung the dreadful possibility that if this went on much longer they were all going to have to miss lunch. It was as bad as that.
Black Thursday, as it has since come to be known, started in the usual way. The breakdown of Middle East peace talks took some of the shine off oil and vague fears on Wall Street about the possibility of the restoration of the Jacobites caused the pound to fall two cents in early trading, but good figures from the banking and insurance sector helped the FTSE to perk up a bit, and only the lost, violent souls whose business it was to follow the vertiginous progress of the Hang Seng were having anything but a perfectly average day. Then it happened. Somewhere in the ether through which the faxes hurtled invisible the notion was spawned that something too ghastly for words was about to happen to the National Lombard Bank. Nobody knew where it came from, but such instances of parthenogenesis are so commonplace in the Square Mile that nobody ever bothers to ask. Consult anyone who has had anything to do with the markets since they introduced the new technology and they will tell you that all such rumours originate with a little man who lives in a converted railway carriage in Alaska and phones them through to the newspaper seller at Liverpool Street station. It may not be true, but it provides a much-needed focal point for baffled indignation.
Once the rumour had started, it grew. Nobody believed a word of it, of course—nobody ever does—but as custodians of the trust of countless small investors they saw it as their duty to wipe as many millions off the price of everything as they possibly could, and so the process was set in ineluctable motion. In the short time it takes for a message to bridge the Atlantic on fibre-optic wings the rumour had hit New York, and from there it moved on, faster than light and considerably faster than thought, to Tokyo, Hong Kong, Sydney, Paris, Geneva and all the other financial capitals of the world. So swift was its development and transmission that within two hours of its immaculate conception it was prompting market-makers in the Solomon Islands to get out of cowrie shells and knocking the bottom out of the reindeer futures market in Lapland.
Gerald took another long, unfriendly look at the screen, scratched his ear with his left index finger, and decided to take an early lunch. The dollar, he decided, was only doing it to attract attention to itself, and if he ignored it then it would stop playing up and return to normal. It was not, perhaps, the view that Keynes or Adam Smith would have taken, but it made about as much sense as anything else. He picked up his personal organiser, scribbled a note saying “Sell” on his scratch pad to remind him when he came back, and tottered off to the Wine Vaults.
♦
All the time in the world, said Vanderdecker to himself through teeth clenched tight as masonry, we’ve got all the time in the world, so let’s not get all over-excited about a little puff of wind in the North Sea.
The gale howling through the shredded canvas of the mainsail was so loud that Vanderdecker was compelled to stop talking to himself and shout to himself instead. All around the
Out of the tiny corner of his eye which was still operational, Vanderdecker noticed something, and he edged out from under the insufficient shelter of the beer-barrel. “Sebastian!” he yelled, “pack it in, will you? This is neither the time nor the place.”
As soon as the first bolt of lightning had split the velvet sky, Sebastian had hurried on deck with a great lump of magnetic iron ore in his hands. He kept it specially for thunderstorms, and although he had so far failed to attract a single sky borne volt with it there was always a first time. Up to a point, Vanderdecker admired the man’s ingenuity, to say nothing of his tenacity, but he wasn’t in the mood for a swim if a baffled thunderbolt went straight down through the soles of Sebastian’s invulnerable feet and reduced the
