Termination Shock

A moment passed while Saskia re-calibrated her conversational brain for this kind of highly layered and ironic talk. In some ways it was more difficult than learning a foreign language. Which was sort of the point; you couldn’t be part of this social class unless you got it. “Bob”—Robert Watts, the Right Honorable the Lord Mayor of London—was a teetotaler. He had blown up a marriage and a job by drinking too much, then sworn off the booze and put his life back together and gotten married to Daia Chand, a British journalist. The assertion by Mark Furlong—a trusted member of Bob’s inner circle—that he’d been incapacitated by too much free Beaujolais on the Gulfstream was under no circumstances to be taken at face value. It was, first of all, a joke that derived its humorous payload from being so utterly outrageous in its falsity. But for the hearer to get the joke they’d have to know Bob at least well enough to know that he was—extremely unusually for a man in his role—an absolute teetotaler. Anyone so ill-informed or credulous as to actually believe this slander would be left out in the cold, operating on bad information. In due time they might work out that they’d committed the monstrous faux pas of taking at face value what had been meant as an ironic witticism and have the good grace to throw themselves in front of a Tube train at Bank. Further embroidering on all this was Mark’s specification of Beaujolais as the drink in question, that being seen, by a certain class of drinker, as an inexpensive and faddish vintage for lightweights. The mention of the Gulfstream was a lovely touch. Mark was basically remarking on how absurd it was for people to travel that way. So the underlying reality was that Mark was a profoundly decent man who knew and loved Bob but couldn’t bring himself to say as much.

Fine. But it simply took Saskia a few moments to get her head in that groove, so different from talking to the Sylvester Lins of the world. During that brief period of readjustment, Mark—who was evidently not a teetotaler—began to look just faintly queasy as it crossed his mind that Saskia might be too dim or literal-minded to get the joke. She was, after all, just a hereditary monarch. It wasn’t like you had to pass an intelligence test to land that job.

“He says he knows you,” Mark said, beginning to sound apologetic.

“Is Dr. Chand holding his head?”

“Perhaps. I thought she might join us.” Mark looked around, then shrugged as if to say no such luck. “I’m afraid I’ll have to do. On behalf of the Honorable the Lord Mayor, howdy and welcome to Texas! Can I grab you a beer?”

“I’m fine with this lovely glass of Beaujolais,” she shot back.

For one exquisite second, she had him. Mark looked exquisitely mortified, his eyes strayed to the glass in Saskia’s hand, but then he saw that it looked more like a Bordeaux. “I’ve heard it’s quite good,” he said.

Obviously discomfited by Mr. Furlong’s breezy informality was the younger man, one Simon Towne by his name tag. He turned out to be a viscount. As such he probably had been brought up to behave in a certain way when in the presence of queens. So Saskia went through the requisite formalities as Mark Furlong gazed on, seeming to find it all worth watching. Mark was a City man through and through. His protégé Simon was of another recognizable type: fresh out of a posh education, sent down to the City for seasoning and to rack up some millions and find a wife who would enjoy picking out curtains in Sussex.

“Mark, you mentioned Alastair had worked for you. May I assume in that case that you too are a risk analyst?”

“We all are,” Mark said.

“We meaning—?”

“Everyone in this room. Even the waiters and bus boys. Especially them. It’s just that some of us actually have the temerity to print it on our business cards.” He regarded Saskia. “Your country. Surrounded by walls. So high, but no higher. There’s a risk that waves will overtop them. Boffins like Alastair understand the maths of waves.” Mark winked.

“So he keeps telling me,” Saskia returned, with a glance at Alastair.

Alastair reddened, and his jaw literally dropped open.

“We’re joking!” she said. But she’d put him in a bad spot and he had to defend himself—if not to Mark and Saskia, who were in on the joke, then to others who were listening. “Anyone who claims to understand waves needs to be fired,” he said.

He had written his dissertation on rogue waves—incredibly random events of astonishing power, thought to be responsible for sudden disappearances of ships, therefore of interest to City insurance companies, who’d hired him before the ink was dry on his Ph.D.

“I know, Alastair,” Mark said calmingly. “So you told me ten years ago. Now it’s how I cull the yearly crop of people like Simon.”