The Rebel Angels

"How odd are you? But I suppose working with figures keeps you sane."

"Do I work with figures?"

"What else is working with money?"

"Oh – quite different. Money's something you shove around, like electricity."

"Like electricity?"

"Like large power-grids, and transformers, and that sort of thing. The diffusion of electricity is an extremely important kind of engineering. You decide where to put the energy, and how to get it there, according to the result you expect. Money is a form of power."

"A kind of power most people think they don't have enough of."

"That's quite different. The personal money people are always making such a fuss about depends heavily on where the big power-money is put – what bonds and industries get the heavy support, and when. People who aren't in the money trade talk about making money; they are able to do that because of the decisions people like me make about the power-money. The money people want for their personal use is all part of the big scheme, just as the electricity they turn on at a switch in their houses is a tiny part of what happens through the big grid. Brightens things up for them but it isn't much in the large scheme. What anybody can do with money for mere personal satisfaction is extremely limited. It's the power-money that's fascinating."

"It doesn't fascinate me."

"Not the power?"

"It's not my world."

"The University world is a power world, I suppose."

"Oh no, you don't understand universities. They're not just honeycombs of classrooms, where students are labelled this, that, and the other, so they can get better jobs than their parents. It's the world of research; the selfless pursuit of knowledge and sometimes of truth."

"Selfless?"

"Sometimes."

Of course I was thinking of Hollier, and how much I wanted to follow him.

"I can't judge, of course. I never went to a university."

"You didn't!"

"I'm a heavily disguised illiterate. I deceive lots of people. No B.A. – not to speak of an M.A. – yet I usually escape undetected. You won't turn me in, will you?"

"But – how have you –?"

"Where did I achieve my deceptive polish and ease in high-class conversation? In the University of Hard Knocks."

"Tell me about the U. of H.K."

"Not so very long ago there was a positive prejudice against university-trained people in the banking world, especially if they were expected to go to the top. What could a university give me that would be of any practical use? A degree in economics? You can learn economics better and quicker by reading a few books. A training in business administration? I was born to business administration. The rich gloss of cultivation? My guardians thought I could get that just as well by travelling and meeting a few Rothschilds and their like. So that's what I did."

"Guardians? Why guardians?"

"Oh, I had a Grandfather, and a fine old crusted money type he was. You'd have loathed him; he thought professors were fellows with holes in their pants who didn't notice the bad food they were eating because they were reading Greek at the same time. He's the one Uncle Frank escaped from. But my Father, who was a very good banker indeed, and not quite such a savage as Grandfather, married rather late, and having begot me was killed in a motor accident in which my young, beautiful Mother was killed too. So I had Grandfather, and guardians who were members of his banking entourage, and was to all intents and purposes an orphan. What's more, that despair of psychiatrists, a very rich orphan. I had no parents to humble me in the great Canadian upper-bourgeois tradition, to warn me against being myself, to urge me to be like them. So far as a civilized upbringing permits, I was free. And being free I found that I had no special urge towards rebellion, but rather, a pull towards orthodoxy. Now perhaps that's odd, if you are looking for oddity. I had a wonderfully happy childhood, suckled at the twin breasts of Trust and Equity. Then I travelled, and it was while travelling that I developed my great idea."

"What was it?"

"Should I tell you? Why should I tell you?"

"The best of reasons: I'm dying to know. I mean, there has to be more to you than banking."

"Maria, that's patronizing and silly. You know damn-all about banking, and you scorn it because it seems to have nothing to do with university life. How do you think a university keeps its doors open? Money, that's how. The unionized professors and the unionized support staff and the meccano the scientists and doctors demand, all cost megatons of money, and how does the Alma Mater get it? Partly from her alumni, I admit; a university must truly be a Bounteous Mother if she can charm so much dough out of the pockets of her children who have long left her. But who manages the money? Who turns it into power? People like me, and don't you forget it."