Mac's head swivelled over the back of the sofa like something out of The Exorcist. Ben was standing next to Elisabeth by the cooker. His eyes locked with Mac's in mid-air. Neither said anything at first.

'And… you would actually make this stuff?' Ben checked in the end.

'A-ha.'

'You can bake?' Mac double-checked.

'It's not rocket science,' she shrugged. But then she could do the rocket science too, or at least the finance with lots of numbers, so perhaps they were right to check. She'd only offered a choice of lasagna, quiche or crepes.

'Elisabeth "the Baking Banker" Bennet,' Ben mused, his face beginning to relax into a grin. Pleased though she was to see a smile on him at long last, she also understood why he was so economical with them. He looked a little mad right now. When he saw that she'd noticed he added to the crazy effect by rolling his eyes and raising his eyebrows. Ben was being funny, for her sake:

'That's right', she smiled back, 'you got yourselves a big fat baking banker of a flatmate. So what's it gonna be?'

'Crêpes!' they shouted together, Ben adding a double air-punch worthy of a Champions' League Final.

She coaxed them with ham and cheddar pancakes first, then surprised them with pancakes stuffed with goats cheese, thyme and a little honey. Ben then experimented with Marmite pancakes -unsuccessfully- before they all gorged on Nutella pancakes.

'Man, that was goooood!' Mac groaned, leaning back against the sofa with his hands on his stomach, and let out a sigh of ecstasy. Ben had been grinning to himself for a while, his back against the radiator. Elisabeth sat cross-legged on the carpet, facing them and three empty plates, wondering how it was that with all her supposed skill for complex process engineering she'd failed to notice right up until she'd served dinner that this flat housed neither chairs nor a dining table.

'What do you guys normally eat then?' she asked, re-crossing her legs.

'Nothing in plastic trays, we have to have aluminium 'cos there's no microwave,' Ben explained. 'But he makes a mean bacon sarnie,' he added, pointing at Mac.

'Well, I'm glad you enjoyed that,' she said, and felt herself relax. How nice it was to be able to pig out in your own living room! She hadn't done that in ages, not since Mike had decided the inflationary growth in his waistline was due not to his lack of exercise or excessive beer intake, but to her cooking. How nice not to be worrying about Mike… or hang on, did that thought count as worrying about Mike? She picked up the plates and walked to the sink, but she'd hardly found the brush and switched the tap on when Mac came to stand behind her.

'Leave it, he likes washing up,' Ben explained.

'Fine by me!' she said, walking away and trying her best to look like she was smiling because she was pleased not to have to wash up, which indeed she was, and not because Mac looked so silly with his plaid lumberjack shirt overlaid with a girl-size floral yellow apron. Squelch, went the matching yellow marigolds, as they somehow stretched over his big hands. She switched the kettle on and took three mugs out.

'Thanks for dinner, Elisabeth,' Mac said, nodding back at her.

'No problem. It was fun! And thanks to both of you for lifting all my boxes.'

She really hadn't expected them to. She heard Mac clear his throat while she returned to the sofa.

'So… you're OK about Tom then?' he said, keeping his eyes on the sink.

'Oh you're not still worried about that, are you? It's fine, really. You guys had nothing to do with it anyway, don't worry.'

'You sure?'

'Of course! Had this woman literally just dumped him then?'

Ben nodded.

'And was she the reason he'd moved to Oxford in the first place?'

Ben nodded again.

'Well that would suck, yes. I mean how long had they been together?'

'Which time?' Mac sniggered from the sink, and Ben shot him a resentful glance:

'Ignore him: Tom and Sara can't function without each other. That's that,' he barked, as if his own honour was in question, rather than Tom's.

Ah, now Elisabeth understood why Ben perhaps didn't like her much. By taking up Tom's room she had stepped in between two best friends. Always a bad idea. Ben's loyalty to Tom may be to her detriment, Elisabeth thought, but in the end it was to Ben's credit.

'Tom certainly seems a bit dysfunctional without her' she concluded, 'but then if he'd left this flat and moved jobs for her...'

'Oh, don't worry about that. Tom's another trustafarian, these two don't need day-jobs,' Ben said with another of his cheeky/mad grins, and a nod towards Mac.

'That's right, leave that to the riff-raff,' Mac said without so much as beginning to blush. Bless pancake magic: if he could joke about his trust fund perhaps he too was going to start to relax around her a bit.

'Hmmm... but then if that's the case, isn't it a bit rich for Tom to hate bankers?' she mused.

'Is that what it was all about?' Mac frowned as he stripped off his rubber gloves with another, wetter squelch.

'I'm not sure it was, really. I think I just rub him the wrong way, you know, that's all. Happens with quite a lot of people, actually.'

William Kingsley-Fitz-effing-Darcy sprang to mind again – an unpleasant thought, quickly dismissed.

Aptly enough at the very same moment five time zones away, Rajeev Nair, who considered Sunday afternoons to be an integral part of the working week, was busy drafting a masterpiece of corporate euphemism. It regretted in the most verbose and vehement terms Wavy's decision "to retire to spend more time with his family after 16 hugely successful years at the helm of our London Equity Derivative Trading Desk". Raj was delighted to announce that William Kingsley-Darcy had "accepted my offer to lead the London Equity Derivative Trading Desk going forward". Will would "bring many years of senior level experience both on the buy side at Beaumont Capital, where he conducted global merger arbitrage strategies, and on the sell side at Goldman Sachs". Furthermore, Will was committed "to fully progressing the desk's electronic trading agenda in line with the new trading environment in New York".

Raj had not deemed it necessary to forewarn the said "London Equity Derivative Trading Desk" of their change of management, and was instead blanketing about two thirds of the bank with his announcement. Reading this on Monday morning, in between wincing at the wanton splitting of infinitives Elisabeth congratulated herself on having broken Raj's injunction to secrecy. She had sneaked Will's CV to Neil before she'd left on Friday night. Neil's poker face had shown little reaction then, and showed even less on Monday as he too read the email, but she knew he appreciated having had the weekend to get used to the idea.

Will was joining in a week's time.

Elisabeth knew Andy had read the announcement too when she heard him bark out a self-contradictory curse rhyming with banker, and simultaneously accusing Raj of both fornication and onanism. Then he went back to swearing at his brokers while Master Yoda read the email too. He tugged at one of his long earlobes, cleared his throat and then went out for a fag, though he'd been back from his last one for all of about two minutes. As for Newbie, he read the email several times but could not make sense of it: surely even all the way out in New York Raj must know that Wavy hadn't retired, right?

There was a second, less formal email from Raj in Elisabeth's Inbox. This one was addressed to her only, and as usual with emails from her bosses she couldn't help making sarcastic asides to herself as she read it.

From: Rajeev Nair

To: Elisabeth Bennet

Sent: Sun, 18 September, 15:03

Re: Great news! (Go on, make my day)

Great news about Will (If you say so) and thanks for taking the time to talk to him (As if I had a choice). He really enjoyed your chat (Yeah, right) and he's greatly looking forward to working with you (He is a liar, and that's the least of his faults). With both of your expertises on the desk now (Can you even plural expertise? I must check) we can start looking forward to beginning the tradePad rollout in London soon (All right, that's actually exciting).

With the trading off-site coming up in two weeks you've got just enough time to make Will familiar with your tremendous work so far (Thanks for buttering me up, Raj, but I wasn't born yesterday) and involve him in your presentation (Seriously? Do I have to?). I'm sure he'd love to share your slot in some way (WHAT!?), but I'll leave the details up to you two.

(WHAT?!)

Regards,

(WHAT?!)

Raj

(Again, WHAT?!)

"Share her slot" with the bastard? OK, first of all, perhaps her mind had got dirtier since joining the desk, but to her that definitely sounded rude. For a trader and a native English speaker, Raj had quite a line of his own in awkward double-entendres. She'd have the desk in stitches if they ever got a hold of that line.

More importantly, however, Raj was expecting her to start doing joint presentations with Fitzwilliam McJerk? Seriously? Had Raj missed the memo about not sharing biros with Goldman people, let along presentation slots? Oh but wait, Raj had actually worked at Goldman too, and he was alright, well by and large he was competent, so…

'Hey, Elisabeth,' Neil called across the empty desk that separated them, 'what's your call on the open?'

'I'm guessing this is for the beer game?'

He nodded.

The beer game consisted of "calling" –i.e. guessing- the opening and closing levels of the FTSE100 index. Neil played it daily with three or four of his young broker friends, and they all met twice a month to settle the bets: down the pub, at a pint a point. Given current levels of market volatility, this meant that hundreds of pints had to be drunk on each occasion.

The index moved dozens of points a minute: Elisabeth could watch it "real time" here on her very own Reuters screen. There was no way any of these guys, or indeed anyone on earth, could forecast it with any reliable degree of accuracy, and that was all that she knew about today's open.

But she had learnt this important lesson: the difference between a trader and anyone on earth, is that a trader is more than willing to bet a pint a point on it, of their own money.

'So? What are you calling it,' Neil asked again, 'what am I telling Tom?'

Tom? Tom doesn't care for the beer game, she thought at first. Then she realised that Neil didn't mean the crazy lovesick Tom out in Oxford, but more likely some far less fortunate young man who, not having been born into wealth, had resorted to procuring it by brokering financial transactions somewhere in Canary Wharf.

'Hey, I'm not telling Tom anything.'

'You haven't got the balls.'

'Too right I don't - in more ways than one.'

'Hey, Tom!' Neil said into his phone, 'Our French geek's still refusing to play, but how's about 5960?'

How about it, yes, why not? Who cared that markets were already at an all-time high? Who cared that, much though she loved the Internet, it simply couldn't account for everything being worth a third more than a year ago? Who cared that this "dot com" bubble, as they called it, could only go the way of all bubbles: pop! Elisabeth would have loved to claim that she was above it all, and yet even she couldn't help hoping that markets would hold up until bonus time.

'Why hel-lo, trader!' Charlotte exclaimed at lunchtime the following Thursday, as she and Elisabeth collapsed into each other's arms for the first time in six months. Because Charlotte earnt a livelihood making sure other people had the perfect lunch or evening experience, it could be hard to pin her down at sociable hours. So to get to spend every other Thursday having lunch with one on one with her was a privilege indeed, and one Elisabeth had sorely missed in the US.

'Hello! My God it's so good to see you!'

'And you! Love the hair!'

'Oh, that's right, you've not seen it,' Elisabeth said, pinching at a strand. It stopped less than an inch below her ear, then pinged back up when she let it go. A good twelve inches shorter than before New York, and literally a weight off her neck.

'I love the messy bob, very on trend,' Charlotte said.

'You know me, messy everything,' Elisabeth said, who only cared for trends of the "time-series statistical analysis" kind. Charlotte, on the other hand, had once tried to explain to her the difference between a trend and a fashion.

Elisabeth had never imagined, when they'd met on her first day at college, that a girl as cool and glamorous as Charlotte Lucas would want anything to do with her. Later she'd put it down to the iron grip of Francophilia on the English middle classes. Later still, she'd realised that really it was down to Charlotte being Charlotte, i.e. not just the life and soul of the party, but its beating heart too.

Today Charlotte was, as ever, turned out immaculately, if a little ... fashion-forward, was what she called it. Charlotte's hair too had changed again since last winter, probably to match Rachel-from-Friend's. It looked very nice but, to Elisabeth's eye, too much like hard work.

'So how was your Saturday night? We missed you, you know!'

'Hmm, how to put it? Interesting? Good in parts? No one died...'

'Hey, you could have stayed in London and played mini ping pong with us.'

'You mean with Mike, in between being trashed at Twister? Actually, that's always a laugh.'

'For me too, Zab, for me too.'

They smiled, then took a moment to order their food and find a table.

'So how's being a trader then?' Charlotte asked.

'I'm not a trader, please.'

'Really? I thought traders were cool.'

'That too. And coarse, and thick and rude and a pain in the … actually that's not true of all of them, Neil's nice.'

'Swedish painter nice, or just nice?'

'Just nice. I mean in the other sense he's nice enough, but the thing is from here up he looks like he should be six foot tall,' Elisabeth said, holding one hand flat a few inches above the table, 'then he stands up and he's about five three.'

'Ah, you do like them tall,' Charlotte nodded.

'Makes his head look big, that's all. But he's a good guy. Smart.'

'Did you say the new head trader was tall?'

'Oh yes! Very tall, very handsome and very very loathsome.'

'I forgot, you do like them not a-holes, damn you!'

'Impossible standards, I have.'

'Do you know who's tall, and not an a-hole? Mike.'

Elisabeth looked at Charlotte, and put her sandwich down with a sigh.

'And you have a nice flat together,' Charlotte added.

'That's the weird thing,' Elisabeth said. 'I'm not too sure why I took this flatshare, other than I needed to give Jane and my brother some space, and their twins were starting to do my head in. Oh and then Mike freaked me out with that text but… it's kind of… I don't know how to put it: it's not at all nice in the conventional sense of the word there, but somehow it's comfy.'

By "somehow", she reflected, maybe she meant "by means of eating pancakes on the carpet of a Sunday night".

'Well, good!' Charlotte said encouragingly, 'When am I giving you a flatwarming party?'

'Flatwarming? Charlie, the boys have lived there for years, I can't just rock up and re-warm their flat.'

'OK…'

Elisabeth tried to picture Charlotte standing on the manky carpet in her Diane von Furster-something dress and Jimmy Choos, got cognitive dissonance, and stopped.

'Sorry, Charlie. Maybe you'll meet them at some point, if I stay.'

She sighed again, and stared at her sandwich.

'…which I suppose I'll have to, while I'm still paying half the mortgage on Canonbury.'

'That's very good of you, Zab.'

'Bah, I don't mind keeping a roof over Mike, it's his sister I always resented subsidising.'

'Caroline? Don't worry, she's only staying another couple of weeks.'

'What?!'

Heads turned around the crammed sandwich bar. Elisabeth made a conscious effort to dial back down to what Jane and her brother would have called her "indoor voice". The twins, Daniel especially, often had to be reminded about the difference between indoor and outdoor voices. And now the tutting around the café reminded Elisabeth too. Charlotte, bless her, outstared a few of the brasher ones:

'So hang on,' Elisabeth asked, 'Caroline's staying at the flat again? Since when?'

'She came… I don't know, late July? Whenever she was back from…'

'Don't tell me. Please do not tell me, I do not want to know.'

'But…'

But? But, oh, that's right: but you can't hate Caroline. Hating Caroline is like hating a puppy, and everyone knows you can't hate a puppy.

Imagine hating the world's cutest puppy: well, Caroline Ronson wasn't just puppy cute, she was thoroughbred stunning, but in a pint-sized, big-blue-eyed package. Five foot one but all legs, a mane of hair a touch blonder than her "little" brother's, curly and sun bleached in all the right places, clear skin and that Ronson tans-nut-brown-at-the-merest-hint-of-sunshine complexion. So no, you couldn't hate her on looks.

Now imagine hating a cute puppy that, despite its young age, holds the doggy equivalent of the Victoria cross. There is one, by the way, it's called the Dickin medal. Well Caroline Ronson was the youngest ever winner of the British Photography Award, for her pictures of the Rwandan genocide, which she'd dropped out of Photography College to go and snap. How could you hate that? Plus, imagine the kind of stories the puppy comes home with when it's spent the last three months living out of the back of a Land Rover in the DRC with a bunch of male reporters and an on/off sound engineer boyfriend. Caroline was a born raconteuse, meaning she never let the truth get in the way of a good story, but if she ever felt conversation was slipping away from her she could always bring it back with something like: so I was speaking to this child soldier whose legs had just been blasted off… So no, you couldn't hate that either. Charlotte was right, it just was not possible.

And finally, picture that same puppy at home, behind closed doors. It's now the worst trained puppy that's ever pooped the earth. Oh, the mess it leaves in its wake! Well, you can't expect a puppy to clean or wash up or even pick up its own dirty underwear from your floor, right? To even mention it would be "bourgeois", and so what if the puppy's been home all day while you were at work? More for you to pick up when you get back, that's all.

Whilst declaring itself delighted to live out of the back of a Land Rover in the jungle for three months, somehow the puppy is not happy with your couch, or with your food. It's not enough to have to stock some poncy and eye wateringly expensive herbal tea for the puppy, they'll still have a go at your coffee for not being ethical enough. Your bed linen is shamefully non-organic certified, it informs you whilst smoking your cigarettes. Also, the puppy must sit between you and your boyfriend at all times, and if you simultaneously disappear from its view it yelps.

Literally.

When your boyfriend leaves you alone with the puppy, it'll sink its delightful little puppy teeth into your ankle and it won't let go until your boyfriend comes back into the room. At which point it will go and cuddle up to him and pull its cutest puppy dog face again. And it will never, but ever pay rent, to you or anyone. At best, if you're very lucky, the puppy will eff back off to Africa for a while, or bunk off to its on-again/off-again sound engineer boyfriend's. Or it will go and "try to forget about the wars, you know" on a beach in Goa for a month - that, it has money for. And then like some nightmare intercontinental fluffy Jokari ball it will fly back at you out of nowhere, hit you right in the face, and resume making your life hell.

Because, as this puppy well knows, you can't hate a puppy.

'Enough about puppies,' Elisabeth said. Charlotte frowned, who was cool, but not as yet a fully trained mind reader. 'I mean enough about Caroline,' Elisabeth said, 'How's your wedding plans coming along? Have you got Colin the perfect morning suit yet? You found those cummerbunds to match the bridesmaids' dresses?'

Good call: Charlotte switched to talking venues, menus, posies and swing bands, and the mood lifted for the rest of their lunch.

Copyright Mel Liffragh 2021, all rights reserved