On The Market Chapter 11 - Blown Away, a pride and prejudice fanfic

Duty done, Elisabeth walked home and collapsed onto the sofa, but she hadn't been there five minutes when she heard Tom's voice behind her:

'Elisabeth, you have quite the most perfect, quite the most delicious toes.'

She'd never looked at her feet in that way, else she wouldn't have put them up on the armrest while she caught up on Ben's copy of News of the Screws. She pulled the paper closer to her face and waited for a blush to pass.

'Can I have some last pancakes before I go?' he asked, 'Pretty please: I haven't eaten all day waiting for you to come back.'

She put the paper down and here he was, one last time, sat at her feet, grinning away while begging for food.

'Is that a yes?'

She shrugged.

'No wait, can you teach me instead? That's even better: you teach me, so when you come and visit me at my new place I can make you pancakes.'

'Sure, yes, that sounds nice.'

He held a hand out for her, dragged her out of the depths of the sofa and to the kitchen.

'Where do we start?' he asked.

'You get the bowl, I'll get the eggs and the milk.'

'What else do we need?'

'Flour, a little oil, or butter if you can be bothered to melt it. That's it really.'

He put a bowl in front of her and she started breaking an egg.

'No no no, wait! Let me do it. Oh this is so much fun!' he said, making a complete hash of breaking the second egg.

As ever with Tom, he was leaving room for interpretation. Was breaking eggs, clearly for the first time, fun? Probably, yes. Or was he referring to the fact that, rather than come and stand next to her as any sensible cook's apprentice would have done, he'd chosen to place himself behind her. His arms therefore had to reach around her waist to get to the bowl and his stubbly chin was poking over her right shoulder, having brushed her cheek on its way there.

She started fishing bits of shell out of the bowl while he broke one more egg.

'Is Ben having any?' she asked.

'No, who cares about Ben, these are only for us.'

'Well in that case you can stop now. Give it a whisk.'

'Yes ma'am.'

She took her gloopy fingers out of the bowl as he leant in to start stirring, thereby closing the gap between her back and his chest. It felt unexpectedly warm in just a t-shirt, unexpectedly calm too, as her silly heart raced away and her face and ears felt unseasonably hot.

'That good enough?' he asked.

'Excellent. Perfect. Very good,' she said, not talking about his egg whisking at all.

'What next?'

Ah, what next indeed. Turn around, kiss him, have it over with?

'Put a little flour in, slowly.'

He added about half a spoonful.

'No sorry, Tom, you do need a little more than that.'

He added another pitiful amount then stirred for a bit in the most elegant and lackadaisical fashion, his chin now resting on her shoulder.

'Look it's gone all lumpy, Elisabeth. Shall we put some milk in?'

'No no, milk's gonna make it worse. Add flour.'

'Shouldn't we be sifting it or something?'

'Sifts are for wimps. Just stir harder.'

'Why, isn't this stirring?'

'Tom, just pour some flour in, will you?' she gasped, her chest ready to implode.

He tipped the flour bag, and a white cloud formed above the bowl just as she was looking down. She shut her eyes and heard him burst out into his high-pitched laughter next to her ear. He spun her around by the shoulders and started ruffling the flour out of her hair. Her hands, still gloopy with raw egg white, were even more than usually useless. She tried to hold them out of the way while shaking her head.

'Tom, leave my hair alone, get this out of my eyes!'

At first his laugh only rose up again, but then he took hold of the sides of her head. Anyone else might have grabbed the nearest kitchen towel, but not so Thomas Reilly: he chose to blow the flour off her face instead. With small playful puffs at first, but after two or three of these even with her eyes closed she could feel his mouth drawing closer to her eyelids. His breaths became longer too, and softer on her skin: he must be millimetres away. Almost touching. His lips brushed the tip of her nose on the way down and he started blowing at her mouth. She could of course have reopened her eyes now, but somehow the longer she thought about it the less she felt like it.

''afternoon!' said Ben, handing her a cold, damp kitchen cloth. She hid her face behind it.

A couple of hours later Tom left for good, making sure to plant his parting kiss less than half an inch away from her mouth, and linger there awhile.

xxx

Time slowed down after he moved out. Life just wasn't as much fun.

Elisabeth didn't like to admit it to herself, but she missed him. Ordinarily she would have confided in Charlotte, but it was probably still too early to level up with her.

Being no good at lying, even by omission, Elisabeth therefore decided to cancel lunch with Charlotte the following Thursday, and trawl Leadenhall Market instead: Jane's birthday was coming up. She settled in the end for one of those chunky silver charm bracelets from Links, un-noteworthy save for its breathtaking price tag.

'Been shopping?' Will asked when she got back, and dumped the beige and brown, expertly ribbonned bag down under her desk.

'Aha,' she said, wondering idly at his unprecedented level of interest in her lunchtime activities.

'Didn't work.'

'What?' she said, short for: What makes you think you and I should be engaging in light banter all of a sudden?

'The retail therapy: it didn't work. You need to get back out there and spend more.'

Right: humour now? What was up with the lad today? Had he taken to drinking at lunchtime?

'Spend more and cheer up,' he clarified.

'I see,' she said through pursed lips. Fair enough, she knew she hadn't been at her most chirpy since Tom have moved out but Will, of all people, was not in her opinion in a position to cast the first stone.

'Can I have your credit card then?' she suggested once she'd sat down.

'You can't, no. But you might fancy spending some of the … Wandsworth Council Endowment Fund?' he said, reading the last part from his screen.

'The what?'

'They're after some Xstrata.'

'Good for them.'

'D'you want to buy it for them?'

'No thanks.'

'Look, Neil saved you the order on Pimms.'

'Thanks, but no, thanks. I'm not allowed, I'm not … I haven't got regulatory approval!' she remembered triumphantly.

'Too right you don't. But you don't really think we're going to let you do this unsupervised, do you?'

'Great, now you're selling it to me.'

'Thanks!' Will and Neil said together, and she gave the latter an apologetic wince. 'But seriously, you two, give me one good reason to do this – you'd be much quicker and better off doing it yourself.'

She wasn't half proud of the last bit: the shameless ego-massage. It was usually failsafe with males in general and traders in particular, but not this time:

'It's the boss's idea but I think he has a point,' Neil said, 'You can't always be trying to analyse what we're doing and never actually try doing it.'

'Hey, it's never stopped me before. Research is the true path of contemplation, I'll have you know. Are you saying that all the accountants that audit … I don't know, pig farms, that they should all try pig farming?'

'World might be a better place,' Will mused. She turned and, for the second time today, repressed a smile at him:

'True,' she said, 'but that's not the point.'

'No: the point is you could do your job a lot better if you tried doing ours just the once.'

She knew it was silly, but he'd just pushed her largest and reddest button.

'OK just the once, bring it on,' she heard herself say.

'Great! Where do you start?' Neil asked.

'Oh that's easy: I check the Indications of Interest,' she said. She'd heard them bicker for access to Bloomberg's "IoI" screen often enough to know what it was for: seeing which stocks which brokers were looking to trade.

'Wrong,' Will said, 'You start by checking what the hell you're supposed to do.'

'Ah, good point. How much do we want: you did say we were buying, right?'

Will and Neil were both grinning from ear to ear, and fair enough. She decided the best route was to carry on playing the innocent for their amusement -admittedly not a huge stretch of her acting abilities right now, but she briefly contemplated making it more fun for them by switching on the comedy French accent.

'You're buying almost fifty grand's worth,' Neil said, pointing at the left-most one of his three screens.

'And Xstrata trades in pounds, right, not in Swiss Francs or Bahts anything?' she asked, turning to raise a sarcastic eyebrow at Will.

'Pence, actually,' he said with perhaps just a tinge of amusement in his grey eye.

'So how many shares is that?' she asked, craning towards Neil's screen again.

'7,128.'

Elisabeth looked at numbers the way most people look at other people: do I know you? How do I know you? Where do you come from? Where do you fit in? How can I categorise you so I remember you next time? Hence while she jotted 7,128 down in her notepad next to "Buy 50k" she was musing out loud:

'That's a pleasing number: divides by 4, 11, by 9 of course, and I reckon even by….'

'Focus,' said Will.

'Sure. So now can I look at those IoIs?'

Neil wheeled himself to the Bloomberg terminal and pulled a screen of 12 rows, all of brokers' names with a declared interest in trading Xstrata. Three said "closed", which narrowed it down to a mere nine, eight taking out Rheinland, who were still confined to the doghouse for the foreseeable future. She sighed and frowned and then got a brainwave. If you were trading something again and again, it was arguably better to go back to the same broker so that, assuming the "relationship" with you was worth their while, they'd keep it quiet and just the one house would get to find out what you were up to:

'Neil, have we been buying this of late? Who from?'

'Good thought!' he said, and with a smile of encouragement he pulled a Pimms screen he'd obviously had ready all along. But though she frowned and peered at it and pulled at her hair, Neil's screen refused to help: it just took a lot of squinting sorting and scrolling to establish that they hadn't traded Xstrata for the four days that stupid clunky system would let her look at. She sat back and frowned to herself for a moment longer under Will's stern gaze, and Neil's more patient one.

'You know, give me half an hour and I could knock together a Sybase query into Pimms' database to see who you've been to last, and then display it into the spreadsheet,' she said.

Neither Will nor Neil's well-trained poker faces betrayed any reaction.

'Or you guys could just tell me, I mean it could be any one of those,' she said with a very Gallic flap of the hand at the IoI screen.

Still, they didn't tell her. Instead Will said an indifferent:

'Your call,' which was no help at all.

Neil, thankfully, showed a little more compassion and eventually said:

'I guess she's getting the idea, right?' He checked with the boss, who gave a barely perceptible shrug of approval. 'Of late it's between LTG and Smith-McGregor.'

'Thanks! And you know, I could definitely write you guys that piece of code if you like.'

'Focus,' Will said again, pointing at her dealerboard.

'I don't know anyone at Smithies,' she said, feeling her pulse quicken at the mere thought of having to call some total stranger, let alone negotiate a 50 grand purchase, 'Do you mind if I try LTG first?'

'Oh so now you care who the people are at the end of these lines?' Will asked.

'I do, yes. I'm rubbish on first acquaintance.'

'Couldn't agree more: go on then.'

Not that she really did know anyone at LTG, she only knew that Neil played the beer game with them. But in her dire straits even that was better than nothing.

'Tom kind of knows you already,' Neil said kindly.

She frowned, then remembered Neil's Tom, the presumably dull, non-charming, non-flirty one he played the beer game with.

'Should I just introduce myself as the French geek then?'

'Focus,' Will said.

'Go on!' Neil nodded.

Now that she'd moved desks there was a proper dealer board in front of her, a fabulous instrument of power, with its five rows of neatly labelled buttons, and access to one hundred secure, recorded phone lines.

Unfortunately at the end of those lines were real human beings, hence the dealerboard had never been Elisabeth's idea of a dream machine. It was probably the one piece of technology around this desk that she'd never remotely fantasised about. Bloomberg? Bloody good data, shame about the API. Reuters? Sweet API, shame about the data. But calling someone? Having to talk a stranger into doing something for you? No, no thank you.

Big global LTG was on the top row on her board, fourth in from the left, whereas small London shop Smith-McGregor was way down the bottom, second one in.

'I'm not allowed…' she muttered again, with her right index finger trembling above the button and her throat tightening.

'Oh, go on!' Will said, reaching over to hit the LTG button for her, and hand over her headset. She put it on in blind panic as the green led below the LTG button went from green to flashing green. She heard first Neil then Will click into the line from their desks while it rang. Her heart was racing away, but she found time to be grateful at least not to have to do this on speakerphone.

'LTG, Rob speaking, who is this?' she heard, and a solid red light lit up next to the green one under the button.

'It's, uh, Elisabeth Bennet,' she mumbled. 'Can I speak to Tom, Tom… Abbott!' she recalled triumphantly from the "market colour" emails she ignored from him on a daily basis. She searched Neil's face for any sign of approval, but it remained impassive.

'Sure, who did you say you were?' asked Rob.

'It's Elisabeth Bennet.'

'I'm sorry, who? Are you new on the desk?'

'Tell him the French geek,' she sighed, despairing of herself.

'Hang on,' said Rob, unfazed, as Will and Neil's faces briefly relaxed into smiles. Oh good, at least they were enjoying this.

'Tom Abbott speaking!' came another voice, friendly enough for her heartbeat to go back down a fraction.

'Hi, it's Elisabeth.'

'Oh yeah, right, you're the quant, right? What can I do you for? Do you need any data, or are you finally joining the beer game?'

'If only: actually, I'm calling about Xstrata.'

'Ah, on Xstrata you want to talk to Robsie, hang on. Rob, back to you on line 3,' she heard and, to her horror, he clicked back out of the line. She looked at Neil in blind panic, but he just smiled on at her:

'Hello again, Elisabeth Bennet!' came Rob's voice, carrying just the right commercial amount of friendliness.

'Hello again, Rob, sorry, I thought…'

'Xstrata, right?' he asked. Thank goodness these guys were paid to know what to say.

'Yes, we need to... ' Elisabeth started,

'Got any form today?' Will interrupted with a hard pointed look in her direction.

'Oh hi, Will. How are you there, mate?' Rob asked while Elisabeth kicked herself. As the boys were wont to say, rule number one of trading is: keep your knickers on, and don't show anything you shouldn't. Open, on the other hand, by saying whether you want to buy or sell something, and any broker worth their salt will start front-running you before you've even finished your sentence. Elisabeth of all people should have remembered this after the Rheinland incident. You ask about "form".

Form.

Form form form form form she repeated mentally, her cheeks turning a burning shade of crimson.

'Hey, Rob,' Will said meanwhile.

'So you guys have a new joiner? You should have told us, when are we taking her out?' Rob asked.

'Don't hold your breath,' Will said, 'This is a bit of an experiment.'

'Shame,' Rob said pleasantly.

'Indeed,' said Will in just the same tone of indifferent pleasantry. 'So what's the colour in Xstrata then?'

Dark red, thought Elisabeth, raising one hand to her cheek.

'Yeah,' said Rob meanwhile, 'we were sellers this morning, had quite a big client order, index rebalance business, you know, no strong views. We've been doing little clips all day but we're nearly done now, I was gonna wait 'til the close to do the rest, I reckon it might bounce, why, would you like to take the other side?'

Which was broker jargon for: Xstrata? We've got so much of the stuff it's coming out of our ears, but hey, we're cool, we wouldn't want you to think we're desperate to sell them or anything.

'Would you?' Rob asked again when no one answered his question.

'Would you?' Will asked Elisabeth. 'Go on, make a call.'

She didn't have the faintest idea but yeah, why not? Sounded reasonable, if this guy was trying to sell them anyway. Only how did she go about finding out whether Rob had enough for her… what was it again, 50 grands' worth? Oh, this was just too stressful for words. Was now the time to open up to Rob, or not yet? She had no idea, she'd never had the remotest talent for timing, and for goodness's sake, this was why she worked with computers.

She really couldn't think of any clever way to go about this so she just assumed someone would jump in again if she came out with anything too dangerously stupid:

'How much have you got?' she asked.

'How much do you need?'

'About fifty thousand…'

'Wow. OK, fifty thou, yeah. That's a bit more than we had left to do but we'll take the rest on. I'm sure we can work it for you by the close.'

She checked Will's face, but he made extra sure to keep each one of his perfect features still, in that practised way of his. Perhaps he had the tiniest of glints in his steely eye, but by that point she couldn't have said whether it was from finding her laughable, or just plain exasperating.

'OK…' she ventured.

'OK, so market order, right? Or do you have a limit?'

'Do I have a limit?' she asked her screen, then remembered that this was why Raj had equipped her with a Reuters license. So she could check the live, real-time prices of things. "Market order" meant Rob would do his best to find a seller for her buy order, and pass on whatever price he could get. That struck her as a little desperate, even for a quant's first trade.

She crooked her neck while she clicked on XTA.L on the flashing screen of FTSE index constituents which she always kept on her right hand screen - so far mostly for decoration. 676p, down from a high of the day of about 680 and seemingly still on its way down.

'Call me if it gets back above 678,' she said, sounding a lot more confident than she felt.

'Good call,' Neil nodded.

'Usual rate?' Rob asked.

'I'm sorry, Rob, I really have no idea what that is.'

'Agency rate: 9 bips?' he asked, and now he started to sound impatient. She looked at Neil, who smiled a yes.

'Yeah that's right, fine,' she said. Not quite 50 quids' worth of commission: she could see why Rob didn't feel like chatting on to her.

'Pleasure doing business with you,' he lied, and hung up.

She didn't buy that for a second, but who cared, what she needed to buy was Xstrata and in that respect the worst was over: her trade was away being "worked".

'What do I do now?' she asked, and felt all the energy drain away from her as soon the red led went off under LTG's button.

'Keep an eye on the stock, send him the booking allocation file, get on with your day,' Will replied, already clicking away at his own computer.

'Right, OK.'

'By the way that Pimms query, you know, checking which brokers we've been using last.'

'Yes?'

'Can you do it today?'

'Today's getting on a bit, but I can try.'

'Please do,' he said, and turned back to his screens again.

OK, right, so she tried to gather her wits, minimised the Reuters window and the VBA one she'd been working on before lunch, which revealed that Outlook had a new message for her:

From: Tom Reilly

To: Elisabeth R Bennet

Subject: Waving at you over the e-ther

Sent: Thu, 21/10/1999 14:23

Hello there dearest.

Are you looking through the screen, staring at the pixels hard enough to melt them into e-jelly? Then, just then, you may be able to see me wave at you through the e-ther.

Hope you don't mind, Ben passed on your email. Said you are coming to the gig next week. Oh, goodeee: looking forward to seeing you again, so we can shout at each other to music once more.

If that's not too trite for you.

Tom

Her face relaxed and half of her brain started knocking that Sybase query together, while the other half thought of what to reply to Tom. Periodically she also kept checking Xstrata's price: still going down, perfect. Now she thought back on it, buying 50 grands' worth of Xstrata had been unpleasant, but it hadn't been a lot more difficult than buying her last Eurostar ticket to France either. Trading really was just glorified shopping.

From: Elisabeth R Bennet

To: Tom Reilly

Subject: RE: Waving at you over the e-ther

Sent: Thu 21/10/1999 15:13

What? They'll be playing actual music at that gig? No one told me but yes, that's definitely something to look forward to.

Unlike you, evidently, I'm a tad busy at work right now. Dear WW decided I should try trading so I'm buying some Xstrata for the good town of Wandsworth. I guess I'll try anything once, but predictably I've hated every second of the experience. Right now, for instance, I should be keeping an eye on it rather than writing to you.

So yes, I look forward to seeing you next week, never mind the soundtrack.

There, perfectly appropriate: this was turning into quite a good day after all! What was that price again? 670 –brilliant, she was well on her way to becoming a trading goddess. Even Will was drawn to comment on it:

'Looks like blowing 50 grand does put you in a good mood.'

'I thought that was the idea?'

'Of course,' he said, but with what she sensed to be a sarky undertone. Was she that transparent, that Will could somehow read Tom's email on her face?

'Lizzie, LTG for you, pick up,' Andy shouted from the other side of the screens, which wiped the smile right off her face again. This time, at least, she was able to grab her headset quite by herself, and click into the line.

'Lizzie? Rob.'

'Hi, Rob.' she said, sufficiently relaxed to find time to wonder whether this Rob hated being called Rob as much as she hated being called Lizzie.

'Right, so we're doing great here. I've done your first 10,000 shares no problem at all, plenty of sellers out there, the stock's down so you're getting a great price, just wanted to check if you'd sent the allocation file yet because I haven't got anything from you yet.'

She frowned:

'Sorry, you've done how many shares?' she asked, feeling her throat begin to dry out and constrict all over again.

'Ten thousand… four hundred to be precise,' Rob said proudly and, just as outright panic was setting in, she heard Will click into the line.

'But we didn't want ten thousand shares!' she cried, feeling her voice break before she heard it. Now she could see why the guys swore and shouted all the time: a lot more dignified than the pathetic croak she'd just produced.

'No, you said you wanted fifty thou,' Rob said with perfect equanimity.

'Fifty thousand pounds, Rob! Fifty grand's worth! Didn't I tell you seven thousand one hundred and twenty eight shares?'

'No you didn't.'

'You sure I didn't? It's such a… wait, I did just send you the booking details, just look at it, the email definitely says…'

'When did you send it?'

'Just now, as soon as Neil passed it on, I…'

'OK yeah, I see it now. Sorry, Lizzie, but you definitely said fifty thou and we're already dealt on the first ten.'

'Can't you…?'

Couldn't he what? Oh crap, what had she done?

'Rob?' Will said while she literally started pulling at her hair. Hard, from a point half way between her right ear and occiput. Three thousand shares at about 7 quid each, she'd just got a small public body's pension fund 21 grand overdrawn: well done her.

'Hey, Will, so what do we do?'

'For now just pull the rest of the order. It's our bad so we'll get a sell order to you. Settle the two against each other,' he said without any perceptible stress or indeed, for once, irritation.

'Sure thing.'

'It may take us a while to get the sell order out to you, but if you tell me how many you've bought exactly, you can start selling back before they hit the floor,' Will continued.

'Sure thing, so that's gonna be, what, 3,272?'

'You got 10,400 done exactly?'

'Aha, so far, yes.'

Besides the fact that they were both doing sums, or rather subtractions, at the speed of light, you would have thought the two of them were just discussing the weather.

'Can you do us a favour then, and start selling 3,272 shares off your book, 'til we get the order out to you?' Will asked.

'Sure thing, mate. Ring back when the order's ready or if there's any change.'

'Wait, Rob, what price did you get?' she asked.

'Average so far, let's see: 674.3.'

'Cheers, Rob,' said Will, and cut the line.

'I'm so sorry,' she whimpered.

'So are you calling the Portfolio Manager or am I?' Will replied, not remotely fussed.

'I'll do it. It's my bad, I'm so sorry.'

'Save the apologies and get on with it,' he said - again in a perfectly equable tone.

Elisabeth picked up the phone and, with a heavy heart, she dialled the portfolio manager's extension. Insensitive to the urgency of the situation, he first of all made her grovel for over ten minutes, during which Elisabeth begun to contemplate hacking into Pimms and putting the damn sell order in herself. She knew where to find the source code for his input screen into the system, and nowadays she had a developer's ID for it. Hell, if she'd wanted to she could have been the next Nick Leeson. She really ought to point this out at her next bonus review.

The portfolio manager relinquished at last, leaving Elisabeth free to do the maths, and to wait impatiently until the closing auction for the last of her sell order to get filled. She then calculated that altogether her losses for the day came to just under £500. She wrote up all about it in the Risk team's neat little "Transaction Incident Report" template, emailed it to them, and of course copied Raj in.

'Great work today, Lizzie. See you tomorrow,' Will said as he stood up to go. He too had had to stay on after the close in order to sign off on the whole sorry mess.

'I'm really sorry.'

'Not at all, I've enjoyed this,' he said, and left.

Smarmy bastard.

xxx

Elisabeth braced herself for the worst ahead of their conference call with Raj the next day, but true to the "collegial buy-side culture" he glossed over her loss and focused instead on that marvellous new query she'd written. He now wanted to release it in New York too. All of five lines of code, but in Raj's verbiage these five lines became "a great example of thought leadership" and "fantastic teamwork" which, she noticed, seemed to make Will cringe every bit as much as it did her.

Then Raj indirectly promoted her by referring to their weekly conference call as a "management level strategic steering group" and, best of all, he promoted her outright by asking her to hire an analyst to help with the programming on tradePad. He was sending her the last MIT alumni book, full of IT-literate Europeans.

So for her next trick, Elisabeth would get to work not with just another useless PhD in accounting, or finance, or worse, both, but with a proper MIT engineer. Imagine the fun they'd have! She couldn't believe it.

All she had to do was go in with Will for his weekly meeting with Toad, and OK it all with him.

Incredible.

Notes: For the non British reader, News of the Screws was the nickname of the now defunct weekly gossip paper News of the World.