‘You may go up now.’
Vivian Blanchard’s office was on the fifth floor, just high enough that you could see the landmark towers of the city skyline through the back window. Ellie barely noticed them. Blanchard filled the room with his presence, welcoming her in, apologising for the delay, offering her coffee, overwhelming her with his energy. When he shook her hand, he tugged it towards him ever so slightly and leaned forward, almost as if he meant to kiss it.
‘Enchanted.’
He ushered her into a deep, leather-upholstered sofa. From a box on his desk he took a fat cigar and a silver knife. He sliced off the end of the cigar with brutal economy, then pulled out a gold lighter.
‘You don’t mind?’
Ellie shook her head, still struggling to take him in. He wasn’t like anyone she’d ever met. Everything about him was larger, grander than real life. His tall frame and broad shoulders, and the grey suit that fitted him like armour; the swept-back mane of silver hair, his craggy face and aquiline nose and eyes that glittered like pins. His cufflinks were Cartier, his tie Hermès, and his shoes (though Ellie couldn’t know it) were hand-stitched in Paris by a man who only made a hundred pairs a year. When he spoke, there was a hint of a foreign accent behind the words.
‘Thank you for coming, Ellie. I can call you Ellie?’ He didn’t wait for permission. ‘I apologise if our approach seemed unnecessarily … mysterious.’
‘It’s not every day you get invited to interview for a job you never applied for.’
‘And with a company you have never heard of, no?’ Blanchard blew a cloud of smoke towards an oil painting hanging over the fireplace, an imitation Pre-Raphaelite knight.
There was no point denying it. Nobody she’d spoken to seemed to have heard of the Monsalvat Bank. They had a website but it was a joke, a single page with the crest and a phone number. The university careers service had nothing in its files. The sum knowledge of the World Wide Web had amounted to a few references in the Financial Times, always in passing; a couple of mentions in The Economist. Almost as if the bank didn’t want to be found.
‘Not much,’ Ellie admitted.
‘Entirely understandable.’ Blanchard bared his teeth in a reassuring smile. ‘Discretion is one of our cardinal virtues. We go to considerable lengths to protect our privacy.’
‘I do know that it was established in the sixteenth century by a merchant who came over from France,’ Ellie added. ‘Saint-Lazare de Morgon. That must make it the oldest bank in England, one of the two or three oldest in Europe. In the Reformation it grew rich handling the proceeds of the dissolution of the monasteries. By the eighteenth century it had established itself as a prime financier to any country in Europe that wanted to start a war.’
Blanchard inclined his head, admitting the charge.
‘In the twentieth century it survived wars and depressions as a small but influential merchant bank catering to rich individuals and their companies. In the twenty-first, it’s about the last of the old firms that hasn’t been taken over by one of the big international conglomerates. Yet.’
Blanchard’s cigar had grown a long finger of ash as he listened to her in silence. He tapped it into the crystal ashtray and took another mouthful of smoke. He looked pleased.
‘I don’t believe that most of that information has ever been placed in the public domain.’
Ellie found herself blushing under his gaze. ‘I was curious when I got your letter.’
Curious why a bank no one’s ever heard of wants to hire a girl no one’s ever heard of, with no experience and no interest in working in the City. She’d spent two days digging through bundles of yellowed documents, crumbling ledgers and arcane forms, trying to work out if the Monsalvat Bank even existed.
‘But actually, there is no great mystery how we found you. You remember your undergraduate dissertation? Your prize-winning dissertation?’
‘The Spenser Prize.’ She’d never heard of it until her supervisor put the entry form in her pigeonhole one day — the only time he’d shown the least interest in her. She’d sent off her essay and forgotten about it. Three months later, back came a letter of congratulations and a cheque for five hundred pounds.
‘We administer the prize on behalf of one of our clients. Occasionally, with his permission, we use it to select individuals who may be of interest to us.’
His gaze landed on her like a physical blow. Ellie squirmed and looked away, back to the painting over the mantelpiece. A woman in a gauzy shift, so sheer it hid almost nothing, was tied to a tree in the background. The knight had his sword half-drawn, though whether to cut the damsel free, or to challenge some enemy approaching off the edge of the canvas wasn’t clear. Ellie began to wonder if the painting really was an imitation.
Blanchard leaned back in his chair. ‘Let me tell you how we are today. We’re an unusual firm. Exceptional, I would say. Some call us old-fashioned, and in certain ways we are. But we also know that if we wish to maintain our independence we must keep ahead of our competitors. The most modern practices, the most up-to-date thinking. New furniture in an old building.’
He was obviously speaking metaphorically. The dark, heavy wood of his claw-footed desk had to be three hundred years old at least. It might even have come from one of the dissolved monasteries the Monsalvat Bank had done so well out of.
‘Our clients mostly represent old money — some of it very old indeed. They understand that money needn’t be vulgar. They require bankers who guard their wealth with a certain …’
‘Discretion?’ Ellie suggested.
‘Aesthetic.’
Elllie nodded, though she didn’t really understand.
‘The nouveaux riches — the Arabs, the Orientals, the Americans — we leave them to others. The Jews have their own people.’
He saw the look that Ellie, despite her best efforts, couldn’t keep off her face.
‘I know this is not politically correct to say, but it is factually correct. Money allows nothing else, only facts.’
Blanchard rolled his cigar around the ashtray again.
‘I told you we are an exceptional company. But we do not have great assets or vast sums of money invested on our own account. Our wealth is in the minds and hearts of our people. Exceptional people. People like you.’
Ellie sat stiffly on the huge sofa, knees pressed together.
‘You think I am flattering you? I can place advertisements in the right universities and next week I will have five hundred impeccable applications. All the same: the same schools, the same degrees, the same thinking. They will all have worked hard — but only within a system that is designed to make them succeed. Whereas you, Ellie — you have succeeded outside this system. And that is exceptional. These others, they think life is a game played between white lines, with rules and scores and referees who blow the whistle if someone kicks them between the legs. You and I, Ellie, we know better.’
Blanchard opened a file on his desk and took out two sheets of paper that looked very much like her CV. How had they got hold of that?
‘Tell me about yourself.’
‘Why don’t you tell me?’
She surprised herself with the boldness of her answer. Perhaps she really didn’t want the job. But Blanchard didn’t look offended. Somehow, she’d known he’d approve.
‘Eleanor Caris Stanton. Born the twenty-second of February 1987, Newport, South Wales. Your mother worked in various industrial jobs; your father …’ He shrugged. He didn’t seem to be reading off any piece of paper she could see. ‘You attended an unregarded school and achieved remarkable results. You were offered a scholarship to Oxford university which you turned down in favour of a local former polytechnic of no great distinction. Were you intimidated by Oxford? The privilege and elitism? Did you fear you would be found wanting?’