‘Oh, come on!’
‘No, she was right, Carla.’ He looked across at her and this time there was pain in his face. ‘Your mother was usually right about these things. I was always too busy being political and angry to spot the emotional truths. She hit the nail on the head. We didn’t have fun any more. We hadn’t had any real fun for years. That’s why I ended up with Karen in the first place. She was fun, and that was something your mother and I’d stopped trying to do years ago.’
‘Chris and I still have fun,’ Carla said quickly.
Erik Nyquist looked at his daughter and sighed again. ‘Then you hold onto him,’ he said. ‘Because if that’s true, if it’s really true, then what you’ve got is worth any amount of fights.’
Carla shot him a surprised glance, caught by the sudden gust of emotion in his voice.
‘I thought you didn’t like Chris.’
Erik chuckled. ‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘What’s that got to do with it? I’m not sleeping with him.’
She smiled wanly and went back to watching the fire.
‘I don’t know, Dad. It’s just.’
He waited while she assembled her feelings into a coherent shape.
‘Just since he went to work at Shorn.’ She shook her head wearily. ‘It doesn’t make any sense, Dad. He’s making more money than he ever has, the hours aren’t so different to what he used to clock at Hammett McColl. Fuck it, we ought to be happy. We’ve got all the props for it. Why are we falling out more now?’
‘Shorn Associates. And is he still in Emerging Markets?’
She shook her head. ‘Conflict Investment.’
‘Conflict Investment.’ Erik smacked his lips, then got up and went to the bookcase set against the wall opposite the fire. He dragged a finger across the tightly packed spines of the books on a lower shelf, found what he was looking for and tugged the volume out. Flicking through the pages, he came back to the fire and handed it to her.
‘Read that,’ he said. ‘That page.’
She looked at the book, turned it to see the title. ‘The Socialist Legacy. Miguel Benito. Dad, I’m not in the mood. This isn’t about politics.’
‘Everything is about politics, Carla. Politics is everything. Everything in human society anyway. Just read the passage in highlighter.’
She sighed and set down her coffee mug at her feet. Clearing her throat, she picked up the line with one finger and read aloud. ‘ ‘‘Revolutionaries throughout the twentieth century had always been aware’’?’
‘Yes. That one.’
‘ ‘‘Revolutionaries throughout the twentieth century had always been aware that in order to bring about a convulsive political change’’.’
‘Actually, I meant, read it to yourself.’
She ignored him, ploughing on with the edge of singsong emerging in her voice. ‘ ‘‘In order to bring about a convulsive political change, it was essential to intensify the existing social tensions to the point where all would be driven to choose sides in what would thus be established as a simplistic equation of class conflict. Marxists and their ideological inheritors described this as sharpening the contradictions of society. In populist recog—’’ Dad is there a point somewhere in all this bullshit?’
‘Just finish it, will you.’
She pulled a glum face. ‘ ‘‘In populist recognition of this underlying truth, the cry during the latter half of the the last century became if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.’’ Aaaagh, new paragraph. ‘‘What any survivor of late Marxist ideology would be forced to recognise in the politics of the twenty-first century is that the contradictions are now so heavily disguised that it would be the work of decades simply to reveal them, let alone sharpen them into anything resembling a point.’’ A bit like this prose style, huh? Alright, alright, nearly there. ‘‘An overall problem is now no longer perceived, therefore an overall solution no longer sought. Any distasteful elements within the world economic order are now considered either candidates for longer term fine tuning or worse still an irrevocable by-product of economic laws supposedly as set in stone as the laws of quantum physics. So long as this is believed by the vast majority of the populace in the developed world, the contradictions identified by Marxism will remain hidden and each individual member of society will be left to resolve for themselves the vaguely felt tensions at an internal level. Any effort to externalise this unease will be disdained by the prevailing political climate as discredited socialist utopianism or simply, as was seen in chapter three, the politics of envy.’’ ’ She laid down the book. ‘Yeah, so what?’
‘That’s your problem, Carla.’ Erik had not sat down while she was reading. He stood with his back to the fire and looked down at her as if she were one of his students. She felt suddenly fifteen years old again. ‘Unresolved contradictions. Chris may still be the man you married but he’s also a soldier for the new economic order. A corporate samurai, if you want to adopt their own imagery.’
‘I know that, Dad. That’s nothing new. I know what he does, I know how his world works. I help build and repair the vehicles they use to kill each other, in case you’d forgotten. I’m just as involved in it all, Dad. What?’
He was shaking his head. He crouched to her level and took both her hands gently in his own.
‘Carla, this isn’t about you and Chris. It’s barely about you at all. Benito’s talking about internal contradictions. Living with what you are, with what your society is. At Hammett McColl, Chris could do that because there was a thin veneer of respectability over it all. At Shorn, there isn’t.’
‘Oh, bullshit. You’ve read what these people are like. Dad, you used to write about what they were like, back when there was anyone with the guts to publish it. The only difference between Conflict Investment and Emerging Markets is the level of risk. In Emerging Markets, they don’t like conflict or instability. The guys in CI thrive on it. But it’s the same principle.’
‘Hmm.’ Erik smiled and let go of her hands. ‘That sounds to me like Chris talking. And he’s probably even right. But that’s not the point.’
‘You keep saying that, Dad.’
Erik shrugged and seated himself again. ‘That’s because you keep missing it, Carla. You think this is about a rift between you and Chris, and I’m telling you it’s not, it’s about a rift inside Chris. Now you’re saying there’s no difference in what he used to do and what he’s doing now, and aside from a few semantic quibbles that may be true. But Chris hasn’t just changed what he does. He’s changed where he does it, and who he does it for, and that’s what counts. Along with Nakamura and Lloyd Paul, Shorn Associates is the most aggressive player in the investment field. That applies to their Arbitrage and Emerging Markets divisions just as much as to Conflict Investment. They’re the original hard-faced firm. No gloss, no moral rationalisations. They do what they do, they’re the best at it. That’s what they sell on. You go to Shorn because they’re mean motherfuckers, and they’ll make money for you, come hell or high water. Fuck ethical investment, just give me a fat fucking return and don’t tell me too much about how you got it.’
‘You’re making speeches, Dad.’
There was a taut silence. Carla stared into the fire, wondering why she found it so easy to sink these barbs into her father. Then Erik Nyquist chuckled and nodded.
‘You’re right, I am,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Sorry about that. I miss seeing myself in print so much, it all just balls up inside me. Comes out whenever I have someone to talk to.’