Remainder by Tom McCarthy Read Free Book Online

It struck me as strange that someone who physically filled so little space could project such a rich sense of presence. He shook my hand heartily—not as cheerfully as Daubenay had, but more assertively, with a firm grip, bringing his transverse carpal ligament into play. Most handshakes don’t involve the transverse carpal ligament: only the really firm ones. He gestured out of the reception room towards a hallway.
    “Let’s go upstairs,” he said.
    I made towards the hall, but hesitated in the doorway because the receptionist was still preparing the coffee for me.
    “Oh, I’ll bring it up,” she said.
    Matthew Younger and I walked up a wide, carpeted staircase above which hung portraits of men looking rich but slightly ill and into a large room that had one of those long, polished oval tables in it which you see in films, in scenes where they have boardroom meetings. He set a dossier on the table top, slipped off the elastic band keeping it closed, slid a piece of paper from it which I recognized from the heading as coming from Marc Daubenay’s office, and began:
    “So. Marc Daubenay tells me you’ve come into rather a large sum of money.”
    He looked at me, waiting for me to say something in response. I didn’t know what to say, so I just kind of pursed my lips. After a while Younger continued:
    “Over the last century the stock market has outperformed cash in every decade apart from the thirties. Far outperformed. As a rule of thumb, you can expect your capital to double over five years. In the current market conditions, you can reduce that figure to three, perhaps even two.”
    “How does it work?” I asked him. “I invest in companies and they let me share in their profits?”
    “No,” he said. “Well, yes, that’s a small aspect of it. They give you a dividend. But what really propels your investment upwards is speculation.”
    “Speculation?” I repeated. “What’s that?”
    “Shares are constantly being bought and sold,” he said. “The prices aren’t fixed: they change depending on what people are prepared to pay for them. When people buy shares, they don’t value them by what they actually represent in terms of goods or services: they value them by what they might be worth, in an imaginary future.”
    “But what if that future comes and they’re not worth what people thought they would be?” I asked.
    “It never does,” said Matthew Younger. “By the time one future’s there, there’s another one being imagined. The collective imagination of all the investors keeps projecting futures, keeping the shares buoyant. Of course, sometimes a particular set of shares stop catching people’s imagination, so they fall. It’s our job to get you out of a particular one before it falls—and, conversely, to get you into another when it’s just about to shoot up.”
    “What if everyone stops imagining futures for all of them at the same time?” I asked him.
    “Ah!” Younger’s eyebrows dipped into a frown, and his voice became quieter, withdrawing from the room back to his small mouth and chest. “That throws the switch on the whole system, and the market crashes. That’s what happened in ’29. In theory it could happen again.” He looked sombre for a moment; then his hearty look came back—and, with it, his booming voice as he resumed: “But if no one thinks it will, it won’t.”
    “And do they think it will?”
    “No.”
    “Cool,” I said. “Let’s buy some shares.”
    Matthew Younger pulled a large catalogue from his dossier and flipped it open. It was full of charts and tables, like some kind of tidal almanac.
    “With the kind of capital you’ve got earmarked for investment,” he said, “I think we can envisage cultivating quite a large portfolio.”
    “What’s a portfolio?” I asked him.
    “Oh, that’s what we call the spread of your investments,” he explained. “It’s a bit like playing a roulette table—with the important distinction that you win