04 May 1998
The office has started to feel less like an interruption and more like the structure underneath everything. That should frighten me more than it does. I arrive early, I know which lift is fastest, I can read a room before anyone has reached the second slide, and I have become the sort of woman who owns more than one jacket that means business.
There is a bleak comfort in a place that admits what it wants. Barclays Capital does not ask me to confuse extraction with love. It wants judgement, stamina, punctuality, appetite, arithmetic, nerve. In return it gives money, light, authority, and the chilly respect due to a person who can be useful under pressure.
The writing has not stopped in the theatrical sense. I still write phrases on the backs of agendas. I still catch a sentence in the train window and hold it for three stops. But the old current is gone. Fiction requires a reckless surplus of attention. Finance has bought the surplus.
At lunch today I found a page of notes in my Filofax between a call with compliance and a meeting about emerging markets debt. The notes were not bad. That was the worst of it. They were not bad, and they were dead. A thing can be well made and still have no pulse.
I used to think selling out would feel like treason. It feels like relief, which is more damning. Treason at least believes in the country it betrays.