LISA Leeson's impossibly tiny waist, cheerful mien and air of quiet efficiency remind me of a nurse in a well-run private clinic where patients are clients, and good looks and, perma-smiles are central to the treatment. She sits, knees crossed, prim Doris Day, checked shirt buttoned high to the neck, the only clue to her unease a constant fiddling with her chafed, blotchy hands. Her childhood ambition was to be a nurse, she tells, me, or an air hostess. But as the world now knows, her Iife took another course.
"What with doing A-levels in finance and accounting, at career in finance seemed the natural thing," she explains. For career read job. For Lisa is no high flyer. All she wanted was "enough money to have a nice holiday once a year, a small car and a good time with the girls". Girls is pronounced "gows". Although Lisa comes from Kent, it's London-over-spill Kent, not Larkin country. There's nothing rural about Lisa.
It was 1987, boom time in the City, when any likely lad with half a brain could reckon on trading in his Astra for a Porsche before he'd had his 21st. Lisa finished her exams on the Thursday and the next Monday she was working for Nikki Securities, commuting daily from Maid stone where she lived with Mum and Dad (and she's back there now). Her job as settlements clerk for the Japanese stockbroker company she describes as "the bottom rung".
Making the same daily journey but from the north of London rather than the south was another settlements clerk, who worked for Coutts & Co, the queen's bankers. Unlike his future wife, he had no qualifications, having failed his maths A-level; but also unlike her, Nick Leeson was as ambitious as a magpie and smart enough to see that the action lay in the new and hazy world of futures, so new and hazy in fact that it was incomprehensible to the old school of bankers, whose lives had been spent in stocks and shares, tangible things that could be bought and, sold.
Dealing in futures is more usefully described as gambling, betting on how the market is going to move. Where markets are made and broken through the sheer power of volume. Like horse racing, if enough punters back a horse the odds come down. But fortunes in futures are made long before the horse has even put his nose out of the stable door, let alone taken the starter's "flag, just by buying and selling the odds. A too-hasty move, and the market can crumble.
Confidence and sheer chutzpah is all it takes. Nick Leeson had both in spades. Within four years he was on his way, working for Barings, the City's oldest and most patrician merchant bank. Sent out to Jakarta to sort out a paperwork-grounded confusion, he did a thorough job - saving them millions and wising up the while to the ease with which errors could be camouflaged to balance the books. To speed up the process he requested assistance. It came in the shape of another Barings employee, Lisa Sims. It was love at first sight.
Three years later - and £869 million lighter - Nick Leeson is banged up in Changi Jail in Singapore for 3 1/2 years while his wife Lisa has traded anonymity for her 15 minutes of Warholian fame, promoting the book of his rise and fall, Rogue Trader.
For Lisa the negative side is less the downfall of Barings (not to mention the financial losses to the bond holders) but the depiction of her husband as a lout rather than a lad. Worst of all, however, was the realisation that her husband was "leading a double life". His claim that she knew nothing of his double dealings appears to be true. It was only when she read the book that she learnt the full story. When" wheeled out to plead for his extradition for trial in England, she spoke from ignorance. "Just as well I didn't know anything, because sitting on the telly with a smile on my face, it was easier doing that not knowing anything."
And does she know everything now? "Well, I know the book. What's in the book." And what about the other book, The Collapse Of Barings by Stephen Fay, described by the former deputy bank of England Sir Kit Macmahon as an excellent account, well-written, lucid, making judicious use of all available resources"?
She hasn't read it. Why not? "I've heard he has a real go at Nick, and to be honest I don't like reading about myself, about Nick." I read her out a passage of Sir Kit's review which makes clear Leeson is not singled out as a scapegoat. She listens under sufferance. "I'm really not interested in Stephen Fay's book. Anyway, I've been told by other people that it's not very good at all. Stephen Fay didn't have access to anything. Not Nick. All he had access to was the newspapers and a couple of reports that he could buy, and I believe he has really slated Nick. I don't think reading Stephen Fay's book would do me any good. And I don't want to read any more about Barings. I've had Barings up to here. I'm only doing this for publicity for the book. I just want to get it over with and start afresh."
At least it's now clear that there was no conspiracy, no siphoning off of funds to a secret account. The whole sorry business was just a cackhanded attempt to gamble his way out of trouble. "All those crazy reports about us being on a yacht. That just shows how nobody knew nothing."
Certainly the story of the rogue trader who lost more money than is owed by Saddam Hussein in arms deals loses its romance when Lisa recounts, with obvious pleasure in the memory, the details of their life in ex-pat Singapore.
Her days were spent with the "gowls" in the gym followed by "noodles and a soup and a natter" across the road in a shopping mall. Unlike the impression given in the book, Leeson wasn't reconciling dodgy dealings till the small hours every night. "Usually he'd be home by six or seven. We'd never go out during the week. It was just like back home really. I'd cook. We'd watch the telly or videos."
During the day Leeson would eat a steady supply of hamburgers and fruit gums. (It became obsessional. He wouldn't even bother to unpick the end, just break the tube in half and cram them in. At the end he was eating four kilos of sweets a day.) Lisa was worried that he was putting on weight, so she made sure that at night he had good home" cooking. "You know, sausages and mash, shepherd's pie, curries." For a treat there would be roasts. With parsnips and, mashed swede. On the telly American comedy shows and English comedy and drama.
"There was this great place where you could get whole series. Like Auf Wiedersehen Pet and Minder."
How could she not have known, cry the tabloids. Thick, Nick and Brainy Lisa with her two A-levels. But this was no modern marriage. Work was never discussed at home, any more than Nick's mates back in Watford would discuss their plastering or plumbing jobs with their wives. "We never went out with people in the banking industry. You see Nick was very quiet. Not at all the flash person everyone says he is.
"Don't get me wrong. I wasn't oblivious to the fact, that he was under pressure. But he just told me that the auditors were around giving whim lots of grief. And the other traders on the floor were only feeding me success stories about how well Nick was doing.
The image of Nick Leeson that emerges from Rogue Trader is a highly romanticised version of events, told by a journalist whose brief was clear and whose narrative and expository skills are first-rate. In short it is a jolly good read. But it is as far from the whole, truth as Lisa's well-honed replies in Hello! magazine's question-and-answer interview are, which give the impression of a young woman with a sharp wit and formidable analytical skills.
But the journalistic massaging of her words does her no favours. Formidable she indeed is in the "stand by your man" sense. But as we talk, sentences stumble along, unfinished, and it's difficult to follow her, not out of cleverness to deceive but because that is how she is - in her own words, "naive".
And the future? "I don't want to think about it. Nick will change. I will change." , She's not making any plans. "This time last year I had so many dreams and look where I am now. Three and a half years is a very long time and things will change. Nick will change. I will change. All I can hope is that things are going to work out."
All she ever wanted, she says, was "harmony. To be happy. And all I got was aggro. And does she ever think about all that money? No. Not really. She feels sorry for the bond holders, of course, "but like you say, it's like playing Monopoly. Like I'll buy Mayfair." She laughs a little hiccupy laugh. "It's not real money. It doesn't sound real money, not when you're used to dealing in small figures."
They still have the £140,000 flat in Blackheath bought with a previous bonus. Would she consider handing that over in some sort of recompense? She thinks long and hard and plays with the hands that she hates, even now smothered in hand cream ("Old gowl's hands"). She doesn't answer directly. "It's our only security. I've been told they could take Nick's half. But not mine." Perhaps it will be a downpayment for the "nice little bed and breakfast in the Cotswolds" that was the only dream she would admit to.
In the meantime, she has applied to Virgin Airways - as an air hostess.
And good luck to her.