In 1997, however, they had found a useful compromise. A country house. It was maybe a tad inconvenient that they should both have fallen in love with a little farmhouse up in North Salem. A mile or two further and they’d have been in Putnam County, where the prices and property taxes were lower, while North Salem was just inside Westchester County, and had unusually high property taxes to pay for the local school. But they adored the house, and there it was.

Gorham was pretty happy. They went up there most weekends, and the children loved it. In the summer, he and Maggie quite often commuted from the house several days a week. It took an hour and fifteen minutes door to door whether they drove or took the train down to Grand Central. He felt as if he’d opened a window in his life.

And, it had to be confessed, it fitted into his plan for his life. Other people might like to have summer houses, or rent them out on Long Island; there was the rich crowd in the Hamptons who paid big money to be there. But there were many people who preferred the quieter, more rural surroundings of the big corridor, from Bedford in the middle of Westchester, northward up the Hudson Valley into fashionable Dutchess County. People who liked horses especially. North Salem might not be deep country, but it was hardly suburban. There was a local hunt, and several estates running into hundreds of acres. Like Bedford, it was a place where rich people went, and this pleased Gorham, for he could feel that the Master family was where it ought to be.

But was he?

It was sometime in the mid-nineties when Gorham had realized the truth, that he wasn’t going any further in the bank. It wasn’t that he’d failed—his job was safe and he was still valued—but there was a group of people of the same age as he who had just done a little better. Maybe they were better politicians. Maybe they had been lucky. But he was never going to be the CEO, or even one of the tiny cadre who really ran the bank. He was going to be the nice guy just below that level.

There was another, even more disturbing thought. It was a time of amalgamation. Banks were getting bigger. Like some vast game of financial Pac-Man, one bank was swallowing another and, many people said, only the biggest would survive. Their huge monetary power and lowered costs would crush all opposition. So far his bank had neither bought, nor been acquired, but if and when that happened, two things were likely to follow, one good and one bad. The good part of it was that his bank stock and options would probably be worth a lot more money. He might come out of such a deal a quite considerably richer man, but not more than that. It was the cadre just above him that had the big stock options. He’d known ordinary bank executives who’d made fifty, a hundred million or more in these corporate games. By getting stuck where he was on the corporate ladder, however, he’d miss out on the big rewards. He might hope to make a very few million at best, if he was lucky, but not more.