As Len ushers him into the back of the car, Julian feels an urgent need to see his children. The children. Whose innocence and unconditional love make him uneasy now. Len is pleased to see him, to be made whole by the Trevelyan-Tubal presence. Julian wants to see Alice’s milk teeth and her pursed, amused lips, which look as though they are lightly rouged at all times. When at bath-time he sees her tiny innocent vulva, he finds it desperately poignant. God knows what’s in store for her in the highly unpredictable sexual realm. He even finds the fine, vulnerable hair at the back of her neck moving. And he has, despite himself, a desperate hunger to embrace the children, to hug them. He longs to hold Sam’s solid, small, restless toughness. It’s not healthy: he needs them perhaps more than they need him, but at this moment he requires a transfusion, an implant – some bone marrow – containing their innocence, the innocence he, after all, helped bring into the world. Yes, he and Kimberly brought this about. Kimberly’s genes are somehow uncomplicated and blonde and sun-struck. He hopes the children have received plenty of her DNA.

There are hundreds of emails for him. His assistant reminds him that he is supposed to go to a charity dinner tomorrow. He hates charity dinners, with all that bonhomie and the childish show-off auctions and those terrible jokey speeches. Dickens described the financiers of his time at a charity dinner: sleek, slobbery, bow-paunched, overfed, apoplectic, snorting cattle. Something like that. Now that he’s more or less settled the future of Tubal and Company, Julian allows himself to admit that he was never at home in the City. The City has made him act in ways his younger self would have despised. Thank God things have eased a little. He sees his father’s angry, distorted face as Estelle helped him hold the pen. He knew he was signing away his life. Assets two thirds. Loans one third. He knew he was putting his signature on his own death warrant. This betrayal may be the last thing he ever signs. And his son, who could have left him in peace under the umbrella pines, to listen to the song of the turtle doves, has harried him to his end, so that he can take himself and his children to another life, free from the bogus demands of history and tradition.

Julian speaks to Nigel. Have you told Eric? Yes, Eric knows that the balance sheet will show that deposits are strong. The auditors and the rating agency will get the news informally by the usual channels. The accounts won’t be out for eleven months, and only then will they go to the Charity Commission, who are seldom in a hurry, but the agencies will know that Tubal’s has come out of the recession pretty well.