Estelle feels deep sadness. He has dried up. The old phrases have escaped in staccato fashion from inside his head and the supply is diminishing. She will tidy them up before sending them. Her sadness is not without an element of self-interest, because for the last thirty-two years she has been the pilot fish to his whale, swimming in his bow-wave, deeply but discreetly in love, and now she can see that the magnificent whale is beached. She doesn’t say it to anyone, but he has more or less been abandoned by the family. Young Simon is in the African jungle and Julian hardly ever visits and Fleur hasn’t been since Christmas. She seems to spend her days in the gym. She obviously finds her husband’s condition difficult to live with.

His eyes are still turned towards the Mediterranean. He sees, she thinks, only blobs of colour, like the Matisse of a view through a window to the port of Collioure, his first purchase in 1952, which hangs in the front hall and which these days he often looks at for hours on end. She knows it cost him £4,900 and is worth some millions now. Twenty million at least. But he has absolutely no interest in the value of his paintings and only sells if he tires of a painter. Nonetheless she is logging them all in her spare time. The world for him has lost its infinite subtlety. His speech suggests that his understanding is not what it was, but she hopes that, in his brain, somewhere behind the portal where the words appear, he is still able to understand and appreciate these subtleties. He once delighted in surprisingly small natural things and events – seasonal changes and moss on the path and birdsong and the bindings of books – as well as the opera, the ballet and a day or two fishing for salmon on the Tay or for trout on his stretch of the upper reaches of the River Test, where the waters are clear and the trout wary. Many of the bank’s clients have enjoyed the box at the opera and the openings of the exhibitions that Sir Harry sponsored. Julian doesn’t like the opera. He thinks it diverts attention from the real aims of the bank, which are the creation of value, and sends out the wrong message, in ways that his father doesn’t begin to understand. Before his stroke, his father had railed against hedge funds, apparently unaware that hedge funds were, for a while, responsible for a sixty per cent growth in their clients’ portfolios. That had made them a whole lot happier than a few nights watching men in tights leaping about at Covent Garden. Under Julian’s regime – until recently – the bank sponsored golf and a whole day at Ascot. Horse racing, of course, appeals to the Gulf States, but now, she has learned, all sponsorships are under review.