Julian Trevelyan-Tubal sits in the back of his car as the driver takes him to Luton Airport. He’s thought about getting rid of the Bentley, but he doesn’t want to cause alarm: the family have always been driven in Bentleys. When people still cared about such things, a Bentley spoke of restraint, where a Rolls-Royce suggested something flashy and unreliable. The argument for selling the Bentley is that the top man should demonstrate that he is in touch with the new financial realities. Also, footballers and hedge-fund managers and property developers now drive sporty little Bentley Coupés and convertibles, and Bentley long ago decided to drop their steady-Eddy image. In a way, he thinks, they are doing just what the banks have been doing. He sits inside the car, an eight-year-old Arnage, feeling as though he is being transported – silently – to his own funeral. He sees Len glancing anxiously at him in the rear-view mirror but he ignores him. Len likes a chat. His opening gambit is usually about the traffic. He has views on most things, deluded but harmless. His father sent him for driver-training at Crewe about twenty years ago and he behaves as though they embalmed him at the same time.

Perhaps the way round this dilemma is to go green: all directors of the bank, including the boss, will drive one of those hybrid cars that run on gas and batteries, demonstrating their commitment to a greener, less wasteful future, and so by proxy to more ethical business practices. Or is the word responsible, rather than ethical? Nobody in the City really gives a monkey’s about green politics, but they know better than to say so publicly. He makes a note to tell his assistant to look into it and to bear in mind the PR benefits; also, they still have one almost viable hedge fund, which has a huge investment in sustainable batteries, and possibly the whole story could be tied in to that. At least it might attract some more investment into the fund. While he worked under his father, he was known for original thinking. His father was far too fastidious to use terms like ‘thinking out of the box’ or ‘pushing the envelope’ – he thinks language should remain in a state of paralysis – but that is what Julian was doing; that was in his carefree role until a few years ago. His father never fully understood the detail of banking: not many important bankers do. You don’t ask the captain of the vessel to stoke the engines, after all. (His imagery, as well as his understanding of banking, was outmoded.) He was close to the top people at Barings when they went down in 1995, but he never learned the lessons: he had no idea what was happening in the engine room.