‘Very good. Well, welcome to the bank. How’s Jason?’

‘He’s fine, sir. He hopes to be back to work soon.’

Jason Newell works in the post room; he was injured playing football for the club’s second team. He severed a cruciate ligament. Despite himself, Julian does feel a responsibility for the staff and he’s always pleased to see a new member. His father would have asked Jade when Jason was going to make an honest woman of her. Julian doesn’t like the word ‘partner’, but not necessarily because he’s in favour of marriage for the staff.

‘OK, good. I will be in my office for about two hours, Jade. Let my visitor in when she arrives, won’t you?’

‘I’m not going nowhere, sir.’

‘That’s the ticket.’

He wonders briefly why he used a phrase of his father’s. Years ago all the directors were family members and they sat together in the directors’ room. When the bank started it was a precaution against family cabals. There’s nothing as destructive as family jealousy. This communality ensured that the members of the family developed a team spirit. Harry was the first chairman to have his own office, and now Julian has it. It looks down across the secret Italianate courtyard to the directors’ room, where, to this day, the five managing directors, as they are now called, sit. They still meet for lunch in the directors’ dining room, watched over with Old Testament rigour by Moses Tubal, his portrait said to be by James Thornhill. It was painted in the period when Moses Tubal raised money for Queen Anne to build Blenheim Palace for John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough. Churchill had in turn recommended Moses Tubal to the Emperor Joseph, one of his patrons, and the family fortune was established. When he’s in the directors’ dining room Julian feels the weight of Moses’s seriousness. Dickens said that there are only two kinds of portraits, the serious, and the smirk. Moses, very definitely, didn’t do smirking.

Julian lets himself into his office. On the wall he has one of Hockney’s Yorkshire landscapes and behind his desk, a commissioned Howard Hodgkin in those wonderful deep blues he favours. The paint flows down on to the frame. The picture hangs where his father kept his Matisse. French Window at Collioure. His desk is a wide, blond piece of Scandinavian design, a huge slice of birch resting on two elegant trestles. All part of his attempt to come out from under the deep shade of heritage. The Italian garden below – box hedges, gravel, bay pyramids and a cruciform pond – has unnaturally early tulips in the squares of box, black and white alternating.