That’s Julian’s Keats. But it’s probably true of Cy that he has never known the weariness, the fever and the fret. Every day for him is, in his telling anyway, an adventure and he never forgets that he started with nothing on Coney Island. He can become lyrical about the sounds of the roaring, screaming, falling Big Dipper that punctuated his childhood and he still goes out there sometimes to buy a hot dog, the best in New York, he says. Owning Tubal’s will remind people of just how far he has come. He is in love with life. Life is to him the multiple opportunities the world of money offers him to demonstrate his combative/charming qualities. He’s the sort of man who spends very little time in introspection. Julian thinks that in order to succeed in business you need, like his father and like Cy, to have limited imagination. If you were aware of life’s possibilities would you really choose a path of endless problems, disappointments and treachery? Would you choose to wear white Gucci loafers without irony? Moses Tubal was probably the same, but he was driven by the ferocious desire of the outsider to belong. But the Tubals are safely on the inside. They’re woven into the fabric. Their bums are deep in the butter.

He asks Jade to open the gate, a Victorian Gothic wooden door, studded with fancy medieval ironwork – Cy will love this – and as he arrives at the car park she is waiting, sturdy, beside the gate, plumped up defensively like a hen, as if she is ready to repel the oiks.

‘Thanks, Jade. Give Jason my best, won’t you?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And tell him from me, you are doing a great job.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

She’s as happy as a Labrador. He’s aware as he drives out on to Bread Street – completely deserted apart from two Japanese or Korean tourists looking at a map – that the staff are going to be angry. They have a proprietorial feeling for the bank, carefully nurtured by his forebears over three hundred years.