As Len pilots the Bentley free of the City, Julian imagines that anyone looking in at him, a forty-one-year-old man, expensively tailored, peering at some papers on a walnut fold-out shelf, would see someone who was living in another – and not even parallel – universe, with his £200,000 car, his old retainer Len at the wheel, his Lobb shoes (invisible but easily imagined) shining like billy-o, a man who was born to wealth. And they would probably believe – not so far wide of the mark – that he had done nothing to deserve it. But they wouldn’t understand – why would they? – that it is not so easy to be born rich in a world where everything that surrounds you from birth is old and beautiful and patinated, a world where you are steered, like it or not, towards the family business, where all around you people are deferential but behind your back dismissive. This world presents you with a choice: either you have nothing to do with it and open yourself to gibes and sneers by becoming a remittance man like his brother, who the newspapers once liked to call the hippy Tubal or the hairy heir, or you try to make a success of it. His father liked to bang on about the customers and the sacred trust – Estelle still sends his rambling letters, freely translated by her from the gibberish – that links banks and their clients with a silken thread. Sadly his theory, that keeping his Eton chums happy at the opera is the essence of banking, proved inadequate. Things moved on long before he retired, although he inhabited a large and moribund office at 11 Bread Street right up until the day of his stroke. He never understood that to produce a decent return you need financial instruments that banks of deposit never dreamed of. The cosy world, in which, for example, undisclosed assets could be left undeclared and untaxed, had changed for ever. Still clad in his plum trousers and rakish hat, his father is now more or less trapped inside the resounding empty tomb that is the extent of his life.

He reads a letter from Estelle. It is one of her updates on his father’s – imagined – progress. She tells him that his father is looking forward to the sailing; the boat has been painted and will be back on its mooring soon, and that the gardeners are doing a fine job in the spring weather. She knows Sir Harry is looking forward to his visit.