As soon as Maria matriculates, Sandi moves the Olszewska family to Switzerland ‘for tax purposes’ and her own sons to Corpus Christi School in London, sloughing off Olly and her regional roots as a rattlesnake sheds its skin. When I mildly question her rejection of past, Sandi smiles tolerantly and murmurs something from Pushkin about ‘the snows of yesteryear’. She is quick to pick up cosmopolitan chic. She flies twice a year to Milan to buy her outfits from Versace, from Gianni himself. Sandra Adams is going places.

Myrtle, alert to her ravenous ascent, announces that she is giving up bridge and is joining me in the office as financial controller. ‘Someone has to keep an eye on the comings and goings, especially the outgoings,’ she states briskly. Her remark calls to mind the milling corridors of my father’s open-door office and I, in a depressed property market, swoop on the ailing next-door neighbours and buy back the rest of the suite.

Myrtle applies the rigour of common sense to our fetterless advance. Her budgetary veto is unbudgeable, and Sandi is obliged to back off a number of stylish acquisitions. But Myrtle is no killjoy or scaredy-cat. She, too, is fired by expansionist desire. Her fluent ancestral Spanish cracks open lucrative overseas markets. She escorts Gudzilla on a riotous Latin-American tour and returns with five tango composers under contract. My warm congratulations are reciprocated by her with rekindled amorous ardour in, ahem, a carnival outfit. Business draws us closer than marriage has ever done, much to the bemusement – not to say embarrassment – of our adult sons.

Mortimer, the elder, undergoes a mid-life upheaval, walks out on his wife and children and buys into a gynaecological practice in Beverly Hills, where (I gather) he receives patients in a flowery shirt. Edgar, the barrister, suffers a precipitate decline in libel work after the suicide at sea of the litigious rogue publisher Robert Maxwell. He comes to me for advice, for the first time since boyhood, and I recall the nights when Myrtle took me into his room to salve my loss in his gentle breathing. I recommend that he should think of turning his formidably trained forensic mind to entertainment law, with particular reference to the contract and copyright implications of new media and the dawning Internet.

He takes to virtual music like a shark to shipwrecks, slicing through standard publishing agreements that have stood unaltered for a century. A submarine treasure-chest of unclaimed electronic rights is uncovered by his beaming eye. There is a fortune to be made from unexploited musical applications. I frugally repossess the visible future of the composers I once sold off as dross. Edgar draws up a precedential contract that licenses Dawn on the Dnieper to a cyberspace bookseller as website aural wallpaper. We find ourselves navigating an uncharted sea with no longitudinal measurement. The horizons are limitless and unforeseeable.