For what do you get for people who have everything they could possibly need or want, plus a shitload of stuff they don't need and often don't even want?

'You get them something lovely, of course,' said Lizzie.

It didn't really matter to Lizzie what that thing actually was, only that it should be beautifully presented. That was the real issue.

To previous generations of purveyors of luxury items a biscuit had still been essentially a biscuit. That was the main item on the agenda. Of course it needed a nicely designed box, but what really mattered was what was inside the box.

'That,' Lizzie assured her young design team, 'is bollocks. What really and truly matters is the box.'

To her it was instinctive, a truth instilled in her by a good (and very pretty) fairy at her birth. Presentation was everything.

Lizzie adored a box.

She gloried in choosing the thick, creamy card from which it was constructed. Comparing the inks and dyes with which it would be coloured. Studying the weave on the ribbon with which its lid would be secured. Considering the dimensions of the cellophane window through which the scrummy cookies within could be glimpsed. All three of them.

Lizzie loved a box.

To her a box was a means of communication. She revelled in all the things a box could say, and in so many beautiful tones and typefaces.

Lizzie Loves Organic.

Only good things inside. Good but very naughty!

50% sustainably sourced cardboard! (Lizzie's promise!) A little of what you fancy!

Cornish Clotted Creamery from VERY happy cows!

Responsibly traded cocoa beans taste better!

In the long run it didn't matter what was in the box at all. Everybody knew that a Malteser was actually nicer than Lizzie's raw ginger nuggets smothered in bitter chocolate, but who cared when the ginger nuggets were so beautifully presented?

You couldn't take a packet of crisps as a gift to a hostess, even though pretty much everybody likes crisps. But you could bring some of Lizzie's shaved turnip curls. Even though they tasted pretty grim.

They were just so beautifully presented.

Half a turnip diced and lightly fried (in sustainable, organic rapeseed oil) then vacuum packed in plastic before being placed in a bag of purest raw cotton which was then put in a little wicker basket designed to look like a miniature version of the sort of basket that a fantasy farm maiden might have used on Fairy Tale Farm to take her home-grown lightly fried turnip curls to market.

Lizzie designed and packaged everything. Her kitchen-accessories range with its great rounded plastic handles in bright Day-glo colours earned her a half-page in Vogue. Her salt and pepper shakers with their cute little feet and hands were the subject of a lawsuit when a major retailer pinched the idea and tried to flog a range at a tenth of the price.

Lizzie offered stationery boxes containing six sheets of writing paper and envelopes handmade from rag cloth to people who only ever sent emails.

She put gorgeous fountain pens with little bottles of green ink into the stockings of people who'd forgotten how to write by hand.

She sold individually wrapped shards of genuine Louisiana peanut brittle to people who threw up in the toilet if they ate a cornflake.

There was nothing, absolutely nothing, no matter how impractical, no matter how pointless, that Lizzie could not box up and make desirable.

Practicality wasn't the point.

The contents certainly were not the point.

The point was loveliness. Pure and simple.

And loveliness had made Lizzie and Robbo very, very comfortable indeed.

A loan secured 'Lizzie, it's Jimmy,' Jimmy said, trying not to sound desperate. Hoping to replicate the tone that he had used on the thousands of times he had said that same sentence when he had been happy and secure and not about to beg for money. 'Monica's told me all about your offer and I can't tell you how grateful I am and I never would have asked in a million years, but since you've brought it up yourself . . .'

Jimmy knew that he did sound desperate, but suddenly he didn't care. All at once he decided to go for broke, throwing shame to the wind as he suddenly upped the ante, explaining to his old friend that simply finding the money to pay off David's firm's outstanding invoices would not actually solve anything either for him and Monica or for David and Laura.

There was a bigger picture which, unless addressed, would make small fixes a waste of money. The problem was that the Webb Street job was only half finished and the real fear was that, with property prices currently in free fall, the whole development would collapse under the weight of its negative equity before the upturn came.

'I'm going to be straight with you, Liz,' Jimmy said. 'If I can't service the interest on the mortgage, the bank will repossess and I'll be officially bankrupt, leaving all my creditors, including David and his firm, to divide up the value of my remaining assets, which are basically a bit of furniture and five flat-screen tellies. Which is of course ridiculous because I own a street. A fucking street! But if I can't keep the bank's hands off it for what I'm guessing will be at least a year it all goes to shit.'

There was a pause during which Jimmy could feel himself sweating. The answer came in that wonderful voice, warm and honeyed. The voice that listeners to Radio 4 knew for its mouth-watering ability to describe the loveliest and most indulgent puddings. Lizzie sounded exactly as if she were reading a bedtime story and in a way she was, because she was about to produce a happy ending.

'How much do you honestly think you need?' Lizzie purred.

'Honestly?' Jimmy asked.

'Honestly,' Lizzie replied. 'We've all been in denial about this for months. We've known you're in trouble and Rupert says it's big trouble, but until Monica phoned me today none of us had really sat down and talked about it. Tell me the truth.'

Jimmy gulped. 'Liz, if I could borrow a couple of million for a year . . .'

He could see Monica's jaw drop and her eyes widen in alarm, but he pressed on.

'I think that would just about keep the bank, David's firm and the other immediate creditors at bay. I mean this thing has to end, doesn't it? Of course it does. Capitalism is cyclical and Mon and I own a street. Look, I know you've said you'll take one of the houses as collateral, but how about this? How about I give you and Robbo half the entire future profit on the development? Only nine months ago that was projected at twenty million quid, Liz! I'll give you half. Lend me two now and post-crunch you'll be looking at ten, minimum.'

For a moment it seemed to Jimmy as if the figures were real again, like they had been before. Not fantasy figures as he had now got used to seeing them, but real hard money that really did exist. Or soon would. It was so easy to slip back into that familiar mindset and it felt good to do so.

Lizzie clearly sensed this and her voice, when she replied, seemed even warmer, even kinder, even more soothing than before and gently scolding in that wonderful, rather sexy way she had.

'Jim. Don't. This isn't a deal. You don't need to pitch me and you don't need to sell me. It's about mates, that's all. I know you'll pay me back when you can and that's all I need to know. Forget collateral. When it's all over you can get me a case of something yummy if you like. Some really good dessert wine would be lovely, or a nice big bold red, a Margaret River Cab Sav or something. But that's it.'

'So you'll . . . you really will?' Jimmy's voice was breathless with hope. 'Two million?'

'Are you sure that's enough?' Lizzie replied.

'Yes. That's enough, Liz.'

'Good, then we'll do it. And I don't want us to have to discuss this again. Mates help each other but it defeats the object if it affects the mateship. So we'll do this and then forget about it until you sort things out. I'll get Robbo to transfer you two million in the morning, it's pretty simple. We've got easily that in gilts. And I insist that you do not ring to thank me. I do not want to discuss it again. We'll get through this together. As mates.'

Jimmy could not believe it. After months of ever-increasing despair everything was suddenly turning around. Two million would definitely see him through for a year, eighteen months probably. Lizzie was just amazing. She always had been. Impulsive. Instinctive. Organic. Like her biscuits. She followed her heart and it never let her down. She'd married Robson, for God's sake! Only Lizzie could have guessed how good a marriage that would turn out to be. Everybody loved Robbo, of course, but surely no one in their right mind would marry him? But Lizzie had, thus ensuring herself a lifetime of domestic contentment to go along with her great business success.

'I'll set up a new account tomorrow,' Jimmy replied.

He did not need to explain further what he meant by that. Lizzie was easily a good enough businesswoman to understand that if Jimmy and Monica were borrowing from her then they must have exhausted all other forms of credit and that if Jim wasn't careful any new windfall would simply get sucked into his ravenous overdrafts.

'Just send Robbo the details,' Lizzie said. 'Now put Mon on. I want to hear how her nipples are bearing up.'

After Lizzie and Monica had discussed lactation for a while Monica hung up the phone. Then Jimmy put Cressida down and Monica put Lillie down and they allowed both toddler and baby to scream away to their hearts' content as they embraced, holding each other close as the full extent of the rescue package sank in. Jimmy almost cried with relief. Monica did cry, sobbing and sobbing with tiredness and happiness and surging emotions that she could scarcely contain.

'So we won't have to leave our house?' she said finally.

'No. We can stay,' Jimmy said.

'Oh Jimmy,' she said, her body shaking against his.

'I know,' Jimmy whispered, 'I know. Shh!' as her tears wetted his shoulders and her breast milk soaked his pen pocket.

They were saved.

Lucky Jimmy Jimmy always thought it was very unfair of his father to be so disparaging about his profession and so suspicious of his wealth. It was pretty hypocritical too when Jimmy remembered how at first, after he had scraped a 2/2 in Politics and Modern History, Derek Corby had been delighted that his only son had ended up in the financial sector.

After all, Jimmy had been toying with the most horribly romantic notions. Like becoming a National Trust ranger or, worse, 'something at the BBC'. Faced with such airy-fairy ideas Mr and Mrs Corby were relieved indeed and much surprised when, out of the blue, Jimmy became what at the time they still called a stockbroker but the world would soon identify as a trader and would finally denounce as a stupid, reckless, greedy, irresponsible bastard.

Of course Mr and Mrs Corby weren't half as surprised as Jimmy was. He just didn't see it coming. Only a week before the day he stepped on to his first trading floor he had been trying his hand at independent documentary film-making. Videotaping homeless people on the South Bank in the hope of knocking together a ground-breaking social expose edited on the TV in the flat where he was staying above a kebab shop in Pimlico.

'Rather amusing, don't you think?' his friend Rupert had drawled through the smoke of his unashamedly pretentious Gitanes cigarette. 'You making a documentary about homelessness when you are in fact homeless yourself. Why don't you give me the camera and you can be in your own film.'

Rupert had been the stock reactionary in the famous house in Sussex. The counterpoint to Henry's political and David's artistic pretentions. He cared neither for art nor for social justice. He cared about money.

He was very brainy and very arrogant, the former somewhat making up for the latter but not quite. He had got a First in Mathematics and it was no surprise to the other members of the Radish Club when he became the first of their little graduation group to move to London and get a flat of his own. A circumstance Jimmy had been delighted to exploit. Rupert didn't mind the situation either as they were both still in that happy, unattached, unencumbered stage of their young lives when it was possible to continue to live like students even though they weren't students any more.

'I'll pay the rent, you can do the booze runs and attract the totty,' Rupert said. 'Babes always love you and I can have your sloppy seconds. We'll get drunk and shagged three nights a week.'

They managed the drunk bit at least and for a month or two had been happy together. But the situation couldn't go on for ever and one day when Rupert returned from the bank to find Jimmy still under the Batman duvet on the couch where he had left him that morning, the conversation turned to what Jimmy actually intended to do with his life.

'Perhaps you should rob your father's bank,' Rupert suggested. 'Perfect crime if you ask me. After all, you have all the inside information that you need and yet would never be suspected. Victimless too, in any real sense. I mean the money's only notional anyway and the insurance companies are thieves who deserve to be fleeced.'

Rupert was so right-wing it was actually quite funny. That was his shtick, his conversational thing. He called himself a libertarian and liked to shock people by saying things like 'A crack whore and her pimp are the perfect business model. No, I'm serious, capitalism in its purest form. The free market operating as it should. Supply and demand. Goods and services. Management and labour. I fail to see a moral dilemma. For fuck's sake, let them get on with it.'

Rupert had got his job at the Royal Lancashire Bank before he'd even graduated and everybody knew he was on the fast track to making millions both for himself and for his bank. There was just something about him, a sort of cheerfully ruthless amoral charm, that and a terrific command of figures, which meant you knew he would be rich. When Derek Corby had been introduced to Rupert at Jimmy's graduation, old Mr Corby had said, 'I hear you're going to be a banker like me,' to which Rupert had drawled, 'Not quite like you, Mr Corby.'

As the son of a commercial haulier he wasn't actually posh at all, but on the day he arrived at Sussex he started pretending to be posh, calling people 'old boy' and girls 'totty' and experimenting with a pipe. By the time he left he had clearly come to believe that he was posh, wearing brogues, tweedy jackets and sometimes even a cravat. Years later, after he had married the genuinely posh Amanda and was on his way to running a major bank, Amanda explained to him that brogues and tweed hadn't been posh since the fifties. Under her tutelage he would become rather trendy, favouring designer suits and hundred-pound haircuts. At twenty Rupert was trying to look like he was forty, and at forty he would be trying to look like he was twenty.

It was Rupert who suggested that Jimmy forget his pathetic notions of a media career and try financial trading.

'Five years from now the BBC will employ only women, ethnics and poofs. What's more, the commercial media will be owned by proper professional Americans, as indeed it should be since they're the only people on Earth who have the first idea about entertainment. You wouldn't stand a chance in either, Jim lad. No, the only place left where a man can still be a man is in money. You're too thick and too badly educated to bank, so I suggest you trade.'

'Trade in what?' Jimmy enquired.

'Trade in wealth.'

'What do I know about money?'

'You know you like it, don't you?'

'Of course. Who doesn't?'

'Then that's all you need to know.'

It had been as simple as that. Rupert made a call to his friend Piers that very evening. Piers had attended the same minor private school as Rupert (who had been a scholarship boy) and hence could be prevailed upon to do a favour. He was at a firm called Mason Jervis who traded in a thing called 'futures' and who, like most of the city, were on a roll. They were looking for new traders, young, energetic guys to work the phones. No previous experience required, all you needed was a strong nerve, a free, creative spirit and balls of titanium. Rupert assured Piers that Jimmy had all these things.

'Piers mate,' he drawled into his fancy new mobile, 'Jimmy Corby's balls could handle a direct hit from a laser-guided smart bomb.'

Jimmy had never thought of himself as a kind of testicular Rambo. But his friend Rupert had gone to the same school as a bloke who had jobs on offer, so Jimmy was in.

After that he just went with the flow.

He told himself that he was doing it for a laugh. Secretly observing some weird post-yuppie world. He would do six months, earn enough to spend a winter snowboarding and then leave. Perhaps he would write a movie about it, working title Thatcher's Children. He'd read an article in Time Out about how the Brit movie industry was back in the game. Surely they'd lap it up. Lots of guys from his uni were now independent film producers and they couldn't all do movies about gay launderette owners or Empire nostalgia.

But inside his first month Jimmy knew that he wouldn't be writing any movies about traders. And he wouldn't be taking any time off to go snowboarding either. Who the hell would want to slide down some French Alp when you could be surfing the future?

'I'm a time traveller!' he shouted at his new mates as he ordered champagne and beer at the end of his first month on the floor, a month in which he had earned Mason Jervis thousands of pounds and gained an appreciative nod from Piers. 'I'm Michael J. Fox! I get in my time-machine DeLorean car, I go to the future and I bring back money!'

He told the same story to his old mates on the first curry night after he became a trader.

'It's just so fucking exciting,' Jimmy burbled. 'You take notional money, make a fantasy trade, hold on to your bollocks and out comes real money!'

'What? Out of your bollocks?' Henry asked.

'Might as well be. I am the man with golden bollocks.'

His new enthusiasm came as quite a surprise for some members of the old gang. Jimmy had never been a bread-head. He liked money but he had never been obsessed with it. He got it, he spent it. That was it with Jim, and when he didn't have it he lived off sliced bread and chocolate stolen from the Student Union shop.

But the truth was that it wasn't the money that obsessed Jimmy. It was the process of making it, the trading. The new, wonderful, high-octane guy-world in which he and a group of equally young, devil-may-care, fun-loving blokes created money. It felt so utterly exhilarating and also sort of hilarious. Here was the one thing everybody on earth wanted, dreamed about and worried about all the time and he and the guys were actually making the stuff out of thin air. If it wasn't so utterly beautiful it would be a crime.

He and his father immediately clashed. Jimmy would turn up waving a bottle of champagne and a sack of washing, suggesting that he take his parents to lunch in some country-house gastro hotel. His dad would point out that the sandwiches were already made for the fishing. Jimmy and his mum would hug and then he and his dad would argue. Derek Corby thought Jim's view of trading was baffling; worse, it was offensive.

'I'll tell you what stocks and shares are, my lad,' he told his grinning son. 'Stocks and shares represent part ownership in a company. If the company is successful then the stock price goes up. If the company is failing then the price goes down.'

Jimmy and his mother would exchange glances as if to say that Dad was off on one again, and Derek would continue to go off on it. 'The job of a responsible stockbroker is to study the performance of a company and determine whether the performance of that company is likely to go up or down. Having made his calculations, he then makes a prudent investment on behalf of his client. That's how it's done. End of story. And if you don't do it that way, Jimmy, it will end in tears. That I can promise you.'

'Dad, you're insane,' the newly confident and bullish Jimmy insisted. 'The value of a company doesn't have to have anything to do with what that company's actually worth!'

'I beg your pardon?' Derek Corby enquired. 'Something's value has nothing to do with its value?'

'Of course not. Not its actual practical value. Who cares about that? A trader doesn't hang around waiting for companies to post their yearly figures in order to find out what they're actually worth. How dull would that be?'

This was too much for a man who had begun his career at the National City Bank in 1968.

'Dull! DULL!' Derek Corby spluttered into his Scotch and lemonade. 'What has "dull" to do with the price of eggs! We're discussing stockbroking.'

Father and son were existing on different planets. Living in different ages. Never once in his entire life had Derek Corby imagined that the financial sector should be interesting. Quite the opposite. He believed that by its very nature it should be dull, very, very dull. That was why it was the financial sector. If you wanted your work to be interesting, find another profession. Become a soldier or an engineer or an entertainer in the halls. Derek Corby had sacrificed eight hours a day, five and a half days a week all his adult life to dull. It was what he was paid for. That was why he worked, not to be stimulated but to earn a decent living so that he could support his family and enjoy his leisure. What he did at home was interesting. Bridge nights, fishing trips and home brewing. Holidays were interesting, not work, two weeks rambling in the Lake District. That was why he worked, so that he might appreciate the rewards of his labour.

Jimmy always ended up drinking the whole bottle of champagne. His father declined to share it and his mother had only a thimbleful.

'The difference between you and me, Dad, is you earn money. I make it.'