AS A LITTLE BOY, Hugh had thought Pilasters bank was owned by the walkers. These personages were in fact lowly messengers, but they were all rather portly, and wore immaculate morning dress with silver watch-chains across their ample waistcoats, and they moved about the bank with such ponderous dignity that to a child they appeared the most important people there.
Hugh had been brought here at the age of ten by his grandfather, old Seth's brother. The marble-walled banking hall on the first floor had seemed like a church: huge, gracious, silent, a place where incomprehensible rites were performed by an elite priesthood in the service of a divinity called Money. Grandfather had shown him all around: the carpeted hush of the third floor, occupied by the partners and their correspondence clerks, where little Hugh had been given a glass of sherry and a plate of biscuits in the Partners' Room; the senior clerks at their tables on the fourth floor, bespectacled and anxious, surrounded by bundles of papers tied with ribbon like gifts; and the juniors on the top floor, sitting at their high desks in lines like Hugh's toy soldiers, scratching entries in ledgers with inky fingers. But best of all, for Hugh, had been the basement, where contracts even older than grandfather were kept in vaults, thousands of postage stamps waited to be licked, and there was a whole room full of ink stored in enormous glass jars. It had amazed him to reflect on the process. The ink came into the bank, it was spread over the papers by the clerks, and then the papers were returned to the basement to be stored forever; and somehow this made money.
The mystery had gone out of it now. He knew that the massive leather-bound ledgers were not arcane texts but simple lists of financial transactions, laboriously compiled and scrupulously updated; and his own fingers had become cramped and ink-stained by days of writing in them. A bill of exchange was no longer a magic spell but merely a promise to pay money at a future date, written on a piece of paper and guaranteed by a bank. Discounting, which as a child he had thought must mean counting backwards from a hundred down to one, turned out to be the practice of buying bills of exchange at a little less than their face value, keeping them until their due date, then cashing them at a small profit.
