The opposite view – that his ascent had been a pinball journey of luck and accident – implied that all our fates were simply random, that we were in the passenger seat of life, watching the scenery as we approached the Savoy or the cliff edge. No one wants that. I say that as a storyteller – it was my job to give lives meaning on the page. A narrative, an arc: that was what people wanted. The truth was only an accessory. What was a story but a semblance of truth, a flavour of truth, applied to a collection of details that may or may not be true? And to collect those details, to include some and not others, was to engineer the truth. Not to warp or undermine it – let’s not be judgemental. But to organise it. To give it meaning. Otherwise it was no more than a transcript of a toddler’s unchronological torrent of tear-soaked, dribbling confession: true, no doubt, but impossible to follow.

De Chauncey, for instance, was editing, as well he might: some colour about setting up his first office in Shoreditch before Shoreditch was Shoreditch, with junkies on the doorstep, and the deals that eased his rise – useful stuff for me, yes, and I could feel myself, without even wanting to, editing the edit to serve what I might want to write. But the story had all the omissions and elisions one expected. The money must always come from somewhere, and circumstances count. He had started just as the city began its long, blazing boom, the eruption of wealth that we were only now coming to the end of. His particular dealings were trifles against the stirring of the leviathan he had ridden for twenty years, which shattered the land and remade it.

He had moved on from the general spiel about himself and London – one good for any occasion – to the specifics of phase 3 of YOLO Shoreditch. Wolfe / De Chauncey’s investment package for rental property came with the very latest in tenant management technology, thanks to a ground-breaking joint venture with—

I belched – a sudden upward rush of rotten acid was behind it. It was as if a switch had been thrown, and I had gone from feeling broadly fine to reeling with nausea and knowing, for a fact, that I would vomit, very soon, perhaps too soon to do anything decorous about it. Phase 3 of YOLO Shoreditch might at any moment receive an unholy baptism, right here in the Zebedee function room. I rose from my seat, not fully standing, doing that embarrassed stoop that we do when leaving a cinema during a film, and bumped into the row of chairs, clattering them together. De Chauncey’s patter missed half a beat. Moving as fast as I dared, as if carrying a brimming container within me, I fled up the side of the room and out of the door, barely pausing to demand ‘toilet?’ from one of the clipboard patrol and receive in response a gestured, frowning direction.