As the nausea subsided, the sickness returned – the anger and the hatred. I sat in reception with a glass of water like an invalid or a child, tolerated and indulged, told to wait until the grown-ups were finished. The sparks of relief lit by De Chancey’s goodwill were extinguished by a tide of corrosive sludge, all my contempt and resentment. I resented that I was reliant on his generosity, that I had to crawl to him for favours, and his civility, his kindness, made it all the worse. They might make you feel at home for a few seconds here and there, but you’re never at home. This was their world, your flat was still the possession of an anonymous oligarch or investment fund, and there was De Chauncey oiling the wheels of the system, and making his own fortune as he did so. And Quin, too, via whatever ghastly AI switchboard he had built for them, the slumlord Siri.

And he had been quite right. I might be feathering the nest of some retired Mail on Sunday reader I had never met, watching my own future drain away just as it drew closer, but I did almost prefer that to being the serf of an offshore entity, reduced to pleading with an algorithm. Better a sucker paying for someone else’s Saga holidays than cattle on a spreadsheet. But I still despised my peonage and everything about it. There were people and institutions who regarded ownership as a burden, that was the horror at the core of it, the gulf of understanding I could not cross – and we call these people landlords. It was a chore, to them, to have the unbeatable investment asset of a London flat sullied by the vile needs of tenants. Not so much of a chore, of course, that they were ever prepared to give up the burden of ownership – just enough to ensure that every human dignity could be considered moot. For me, ownership was an unimaginable privilege, a source of security and comfort so distant that it might be Xanadu. An escape from the exhaustions and humiliation of renting. And why is rent such a treadmill of shame? Because of landlords who regard the responsibilities of ownership as a treadmill. Who resent that the provision of a home interferes with their enrichment.