‘There were loads of interviews when that book came out,’ Freya said. There was brightness in her tone, no obvious malice, but I knew her game. She was trying to smear my pitch. And as she spoke, it was as if I could detect the gaseous content of each word, the carbon dioxide in each treacherous exhalation, subtracting from the breathable air in the room, adding to the fog around me. ‘And besides … A novelist … Not much visual appeal.’ She pursed her lips into a red spot of disapproval.

No one else spoke. Eddie pushed back in his chair. ‘When are you meeting him?’

‘Tomorrow,’ I said. ‘Morning. Tomorrow morning.’

‘Let’s have a back-up,’ Eddie said. ‘I want you to meet Alexander De Chauncey.’

An action took me without my willing it, an autonomous protest from my body. My head fell back and my eyes rolled; my lower jaw sagged; and I made a noise: ‘Euuhhhh …’

Another boss might have regarded this as insolence – it was insolence, after all, a momentary lapse into teenage rebellion, not calculated but real – and hit back hard, but this was Eddie, our friend. He smiled at it. ‘Look, I know you don’t rate the guy …’

‘He’s a prick.’

‘Have you met him? You wouldn’t say that if you met him. Ivan introduced us. He’s actually a great guy. Fun, creative, down-to-earth. An ideas guy.’

‘He’s a fucking estate agent.’

Eddie was away, fizzing with enthusiasm for his own proposal. ‘That’s the angle. An estate agent, but a new breed. Young, hip, creative. Progressive. One of us, you know? Not one of them. He’s got some really amazing ideas. You’ll love him.’

Every particle of my body screamed with cosmic certainty that I would hate him. ‘Maybe next month?’

The change in Eddie’s manner was so slight that perhaps only half the people in the room picked up on it, if they were paying attention: a hardening, a cooling. ‘What, you’re too busy this month?’ A chuckle from the ones who had detected the change in Eddie-weather. ‘Look, it’s win-win, Jack. If your mugging guy pays off we can go large on him and maybe hold De Chauncey for next month. It won’t hurt you to have one in the bag, to get ahead of yourself. If mugging guy is so-so, we do both. If Mr Mugging is a dud, we do De Chauncey. Yeah?’

There was no real question at the end of Eddie’s statement – more a choice between consenting by saying something or consenting by staying quiet. I chose to stay quiet. Eddie turned to his flatplan and struck out six spreads, over which he scrawled PROFILE PIERCE? / ALEX. The spread after this block he put an X through.