My anxiety is at defcon five. The idea of a heart-to-heart with Charles fills me with dread. I didn’t have the guts to tell Marilyn that the biggest cause of my rupture from Clare was over him. I humiliated him, because I hated him, her darling husband.

What word could Marilyn come up with to describe what I had actually done? Arsehole is too tame. I’d written a story about a disgraced American insider trader, Ronnie Piskin, and I could not help pointing out that his son is a partner in the London office of Schon. Yup. I actually did that. Clare was completely right that it was gratuitous of me to show off my own ‘insider’ knowledge. There was no editorial justification. On the most generous interpretation – my one – I was insensitive. Clare was in no doubt I had been wilfully malicious, having told me when she first met Charles about how his mother and he had rebuilt their lives after his parents’ messy divorce. Charles even changed his name from ‘Piskin’ to ‘Prince’, because he no longer wanted anything to do with his father. No one at Schon where he works, or in his friendship circle, was aware of the connection. But within hours of me mentioning his name in the FC splash, journalists from the Globe, Daily Mail and other papers were banging on their Primrose Hill door and hanging around outside Schon’s HQ hoping to get a comment from him on how he felt to be the son of the world’s most notorious financial crook. Charles was devastated. I later discovered that he quite reasonably feared that Schon – as one of Wall Street’s elite ‘white-shoe’ firms – would find a way to sack him. Clare was angrier with me even than when she was fourteen and I stole her diary to repeat choice extracts over breakfast about her agonies over the changes in her body (‘Ooh, my breasts are sore, I think I’ve started my period, there’s blood in my knickers’ ). She was blunt on the phone: ‘You betrayed Charles. You betrayed me. I don’t wish to speak to you ever again.’

‘Don’t be silly Clare,’ I whined. ‘It was just a story.’ She hung up. That was just over two years ago: she kept her word. And even at family gatherings she skirted around me and refused to engage.

As the yellow brick of their Victorian home comes into view on the right, I try to calm myself by muttering under my breath a safe number of times, ‘Let me die, save Charles and the boys,’ I whisper, once, twice, thrice. Having offered myself up as a sacrifice, I feel calmer.

‘Something you needed, sir?’ asks the driver.

‘No. Everything’s fine.’