Admittedly, not all the people who came to look round the properties she bought and sold were very privileged. It was harder to enjoy the performance when it was an anxious couple trying to find somewhere their savings would stretch to a deposit. She feared then that she was part of the problem, not the resistance, but there was no solution that could be effected by her on her own. She had to take what she needed while she could get it.

As a single woman she could only get her buy-to-flip mortgages with a regular salary to show the lenders. Her job had been perfect for the way she made real money: no one kept track of where she was; she worked from home whenever she could, answering the occasional email but mostly pursuing her own schemes, scouring through the estate-agent sites for promising properties in east and south-east London. She wasn’t going to keep on with the property-renovating forever, just until she had enough money for a little house of her own with a garden, just until the money wasn’t there begging. It was better that she picked up the profits than someone who had been to private school. Mum was gone, and with the brother she had she couldn’t rely on anyone else to look after her if things went wrong.

Which was why the argument at work had been so shaming and stupid.

Not all her colleagues were awful, just the ones who made the most noise and did the least work. She had liked her manager, Hannah, who had looked after the art team, which was made mostly of people doing exactly the same job as Amy while claiming expertise in a certain niche (with less plausibility, the louder they were). When Hannah announced she was leaving she had taken Amy aside and said, ‘You’d be good at this. You should apply.’

‘Thanks,’ said Amy. ‘Are you pleased not to be doing it any more?’

‘Um…’ her boss said.

‘Yeah, I thought so,’ said Amy.

But she thought about it, and about working under the colleagues who did want the job, and she decided that she would apply, even if she’d have to work harder and care more about what she was doing. Perhaps she did care, after all.