My best friend has just been given a fortune and it’s driving me mad with envy. What’s worse, she refuses to admit it. Can ANY relationship ever survive the ‘inheritance gap’?

I’m waiting for my friend Ellie in the car park of a pub, where we often meet for lunch on Fridays. Suddenly I see her arriving in a new Land Rover Defender, costing around £58,000? “Wow,” I say as she steps outside. ‘I love the new wheels!’

“Well, you know how dilapidated my last car was!” she laughs. She is referring to a Volvo SUV that is only a few years old. Unlike my eight-year-old VW Tiguan, which I talked my husband into buying last year and which we are still paying off.

During lunch we talk about work and children. ‘How do you deal with the increase in school fees?’ I ask. ‘We’ve told Matilda she can’t go on a school trip to Italy next year and new bathroom plans are on hold. It’s going to break us and we only have one to pay for. How are you three doing?’

Ellie shrugs her shoulders and says, “Poor Matilda. Difficult, isn’t it? What would you like to drink, Chablis or rosé?’

I realize with sadness that this VAT increase will not affect Ellie at all, probably because she recently inherited a significant amount of money from her father-in-law, who passed away earlier this year. Her husband is an only child and his parents were wealthy.

However, I only know this by process of elimination, not because Ellie told me.

Over the past year she has cut her working days to two, enjoyed a Caribbean holiday and is currently planning a family ski trip to Chamonix. She also started playing tennis and signed up for a luxury cooking course. Yet she won’t admit that anything has changed or talk about her stroke of luck, and the fact is that it’s driving a wedge between us.

It’s not the money. It’s the secrecy that I struggle with.

We’ve been friends for over 30 years, since our first semester at our all-girls high school, and we’ve never kept secrets from each other. We were bridesmaids at each other’s weddings and have shared everything over the years.

Obviously her finances are none of my business, but since we’ve discussed every other aspect of our lives for decades, it baffles me why she won’t talk about this. Could it be because the roughly parallel paths we have followed all our lives are now diverging?

When I inherited £10,000 from my late grandmother in my twenties, I used it as a deposit for a flat. I made no secret of the fact that I could buy like this.

Most of my friends were in a similar situation: struggling with meager salaries but working their way up. We relied on a little help from parents or grandparents to get on the property ladder, and most of our disposable income went towards nights out. Later it disappeared during weddings, vacations and home renovations.

But now, in my forties, a new divide has emerged that threatens to overshadow all those years of friendship: the inheritance divide.

While my husband and I are comfortable by many people’s standards—he works in professional services for a top company, I’m a copywriter—we’re struggling compared to Ellie.

I’ve never been jealous of her before, despite the small holiday home in France and the occasional splurge on designer stuff that she has always enjoyed. But this has changed things. It has changed the dynamic in our relationship.

Money problems at this stage of life seem more acute than ever. Faced with another twenty years of mortgage payments and rising bills, we could really use some help right now.

We would have liked to send both of our children to a private school. Our eldest, now 14, has fortunately passed his 11-plus and is following good local grammar. But our daughter, 11, is not that academic, so we decided to go private, at great personal cost.

It’s a first world problem, but paying out £18,000 a year, which we expect the cost will be with the VAT increase, means forgoing expensive holidays (last year we spent a rainy week in Devon and another week in Wales, but even that has cost us a lot of time), postponing any renovation work (despite the fact that we really need new carpets and electricity) and cutting back on restaurants and day trips. In other words: the kind of things that make life fun.

I worry whether our son will resent me in the future for not educating him privately, but my husband refused to take out a new mortgage. I shudder to think of the six consecutive years of university housing costs we will have to find.

So no, I’m not proud of it, but I do find myself hating those who either inherit a nice amount of money or still have Mom and Dad’s bank to benefit from.

One, a woman I lived with at university, recently complained about her parents having to sell their holiday home so they would no longer have a seaside hideaway – although they did enjoy the cash injection when the proceeds were split.

This was after her parents had previously sold their main home for £5 million, much of which, I assume, went to her and her siblings. Estate planning is big business these days and she is a lucky beneficiary of it.

Another sadly lost both parents in quick succession, but inherited their old parsonage. It’s no exaggeration to say that she never really has to worry about money again. Not that I think for one moment that money can buy happiness, but it’s the absence of worry about it that I envy.

I was talking about this with a good friend who is in a similar situation to me. She confessed that she felt like a pauper among her son’s parents in high school.

Earlier this year she took her two sons to Val d’Isere to ski with another family from the school. “We kept asking how much we owed them for the chalet before we realized they owned it,” she says.

“While he hasn’t told us that this chalet is the byproduct of his elderly mother’s recent death and the inheritance he received, it doesn’t take a genius to put two and two together.”

Another friend also feels the sting of prep school privilege. Although she and her husband, who works in private wealth management, are doing extremely well by anyone’s standards, she doesn’t feel that way compared to some of her new peers.

They may have impressive incomes, but without generational wealth they feel like church mice.

“Freddie and Jack recently went to a tenth birthday party at one of their friends’ houses, which was huge: a big driveway, stained glass windows, you know the kind of thing,” she says.

‘When they got home, they kept asking why we only had two cars. It turns out the dad has a secret Ferris Bueller-style garage under the stables with a slew of supercars. Freddie was thrilled that he got to sit in a Bugatti.” When she Googled the name of the family, she discovered that the son was an heir to a well-known company.

The thing is, I’ve always had friends who are richer than me. Another ex-flatmate from my student days had a flat in Chelsea and a country house in Yorkshire.

Among the residents of her townhouse near Sloane Square were a member of a popular ’90s boy band and a lady. But because we always knew she was busy, that was never a big problem.

It’s the fact that a significant amount of inheritance – or worse, a secret inheritance – later in life changes everything. I can’t help but feel like I’ve fallen down the pecking order: Ellie has started spending time with a much larger gang of rich farmer types who go out shooting at the weekend and have pictures of pheasants on their toilet seats (I don’t make just kidding).

Ellie’s husband went to school with some of them and every now and then I hear her casually talking about a dinner party I was never invited to. (‘Sophia Rutland-Edmonds makes a beautiful pavlova’, etc.)

I can’t deny that I’m a little jealous. Nor that there now exists a divide that we may struggle to overcome.

Maybe one day I’ll find the courage to ask Ellie about her stroke of luck, or she’ll open up to me.

In the meantime, maybe I should start saving for a Land Rover Defender. It will only be ten years before I buy one.