Louis Kildare was the first through the door and down the uneven stairs – but then, he’d been here before. The Midnight Rooms didn’t care whether a musician was white or black, rich or poor – and, in 1929, when Kildare had first sauntered through these Soho streets, fresh off the steamer that had brought him from his West Indies home, the Midnight Rooms had been one of the first to give him a chance. He could still remember sitting on a stool in the cramped basement club, taking his saxophone out of its case and giving them his best rendition of the solo from ‘Squeeze Me’, the version first performed by Albert Brunies and his Halfway House Orchestra. Kildare had played for the Midnight Rooms crowd that very same night. It was the same night he’d met Gus Black, Fred Wright, and so many of the others who would one day sign up with the Archie Adams Band.

Halfway down the stairs, he looked back to see Hélène Marchmont and Raymond de Guise still hovering on the threshold, like a married couple uncertain whether they should venture through the bedroom doors. Kildare beamed at them – those two dancers had spent far too long in the cosseted halls of the Buckingham Hotel! – and disappeared into the darkness at the bottom of the stairs.

In the street above, Raymond could tell that Hélène was anxious. A starlet like Hélène had not come up through the dance halls. There was a time when Hélène had been an amateur dancer, the classical beauty waltzing on the arm of whatever gentleman was courting her at the tea dances and private parties of Fitzrovia, Mayfair, and Holland Park. Those were the days when her glacial blue eyes had stared out of the cover of every magazine. But Hélène had wanted more. The world was not kind to the beautiful. It used them and then, when the years took their beauty away, it kicked them aside. What riches she had saved from her days modelling for Harper’s and Vogue had been enough to hire tutors, and it had been one of those tutors who first brought her to the ballroom. Most dancers found their feet in places like this basement club, but Hélène had come through unscathed.

‘Aren’t you nervous, Raymond?’

He didn’t tell her that this wasn’t his first visit to the Midnight Rooms. He could distinctly remember standing on the cusp of these very same stairs with his father, listening to the wild hubbub below – both of them, simple East End boys, pulsing with nerves at what they would see below.

But that had been the old days. 1925. What new dances, new music, he might find here now, he didn’t know.

‘It’s just dancing,’ he said. ‘The high-born dance, and so too does the rest of the world.’