At 9 p.m., with the last of the late summer light finally fading across London, the door to the Park Suite opened and Maynard Charles stepped into the corridor. Moments earlier, he had stepped out of his dressing gown and back into the double-breasted grey suit he wore for all formal occasions. With a look over his shoulder, he closed the door behind him, produced a single silver key and made certain that the lock was tight. Then he glided on, until finally he reached the top of the stairs, where he waited as an attendant summoned the lift. In his mind he began listing the tasks he had to complete before the night was through.

Running the Buckingham Hotel was not, as many hoteliers said, like being the captain of a ship. It was more, Maynard Charles mused – as he stepped into the ornate golden cage of the executive lift and allowed the attendant to take him down through the Buckingham’s many floors – like being the conductor of an orchestra. All of the musicians had to play in time with one another, or the whole piece would sound discordant and wrong. He allowed himself a thin smile, for he found the idea that he and Archie Adams had anything in common wryly amusing. Maynard Charles was not a man of music, but he could appreciate the value of an orchestra and dance troupe. What he could not appreciate was the manner of a man like Archie Adams, and so many among his band, who seemed to live for nothing other than the ‘good times’ they had with their instruments in hand. Most of them are too young to have been in Flanders or France, Maynard thought. They’d be different men if they had been out there like me and my brothers, if they’d heard the roaring cannonade, sat cramped together in a hole in the earth for days on end while a very different sort of music – the deathly music of mortars, the music of bombs – played all around. Perhaps that might have drilled some decorum, some sobriety, some propriety, into them. Thank the Lord, he found himself thinking, the Buckingham did not host the rhumbas and sambas of which some of his guests had spoken. The world was a licentious place but some bastions of righteousness remained.

The third-floor cocktail lounge was walled in great glass windows that overlooked the treetops of Berkeley Square, with a terrace on which the Buckingham gardeners had reared exotica with such fine fragrances that guests might easily think themselves drinking Martinis on some balmy Mediterranean coast. Regular guests called this place the Garden Lounge, but Maynard insisted upon its proper name: the Candlelight Club. Inside, a harpist was playing on a tiny spotlit stage and the room, bathed in blue light, was alive with guests in lounge suits and bias-cut dresses, while a veritable army of waiters flitted silently between them, keeping glasses full.