It took concentration to steal past the kitchen doorway and reach her own bedroom. If Ruth were to see her, there’d be no escaping; it would be a long night, filled with stories of the time Ruth spied the Dowager Countess of Mazovia in a tryst with a wealthy hotel patron quite evidently not of the same social stratum – or of what Rosa swore she saw the Right Honourable Freddie Prince doing with Lord Hoxton’s son in the bedroom of the Livingstone Suite. ‘Nancy!’ they would cry out, and then that was it; the night would be lost.

Weeks had passed but she could still hear the echo of that saxophone playing in her mind. Twice now she had dallied by the doors of the ballroom as the demonstrations went on inside, mindful of the way Mr Simenon glared at her from the reception desk when he happened to look up. The gramophone records she’d play for her father as she sat by his bedside had brought him such comfort in those final months. And yet, to hear it played by real musicians, to catch glimpses of the dan-cers crossing the ballroom so elegantly – that was something of which she had barely even dreamed! When she had first come here, she had thought of the Buckingham’s Art Deco doors, with their bronze revolving frames, as the entrance to another world. Listening to the music she understood there were yet more worlds inside the hotel. The music could carry you there.

Somehow she made it past the staff kitchen. A single bed sat under a window in her room, which looked out only on to other windows across a narrow yard, and beside that was a small wardrobe with space enough to hang her uniform, and a bedside table where three candles had already guttered to stubs. She had a pile of Harper’s Bazaar magazines she’d taken from the staff kitchen. The girls said that Hélène Marchmont, who danced daily with the debonair Raymond de Guise, was once a regular feature of these types of magazines – draped in the latest ball gowns, adorned with jewellery so fine that only princesses and starlets ever wore it – that, by the time she was Nancy’s age, she was being courted to cross the oceans to California, where a dozen different directors said she would become a star. The legend went that Hélène had fallen in love with the ballroom instead, when one of her suitors dragged her along to a tea dance in Kensington. Some of the magazines were snide about that – why forsake the glamour of Hollywood for a ballroom? But Nancy, who had only caught the merest glimpses of the ballroom, believed she could understand.