It had been a long, hard road from following his father to the dance halls to waltzing across the Grand Ballroom at the Buckingham Hotel, and Raymond owed it all to Georges de la Motte. In the days after Raymond himself had started dancing in the Brancroft – the envy even of his father, for all the girls flocked to dance with Ray Cohen – there’d been talk of the ballroom dance festival in faraway Brighton, a place where young and old, high-born and low could pitch themselves against each other for the coveted title Dancer of the Year. Raymond had grown obsessed with going, but it was a fool’s dream; Brighton may as well have been over the oceans, an entirely different world. Only . . . Stanley Cohen loved his boy. And when he put his hand in his back pocket and came out with his fist crammed with enough money to get Ray there and back again, it was nothing more or less than an act of love. Raymond had put his arms around the old man then, and even though he had shaken him off – he was a man, after all – he had hesitated just enough that Raymond knew how much he was loved.

When he got there, Brighton was a revelation. Not just the seafront and the lights. Not just the girls, who braved the cold and turned Raymond’s eye, up and down the pier. The Elysium Hotel was quite unlike any dance hall Raymond had seen before. Opulent glass chandeliers hung down from a barrel-vaulted ceiling, patterned in panels of gold and white. Three walls of the ballroom were lined in boxes for paying customers, each one of them draped in velvet. The dance floor itself was a chequerboard of ten thousand squares of gleaming mahogany, walnut and greenwood – and when Raymond stepped on it for the first time, it seemed to shift with his weight. Waltzing across the hard stone of the Brancroft Social Club could never compare to the sprung dance floor of the Brighton Elysium. Raymond had felt like he was dancing on air.

And then there were the other dancers . . .