The clubs Raymond had been used to were small, dark, underground places where it scarcely mattered whether you danced well or not at all – but here, in the incandescent environs of the Elysium, everything seemed so much more. The ballroom itself exuded splendour. The ball gowns and evening suits that the other competitors wore were tailored perfectly to their bodies. Until then, Ray Cohen had thought he was a competent dancer, that he might even have had a chance. But now he realised: there was another world out there, a world he hadn’t even imagined, a world to which he was desperate to gain access. And right now, as he watched the elegant dancers of high society twirl, standing on the edge of the dance floor in an ill-fitting suit handed down from his father, he felt as if he was on the other side of a glass partition, peering in.

As soon as the heats began, Raymond had known that he couldn’t compete. Old men here moved with more elegance than he had ever seen in the Brancroft. Free spins and feather steps, back whisks and telemarks. Raymond had learned much already – but the opportunity to become truly proficient had, he realised with some despair, never been his in the clubs off the Whitechapel Road. However good he thought he was, the most amateur of these dancers was better. He crashed out of the competition in the first round and, chastened, would have fled back to the East End there and then had he not, deep in his cups that night, stumbled into a man by the name of Georges de la Motte. The aristocratic de la Motte, already an international darling of the ballroom, was holding court in the corner of a public house that backed on to the Elysium Hotel when Ray Cohen quite literally fell over his own feet and into him. Some sharp wit in the crowd had cried out, ‘That one’ll never be a dancer, not with feet like that!’, but de la Motte – ever the gentleman – had leaped to his defence, picked him up and made him party to the evening’s celebrations.