‘I don’t care!’ Peter shouted at their backs.

‘It’s true,’ Arthur said to her, ‘he really doesn’t care.’

‘But you do, don’t you?’ she said, inching a tiny movement closer to him.

‘I really can’t dance, you know that,’ he said.

‘I don’t care a fig. But you’ll dance with me? I couldn’t bear it if I had to sit out the whole time.’

‘Yes, all right,’ he said. The thought of her dancing with other men while he watched from the side was impossible. He smelled her perfume: something floral, heavy and rather alarming. A man dressed in a tailcoat took the men’s coats and the ladies’ little shawls and cardigans in the hallway. It was brightly decked in lanterns and candles, the kind of entrance hall he had only seen in pictures, with a swirling staircase rising from the far end. Numerous doors came off each side, and on the right, one enormous door opened onto a scene of flickering light and the sound of a big band striking up.

Without her shawl, Verity’s long white neck glowed, a curve of smooth porcelain from her chin to her shoulder blades and a wide V falling to the silky blue neckline. The tops of her shoulders were hidden under the blue capped sleeves but her arms were bare, smooth and honey-coloured from the sun. All this Arthur saw in sidelong glances as he tried not to gape. She smiled at him, and pulled him towards the ballroom.

‘You look terrified,’ she said, but it was not terror. Her hand was hot and urgent in his and the promise it signalled buzzed through him like a shot of electricity.

8.

The boy – he said his name was Jack – Muriel was dancing with had a big, wide mouth that was sort of lop-sided, and pale orange eyelashes and eyebrows, and the way he was looking was burning right into her.

He held her in a tight squeeze, and his hands dug quite hard into her back.

‘Bunch of squares, eh, beautiful?’

She laughed. ‘I’m no square,’ she said.

‘No, I bet you’re not,’ he said.