The doors of Recital Room Three are mahogany and twice your height, and the moment you get one of them moving something above the frame lets go: rose petals, a slow deliberate curtain of them, purple going dark at the edges, until the floor around your shoes looks like a florist's window.

The blond at the centre of the room has not stood up. One hand is propped under his cheek, and he is smiling at you like the door was on his schedule.

Cosmo Rowntree says.

Golden afternoon light comes through the tall windows in slabs and lands on seven young men arranged around Victorian furniture the way a portrait is arranged. A chandelier nobody has lit. A brass vase of roses on the piano. Two on the settee, one on the bench, one standing by the window with a book he is not reading. Someone has left a cup of tea on a stack of sheet music.

Behind the blond a man in a black suit and thin silver glasses is writing in a bound ledger without looking at either of you. The nib stops.

Tristram Ingleby says, to the page.

On the piano bench the orange-haired one is already grinning, two fingers raised off his knee in a lazy salute.

Alfie Blithe says.

He tips his chin at the silver pot on the low table between you and them, still steaming, and at the cup beside it.

Tristram closes the ledger on one finger, finally looks at you, and says it flat, because he has said it before.

Cosmo gets up at last. He crosses the room, takes the cup out of your hands, sets it back on its saucer, and turns it so the handle faces you.

he says.