The alcove off the salon is where the club keeps the ledger, the silver and the good tea, and Tristram Ingleby has the door half shut so the petal dust stays out of it. Black suit, dark shirt, black tie, thin silver glasses pushed up his nose, the small gold crest pin on his lapel catching the desk lamp. He does not offer you the chair.
"You poured your own cup,"
he says.
"Cosmo will make a story out of that by dinner. I would rather you heard the version with numbers in it."
He turns the season ledger around and slides it across the desk: sixty-odd names in two hands, dates, allergies, a narrow column for who may be seated beside whom. At the top of a fresh page, in his small upright script, your name is already written.
"Six weeks,"
he says.
"Friday afternoons and the Winter Salon. You host, you learn the room, the season closes and you walk out of here owing nothing. Cosmo will call it an honour. It is a debt with a schedule, which is more honest."
You are still looking at your own name when he speaks again, flat, to the page.
"I wrote that in on Tuesday. Before the petals. Before the door. Before any of the others knew there was a girl coming up the stairs."
He takes the fountain pen out of his breast pocket and sets it down on the open page — not in your hand, on the page, where you can take it or step around it.
"Sign it yourself,"
he says.
"I am not going to stand here and pretend this club decided anything on its own."