Gideon had read what she'd sent.
Frankie could tell because he'd marked it.
Three neat ticks, two questions and a line beneath founding company.
The paper lay beside his plate. She'd kept it to a page and a half, which now seemed half a page too generous.
“Ninety thousand pounds,” he said.
Vivian reached for her water.
Frankie didn't.
“Advance.”
“Against?”
“The founding place and the production of the reopening weekend. The private preview is part of that.”
“And what do I own?”
“Nothing you can sell.”
He smiled.
“People usually make that sound better.”
“Do you need me to?”
He looked at the paper again.
She had written the proposal as Celia Quinn, curator of the revived Tuesday Table, authorised by the people and history behind it. The house was real. The history was real. The quiet company which had supposedly chosen to extend an invitation existed on her page, in the parts she'd given Duncan and the actors, and nowhere else.
Gideon had circled the word invitation.
“Who else has one?”
“Several conversations are taking place.”
“With?”
“People who don't enjoy being told they're one of several conversations.”
“I can understand that.”
“So can I.”
Duncan sat at the far side of the table, the grey jacket looking better now that he'd stopped trying to keep it perfect. As Lorne Bell, he had come to lunch because Vivian had asked him, not to prove any particular thing about Gideon.
At least that was how he sat.
Frankie had spent the drive rehearsing answers. Duncan seemed to have spent his thinking about what he would eat.
Nina was with June at the door.
The first course arrived.
Gideon looked down.
“That's not mine.”
The young waiter looked at the plate, then at his other hand.
“Yes. Sorry.”
One was a tart. The other was fish. He had tried to put them down in the order which would save him a journey round the table, and the table had disagreed.
“I'll take that,” Duncan said.
The waiter turned.
“Are you sure?”
“It was what I asked for.”
He moved the plate.
Gideon laughed.
“Very democratic.”
“Only about lunch,” Duncan said.
The conversation recovered without Frankie having to touch it.
She wanted Gideon to notice the recovery. He did. His shoulders settled.
He turned to Vivian.
“What happens to the house?”
“We'll do what it needs.”
“Roof?”
“Some of it.”
“Windows?”
“Not all at once.”
He nodded. Practical answers. He knew how buildings took money and hid the result until the next person asked what had happened to it.
“That's separate from my place.”
“Related,” Frankie said. “The weekend belongs here. A founding commitment should make something possible.”
“Then why not ask everybody for the same thing?”
“We aren't asking everyone for the same thing.”
“What does Lorne contribute?”
Duncan looked up.
“Depends what Celia can persuade me to give.”
Gideon grinned.
“Money?”
“Attention, mainly. I try not to bring too much of either.”
“You don't seem worried about the ninety.”
“It isn't mine.”
Frankie almost laughed.
She had asked him not to be so dry. She was glad he hadn't listened.
Gideon cut a piece of fish.
“I'm going to ask something unreasonable.”
“Good,” she said. “Reasonable questions take longer.”
“One guest. Mine.”
“Who?”
“He hasn't decided whether he wants to come.”
“Then he isn't your guest yet.”
Gideon looked at her.
“That's how invitations work.”
“Most.”
“Not yours.”
“They're invitations to a particular company.”
“And you don't know whether he'd fit.”
“No.”
“What if I gave you another thirty?”
Vivian's hand stopped against the stem of her glass.
There it was. Money for a thing Frankie could probably have allowed at no cost, money which could have solved some of the hotel's smaller humiliations or Nina's unpaid ambitions.
She looked at Gideon.
“No.”
His smile stayed, though its warmth changed.
“No.”
“Not for a guest I haven't met.”
“That's quite strict.”
“Would you want to come if another thirty could buy anybody a chair?”
He considered.
Duncan took a bite of his tart. He gave Frankie no help she could see.
She waited.
Gideon looked towards the doors, where Nina was arranging something with the staff.
“Perhaps not.”
He let the additional offer go.
Frankie didn't know whom he'd meant. Felix, perhaps. Somebody he wanted to impress, somebody he wanted to make turn up because the invitation had come through him. She couldn't treat a possibility as something he had told her.
She said, “If you want him considered, tell me who he is.”
“Later.”
“Of course.”
He picked up the proposal.
“References.”
She had expected that.
“From?”
“Somebody who has seen you do this.”
Vivian sat a little straighter.
“The Table hasn't been done for decades,” Frankie said. “You'll be seeing what starts it again. If you want a reference for the house, you have one already.”
“And the people?”
“You're meeting them.”
“No titles. No biographies.”
“Do you want them?”
“I'm used to getting them.”
“That wasn't what I asked.”
He watched her.
She had brought a few real names from the hotel's past, a genuine photograph, actual production costs and the care with which everyone in the room was performing their work. The rest depended on him wanting to be selected by people he couldn't simply price.
If he insisted on a full account of the invented company, she would have to make more lies. Each additional detail gave him something else to examine.
Duncan put down his fork.
“What do you want to know about me?”
Gideon looked at him.
“That depends what you're willing to say.”
“I've spent years doing work most people notice only if it goes wrong.”
“That's a great deal of work.”
“It is. I like an evening where nobody asks me for a performance.”
Frankie looked at him.
He didn't look back.
Gideon gave a short laugh.
“Yes. So do I.”
The quiet company at the table became something he could want without having to justify the wanting as business. Duncan hadn't told him anything verifiable. He'd offered something recognisable.
Nina came towards them.
“The menu for the preview,” she said to Vivian.
She put it between Vivian and Gideon. Not a grand document. A practical choice which hadn't yet been made.
Gideon read.
“You could do better than this.”
“Which bit?” Nina asked.
He named a course.
“That needs someone extra,” she said. “And it slows service.”
“So hire someone.”
“We can. Is that the evening you want? Longer pauses while people admire what they've been given?”
He looked up.
Frankie felt Vivian stiffen.
Nina didn't retreat.
Gideon pointed at the page.
“Something simpler.”
“Good.”
“You knew I'd say that.”
“I hoped.”
She took the menu and went back to June.
For a moment Gideon watched her.
Then he looked at Frankie.
“She doesn't flatter.”
“She has a show to make.”
“What about you?”
“I have a room to choose.”
“You've chosen it.”
“Not everyone in it.”
He placed the marked proposal beside her hand.
“All right.”
She didn't touch it.
“All right what?”
“The ninety. The preview. The weekend. No additional chair unless you approve.”
Vivian took one slow breath.
Frankie heard it because she'd been holding her own.
“I'll send the practical arrangements,” she said.
“Today.”
“Yes.”
“I don't intend to chase this.”
“You shouldn't.”
His hand rested on the paper a moment longer. He had made the decision, and he wanted the room to understand that it was generous.
Frankie let him have that.
They finished lunch.
It was good, and Gideon said so. He told Duncan a story about an event at which the centrepieces had hidden every person from the person opposite. Duncan said he'd attended family dinners which would have benefited.
Vivian laughed.
Frankie laughed too.
She could have stayed there a long time, making an expensive stranger believe he'd found somewhere nobody was doing that to him.
When Gideon left, he stopped beside Nina.
“Good choice on the menu.”
“It isn't final yet.”
“But that was.”
She smiled.
He took his umbrella, though it had stopped raining, and went.
Vivian remained at the window until his car had left the drive.
“Another thirty,” she said.
Frankie took the proposal from the table.
“He didn't give it.”
“You didn't let him.”
“He needed to know there was something he couldn't buy.”
“And apparently it was our thirty thousand pounds.”
Duncan pushed in his chair.
“It was his.”
Nina laughed.
Vivian didn't.
She went to the office to speak to June about the window work, and Frankie followed because the argument wouldn't improve by becoming distant.
The office was small. Papers in trays, a calendar with repairs and bookings written over one another, two chairs which were never both available. June was on the telephone.
She held up a hand.
They waited.
Frankie looked at the invoice she'd brought. A supposed founding arrangement, real production work, an amount large enough to make her old reflexes sit up.
She was going to enjoy the receipt.
That worried her less than it should have.
June finished the call.
“What?”
“Gideon has agreed,” Vivian said.
June looked pleased.
“For the launch?”
“Yes.”
“Then I need to know what we're actually doing. Not what everybody's pleased he's agreed to.”
Nina came in behind Frankie.
“I'll go through it with you.”
“Good.”
“We'll need extra hours.”
“I know.”
“Paid.”
“I assumed.”
Vivian put down the invoice.
“We need the advance first.”
It arrived that evening.
Not while they were still entertaining him, not as a flourish on a phone he tilted for them to admire. Vivian rang Frankie after dinner and asked her to come back to the office if she was still near enough.
She was.
Duncan had gone home. Nina was there, looking at the working budget with a pen behind her ear.
Vivian showed them the actual receipt in the hotel's account.
Ninety thousand pounds.
Frankie looked at the number.
She had imagined it many times. On a proposal, in a conversation, as a measure of what Gideon wanted. Received money was different. It made the imagined thing start to feel as though it had been real all along.
Nina put down the budget.
“Thirty for getting the first evening and the launch started. Cast, work, rooms, food, what we've agreed. Sixty stays where it is.”
“For now,” Vivian said.
“For now.”
Frankie looked up.
“We aren't paying ourselves tonight.”
Nina gave her a sharp glance.
“I hadn't suggested it.”
“Nor had I,” Vivian said.
Frankie shut her mouth.
They were all looking at money they'd wanted for different reasons.
Vivian wanted to put it into walls and windows, and into an evening people would remember she had given. Nina wanted a show large enough to carry her name. Duncan, elsewhere, would want to know what it meant to have Claire's talent produce something he could keep.
Frankie wanted to feel that they'd looked at her and seen somebody who could do this.
She folded the proposal and put it in her bag.
Nina went back to the budget.
Vivian rang June to say the extra hours could be booked.
Outside, the hotel continued. A guest asked for another pillow. A door closed. Somebody laughed in the lobby.
The number was still there when Frankie looked again.