Vivian had put the old menus in a biscuit tin.
Frankie found that reassuring until she realised it was a very good tin: cream lettering, a painted ship, no dent in the lid. Even Vivian's storage had expectations.
“Sit there,” Vivian said.
“Where?”
“Not on the photograph.”
Frankie moved it.
They were in the little room beside the hotel office, with the Sunday papers stacked under the window and the smell of breakfast still coming through the corridor. Nina sat on the floor because she'd arrived first and claimed the patch of sunlight. Duncan was bringing mugs from the office.
It was an odd arrangement for people planning to rob somebody. Frankie had expected more secrecy. At least a room with the door shut.
Vivian took out another menu.
“Fifty-four.”
“Guests?”
“Year.”
The paper was thick, yellowed round the edges. At the top, in blue ink, somebody had written Tuesday Table. Below it were three courses and a short list of names in a hand which assumed each person required no explanation.
Frankie read the list.
“Anybody I should have heard of?”
“Young then. Important here.”
“That isn't an answer.”
“It's the one I've got.”
She looked at a photograph.
Eight people at a table. Men in jackets, women in dresses which seemed to have been designed to make sitting down an act of resolve. A waiter stood in the background looking as though he had been caught between duties and would be blamed for whichever he didn't complete.
“The thing about a photograph,” Frankie said, “is nobody remembers whether the evening was any good.”
Vivian leaned across to inspect it.
“My father said it was.”
“Did he go?”
“Once.”
“What happened?”
“He wasn't asked again.”
Nina looked up.
“Why?”
“My mother asked too loudly whether they ever ate anything hot.”
Duncan set down the mugs.
“I like your mother.”
“She died forty years ago. Very difficult woman.”
Frankie smiled.
Vivian took the photograph back.
“This was a place people wanted to be.”
“Who chose them?”
“The people already there.”
“And why did it stop?”
Vivian's fingers rested on the edge of the paper.
“People died. People moved away. Some who remained discovered television. It wasn't a constitution, Frankie. It was supper.”
The real name sounded strange in her mouth.
Frankie drank the tea Duncan had brought. Milk already in it. He'd remembered how she took it, or taken a guess which pleased her too much.
She put it down.
“No one's inherited the right to it.”
“No.”
“No living committee.”
“Not unless they've failed to tell me for fifty years.”
“Good.”
Vivian looked offended.
“Good for this. We wouldn't have to persuade a surviving chairman that he'd appointed me.”
“What would you be?”
Frankie looked round the room.
There was a lot to work with. The old hotel, the paper, Vivian's authority, the fact that breakfast guests kept walking past without ever wondering whether the place was real. Any false thing put here would acquire the smell of toast and furniture polish.
“A curator.”
Nina tipped her head back against the wall.
“Of supper.”
“Of the Table. Curator sounds like somebody whose power is arranging other people's importance. Nobody wants to ask exactly who pays her.”
“I do,” Nina said.
“That will be a private discussion.”
“It always is with you.”
The sunlight had moved off Nina's shoes. She slid the tin farther into it.
Frankie took the photograph again, carefully this time.
“Don't make it a club. Clubs have memberships and benefits and people who ring to ask why the pool's shut. Make it an occasion which happens to have selected people.”
“Tuesday?” Duncan asked.
“Not necessarily.”
“That's quite a thing to happen to a Tuesday Table.”
“It can survive a Saturday. Most people do.”
Vivian looked towards the door.
“A relaunch weekend.”
“Something like that. A founding company. Small. No applications. Nothing you can buy by filling in a form.”
“With the interesting exception that Gideon buys it,” Nina said.
“He funds the occasion. The invitation is bestowed.”
Duncan sat.
“By you.”
“Through me.”
“There's the distinction.”
He didn't smile. Frankie couldn't tell whether he was irritated or helping.
She looked back at the picture. There was a woman near the centre who wasn't looking towards the photographer. Somebody beside her must have said something worth turning for. The whole room might have wanted to know what it was.
Frankie wanted Gideon to want that.
Not a gold chair, not a bottle which arrived with fireworks. A person leaning towards him because she'd chosen to hear him finish.
“Why him?” she asked.
Vivian set a mug on a coaster, moving Duncan's at the same time.
“Because he comes here.”
“Regularly?”
“Not every week. Business meals. A room when his own house is inconvenient. We hosted one of his launches years ago. He likes the house.”
“Does he like you?”
“Of course.”
Nina made a sound.
Vivian glanced at her.
“He calls me Mrs Holt. It pleases him to know where to put people.”
Frankie waited.
“He'll pay for a good occasion,” Vivian said. “And he likes being the reason it happened.”
“What does he do when it doesn't?”
“He asks why. He's quite good at that.”
It was useful to hear. Frankie didn't want a mark who was only rich on paper and vain in a sentence. She wanted to know which way he'd turn when somebody refused him.
Duncan said, “His brother used to be the one people wanted.”
Vivian looked at him.
“You know Felix?”
“I've met him. They were both at an opening. One gave a speech about the next five years. The other remembered the name of the woman holding his coat.”
“Which mattered more?” Nina asked.
“Depends how you measure five years.”
Frankie looked from Duncan to Vivian.
“What happened between them?”
“Business,” Vivian said. “Money. Pride. There'll be versions.”
“Which one does Gideon tell?”
“That he did all the work.”
“And Felix?”
“That people came.”
Nina sat forward.
“Imagine being asked for something your brother can't give you.”
Frankie could.
She could imagine Gideon accepting a drink in a room which didn't need him to explain how much it cost. A company which appeared to have made its choice before he arrived. One seat, his, waiting because somebody thought the evening would be better with him.
She could make that seat desirable.
The thought arrived with an almost physical pleasure.
Duncan saw her looking at the picture.
“That's it, is it?”
“What?”
“You've started.”
She set it down.
“I'm thinking.”
“Yes.”
Nina got up from the floor, brushed dust from her trousers and took the menu from Frankie.
“If we're doing this, I'm producing it.”
“Of course.”
“No. Not hanging lamps where you point. Producing.”
Frankie looked at her.
Nina had been younger in the festival photographs, wearing a headset too big for her face, grinning at a stage with nothing on it yet. She'd made that stage worth borrowing money for. Frankie had known it when she took the money.
“What do you want to decide?”
“The show. Entrances. Who works it. What I'm asking them to do. Where my name goes.”
“Not on the false—”
“On the real work. Which there will be quite a lot of.”
Vivian nodded.
“I can't have another evening where staff are promised things by someone who hasn't checked the rota.”
“The staff won't know about Gideon's invitation,” Frankie said. “They'll know we're giving a private preview, then a relaunch. Paid work.”
“They'll ask what sort of relaunch,” Nina said.
“Theatrical. A revival of the old suppers.”
Duncan looked at the photograph.
“Some of that's true.”
“Most of what they do will be.”
“And what do I do?”
Frankie studied him.
He didn't look like a criminal. Neither did Vivian, in the jacket she wore to complain to plumbers. Nina might have done, if the offence involved getting thirty people into a building before a van could unload.
Duncan looked like somebody you might tell something to.
“Be invited,” Frankie said.
“As myself?”
“We'll talk about that.”
“Do I have to be rich?”
“Comfortable enough not to mention it.”
“I can manage comfortable.”
“You do it very well.”
His face closed a little.
Frankie stopped smiling.
Vivian gathered the menus.
“How much?”
“For what?”
“The thing you're going to sell him.”
“We haven't made it yet.”
“That didn't stop Anna.”
The name landed between the mugs.
Frankie could have said this was different. She could have said they were doing it together, they would spend real money, there would be an actual occasion. All true, none of it useful just then.
She said, “Enough for it to be worth wanting.”
“And enough for us,” Nina said.
“Yes.”
“How much of it gets spent?”
“That depends what you build.”
“Excellent. A conversation I enjoy.”
Duncan looked towards the corridor, where a child was asking whether the lift went sideways. Somebody replied that it wasn't supposed to, which made the question seem less absurd.
“People will be here,” he said.
“They are here,” Vivian said.
“I mean during all this.”
“The hotel operates. It has to.”
Frankie stood.
She hadn't said yes yet. She could go outside, get into her car and start making calls under her own name. She could tell the truth badly, lose work, find some other work. There were people whose job was to listen to what Vivian had in the folder.
She looked at the photograph one last time.
“What room did they use?”
Vivian rose too.
“The Ballroom.”
“Show me.”
Nina caught her sleeve before she reached the door.
“That is yes?”
Frankie looked at the hand on the fabric, then at Nina.
“It is.”
Nina let go.
Outside in the corridor, June was moving a trolley past the doorway.
“Mrs Holt. The Morning Room isn't available for you to fill with photographs.”
“I'm not filling it with anything.”
“You did last time.”
“A small exhibition.”
“Four tables. People ate on their knees.” June glanced at Nina. “You used to be the one complaining.”
“I still am,” Nina said.
Vivian drew herself up.
“Those were quite important photographs.”
“So was the breakfast.”
Frankie moved out of the trolley's way. June took it towards the open doors at the end of the corridor, where a man was waiting with a newspaper and a plate.
Vivian watched her go.
“She's very good.”
“I noticed,” Frankie said.
“Very difficult, too.”
Nina laughed.
Frankie followed them towards the Ballroom.
At the door she could hear the piano being tuned, one note repeated until it stopped sounding like music and became a request.
She had missed this.
She would have liked not to know how much.