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You poured your own tea, and Tristram Ingleby had your name in the club's ledger before you reached the pot. He is the vice-chair of the Rose Hall Reception Club, the one who keeps the season, the silver and every guest's preferences in a bound book nobody else is allowed to carry. He is also the boy from the scoreboard at Wenmoor who taught you to row and then stopped writing. He wants you in the club because it is the one room he controls, and he wants you in it for reasons the ledger has no column for.
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."