At last it was over and Ethel left the chamber. Her family and friends stood up. Dave’s mother led them through a maze of corridors and staircases to a basement room for the party. Dave checked that his guitar was safe in a corner. He and Evie were going to perform, though she was the star: he was merely her accompanist.
Within a few minutes there were about a hundred people in the room.
Evie buttonholed Jasper and started asking him about the student newspaper. The subject was close to his heart, and he answered with enthusiasm, but Dave was sure Evie was on to a loser. Jasper was a boy who knew how to look after his own interests. Right now he had luxurious lodgings, rent-free, a short bus ride from his college. He was not likely to destabilize that comfortable situation by beginning a romance with the daughter of the house, in Dave’s cynical opinion.
However, Evie took Jasper’s attention away from Beep, leaving the field clear for Dave. He got her a ginger beer and asked her what she thought of the ceremony. Surreptitiously, she poured vodka into their soft drinks. A minute later everyone applauded as Ethel came in, dressed now in normal clothes, a red dress and matching coat with a small hat perched on her silver curls. Beep whispered: ‘She must have been drop-dead gorgeous, once upon a time.’
Dave found it creepy to think about his grandmother as an attractive woman.
Ethel began to speak. ‘It’s such a pleasure to share this occasion with all of you,’ she said. ‘I’m only sorry my beloved Bernie didn’t live to see this day. He was the wisest man I ever knew.’
Granddad Bernie had died a year ago.
‘It is strange to be addressed as “My lady”, especially for a lifelong socialist,’ she went on, and everyone laughed. ‘Bernie would ask me whether I had beaten my enemies or just joined them. So let me assure you that I have joined the peerage in order to abolish it.’
They applauded.
‘Seriously, comrades, I gave up being the Member of Parliament for Aldgate because I felt it was time to let someone younger take over, but I haven’t retired. There is too much injustice in our society, too much bad housing and poverty, too much hunger in the world – and I may have only twenty or thirty campaigning years left!’
That got another laugh.
‘I’ve been advised that here in the House of Lords it’s wise to take up one issue and make it your own, and I’ve decided what my issue will be.’
They went quiet. People were always keen to know what Eth Leckwith would do next.
‘Last week my dear old friend Robert von Ulrich died. He fought in the First World War, got in trouble with the Nazis in the thirties, and ended up running the best restaurant in Cambridge. Once, when I was a young seamstress working in a sweatshop in the East End, he bought me a new dress and took me to dinner at the Ritz. And . . .’ she lifted her chin defiantly – ‘and he was a homosexual.’
There was an audible susurration of surprise in the room.
Dave muttered: ‘Blimey!’
Beep said: ‘I like your grandmother.’
People were not used to hearing this subject discussed so openly, especially by a woman. Dave grinned. Good old Grandmam, still making trouble after all these years.
‘Don’t mutter, you’re not really shocked,’ she said crisply. ‘You all know there are men who love men. Such people do no harm to anyone – in fact, in my experience they tend to be gentler than other men – yet what they do is a crime according to the laws of our country. Even worse, plain-clothes police detectives pretending to be men of the same sort entrap them, arrest them and put them in jail. In my opinion this is as bad as persecuting people for being Jewish or pacifist or Catholic. So my main campaign here in the House of Lords will be homosexual law reform. I hope you will all wish me luck. Thank you.’
She got an enthusiastic round of applause. Dave figured that almost everyone in the room genuinely did wish her luck. He was impressed. He thought jailing queers was stupid. The House of Lords went up in his estimation: if you could campaign for that sort of change here, maybe the place was not completely ludicrous.
Finally Ethel said: ‘And now, in honour of our American relatives and friends, a song.’
Evie went to the front and Dave followed her. ‘Trust Grandmam to give them something to think about,’ Evie murmured to Dave. ‘I bet she’ll succeed, too.’
‘She generally gets what she wants.’ He picked up his guitar and strummed the chord of G.
Evie began immediately:
‘
O, say can you see by the dawn’s early light
. . .’
Most of the people in the room were British, not American, but Evie’s voice made them all listen.
‘
What so proudly we hail’d at the twilight’s last gleaming
. . .’
Dave thought nationalist pride was bollocks, really, but, despite himself, he felt a little choked up. It was the song.
‘
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight
O’er the ramparts we’d watched, were so gallantly streaming?
’
The room was so quiet that Dave could hear his own breathing. Evie could do this. When she was on stage, everyone watched.
‘
And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there
. . .’
Dave looked at his mother and saw her wipe away a tear.
‘
Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave,
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
’
They clapped and cheered. Dave had to give his sister credit: she was a pain in the neck at times, but she could hold an audience spellbound.
He got another ginger beer then looked around for Beep, but she was not in the room. He saw her older brother, Cameron, who was a creep. ‘Hey, Cam, where did Beep go?’
‘Out for a smoke, I guess,’ he said.
Dave wondered if he could find her. He decided to go and look. He put down his drink.
He approached the exit at the same time as his grandmother, so he held the door for her. She was probably heading for the ladies’ room: he had a vague notion that old women had to go a lot. She smiled at him and turned up a red-carpeted staircase. He had no idea where he was so he followed her.
On the half-landing she was stopped by an elderly man leaning on a cane. Dave noticed that he was wearing an elegant suit in a pale-grey material with a chalk stripe. A patterned silk handkerchief spilled out of the breast pocket. His face was mottled and his hair was white, but obviously he had once been a good-looking man. He said: ‘Congratulations, Ethel,’ and shook her hand.
‘Thank you, Fitz.’ They seemed to know each other well.
He held on to her hand. ‘So you’re a baroness now.’
She smiled. ‘Isn’t life strange?’
‘Baffles me.’
They were blocking the way, and Dave hovered, waiting. Although their words were trivial, their conversation had an undertone of passion. Dave could not put his finger on what it was.
Ethel said: ‘You don’t mind that your housekeeper has been elevated to the peerage?’
Housekeeper? Dave knew that Ethel had started out as a maid in a big house in Wales. This man must have been her employer.
‘I stopped minding that sort of thing a long time ago,’ the man said. He patted her hand and released it. ‘During the Attlee government, to be precise.’
She laughed. Clearly she liked talking to him. There was a powerful undertone to their conversation, neither love nor hate, but something else. If they had not been so old, Dave would have thought it was sex.
Getting impatient, Dave coughed.
Ethel said: ‘This is my grandson, David Williams. If you really have stopped minding, you might shake his hand. Dave, this is Earl Fitzherbert.’
The earl hesitated, and for a moment Dave thought he was going to refuse to shake; then he seemed to make up his mind, and stuck out his hand. Dave shook it and said: ‘How do you do?’
Ethel said: ‘Thank you, Fitz.’ Or, rather, she almost said it, but seemed to choke before finishing the sentence. Without saying anything more, she walked on. Dave nodded politely at the old earl and followed.
A moment later Ethel disappeared through a door marked ‘Ladies’.
Dave guessed that there was some history between Ethel and Fitz. He decided to ask his mother about it. Then he spotted an exit that might lead outside, and forgot all about the old folk.
He stepped through the door and found himself in an irregular-shaped internal courtyard with rubbish bins. This would be the perfect place for a surreptitious smooch, he thought. It was not a thoroughfare, no windows overlooked it, and there were odd little corners. His hopes rose.
There was no sign of Beep, but he smelled tobacco smoke.
He stepped past the bins and looked around the corner.
She was there, as he had hoped, and there was a cigarette in her left hand. But she was with Jasper, and they were locked in an embrace. Dave stared at them. Their bodies seemed glued together, and they were kissing passionately, her right hand in his hair, his right hand on her breast.
‘You’re a treacherous bastard, Jasper Murray,’ said Dave, then he turned and went back into the building.
* * *
In the school production of
Hamlet
, Evie Williams proposed to play Ophelia’s mad scene in the nude.
Just the idea made Cameron Dewar feel uncomfortably warm.
Cameron adored Evie. He just hated her views. She joined every bleeding-heart cause in the news, from animal cruelty to nuclear disarmament, and she talked as if people who did not do the same must be brutal and stupid. But Cameron was used to this: he disagreed with most people his age, and all of his family. His parents were hopelessly liberal, and his grandmother had once been editor of a newspaper with the unlikely title
The Buffalo Anarchist
.
The Williamses were just as bad, leftists every one. The only halfway sensible resident of the house in Great Peter Street was the sponger Jasper Murray, who was more or less cynical about everything. London was a nest of subversives, even worse than Cameron’s home town of San Francisco. He would be glad when his father’s assignment was over and they could go back to America.
Except that he would miss Evie. Cameron was fifteen years old and in love for the first time. He did not
want
a romance: he had too much to do. But as he sat at his school desk trying to memorize French and Latin vocabulary, he found himself remembering Evie singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’.
She liked him, he felt sure. She realized he was clever, and asked him earnest questions: How did nuclear power stations work? Was Hollywood an actual place? How were Negroes treated in California? Better still, she listened attentively to his answers. She was not making small talk: like him, she had no interest in chit-chat. They would be a well-known intellectual couple, in Cameron’s fantasy.
For this year Cameron and Beep were going to the school Evie and Dave attended, a progressive London establishment where – as far as Cameron could see – most of the teachers were Communists. The controversy about Evie’s mad scene went all around the school in a flash. The drama teacher, Jeremy Faulkner, a beardie in a striped college scarf, actually approved of the idea. However, the head teacher was not so foolish, and he stamped on it decisively.
This was one instance in which Cameron would have been glad to see liberal decadence prevail.
The Williams and Dewar families went together to see the play. Cameron hated Shakespeare but he was looking forward eagerly to seeing what Evie would do on stage. She had an air of intensity that seemed to be brought out by an audience. She was like her great-grandfather, Dai Williams, the pioneering trade unionist and evangelical preacher, according to Ethel, Dai’s daughter. Ethel had said: ‘My father had the same bound-for-glory light in his eyes.’
Cameron had studied
Hamlet
conscientiously – the way he studied everything, in order to get good marks – and he knew that Ophelia was a notoriously difficult part. Supposedly pathetic, she could easily become comic, with her obscene songs. How was a fifteen-year-old going to play this role and carry an audience with her? Cameron did not want to see her fall on her face (although there was, in the back of his mind, a little fantasy in which he put his arms around her delicate shoulders and comforted her as she wept for her humiliating failure).
With his parents and his kid sister, Beep, he filed into the school hall, which doubled as the gym, so that it smelt equally of dusty hymn books and sweaty sneakers. They took their seats next to the Williams family: Lloyd Williams, the Labour MP; his American wife, Daisy; Eth Leckwith, the grandmother, and Jasper Murray, the lodger. Young Dave, Evie’s kid brother, was somewhere else, organizing an intermission bar.
Several times in the past few months Cameron had heard the story of how his mother and father had first met here in London, during the war, at a party given by Daisy. Papa had walked Mama home: when he told the story, a strange light came into his eye, and Mama gave him a look that said
Shut the hell up right now
, and he said no more. Cameron and Beep wondered pruriently what their parents had done on the walk home.
A few days later, Papa had parachuted into Normandy, and Mama had thought she would never see him again; but, all the same, she had broken off her engagement to another man. ‘My mother was furious,’ Mama said. ‘She never forgave me.’
Cameron found the school hall seats uncomfortable even for the half-hour of morning assembly. Tonight was going to be purgatory. He knew all too well that the full play was five hours long. Evie had assured him that this was a shortened version. Cameron wondered how short.
He spoke to Jasper, sitting next to him. ‘What’s Evie going to wear for the mad scene?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Jasper. ‘She won’t tell anyone.’
The lights went down and the curtain rose on the battlements of Elsinore.
The painted backdrops that formed the scenery were Cameron’s work. He had a strong visual sense, presumably inherited from his father, the photographer. He was particularly pleased with the way the painted moon concealed a spotlight that picked out the sentry.