Page 310 of Edge of Eternity (The Century 3)

Dave met Ethel at the entrance to the chamber and took over the wheelchair from one of her friends. She looked triumphant but exhausted, and he could not help wondering how long she had to live.

What a life she had had, he thought as he pushed her through the ornate corridors toward the exit. His own transformation from class dunce to pop star was nothing by comparison with her journey, from a two-bedroom cottage beside the slag heap in Aberowen all the way to the gilded debating chamber of the House of Lords. And she had transformed her country as well as herself. She had fought and won political battles--for votes for women, for welfare, for free health care, for girls' education, and now freedom for the persecuted minority of homosexual men. Dave had written songs that were loved around the world, but that seemed nothing compared with what his grandmother had achieved.

An elderly man walking with two canes stopped them in a paneled hallway. His air of decrepit elegance rang a bell, and Dave recalled seeing him once before, here in the House of Lords, on the day Ethel had become a baroness, about five years ago. The man said amiably: "Well, Ethel, I see you got your buggery bill passed. Congratulations."

"Thank you, Fitz," she said.

Dave remembered, now. This was Earl Fitzherbert, who had once owned a big house in Aberowen called Ty Gwyn, now the College of Further Education.

"I'm sorry to hear you've been ill, my dear," said Fitz. He seemed fond of her.

"I won't mince words with you," Ethel said. "I haven't got long to go. You'll probably never see me again."

"That makes me terribly sad." To Dave's surprise, tears rolled down the old earl's wrinkled face, and he pulled a large white handkerchief from his breast pocket to wipe his eyes. And now Dave recalled that the previous time he had witnessed a meeting between them he had been struck by an undercurrent of intense emotion, barely controlled.

"I'm glad I knew you, Fitz," Ethel said, in a tone that suggested he might have assumed the opposite.

"Are you?" Fitz said. Then to Dave's astonishment he added: "I never loved anyone the way I loved you."

"I feel the same," she said, doubling Dave's amazement. "I can say it now that my dear Bernie's gone. He was my soul mate, but you were something else."

"I'm so glad."

"I have only one regret," Ethel said.

"I know what it is," said Fitz. "The boy."

"Yes. If I have a dying wish, it is that you will shake his hand."

Dave wondered who "the boy" might be. Not himself, presumably.

The earl said: "I knew you would ask me that."

"Please, Fitz."

He nodded. "At my age, I ought to be able to admit when I've been wrong."

"Thank you," she said. "Knowing that, I can die happy."

"I hope there's an afterlife," he said.

"I have no idea," said Ethel. "Good-bye, Fitz."

The old man bent over the wheelchair, with difficulty, and kissed her lips. He pulled himself upright again and said: "Farewell, Ethel."

Dave pushed the wheelchair away.

After a minute he said: "That was Earl Fitzherbert, wasn't it?"

"Yes," said Ethel. "He's your grandfather."

*

The girls were Walli's only problem.

Young, pretty, and sexy in a wholesome way that seemed to him uniquely American, they trooped through his front door in dozens, all eager to have sex with him. The fact that he was remaining faithful to his girlfriend in East Berlin seemed only to make him more desirable.

"Buy a house," Dave had said to the members of the group. "Then, when the bubble bursts and nobody wants Plum Nellie anymore, at least you'll have somewhere to live."

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