Page 74 of Edge of Eternity (The Century 3)

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 gray 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 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 hometown 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 chitchat. 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.

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