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 onto 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.”