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.

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 onstage. 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.”