“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.”

Walli was beginning to realize that Dave was very smart. Since he had set up the two companies, Nellie Records and Plum Publishing, the group were making a lot more money. Walli was still not the millionaire people thought he was, though he would be when the royalties started to come in from For Your Pleasure Tonight. Meanwhile, he could at last afford to buy a home of his own.

Early in 1967 he bought a bow-fronted Victorian house in San Francisco, on Haight Street near the corner of Ashbury. In this neighborhood, property values had been blighted by a years-long battle over a proposed freeway that was never built. Low rents drew students and other young people, who created a laid-back ambience that then attracted musicians and actors. Members of the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane lived there. It was common to see rock stars, and Walli could walk around almost like a normal person.

The Dewars, the only people Walli knew in San Francisco, expected him to gut the house and modernize it; but he thought the old-fashioned coffered ceilings and wood paneling were cool, and he kept everything, though he had it all painted white.

He installed two luxurious bathrooms and a custom kitchen with a dishwashing machine. He shopped for a television set and a state-of-the-art record player. Otherwise he bought little normal furniture. He put rugs and cushions on the polished wood floors, mattresses and coat rails in the bedrooms. He had no chairs other than six stools of the kind used by guitarists in recording studios.

Both Cameron and Beep Dewar were students at Berkeley, the San Francisco branch of the University of California. Cam was a weirdo who dressed like a middle-aged man and was more conservative than Barry Goldwater. But Beep was cool, and she introduced Walli to her friends, some of whom lived in his neighborhood.