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His appeals had some effect, but it was the shift of the arc lights that really put a stop to the chaos. They were shining upward now, picking out a man who was clambering across the forest of iron girders that held up the great glazed roof one hundred and fifty feet above the audience down below. Five Blackshirts were up there, too, but they were hesitant in their pursuit, clearly frightened that they would fall. The man looked back at them contemptuously and shouted, “Down with Fascism!” and then pulled himself up acrobatically onto a higher platform out of sight, and the lights swung back to Mosley.

He was ranting about the Jews. “European ghettos are pouring their dregs into our great country. The dregs of humanity—you know who I am referring to!” he roared, and Esmond pulled Theo’s arm and got to his feet.

“Down with Fascism!” he yelled, echoing the man in the roof, and Theo realized he was shouting too. At least he could hear a voice that sounded like his. And once he’d started, he couldn’t stop. “Fascism is murder!” he cried. “They’re murdering the Jews; they’ll murder us all if we let them.” He wasn’t aware of his body or of Esmond, only his voice crying out in the wilderness, until he felt the blows coming and shrank into a ball, curling himself fetus-like on the hard floor as the stewards kicked him with their heavy boots. Then he felt their foul hands pulling him up and he couldn’t resist as they twisted his arms behind his back, starting a new exquisite pain that he would have done anything to stop, but which was replaced with something new and even more terrible when they reached the top of the metal stairs and flung him down into the outer corridor, where more of them were waiting to administer a final crescendo of punishment before they finally threw him out into the street.

He lay on the ground where he’d landed. The pain was excruciating, but it was alleviated by his body’s awareness that the blows that had caused the hurt had ceased. He moved his fingers and toes successfully but kept his eyes closed and didn’t try to get up. He could hear the chanting of the demonstrators, but he paid it no attention: it was a background noise in his consciousness, irrelevant to his present situation.

“Can you stand? Can you walk?” This voice was close and he had to attend to it because whoever was speaking was lifting him, pulling his arm across broad shoulders. He began to move, tottering forward, and then he was sinking again and another voice was telling him to open his eyes. It was a young man with a beard and he was examining him, tapping and poking, and Theo cried out because it hurt, but the man said: “It’s okay. You’re lucky. They gave you one hell of a beating, but nothing’s broken as far as I can tell.”

Theo shook his head because he felt that he was the opposite of lucky, but it wasn’t worth arguing, because it hurt to speak.

Theo couldn’t see the other man—the one who’d lifted him up and helped him walk—because he was behind his head, but he heard him whistle in admiration and say: “You’re a brave man, Comrade. A hero. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“Where’s Esmond?” Theo asked.

“No Esmond here,” said the man. “Just you and me and Doctor Dan—well, he’s more a medical student, actually.”

“Second year at Saint Bart’s,” said Doctor Dan, handing Theo a bottle of water and a couple of pink pills, which he obediently swallowed without asking what they were.

“I need to go home,” he said. “Can you help me?”

“Where’s that?” asked the man who wasn’t Dan. Theo could see him now—he looked like Frank Vogel. Solid and honest, someone you could depend on.

Theo could feel Jacob’s card in his pocket, but he had no intention of going back to the bookshop. He wasn’t going to get anywhere, living penniless in London. He knew he needed his stepfather’s help if he was going to get back on his feet. “Mayfair,” he said.

The man laughed. “You’re joking, right? Are you some kind of toff?”

Theo shook his head, too battered and exhausted to try to explain. “No, I’m a hero,” he said. “Remember?”

The man looked at him hard and then smiled. “So you are,” he said, tipping his cap. “We’ll have to walk a bit, but if you can do that, I’ll get you in a cab.”

The butler answered the door and had to half carry Theo inside, where he collapsed on a chair and closed his eyes. It had taken everything he had to get this far, and all he wanted to do now was sleep.

But he wasn’t going to be allowed to do that. A scream punctured his stupor. His mother was shaking him and it hurt, so he screamed, too, to make her stop.

“Where have you been?” she shouted. “We’ve been so frightened since the school called us.”

“I went to Olympia—to the Mosley rally,” he said, too exhausted not to tell the truth.

“With this boy Esmond?”

“Yes.”

“Father Laurence said he’s a Communist. Is that true?”

Theo nodded.

“How could you?” she yelled. He thought she was going to shake him again, and he shrank away from her in the chair.

“How could I what?” he asked, playing for time. It was strange speaking in Spanish when he hadn’t spoken it in months, and the raw immediacy of the language tore at him, cutting through his defenses.

“Take up with a Communist! After what happened to me—your own mother. They killed your grandparents. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“Not all Communists are the same,” he said wearily, remembering the same argument they’d had in New York two years before. “Most of them are good men who want a just world, and are willing to sacrifice themselves for it too.”

“A just world!” Elena repeated the phrase with contempt, practically spitting out the words. “It’s a godless world that they want. All of them. Look at Russia now. It’s just like my country. They’re murdering the priests and the bishops, turning monasteries into prison camps. They’ve abolished Sunday and Christmas. Do you know that?”

“I know that religion is how rulers keep people subjugated when they have nothing,” said Theo angrily, and he would have said more but the rush of emotion and the effort to speak were too much and he fell back in a half swoon, through which he was dimly conscious of his mother wringing her hands and talking, and then arms lifting him again like they had at Olympia and carrying him away.

He slept until the next afternoon, when Sir Andrew’s doctor came and verified that Dan the medical student had been right and that nothing had been broken. He gave Theo more painkillers and told him that his stepfather wanted to see him downstairs when he was ready.

All Theo wanted to do was swallow the painkillers and sink back into oblivion, but he knew he had to think. His mother and stepfather would want to talk about the future. They would make demands, and he needed to work out in advance how he was going to respond to them. He couldn’t leave decisions that would affect his life to the whims of the moment.

Olympia—the name he forever afterward gave to his experience—had had a powerful effect on his psyche. He’d seen the enemy in the flesh and been attacked by them. The threat of Fascism had become real to him in a way in which it had never been before when he and Esmond had dissected the world order over endless cups of low-quality tea at Saint Gregory’s. He was determined to fight them. That he knew. But he was far less certain about how to achieve his purpose.

One way certainly was to join the Communist Party. They were the only ones who appeared to be doing anything about the Fascist threat, while the Labor Party and the trade unions sat on their hands, and Theo agreed with the Communists wholeheartedly that the callous exploitation of the poor by the rich was intolerable on both sides of the Atlantic. He’d seen that, too, firsthand. He knew what it meant.

He’d been impressed, too, by the Communists’ bravery and organization at Olympia, and he felt proud to have played a part in their attack on Mosley, but he remained less sure about the Socialist paradise that Marx had promised and the methods he’d proposed for achieving it. There was an embrace of violence and dictatorship in the doctrine that Theo distrusted.

The evils were there in Russia, however much Esmond tried to deny it. He vividly remembered the authoritative way in which Father Laurence had described Stalin’s mass murder of the peasantry. Esmond had argued that Father Laurence was relying on a discredited source, but Theo had too high an opinion of his housemaster to dismiss what he said so easily. In recent months, Theo had kept his doubts about Esmond’s arch-hero to himself as he’d worked to repair his relationship with his friend, but that didn’t mean he didn’t still harbor them.

So he was an anti-Fascist but not necessarily a Communist, and that was a good thing, he thought, because Communism was what his mother and stepfather hated above all else, with their rigid determination to see the world entirely through the prism of their religious faith. He’d seen that the night before with his mother: she’d become hysterical when she thought he had fallen under the spell of the Reds.

Maybe if he forswore Communism, he could earn their forgiveness, and then, with Sir Andrew’s backing, he might be able to go back to Saint Gregory’s and get a place at a good university. He wasn’t going to change anything, living on bubble and squeak and trying to sell The Daily Worker on street corners. He needed to find a way to maneuver his boat back into the slipstream of life.

Theo closed his eyes, remembering Esmond leaning forward in his study chair and telling him: “ You can blame it all on me for leading you astray, if that helps. I’m not coming back, so I won’t need to defend myself. ” Not coming back! For the first time, Theo understood that Esmond had gone out of his life, and it made him feel that same sense of desolation he’d experienced in New York in the months after his father died. It brought tears to his eyes, but even as he cried, he realized that Esmond’s parting gift had been a possible passport back into the world that Esmond despised.

He went downstairs slowly, hanging on to the banister of the staircase, feeling the pain of every step. He passed through the drawing room and into the library, where he was surprised to find a fire burning, even though it was summer. The crackling of the logs was the only sound in the somnolent house, and it was incredible to think that the great city was so close at hand on the other side of the high garden walls.

Above the hearth, a dark portrait in profile of a man in armor, some ancestor of Sir Andrew’s, surveyed the room with a disdainful expression, and shelves of leather-bound books with well-tended golden spines bore witness to the present owner’s literary tastes.

Everything from the crystal chandelier overhead to the thickness of the Turkish carpet under Theo’s feet resonated wealth and privilege: appurtenances of the entitled world of the British ruling class that Theo, under Esmond’s tutelage, had learned to set himself against. But he had to admit the room’s beauty. Its sense of history spoke to something in his soul—that same love of tradition that had kept him returning to the lines of old photographs in the hall at Saint Gregory’s—and he felt a sudden longing for the school—his school—that had nothing to do with the calculations of advantage that he had been making before he came downstairs.

Theo advanced into the room, thinking it was empty, and then stopped abruptly when he caught sight of his stepfather sitting in one of two leather-backed armchairs by the fire. In profile, Sir Andrew’s pale, aristocratic face bore an uncanny resemblance to the man in the portrait. He had a chain or something in his hands that he began to put away as he moved to get up, but then when he saw Theo’s eyes on it, he held it up.

“It’s my father’s rosary,” he said. “He gave it to me when I went to France in 1915, and I had it at the Somme. I believe it saved my life.”

Theo did not know what to say. It was the first time he’d ever heard his stepfather refer to the war, other than his quick deflection of Father Philip’s reference to it on that first day at Saint Gregory’s.

“Was it bad? The war, I mean?” he asked, blurting out the first words that came into his head and immediately afterward wishing he could take them back because they were so inadequate to the question he’d wanted to ask.

“It was terrible,” said Sir Andrew. “An abomination. And it must not be allowed to happen again.” He nodded, as if he’d been talking to himself as well as to Theo, and gestured to his stepson to sit in the chair opposite.

“Your mother is very upset,” he said. “And so I thought it best if I spoke to you alone.”

Theo nodded, not objecting. Usually he was prepared to blame his stepfather for coming between him and his mother, but after what he had seen the night before, Theo thought he stood a better chance of a fair hearing without her present.

Sir Andrew said nothing for a minute and Theo waited watchfully, looking into the fire but keenly aware of his stepfather’s knitted brow.

“Are you a Communist?” Sir Andrew asked eventually.

“No,” said Theo, giving the answer he’d settled on before he came downstairs. The denial didn’t feel like a lie as he said it, a fact that he filed away for later consideration.

“But you were with them last night,” Sir Andrew pressed.

“Yes. They’re the only ones who are trying to do something about Fascism.”

“Mosley’s a clown running a one-man circus,” Sir Andrew said contemptuously. “He’ll be forgotten by Christmas.”

“Isn’t that what they said about Hitler?” Theo hadn’t come to argue, but he couldn’t let his stepfather’s casual dismissal of the Fascist threat pass without any response. Not after what he’d seen at Olympia.

“That’s different. This country isn’t Germany,” said Sir Andrew. “And we’re not here to talk about politics. It’s you I’m concerned with. I need to know why you committed this act of lunacy.”

“I wanted to make a difference,” said Theo, falling back on the old phrase that he and Esmond had so often used as a basis for their aspirations.

“To what?”

“To the world. To make it a better place.”

“Don’t you think that’s a bit of a tall order for someone your age?”

Theo opened his mouth to argue but then shut it again and nodded his head. He was convinced that he had made a difference at Olympia, but he knew he wasn’t going to get anywhere with his stepfather if he wasn’t prepared to swallow his pride and toe the line.

“Whose idea was it to go to London?” asked Sir Andrew, shifting tack.

“Esmond’s.”

“And do you regret it now?”

Again, Theo nodded, not trusting himself to speak. It hurt him to lie, even though he felt he had no choice.

Sir Andrew sighed, as if aware that Theo was not being sincere. “I don’t understand you,” he said. “You were doing exceptionally well at Saint Gregory’s, and then you decide to throw it all away on an impulse. Which is the real you? I suppose you don’t even know, yourself.”

“I know I want to go back,” Theo said. “Can you help me?”

It had been hard to say. It was the first time he’d ever asked his stepfather for anything.

“It depends on you,” said Sir Andrew. “I’ve talked to Father Philip today, and they may be prepared to take you back if you write a letter expressing remorse and promising not to see or talk to this Esmond character. Saint Gregory’s certainly seem to think that he led you astray and that there’s some mitigation in that.”

“Can I telephone Esmond and tell him?”

“No,” said Sir Andrew, annoyed. “Aren’t you listening? There’s to be no more contact. You can write and tell him that, I suppose.”

“But he may not get the letter, and then if he comes down to the school to see me, there’ll be more trouble.”

Sir Andrew tapped his foot with irritation and then gave way. “Oh, very well,” he said. “Make the call before you write to the school, and then let that be the end of it.”

Theo looked at his stepfather and felt a surge of gratitude. He needn’t have helped, but he had. “Thank you,” he said.

“You should thank your housemaster too. Father Philip told me that he had Father Laurence in his study, pleading your cause for twenty minutes this morning. It’s a strange character trait you have, isn’t it? You make your friends care for you, and then you let them down.”

“I won’t disappoint you this time.”

“It’s your mother you need not to disappoint. She’s very highly strung, and self-inflicted trouble like this hurts her more than you can imagine. If you could turn over a new leaf and show her some love and kindness, then that would be all the thanks I need. Can you do that?”

“Yes, I think so,” said Theo. It rankled with him still that his mother had stopped him finding his grandparents, but he knew there was nothing to be gained now by dwelling in the past and that what his stepfather was asking was hardly unreasonable.

“Good. Stay there,” said Sir Andrew, getting up from his chair and laying a hand momentarily on Theo’s shoulder as he went past him and out of the room.

He returned after a minute or two, holding Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare and put it in Theo’s hand. “Better late than never,” he said with a smile.

The next morning Theo used the telephone in the drawing room to call the number on the card Jacob had given him, and to his surprise it was Esmond who answered.

“Left Bookshop,” he said. “Can I help you?”

“Esmond. It’s me,” said Theo, holding his hand around the mouthpiece to muffle his voice. He wouldn’t have put it past his mother to be listening behind the door.

“Theo! Are you all right?”

“Yes. A bit sore.”

“They gave us quite a beating, didn’t they? But wasn’t it worth it? Have you read the newspapers today?”

“No.”

“Well, you should. Everyone’s talking about how Mosley’s Biff Boys behaved like a bunch of wild animals. The establishment’s turning against them. And we did that, Theo. We showed them up for what they are. We changed the world!”

Theo was silent. He felt utterly happy for a moment, at a loss for words.

“Are you there?” asked Esmond.

“Yes.”

“Look, I wanted to say sorry. I didn’t mean for us to get separated. I went to look for you outside, but you’d gone.”

“It’s fine. I’m okay. I was just calling to tell you that they’re letting me back ...” Theo stumbled over his words, finding it hard to admit to the bargain he’d made with his stepfather.

“I told you they would.”

“Yes, but there’s more to it than that. I had to do what you said. I had to agree not to see or talk to you. Well, after this call. And I wanted to tell you myself.”

“How long for?”

“I don’t know. I’ve got to put it in writing.”

“Who to?”

“The school.”

“Well, if it’s them you’re promising, then it’s only for as long as you’re there. After that, you’re a free man. It stands to reason.”

“I suppose so.”

“No, there’s no supposing. It’s definite. This is just a break for us. That’s all. Okay?”

“Okay,” said Theo, feeling better again. “What are you going to do?”

“Remember the picture in my room? Of Moscow? I think maybe it’s time for me to take that trip. I’m going to work here until I’ve got the price of a ticket, and then I’ll be on my way.”

In the background Theo could hear the familiar sound of a jangling bell. “Look, I’ve got to go,” said Esmond hurriedly. “It’s a customer. Maybe I can sell him the complete works of Marx and Engels. Jacob’s got a deluxe edition that’s just come in. Commission on that would buy me a ticket tomorrow,” he said, laughing as he hung up the phone.

But Theo didn’t smile as he slowly replaced the receiver. He was filled instead with an aching sadness as he wondered how long it would be before he would see his friend again.