The Stranger's Child Part 36

'You probably knew him well.'

'Not really, I'm afraid. I mean, I grew up on his TV series, but I only got to know him much later.'

'I loved those, didn't you.'

'We did a lot of business with him . . . Sorry, I should say, I'm a book-dealer,' and here Rob reached in his suit pocket for the little translucent case and presented her with his business card: Rob Salter, Garsaint.com, Books and Ma.n.u.scripts.

'Aha! very good . . .' She peered at it.

'He had a great art library.'

'I imagine so. Is that your field?'

'We're mainly post-1880 literature, art and design.'

She tucked the card in her handbag. 'You don't do French books, I suppose?'

'We can search for specific things, if you need them.' He shrugged pleasantly. 'We can find you anything you want.'

'Mm, I may well have to call on you.'

'Now that all information is retrievable . . .'

'Quite a thought, isn't it,' she said, and here she fished out her own card, rubbed at the corners, and with a private phone-number inked in: Professor Jennifer Ralph, St Hilda's College, Oxford. 'There you are.'

'Oh . . .' said Rob, 'yes, indeed . . . Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, I think?'

'How clever of you.'

'I've sold several copies of your book.'

'Ah,' she said, delighted but dry 'which one?'

But here a horrible lancing whine was heard from the speakers, as the tall figure of Nigel Dupont approached and ducked grinningly away from the microphone. Then he approached again, and had said no more than 'Ladies and Gentlemen' when again the savage noise leapt into the room and echoed off the walls and ceiling. Though it wasn't his fault, it made him look a bit of a fool, which he plainly wasn't used to. He swept his strikingly blond forelock back with a distracted hand. When the problem had been more or less sorted out, all he said, squinting at a text on his iPhone, was, 'I'm sure you'll understand, there will be a slight delay, Peter's sister's held up by traffic.'

'The famous Dupont, I presume,' said Jennifer, quite loudly, as talk resumed. 'We are honoured.'

'I know . . .' said Rob. Dupont had a long unseasonally suntanned face with almost invisible rimless gla.s.ses, and a suit that in itself conveyed the sheer superiority of a well-endowed chair at a Southern Californian university.

'And do you know by any chance the name of the man at the far end with the, um, green tie?' said Jennifer, picking his least personal identifying feature.

'Well, I think,' said Rob, 'it must be Paul Bryant, mustn't it, who writes all those biographies there was that one that caused all the fuss about the Bishop of Durham.'

Jennifer nodded slowly. 'Good . . . G.o.d . . . yes, it is! I can't have seen him for forty years.'

Rob was amused by her half-abstracted, half-mocking gaze across the room. 'How did you come to know him?'

'Hmm? Well,' said Jennifer, sliding down a little in her chair, as though to hide from Bryant but also to enter a more confidential phase with Rob, 'years ago he wrote one of his books, his first one, actually which also caused a good deal of fuss about my . . . sort of great-uncle.' She shook away the unnecessary explanation.

'Yes . . . that was Cecil Valance?'

'Exactly.'

'Your great-uncle was Cecil Valance . . .' said Rob, marvelling, almost teasing.

'Well' she s.n.a.t.c.hed a breath, and he saw her in her College room, in a trying tutorial on Mallarme or some other subject beyond the student's reach: 'I mean, do you really want to know?'

'Very much,' said Rob, quite truthfully, and with a sense now it would be rather annoying when the event started. He'd been a student when the Valance biography came out, and he remembered reading extracts from it in a Sunday paper, and enjoying the atmosphere of revelations without being specially interested in the people involved.

'My grandmother,' said Jennifer, 'was married to Cecil's brother Dudley Valance, who was also a writer, rather forgotten now.'

'Well, Black Flowers,' said Rob.

'Exactly I mustn't forget you're a bookseller! But anyway she left him, and married my grandfather, the artist Revel Ralph.'

'Yes absolutely,' said Rob, seeing her quick raised eyebrow.

'Now my father worked mainly in Malaya, he was very big in rubber, but I was sent to school in England, of course, and in the holidays I often stayed with my aunt Corinna, who was Dudley's daughter. That was when I met Peter, by the way. He played duets with her. She was a very fine pianist could have been a concert pianist.'

'I see,' said Rob, distracted by the image of her father in rubber, though the lewd subtext flickered only as an encouraging smile. 'How interesting.'

'Well it is interesting,' said Jennifer drily, tucking in her chin, 'but according to Paul Bryant everything I've just told you is untrue. Let me see . . . My aunt wasn't really Dudley's daughter, but Cecil's, Dudley was gay, though he managed to father a son with my grandmother, and my father's father wasn't Revel Ralph, who really was gay, but a painter called Mark Gibbons. I may be simplifying a bit.'

Rob grinned and nodded, not taking all of this in. 'And this wasn't the case?' he said.

'Oh, who knows?' said Jennifer. 'Paul was something of a fantasist, we all knew that. But it caused a fair old stink at the time. Dudley's wife even tried to take out an injunction against it.'

'Yes, of course' it was that sense he'd had of the old guard trying and failing to close ranks.

'Do you remember? And of course it cast my poor grandmother in rather an unenviable light.'

'Yes, I see that.'

'She'd been married three times as it was, and now he was claiming that two of her three children hadn't been sired by her husbands, and also, did I mention that Cecil had had an affair with her brother? Yup, that too.'

'Oh dear!' said Rob, who couldn't quite see where Jennifer stood on the subject. She seemed to deplore Paul Bryant, but wasn't exactly disputing what he'd said. Her droll academic tone had something county in it too, a little sn.o.bbish reserve she hadn't wholly wanted to disown. 'I presume she wasn't still alive?'

'Mm, well she was, I'm afraid, though extremely old, and virtually blind, so there was no chance of her actually reading it. Everyone tried to keep it from her.' Jennifer flinched with her evident sense of the humour as well as the horror of the situation. 'Though as I'm sure you know there will always be one very dear friend who feels they have to put you in the picture. I think it sort of finished her off. As it happened she'd written a rather feeble book of her own about her affair with Uncle Cecil, so it was a bit of a shock to be told he'd also had an affair with her brother.'

'Well, outing gay writers was all the rage then, of course.'

'Well, fine,' she said, with a candid shake of the head. 'If that's all it had been . . .'

Rob looked at her as he found the t.i.tle. 'England Trembles,' he said. Long out of print, though an American paperback had surfaced later he could see the photo of Valance on the front 'Sensational!' Times of London something like that.

'England Trembles,' said Jennifer, 'exactly . . .' turning down the corners of her mouth in a rather French expression of indifference. 'The thing was-'

A loud purring sound, a preparatory burble of self-pleasure, rose above the talk, and then 'Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much, my name's Nigel Dupont . . .'

'Ah ' Rob winced.

'There's quite a story about Master Bryant as well,' said Jennifer, with a rapid nod and grimace of a promise to carry on with it later. 'All was not as it seemed . . .' Rob sat back, smiling appreciatively, but amused too to be reserving judgement on the matter.

It seemed Dupont had been asked by the family to be a sort of MC for the occasion he a.s.sumed the role with evident willingness and natural authority and just a hint of allowable muddle, as if to remind them he was good-naturedly helping out. 'So, we're all here,' he said, peering down with a smile of exaggerated patience at the confused figure of Peter's sister, red-faced from a horrible rush across London, still settling her bags and papers in the front row. Then, the smile running across the rows, 'I'm aware many people in this very splendid room knew . . . er, Peter far better than I did, and we'll be hearing from some of them in a moment. Peter was a hugely popular guy, with a huge variety of friends. I can see many different types of people here' surveying the room humorously, with his expat's eye, and producing confusion and even laughter in persons suddenly considering what type they might belong to 'and perhaps this gathering of his friends can best be thought of as the last of Peter's famous parties, at which one might meet anyone from a duke to a . . . to a DJ, a bishop to a barrow-boy' Dupont perhaps suggesting a certain loss of touch with contemporary English life; the bishop in the second row smiled tolerantly. 'Many friends.h.i.+ps of course were initiated at those parties. I know some of my own best work might never have been done if it hadn't been for meetings brought about by, um . . . Peter.' He reflected for a moment it seemed he was going to speak without notes, which created its own small tension of latent embarra.s.sment and renewed relief when he went on. Peter's name itself seemed constantly about to elude him. 'However, for now, Terence Peter's father has suggested I say a few words about the period when I first knew him, when he was in his early twenties, and I was a tender twelve years old.' Dupont smiled distantly and high-mindedly at this memory as the vaguely disturbing sound of what he had said sank in Rob glanced across the room, and caught a tall fair-haired man smiling too, and smiling at Rob specifically through his more general air of amus.e.m.e.nt. Rob thought he might have seen him around, but his cataloguing mind couldn't yet place him. He looked down, and saw that Jennifer, beneath her own air of polite attention, was discreetly drawing on the back of the service card with a propelling pencil: an expert little sketch of Professor Dupont.

'For a brief period, just over three years, Peter taught at a prep-school in Berks.h.i.+re called Corley Court. It was his first proper job I believe he had worked in the men's department at Harrods for a few months before, which was what gave him his first taste for London life in the inside leg as he used to call it! He had come down from Oxford with a decent second, but true academic endeavour was never going to be Peter's Fach.' Dupont gazed complacently at the tiers of leather-bound books, while a frown of uncertainty about what he'd just said pa.s.sed through the audience. 'He had a pa.s.sion for knowledge, of course, but he wasn't a specialist which was just as well at Corley, where he had to teach everything, except I think math, and sport. Corley Court was a High Victorian country house of a kind then much reviled, though Peter was fascinated by it from the start. It had been built by a man called Eustace Valance, who had made his fortune from gra.s.s seed, and been created a baronet on the strength of it. His son was also an agriculturalist, but his two grandsons, Cecil and Dudley, were both in their ways to become quite well-known writers.' Here Rob looked at Jennifer, who gave a little nod as she strengthened the boyish curl of Dupont's forelock.

'You probably all know lines of Cecil's by heart,' he went on, smiling along the densely packed rows and eliciting again a mixture of resistance and eagerness; it was as though he might ask any one of them to quote the lines they knew. 'He was a first-rate example of the second-rate poet who enters into common consciousness more deeply than many greater masters. "All England trembles in the spray / Of dog-rose in the front of May" . . . "Two blessed acres of English ground" ' he looked almost teasingly at them, as though he were a prep-school master himself. 'Some of you perhaps know that I went on to edit Cecil Valance's poems, a project that might never have come about had it not been for Peter's early encouragement.' And he nodded slowly, as if at the providential nature of this. Rob had forgotten this fact, which linked Jennifer and Dupont in the sort of unexpected way he liked.

'So . . .' Dupont paused, as if to recover his bearings, some clever little vanity again in the invitation to watch him improvise. Half the audience seemed seduced by it; others, older colleagues of Peter's, friends of the family who had never heard of Dupont, and were yet to see the point of him, had the air of mildly offended blankness which is the default expression of any congregation. One or two, of course, would have read Dupont's milestone works in Queer Theory, and perhaps be pleasantly surprised to find he could talk in straightforward English when necessary. Rob felt again he didn't have to take a view, he looked humorously and enquiringly at Jennifer's knee, and she offered her service card with her little down-turned smile: she had got Dupont exactly, in a sketch that was somewhere between a portrait and a cartoon. Rob gave an almost noiseless snort and as he looked across the rows again he found the tall blond man smiling at him and then blinking slowly before he turned away. Rob's feeling it wasn't proper to cruise at a memorial service was mixed with a feeling that Peter himself wouldn't have minded. He looked aside and his gaze fell, with a kind of respectful curiosity, on Desmond, sitting very straight, but with his eyes fixed on Dupont's black brogues. 'So,' Dupont was saying: 'what . . . er, Peter used to call a "violently Victorian house", and a poet of the First World War, with an interesting private life. We can see now that Corley Court was as seminal to Peter's work, as it was to be to my own. His two ground-breaking series, Writers at War, for Granada, and The Victorian Dream, for BBC2, were in a way incubated in that extraordinary place, cut off from the outside world and yet' here he smiled persuasively at the beauty of his own thought 'bearing witness to it . . . in so many ways.'

Rob's eye ran on along the curve of the front row, where the later speakers were smiling at Dupont with polite impatience and anxiety. At the far end Paul Bryant was scribbling on his printed text, like someone at a debate. Peter's father had a grief-stricken but curious look, as though he were still finding out important things about his son. The timing of the event, four months after Peter's death, was surely not easy for him. But something else, both awkward and comic, was now becoming unignorable. Very slowly, Dupont's loud purr, a kind of maximized intimacy filling the high-ceilinged room impartially from the two large speakers on stands, had been dwindling to a sound of more modest reach, clearer at first, as the short masking echo was removed, then quieter altogether, as though a humble functionary were revealed working some splendid machine. He himself seemed to notice that his words weren't coming back at him at quite the optimal volume. 'When Peter drove some of us into Oxford in his car,' he was saying, 'the first thing he took us to see was Keble College chapel . . .' 'Can't! hear!' came a lordly shout from the back, enjoying its own petulance, and others more politely and helpfully joined in. Dupont looked down and found the microphone on its stand had drooped like a flower, and was now pointing at his crotch.

Rob smiled at this, glanced over to the blond man, only to find him sharing a grin with one of the men in leather on the far side of the room. Faintly annoyed, Rob turned in his seat while the mike was sorted out, and gazed up at the shelves closest to him. He thought it must be a section where books by members were placed. A few famous names stood out, to the pride of the Club; other writers Rob had never heard of must dutifully and determinedly have given copies of everything they published now fading, foxing, sunning, untouched surely, for decade after decade. He liked the effect of recession, of work proudly presented and immediately forgotten hidden in full view, overlooked surely even by those members whose eyes swept over the shelves each day; it was the sort of shadowy terrain the well-armed book-dealer hunted in.

'I could talk about Peter for hours,' Dupont was saying, 'but now let's have some music.' He stepped down from the podium and they listened to Janet Baker singing Mahler's 'Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen', so loudly that the system flared and crackled, and the young man in charge of the sound abruptly turned her down, and then, seeing the little searching smiles of some of the audience, turned her up again, grinning and tucking his hair behind his ears. Rob got out his fountain-pen and made a few notes of his own on the back of his service card.

Next Nick Powell, who had been at Oxford with Peter, described the journey to Turkey they had made together one summer reading from a text, though with a more hesitant and personal effect than Dupont had managed while improvising; he didn't say exactly that he'd had an affair with Peter, but the likelihood seemed to fill the vague well-intentioned s.p.a.ce between his spoken memories and the listeners' imagining of them. And then again, at first as if cloaked by emotion, the voice grew dry and withdrawn, and the long rising whine of a motorcycle speeding the length of Pall Mall lent a sudden sad sense of the world outside. There was the c.h.i.n.k of workmen's hammers, a faint squeal of brakes. A more sympathetic woman rose in her seat to point out the problem with the mike. And again came the voice from the back, 'Can't hear!' as if the speaker's failure to get through to him confirmed the very low opinion of him that he already held.

The feebleness of the mike now became a trying and subtly undermining part of the programme itself. Everyone's patience was stretched by it, the sound-boy, with his inane air of knowing less about sound than anyone present, kept getting up and tightening the wing-nut that held the mike in place, while irritation with him grew, and advice was called out. In some barely conscious way it made the audience fed up with the readers and speakers too. Eventually the mike was detached from the stand, and they had to hold it, like a singer or comedian, which led to further problems with ringing feedback or again the slow fade as they lowered it unawares away from their faces. It was difficult to manage, and Sarah Barfoot's hand shook visibly as she held it.

As the others spoke, Rob noted down a few things that Peter had learned to play the tuba 'to an almost bearable standard', that he had built a temple in his parents' garden, but abandoned it halfway through, and called it a sham ruin. This was said to be typical of him. 'Peter was an ideal media don,' said someone from the BBC, 'without actually being a don or indeed having much technical grasp of the media. The producers he worked with were crucial to the success of the series.' At least three people said he'd been 'a great communicator', a phrase which in Rob's experience usually meant someone was an egomaniacal bore. Though he hadn't known Peter at all well, Rob was struck by the odd tone of several remarks, the not quite suppressed implication that though Peter was 'marvellous', 'inspiring' and 'howlingly funny', and everyone who knew him adored him, he was really no more than a dabbler, prevented by the very haste and fervour of his enthusiasms from looking at anything in proper scholarly detail. Of course it was a 'celebration', so a veil was drawn over these shortcomings, but not so completely that one didn't catch a glimpse of the hand drawing it, the prim display of tact. Then they played ninety seconds of Peter himself on Private Pa.s.sions, talking about Liszt, and his voice, with its rich boozy throb and its restless dry wit, seemed to possess the room and put them all, half-forgivingly, in their place, as if he were alive and watching them from the walls of books, as well as being irrecoverably far away. There was even laughter along the rows, grateful and attentive to the shock of his presence, though Peter was hardly being funny. Rob had never heard the piece before 'Aux cypres de la Villa d'Este', played at almost painful volume, so that it was hard to judge what Peter had said about it as a 'vision of death': that Liszt had rejected the t.i.tle 'Elegy' as too 'tender and consoling', and had called it a 'Threnody' instead, which he said was a song of mourning for life itself. Rob wrote the two words, with their distinct etymological claims, on the back of his card. Glancing along the front row, he saw Paul Bryant, who was up next, and evidently unsure how long the Liszt was going on, discreetly applying a ChapStick, then sitting forward and staring at the floor with a tight but forbearing smile. Then he was up at the lectern, and seized the mike with the look of someone who'd long wanted to have such a thing in his hand.

Rob glanced at Jennifer, her eyes narrowed, revolving her pencil abstractedly between her fingers. Bryant was a good subject, short but ponderous, with a long decisive nose in a flushed, rather sensitive face, frizzly grey hair trained carefully from side to side across his pale crown. He stood just beside the lectern, stroking down his tie with his free hand. He said that, as a literary biographer, he'd been asked to talk about Peter's literary interests, which of course was absurd in a mere seven minutes: Peter deserved a literary biography of his own, and maybe he would write it anyone with stories to tell should see him afterwards, in strictest confidence, of course. This got a surprisingly warm laugh, though Rob was unsure, after what Jennifer had said, whether he was sending himself up as a teller of other people's secrets.

Bryant made it clear, in the way Nick Powell had sweetly avoided, that Peter had been his lover Rob glanced at Desmond, who remained impa.s.sive; the thirty-year difference in their ages certainly said something about Peter's tenacity and appeal. He said he hadn't had the advantage of a university education, 'but in many ways Peter Rowe was my education. Peter was that magic person we all meet, if we're lucky, who shows us how to live our lives, and be ourselves.' This stirred vague wonderings about the completely unknown subject of Bryant's private life. 'Like . . . Professor Dupont, I too was brought closer to Cecil Valance by Peter. I well remember him showing me the poet's tomb at Corley on our very first date an unusual sort of first date, but that was Peter for you! He even talked at that time of writing something about Valance, but I think we're all agreed that he would never have had the patience, or the stamina, to write a proper biography as soon as I started on my own life of Valance he sent me a letter, that was very typical of him, saying that he knew I was the right man for the job.' Rob was looking at Jennifer's card as she swiftly and elegantly wrote 'NOT!' on it. 'When I'd made my way somewhat in the literary world, it was a pleasure to be able to recommend Peter as a reviewer, and he did some marvellous pieces in the TLS and elsewhere though deadlines, I believe, remained a bit of an "issue" for him . . .'

It was true of course that the lyric of grief was often attended, or followed soon after, by a more prosaic little compulsion, the unseemly grasp of the chance to tell the truth and since the person involved could no longer mind . . . There was a special tone of indulgent candour, amusing putting-straight of the record, that wandered all too easily and invisibly into settling of scores and something a bit shy of objective fact. 'He once more or less admitted to me,' Bryant said with a rueful laugh, 'that he could hardly play the piano at all, but in front of an audience of prep-school boys he could generally get away with it.' (Here Jennifer shook her head and sighed, as if disappointed but unsurprised.) By the time he sat down again, he had said almost nothing about Peter Rowe's life in books, beyond his failure to produce anything but 'TV spin-offs'. Was it envy? It was fairly clear that they hadn't seen much of each other for the past forty years, so the talk was a wasted opportunity Rob thought of what he could have said himself about Peter's book collection.

The final speaker was Desmond, who gripped the mike in both hands with a much less humorous look. There were perhaps a dozen people of colour in the room, but Desmond was the only black speaker, and Rob felt the small complex adjustment of sympathy and self-consciousness that pa.s.sed through the audience; and then an unexpected squeeze of emotion of his own, at the thought of Desmond ten years ago. He was heavier and squarer-faced now, the lovely boyish thing in him was lost, except in his tremor of determination. Rob frowned gently as he remembered the scar on Desmond's back, his almost hairless body and k.n.o.bbly navel; but he saw that the magic of s.e.xual feeling for him lingered only as a kind of loyal and sentimental sadness. He knew that in the six years he'd been with Peter, Desmond had divided opinion, especially among Peter's old friends: was he a G.o.dsend or a frightful bore? Now he had the awkward dignity of the less amusing survivor from a couple, testing the loyalty of those very friends. Perhaps grief itself had subtly uns.e.xed him, just at the moment he would have, in one way or another, to start again.

He spoke clearly, and rather stiffly, with a hint of reproof in his face for all the trivialities that had gone before. The nice square Nigerian diction, with its softened consonants and strong hard vowels, had been slowly effaced by London in the years since Rob had met him at a party and taken him home s.h.i.+vering in a taxi. He said how being Peter's friend had been the greatest privilege of his life, and that being married to him for two years had been not only wonderfully happy but a celebration of everything Peter had believed in and worked for. He had always said how important the changes in the law in 1967 had been to him and to so many others like him, when he was a young man teaching at Corley Court, but that it was very imperfect, only a beginning, there were many more battles to be won, and the coming of civil partners.h.i.+ps for same-s.e.x couples was a great development not just for them but for civil life in general. This was met by a few seconds of firm applause, and fl.u.s.tered but generally supportive looks among those who didn't clap. Rob clapped, and Jennifer, surprised but willing, a moment later clapped too. It was good to see the gay subject, which after all had bubbled through Peter's life more keenly and challengingly than it did in his own, brought home here under the gilded Corinthian capitals of a famous London club. There was a sort of yearning in some of the older faces not to be startled by it. Then Desmond said he was going to read a poem, and drew out a folded sheet of paper from the breast pocket of his pin-stripe suit. 'Oh, do not smile on me if at the last / Your lips must yield their beauty to another . . .' Rob didn't think he knew it, and felt the awkwardness of poetry in the mouths of people untrained to read it; then abruptly felt the reverse, the stiff poignancy of words which an actor would have made into a dubious show of technique. 'Let yours be the blue eye, the laughing lips / That at the last and always smile on me.' Rob gave Jennifer a quizzical glance, she leant towards him and whispered behind her hand, 'Uncle Cecil.'

Rob escorted Jennifer through the clearing and stacking of the chairs towards the crowd around the buffet table, Jennifer making confidential but fairly loud remarks about some of the speakers, while Rob discreetly switched on his phone. 'A shame about the sound,' she said. 'That young man was absolutely hopeless!'

'I know . . .'

'You'd have thought they'd have something as basic as that sorted out.' Rob saw he had a text from Gareth. 'I thought that Scotsman was awfully boring, didn't you?'

see u 7 @ Style bar cant wait! XxG 'He was rather. . .' said Rob distracted for a moment in the mental blush of disorientation, then pocketing his phone and glancing round. The blond man had attached himself to the group of leather queens. But the idea of picking him up, so simply initiated by a sly shared smile, didn't wholly dissolve under the reminder of his imminent date with someone else.

There were rows and rows of white cups and saucers, for tea and coffee, but Jennifer said, 'I'm having a drink,' and Rob, who never drank during the day, said, 'I'm going to join you.' She picked up a gla.s.s of red with a quick s.h.i.+ver and then seeing platters of sandwiches already reduced to cress-strewn doilies she pushed in between two other people waiting and built herself a little plateful of sausage rolls and chocolate fingers. She had the look of someone making the most of a day out Rob thought the arrangements at St Hilda's College might be fairly spartan; and then a visit to London . . . She held her plate and gla.s.s expertly in one hand, and ate swiftly, almost greedily. He wondered what her emotional history had been not women, he felt. She had a quiver of s.e.xual energy about her, unexpectantly tucked under her crushed velvet hat. They moved away together, each looking round as if prepared to free the other. He felt she liked him, without being interested in him it was a consciously temporary thing, and none the less happy for that. He said, 'Well, you were saying. . . !' and she said, 'What? oh, well, yes . . . so, Paul Bryant started out, before he became a great literary figure, as a humble bank clerk Rob glanced round 'Oh, actually,' he said, and touched her arm. The readers and speakers of course were moving among the crowd, with uncertain status, as mourners and performers. Now Bryant was just beside them, making for the buffet, talking to a large woman and a handsome young Chinese man with gla.s.ses and a tie-clip. 'Oh, I know!' Bryant was saying, 'it's an absolute outrage the whole thing!' There was something camp and declamatory about him Rob saw he was still riding the wave of his performance, to himself he was still the focus of attention. 'I need a drink!' he said, sounding just like Peter, cutting in behind Jennifer, with a busy but gracious nod, an unguarded blank glance at her, two heavy seconds of possible recognition, a breathless turn, surely, and denial 'Andrea, what are you having?' But Jennifer, curious and fearless, touched his shoulder: 'Paul?' she said, and as he twitched and turned, her face was a wonderful hesitant mask of mockery, greeting and reproach. Rob thought she must be the most terrifying teacher.

Bryant stepped back, gripped her forearm, stared as if he were being tricked, while some rushed but extremely complex calculation unfurled behind his eyes. Then, 'Jenny, my dear, I don't believe it!'

'Well, here I am.'

'Oh, Peter would have been thrilled,' shaking his head in wonderment. Was it a fight or a reunion? He craned forward 'I can't believe it!' again; and kissed her.

She laughed, 'Oh!', coloured slightly and went on at once, 'Well, Peter meant a lot to me, long ago.'

'Oh, the dear old tart that he was . . .' Bryant said, glancing narrowly at Rob, not knowing of course what role he might have played in Peter's life. 'No, a great man. Peter Rowe-my-dear you used to call him, do you remember?' he was sticking to the fondly proprietary view of the deceased, barbs in an indulgent tone of voice. 'Andrea, this is Jenny Ralph or was I don't know . . . ?'

'Still is,' said Jenny firmly.

'A very old friend. Andrea . . . who was Peter's next-door neighbour, am I right?'

'Rob,' said Rob, nodding, not giving them much to go on, though Jennifer endorsed him, in a supportive murmur, 'Yes, Rob . . .'

'Rob . . . h.e.l.lo, and this is where are you? come here! Bobby' to the patient Chinese man he'd turned his back on 'my partner.'

Rob shook hands with Bobby, and smiled at him through the knowing s.h.i.+mmer of gay introductions, the surprise and speculation. 'Civil?' he said.

Bryant said, 'Hmm, well, some of the time,' and Bobby, with a sweet but tired grin at him, said politely, 'Yes, we're civil partners.'

In a minute gla.s.ses of wine were raised, Bryant peeping over his a bit cautiously at Jennifer, who said, in her candid way, 'Well, I read your book.'

'Oh, my dear,' he said, with a little shake of the head; then, 'Which one?'

'You know Uncle Cecil . . .'

'Oh, England Trembles, yes . . .'

'You caused quite a stir with that one,' said Jennifer.

'Tell me about it!' said Bryant. 'Oh, the trouble I had with that book.' He explained to Andrea, 'It's the book I mentioned in my speech just now, if you remember the life of Cecil Valance. My first book, actually.' He turned to Jennifer. 'There were times I felt I'd bitten off more than I could chew.'

'Yes, I'm sure,' said Jennifer.

'Didn't he write "Two Acres"?' said Andrea. 'I had to learn that at school.'

'Then you probably still know it,' Jennifer a.s.sured her.

'Something about the something path of love . . .'

'It was written for my grandmother,' said Jennifer.

'Or, as I contend, for your great-uncle!' said Bryant gamely.

'That's amazing.' Andrea looked round. 'I must introduce you to my husband, he's really the poetry lover.'

Bryant chuckled uneasily. 'It was your dear grandmother who gave me so much trouble.'

'Well, you certainly reciprocated,' said Jennifer, so that Rob thought perhaps it was a fight after all.

'Was I awful? I just couldn't get anything out of her.'

'That could have been because she wanted to keep it to herself, I suppose.'