The Stranger’s Child

1

The woman sitting next to him said, ‘I don’t know if Julian’s coming, do you?’

‘I don’t, I’m afraid…’ said Rob.

‘I believe they were great friends. I’m not sure I’d recognize him now.’ She craned round. Her black hat had an inch of veil at the front, and a mauve silk flower over her right ear. No wedding-ring, but several other fine old rings, heirlooms perhaps, on other fingers. Her clothes were soft crumpled velvet and silk, black and deep red, stylish but not exactly fashionable. She smiled at him again, and he wasn’t sure if she thought she knew him, or thought quite naturally that she didn’t need to know him to speak to him. Her firm, clipped voice had a hint of mischief. ‘I fear a number of these people are going to have to stand.’ She looked round with satisfaction at the embarrassed struggles of the latest arrivals, as they clambered along the rows, or sat down abruptly and as if they didn’t mind on some impossible ledge or radiator; one old man had perched like a tennis umpire at the top of the library steps. It was still only ten to two, but events like this brought out a strange zeal in people. Rob had been lucky to find this seat, at the end of a row, but near the front. ‘Did you go to the funeral?’

‘I didn’t, I’m afraid,’ he said.

‘Nor did I. Not a fan.’

‘Oh…’

‘Of funerals, I mean. I’ve reached the age where one finds, with sore dismay, that one goes to more funerals than parties.’

‘I suppose you could say this was somewhere between the two…’ He opened the folded order of events, on which nine readers and speakers were listed. Inevitably, out of emotion, inexperience or sheer self-importance, almost all of them would go on too long, and the glinting wineglasses and shrouded buffet just visible at the far end of the library would not be reached till about four o’clock. The library itself was funereally splendid – Rob gazed at the tiers of leather-bound books with the sceptical, secretive eye of a professional. A broad arc of chairs filled the space and a low podium had been set up, with a lectern and a microphone. The servants, in their black jackets, were growing flustered, more chairs were brought in. An event like this must be a challenge to the routine of a club, the automatic deference due to a deceased member stretched a little thinner over this very mixed crowd. A couple of youngsters had been made to put on ties, but one group of men in leather were too far outside the dress-code for any such remedial action and had been let in unchallenged. The only other man without a tie was a lilac-vested bishop.

From his seat Rob had a view along the front row in profile, unmistakably members of the family, as well as people who were due to speak: he recognized Sarah Barfoot, Nigel Dupont and Desmond, Peter’s husband. Rob had had a fling with Desmond himself, ten or twelve years ago, and looked at him now with that eerie awareness of the unforeseen that lurks beneath the reassurances of any reunion. The other readers could be identified perhaps from the list. Dr James Brooke he didn’t know at all. At the far end was a man of about sixty, with a long nose and glasses on a string, looking over the typed sheets he was going to read from. He seemed somehow outside the nervous but supportive mood of the rest of the team, his own nerves perhaps concealed behind his frown and the sudden impatient glare he turned on the audience behind him; then he saw someone he knew, and gave a curt but humorous nod. Rob thought this must be Paul Bryant, the biographer.

Rob’s neighbour said, ‘How old was he?’ getting out her reading glasses.

He looked at the front of the card with its small black-and-white photo and the words ‘PETER ROWE – 9 OCTOBER 1945-8 JUNE 2008 – A CELEBRATION’. ‘Um – sixty-two.’ The photo was more typical than flattering, Peter at a party, making a point, with a glass of wine in his hand. At these memorials great fondness was often shown for the foibles of the deceased. Rob found it brought back immediately the sound of Peter’s voice, plummy, funny, carrying – a sound which Peter himself had been very fond of.

‘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 Manuscripts.

‘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 glasses, 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… god… 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 snatched a breath, and he saw her in her College room, in a trying tutorial on Mallarmé 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 snobbish 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 title. ‘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 assumed 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 friendships 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 embarrassment 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 amusement. 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 Berkshire 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 passed through the audience. ‘He had a passion 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 grass 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 blessèd 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 space 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 chink 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 Passions, 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 cyprès 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 title ‘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 impassive; 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 passed 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 knobbly navel; but he saw that the magic of sexual 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 godsend 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 unsexed 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 shivering 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 partnerships for same-sex 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 flustered 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 glass of red with a quick shiver – 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 glass 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 sexual 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 glasses 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… hello, 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 shimmer 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 glasses 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 assured 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.’

‘Mm, Jenny, I can tell you disapprove.’

‘Who was this?’ said Andrea.

‘My grandmother, Daphne Sawle,’ said Jennifer, as if this needed no further explanation.

‘I knew she’d never see it, of course, so…’

But Jennifer didn’t give ground on this, and Rob, who imagined they were both wrong in different ways, was not in the mood for a row. He said to Bobby, ‘So did you ever meet Peter?’ and drew him aside as he got a second glass of wine. He glanced round, thinking with a touch of relief of the two hundred other people here he could talk to if he wanted. He saw the blond man look over the shoulder of the man he was joking with and give him a frank saucy look, as though he thought Rob had picked Bobby up. Bobby had a wide smile, short shiny black hair, and a strong uncritical belief in his husband’s work. He dismissed his own work in IT – ‘Too boring!’ He told Rob they lived out in Streatham, and though Paul often worked in the British Library, Bobby rarely came into Town. They had been together for nine years. ‘And you?’ said Bobby. ‘Oh, I’m very much single,’ said Rob, and grinned, and felt Bobby was slightly sorry for him. He looked round and saw that Nigel Dupont was coming through towards the buffet. ‘That woman is being quite aggressive to Paul!’ said Bobby. ‘Yes, I know…’ said Rob. In fact Bryant himself had half-turned away from Jennifer.

‘About my present project? I can’t tell you,’ he was confessing to a woman in a black suit. ‘Oh, yes, another Life. Still rather hush-hush – I’m sure you’ll understand! – ah, Nigel…’ – with a clever little air of deflation.

‘Hello, Paul!’ said Dupont, warily genial, and rather oddly too, since they’d just been sharing a podium.

‘Oh, I loved what you said,’ said the woman. ‘Very moving.’

‘Thanks…’ said Dupont. ‘Thanks so much.’

‘Do you know Jenny Ralph?’ said Bryant.

‘Ah! nice to see you,’ said Dupont warmly, allowing the possibility they had met before.

‘Bobby you’ve met, and…’

‘Rob Salter.’

‘Rob… hi!’ – shaking his hand gratefully, and holding his eye.

Rob smiled back. ‘Interesting to hear about your school – and the Valance connection.’

‘That’s right… Old times…’

‘So here we have his editor -’

‘… in the red corner…!’ said Bryant -

‘hah – and his biographer!’

‘That’s right…’ said Dupont again.

‘No, we’re old friends,’ said Bryant, curving against him, as if he’d just been kidding. ‘It worked out quite well, didn’t it. We were both digging away like mad, from quite different angles.’ He tilted his head from side to side. ‘I’d get one thing, old Nigel would get another.’

‘It worked out fine,’ said Dupont, in a tone that showed he had a forgiving nature, and it had all been a long time ago. From here the Valance work seemed a distant prolegomenon to far more sensational achievements.

‘Of course I put you on to the Trickett MS,’ said Bryant, wagging his finger.

‘That’s right… If only you’d been able to track down the lost poems as well…’ said Dupont, with a playful shake of the head.

‘Oh, they’re gone, don’t you think? I’m sure Louisa burnt them – if they ever existed!’

‘What was the Trickett thing?’ said Rob, piqued by the talk of manuscripts and lost poems.

Dupont, whom Rob now found, with the sudden surrender of a prejudice, completely charming, even sexy, paused on the brink of a shift into academic talk – ‘Oh, it was an unpublished part of one of the poems, which turned out to be a sort of queer manifesto, except in tetrameter couplets…’

‘Really?’

‘Written in 1913, quite interesting…’

‘You know, I had to take issue with one thing you said,’ said Bryant.

‘Oh, lord,’ said Dupont, with a comical cringe.

‘Just now, I mean, when you said dear old Pete’s famous Imp was pea-green.’

‘Yes’ – Dupont looked nonplussed.

‘I could swear it was sort of beige.’ Bryant grinned and narrowed his eyes.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Dupont. ‘I went in that car a lot. In fact I even washed it once, before a group of us went to Windsor Castle in it, just in case we saw the Queen.’

‘Well, I won’t tell you what I did in it!’ said Bryant with a gasp – ‘no, but I’m sure you’re wrong.’

‘Maybe you’re colour-blind,’ said the woman in black.

‘Not at all,’ said Bryant. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter!’

‘It sometimes looked beige with dirt, I suppose,’ Dupont said in a cleverly bemused tone.

Jennifer said, ‘I’m very much of Professor Dupont’s view.’

Rob thought it rather comical that these two who’d tussled over Cecil Valance were doing it again over Peter Rowe. He saw that Bryant, a moderately successful writer, after all, and in his mid-sixties, had a look of exasperation, as though never given the credit due to him, and almost provokingly determined to get it. Rob thought he might get hold of England Trembles, and judge for himself.

Half an hour later, after three drinks, and a trip downstairs to the marble and mahogany loo, where Peter’s father emerged from a cubicle and engaged him in earnest talk by the basins while a dozen tipsy guests darted or staggered in and out, he accompanied the old man up the grand stairs and thought about saying his goodbyes and going. The huge brass chandeliers had been switched on, and the room was thinning. It seemed the blond man had already left, and at this Rob felt almost relieved. And really this wasn’t the moment… and with the eager young Gareth to see in an hour, at the Style Bar… He looked round for Desmond, whom he had, not quite purposely, been avoiding.

He saw him talking to an elderly couple, with a resolute air of courtesy which Rob found lightly chastening as he slid towards him. He gave him the warm little smile of a prior claim, over their two grey heads. Desmond caught his eye but carried on talking, ‘Well, we’ll speak to Anne about it – that should work out well,’ still standing stiffly, so that Rob, in momentary confusion, merely gave him a hug, sideways on; and was then introduced to Mr and Mrs Sorley.

‘Did you know Peter well?’ asked Mrs Sorley, small and sweet-faced, a bit thrown perhaps by a glass of wine in the afternoon, and the crowded occasion. They were Yorkshire, it seemed lived there still.

‘Not well,’ said Rob, ‘I sold him a lot of expensive books.’

‘Oh… oh, I see! No, we’re old friends of Terry and Rose – well, Bill was in the army with Terry, and of course I knew Rose in the Wrens – all those years ago!’ – a guileless promptness of exposure. Rob said,

‘So you knew Peter all his life,’ and smiled back.

‘Oh yes,’ she said, with a conscientious little shake of the head. ‘I was just saying to Desmond, how Petie used to put on plays when he was quite small – him and his sister played all the parts. Proper grown-up plays, you know – Julius Caesar.’

‘I can just imagine!’ Rob thought they could hardly have expected then to have been up in London half a century later, at Peter’s own memorial, talking to his male partner. He wanted to commiserate with them and also in a way to congratulate them.

‘Well, I must have a word with Sir Edward,’ said Desmond, with a dutiful smile.

‘Well, well done today,’ said Rob, mournful, head on one side.

‘Yeah, thanks, Rob. We’ll be in touch – we’ve got your e-mail, I think’ – so was there a new man on the scene already? Or was the ‘we’ a mere habit, the way he thought of his and Peter’s home? With a kiss for Mrs Sorley, though not for Rob, he went off across the room, amid sympathetic smiles and blank but lingering glances.

Rob spoke a bit longer to the Sorleys, feeling stung by Desmond’s coldness, and of course completely unable to protest or explain. It was true he hadn’t been to the funeral, hadn’t been in touch with Desmond at all since 1995. He meant nothing to Desmond. And it occurred to him, as he gazed a little distractedly over Bill Sorley’s shoulder, that perhaps Desmond thought Rob had only come today out of some idea he had of making an offer for Peter’s library – which was, in truth, at the back of his mind. Though there was more to it than that, much more.

He could see the Sorleys rather sticking to him, now they’d got him, among all these strangers and alarming if sometimes unnameable celebrities. Paul Bryant and Bobby were leaving, Bobby turning and giving Rob a finger wave. They went out through the double doors, arm in arm for a moment, so that he felt abashed by their evident contentment and self-sufficiency. ‘That’s very funny,’ he said to Bill Sorley, ‘yes…’: they seemed happy to do most of the talking. He spotted Jennifer, by the white marble fireplace, talking to a man he’d seen arrive about half an hour ago, as if unavoidably detained or really as if appointments of any kind were beyond him. He had a soft, intelligent but very nervous face, and thick shoulder-length grey hair, unwashed and unmanageable, which he ran his hands through incessantly as he spoke. His suit was old and shiny and scuffed at the heels, and Rob imagined he might have had some difficulty getting past the porter downstairs. He couldn’t tell from Jennifer’s expression, which seemed to hover between grief and hilarity, if she needed rescuing. He smiled and slumped regretfully – ‘Well, I think I really have to go…’

As he approached her, she looked up and nodded at him, as if they were partners themselves, or at least had some useful and chivalrous agreement for the occasion. The man half turned – ‘Well, it was marvellous to see you, darling,’ a cultured voice, terrible teeth, a flinching smile, the look of being fed up with being a nuisance to people.

‘And you!’ said Jennifer, warm in the moment of escape; but perhaps here there was more to it too. ‘Shall we?’ she said to Rob. And then, ‘This is Julian Keeping.’

‘Hello.’ Rob smiled keenly at him, leant in and shook his hand, which had a bony grip.

Keeping flapped his other hand, as if to say he wouldn’t bother them further. ‘An old friend of Peter’s, from way back,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Too long ago!’ He had a sad smell to him – Rob didn’t think it was drink, that sweet and sour choke to the nose; but smoke certainly, his finger ends and nails were tanned; and beyond that perhaps just long and compounded neglect. Rob nodded to him again, and then followed Jennifer to the door.

‘Are you getting a taxi?’ she said, at the top of the stairs, and Rob saw, which he hadn’t a minute before, that she was pretty drunk. She went down with high-stepping wariness, smiling faintly, preoccupied perhaps by thoughts of this unfortunate man. Rob was bright and speedy with drink himself, laughing half-guiltily at the echo of his own voice off the marble stairwell. ‘Believe it or not,’ she said, ‘that was my first sweetheart.’

‘Really,’ said Rob. ‘Well…’ He glanced at her, still unsure of her feelings, or what she would let him see of them.

‘He couldn’t be said to have worn well.’

‘Um, no…’

‘Corinna’s son, in fact,’ she said.

‘Oh, really?’ Rob looked narrowly at her. ‘So, your cousin, and, let me get this right, Cecil Valance’s grandson!’

‘Well, if you believe all that,’ she said; she shook her head and laughed, ‘Oh god!’

They went to their separate cloakrooms, and then he waited for her under the columns of the hall – the lights on now and a glimpse through the glass doors of evening already in possession of the street outside. She came back out with a humorous smile of accepted courtesy, a little flushed, but clearly, even determinedly, refocused on the present. Her coat was long, dark, made of some softly crinkling and glowing material, shyly extravagant, and again with an air of being a fashion all of her own. ‘So funny seeing Paul Bryant,’ she said, as they went through into the lobby, her tone again very dry.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Rob, glad she hadn’t forgotten her promise.

‘I probably shouldn’t say this…’

‘Oh, surely?’ – catching her mischievous look under the flowered hat, and giddily aware of the contrasting sobriety of the porter, in his striped trousers. Jennifer glanced over her shoulder. ‘He was always somewhat of a fantasist, you see. He told the most pitiful stories about his father, being a fighter pilot, shot down at the end of the war – somewhere or other.’

‘You don’t remember?’

‘No, he was the one who didn’t remember. The story kept changing. My aunt and I picked up on it, she thought it was odd, she had a terrifying eye for any kind of nonsense.’

‘This is Corinna, you mean?’

‘Yes… Anyway, of course, the point was he never had a father, he was a bastard,’ she said in her candid old-fashioned way. ‘His mother had been in a factory in the war, and got pregnant by someone there. There was some story about her being ill, as well, I can’t quite recall. That may have been true, of course, but one started to treat anything he said with a degree of suspicion.’

Rob glanced again at the porter, whose stare seemed simultaneously offended and indifferent. He himself didn’t see this as quite such a point against Bryant as Jennifer seemed to – in fact it made him if anything more intriguing and sympathetic. ‘So you said he used to be a bank-clerk?’ (He had the examples of T. S. Eliot and P. G. Wodehouse at the ready.)

‘Used, yes, in my uncle’s bank. No, the rather awful thing was, my uncle had to fire him: I believe he was jolly lucky it didn’t go to court.’ They went out and down the steps into the waiting chill of Pall Mall, car headlights, briefly stalled, advancing on them with the bright impersonal rush of the London night. ‘Some sort of fiddle. He was quite clever – he is clever, Paul Bryant, in his odd way – and I think it was difficult to prove, but Uncle Leslie had no doubt about it, and Paul himself somehow wasn’t surprised, from what I gathered, to be thrown out of the bank. I was doing my doctorate then, and he sent me a card, right out of the blue, to say he was leaving the world of banking to pursue a career as a writer.’

Rob said, vaguely humorously, looking around, ‘To spend more time with his family.’

‘Well, to spend more time with my family, as it turned out,’ said Jennifer.

‘And the rest is biography,’ said Rob with a wise grin, as the cab he had waved at came to a halt and he opened the door for her.

2

What Rob thought of as Raymond’s was properly Chadwick’s, Antiques and Second-Hand, though it had started out, a century ago, as the best dress-shop in Harrow. In the floor of the set-back doorway the words ‘MADAME CLAIRE’ could still be read in the dulled mosaic, circling the barely legible ‘MODES’. Now the two broad display windows, where headless Edwardian mannequins had once been stationed (hats shown on separate stands, like cakes), were barricaded with old furniture, the rough deal backs of wardrobes, tables stacked on tables, among which an individual item, a plaster bust of Beethoven or a real glass cake-stand, was sometimes artlessly exhibited to the public. Rob had never set eyes on Hector Chadwick himself – it was always Raymond he saw, if he was in the area, or if Raymond let him know he had something for him. The old Harrow houses yielded treasures, now and then, among the van-loads of almost unsaleable books that found their way into the shop and then on, into junk shops and musty charity stores all over North London.

Rob shoved open the door, and a leisurely bell rang, and then rang again, in a part of the shop that was out of view. The showroom, as Raymond called it, was partitioned by ramparts of furniture into gloomy alleys, and it was hard to tell if there was anyone else in it. Not much natural light got through, and lamps that were notionally for sale glowed here and there on desks and sideboards. The feeling of secrecy and safety was shadowed by a childish sense of unease. At the back was a wall of books Rob had sometimes looked over, torn wrappers, dun-coloured cloth, obscure possibilities, the wary flicker of excitement snuffed out, as often as not, in the odour of dust and disuse. The smell of the books was like a drug, a promise of pleasure shot through with a kind of foreknown regret. In dreams he clambered or floated up bookshelves like these, where indefinably significant copies of editions that never existed hid among themselves in shy dull colours, old greens and ochres and faded yellows. Undeveloped prototypes for books, the novel by Woolf of which only one copy was printed, the unknown Compton-Burnett with its ever-mutating title, Helpers and Hinderers, A House and Its Horse, Friend and Fraud. He worked his way round – ‘Raymond?’

‘Hey, Rob?’ There was the clatter of his keyboard. ‘With you in a sec.’ Raymond and his computer lived together in intense co-dependency, as if they shared a brain, his arcane undiscriminating memory backed up on the machine and perpetually enlarged by it. Raymond himself was vast, in a cheerfully challenging way. What his life was like beyond the confines of the shop Rob had no idea. ‘Just uploaded a new thing for you.’

‘Oh yeah…?’

‘You’re going to like this one.’

‘Mm, I wonder.’

At the side of the shop, a chaotic cubicle made a kind of office. Rob grinned in over the heaped papers and coiling dusty cables at Raymond’s round face gleaming in the light from the screen; he bounced slightly on his office chair as he nodded. His reddish beard, grown long and wild like a martyr’s, spread out over his T-shirt, half-covering the slogan for his website, ‘Poets Alive! Houndvoice.com’, above an implausibly cheerful picture of W. B. Yeats. He looked up and nodded. ‘I’ve just done Tennyson – want to see?’

On Houndvoice Raymond posted eerie little videos of long-dead poets reading, authentic sound recordings emerging from the mouths of digitally animated photographs. It was clear from the Comments that some viewers thought they were really seeing Alfred Noyes read ‘The Highwayman’, while even those who weren’t taken in were apparently impressed by the fish-like gaping of the poet’s lips and the rhythmical flicker of his eyebrows.

‘Yeah, I guess…’ said Rob, coming round as Raymond pushed back his chair. ‘They’re a bit spooky, aren’t they.’

‘Yeah?’ said Raymond, clearly pleased. ‘Yeah, I suppose people might be a bit spooked by them.’

Rob didn’t think the films were remotely convincing, but in a way this made them more disturbing. The dummylike dropping of the jaw, the cheesy melting and setting of the features, were like the evidence of other impostures – the doctored photos of early séances, more creepy and depressing to Rob than the thought of real communication with the dead. Rob met up with his dead friends in witty and poignant dreams, where they didn’t look at all like these bundles of mouthing matter. ‘Here we go,’ said Raymond, maximizing the player and whacking up the volume. Lord Tennyson’s notable head and shoulders filled the screen – hollow-cheeked, high-domed, hair tangled and greasy, the straggly dark beard with a lot of grey in it. The beard, at least, was a blessing, as it completely covered the poet’s mouth, preventing any ghoulish working of the lips. Raymond clicked the Play button and against a rainstorm of hissing and the galloping thump of the cylinder the determined quavering voice of the great poet began its familiar rush through ‘Come Into the Garden, Maud’. Rob had always thought the recording uncanny in itself – the effect whenever he’d heard it before was comic and touching and awe-inspiring by turns. He saw Raymond was watching him watch the video, and he smiled thinly, as if only just reserving judgement. The bard’s beard quivered like a beast in a hedge, as the famous face made repetitive mincing and chewing movements. Rob felt the peculiar look in the older Tennyson’s eyes, the air of almost belligerent anxiety, appealing to him critically and directly through the shame that was being inflicted on his lower features. Then it came to its abrupt end, and Raymond’s copyright line – not in the recording or the image, but in the puppet-show he’d made with them – appeared across Tennyson’s frozen face.

‘Almost incredible,’ Rob said, ‘listening to a man read a poem he wrote a hundred and fifty years ago.’

‘Ah – yes,’ said Raymond, seeing this rather skirted the issue.

Rob stood back. ‘I suppose that’s the earliest you can go, isn’t it,’ with a quick grasp for reassurance. ‘That must be the earliest recording of a poet.’

‘Well, strictly speaking,’ said Raymond, ‘though of course you can fake the voices, if you want to,’ peeping at Rob with that strange look, in a middle-aged man, of a teenager trying his luck.

‘Oh, for god’s sake,’ said Rob.

‘No, a bit naff, perhaps.’ Raymond shielded his feelings with a genial-sounding change of subject. ‘So what can I do for you, Rob?’

Rob narrowed his eyes. ‘You said you might have something for me…’

‘Oh, yes… Yes, indeed.’ Raymond swivelled his chair and peered bemusedly around the office – a moment’s teasing to cover his excitement. He raked his beard as his eyes ran over the shelves. ‘I thought, this is quite up Rob’s street… if I can only find it. Oh, I know, I put it in my naughty drawer’ – and leaning forward over himself, Raymond tugged open the bottom drawer of a filing-cabinet. The naughty drawer was where he kept things he didn’t want the Harrow schoolboys to find, in their occasional lingering searches in the more hidden parts of the shop. Sometimes a house clearance turned up a stash of girlie mags or even muscle mags which by now were antique collectibles in themselves. Raymond was the mere dealer – to Rob’s eye he seemed to survey an old Penthouse and an issue of Physique Pictorial with the same gruff detachment. Now he brought out a red leather-bound book, a thickish quarto, at a glance a journal or manuscript book, with a rounded spine to enable it to open flat. He swivelled back, weighing the book in both hands, as if he shouldn’t let it go without certain warnings and preconditions. ‘What do you know about someone called Harry Hewitt?’

‘Nothing whatever.’ Rob saw that the book had a clasp, a lockable diary, perhaps; on the front, under Raymond’s thumb, an embossed gold H.

‘No…’ Raymond nodded. ‘Quite an interesting character. Died in the sixties. Businessman, art collector – left some stuff to the V and A?’ Rob shook his head obligingly. ‘Lived up the road – Harrow Weald. Big house called Mattocks, sort of Arts and Crafts. Never married,’ said Raymond reasonably.

‘I get the picture.’

‘Lived with his sister, who died in the mid-seventies. After which Mattocks became an old people’s home. Closed down a few years ago – place boarded up, kids got in, a bit of vandalism, not too bad. Now about to be demolished.’

‘I assume Hector’s been over it…?’

‘There wasn’t much left.’

‘No, well, those old folks…’

Raymond grunted. ‘Thieves got the best stained-glass windows. Hector salvaged a fireplace or two. But there was a strong-room no one had got into, which didn’t hold Hector back for long. Nothing valuable in it, apparently, just papers and stuff from Hewitt’s days.’

‘Including what you have in your hand.’

Raymond passed it over – and as he did so the hinged brass bar of the lock dropped open. ‘We had to cut it, I’m afraid.’

‘Oh…’ It seemed to Rob a bit rum that a man who could unlock a strong-room had to take a hacksaw to a book. A handsome book, too, the inner border of the binding tooled in gold, thick gold on the page-edges, the endpapers with gold-seamed crimson marbling, bound by Webster’s, ‘By Appointment to Queen Alexandra’. Rob winced at the violation, quite apart from the damage to the price. Inside perhaps a hundred pages densely written over in greyish blue-black ink, a sheet of mauve blotting-paper half-way through marking where the writing stopped.

‘Have a look at it,’ said Raymond. ‘Cup of tea?’

And so he settled Rob down, after jarring shunting of a large wardrobe, in a tiny improvised sitting-room, made out of a chaise-longue, a bedside cupboard and a standard-lamp. The tea was served in a bone-china cup and saucer. Beyond the wardrobe, he could hear Raymond back at his computer, moments of music and talk.

At first, Rob wasn’t sure what he was reading. ‘December 27, 1911 – My dear Harry – I can never thank you enough for the Gramophone, or “Sheraton Upright Grand” to give it its official title! It is the most splendid gift anyone ever had, Harry old boy. You should have seen my sister’s face when the lid was first opened – it was a Study, Harry. My mother says it is quite unearthly to have Mr McCormack singing his heart out in her own humble Drawing room! You must come and hear him yourself soon Harry. Mere Thanks are inadequate Harry old boy – Best love from Yours ever Hubert.’ The handwriting was small, vigorous and compacted. Under a ruled line another letter began immediately: ‘January 11, 1912 – My dear old Harry – A Thousand thanks for the Books. The binding alone is most handsome and Sheridan one of the best writers I am sure. My mother says we must read the plays out Harry she is keen for you to take a Part! Daphne is all set to dress up too! You know I am not much of an actor Harry old boy. We will see you tomorrow at 7.30. Really you are too kind to us all. Tons of love from yours Hubert.’

So, a letter-book, copies kept by the grateful ‘Hubert’? It seemed a bit unlikely he would show such pride in them. In which case, letters transcribed by their recipient, also ‘H’ of course, to immortalize them, if that was the word? So many of them were thank-you letters that it seemed little more than a vanity project. He had an image of this wealthy old queen in effect writing thank-you letters to himself (‘ “My dear Harry,” wrote Harry.’). Rob skimmed on, with lowish expectations, eye out for proper nouns… Harrow, Mattocks, Stanmore, the whole thing parochial in the extreme, and then Hamburg, ‘when you get back from Germany, Harry,’ well, we knew Harry was a businessman. Rob sipped frowningly at his tea. It was slightly chilly in the shop. ‘You will not find me much use at bridge, Harry, Old maid is about my level!’

Jumping ahead, Rob started to see there was something else going on, a kind of shadow side to the glow of gratitude. June 4, 1913 – ‘My dear old Harry, I am very sorry but you know by now I am not the demonstrative type, it is not in my nature Harry.’ September 14, 1913 – ‘Harry, you must not think me ungrateful, no one ever had a better friend, however I’m afraid I do rather shun, and Dislike, displays of physical affection between men. It is not in my way Harry.’ In fact – of course – the two strands often came together, thanks and no thanks. Perhaps the book of vanity was also a covert record of mortification – or success: Rob didn’t know how it was going to end. He tried to picture the displays of physical affection – what were they? More than hugs, kisses, perhaps, begun with tense negligence, then growing more insistent and difficult. And meanwhile the presents escalated. May 1913, ‘The gun arrived this morning – it’s an absolute ripper, Harry old boy’; October 1913, ‘Harry, I can’t thank you enough for the truly splendid wardrobe. My poor old suits look quite shabby in their new home!’ – and a quaint reflection, ‘Creature comforts in life do matter Harry, whatever the Divines may say!’ Then January 1914, ‘My dear old Harry, the little car is a joy – I went out with Daphne for a spin in her – we did 48mph several times! She says a Straker is the best car in the world, and I am bound to agree. Only a large Wolseley overhauled us.’ Was there a certain hardening, the half-hidden note of covetousness, poor puzzled Hubert very slightly corrupted by all this generosity? Perhaps Harry would give him a Wolseley next. To an ardent gay man the recurrent olds that tolled through the letters – ‘My dear old Harry’, ‘Harry old boy’ – however cheerfully meant, might have palled after a bit: ‘I cannot believe you are 37 tomorrow, Harry old boy!’ in November 1912. Well, it was a curiosity – clever of Raymond to see that, and worth paying a bit for. One of Garsaint’s customers would probably go for it, the collectors of Gay Lives, which Rob had made a speciality of. And then of course the date.

He leafed forward, something resistant in the dense exclamatory crawl of the writing, the words themselves. There was very little after the end of 1914 – a few short letters from France, it seemed: BEF Rouen, more whole-hearted letters now they were apart, perhaps, and the whole perspective had changed. Then a letter of April 5, 1917: ‘My dear old Harry – A quick letter as we are moving shortly but don’t know where. They don’t give us much notice as a rule. A glorious day, which makes life feel much more worth living. We had our Easter service today, as we shall probably be moved by then, and I stayed to Communion afterwards. You will keep an eye on Hazel won’t you Harry old boy – she is a dear sweet girl – and on Mother and Daphne too. Goodnight Harry and best love from Hubert.’ After which Harry had written, ‘My last letter from my darling boy: FINIS.’ But underneath, in a ruled ink box, there was a little memorial:

HUBERT OWEN SAWLE

1st Lieut ‘The Blues’

Born Stanmore, Mddx, January 15, 1891

Killed at Ivry April 8, 1917

Aged Twenty-Six

At the counter Raymond raked his beard, ‘Ah, Rob – any interest?’

‘This Hubert Sawle – any relation of G. F. Sawle and Madeleine Sawle?’

‘Very good, Rob… yes… Hubert was G. F.’s brother.’

‘Totally unheard-of.’

‘Till now…’ – Raymond nodded at the book.

‘And Daphne Sawle was the sister. You see, I met this woman last week who was Daphne Sawle’s grand-daughter.’

‘Right…’

‘I got a bit lost in her story, about the biography of Cecil Valance, you know. She said her grandmother had written her memoirs. I meant to chase it up.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Raymond; and as this was something he didn’t like saying, he got to work.

‘Of course the house in “Two Acres” was round here, wasn’t it?’

‘Stanmore, yep.’

‘Anything there?’

Raymond peered, scrolled down and up, tongue on lip. ‘Demolished five or six years ago – well, it was a ruin already. No, Rob, there’s no one called Sawle except G. F. and Madeleine, who I happen to know was his wife.’

‘Are you on Abe?’

‘G. F. edited Valance’s letters, of course.’

‘That’s right,’ said Rob, again with the private glow of perceived connections, the protective feeling for his quarry that came up in any extended search. ‘I’ve an idea Daphne wrote under the name Jacobs.’

‘Oh yes…’ Raymond’s large hands made their darting wobble above the keyboard.

‘She’s totally forgotten now, but she published this book of memoirs about thirty years ago – she was married to Dudley Valance, then to an artist called Revel Ralph.’

‘Right… here we are… Daphne Jacobs: Assyrian Woodwind Instruments – that the one?’

‘Um…’

‘Bronze Ornaments of Ancient Mesopotamia.’

‘I don’t think she goes back quite that far.’

‘Corpus Mesopotamianum…’ – that slowed him up for a second. ‘There’s loads of this stuff.’

‘I think her book’s called The Short Gallery.’

‘O-kay – here we go – The Short Gallery: Portraits from Life. Aha, seven copies… Plymbridge Press, 1979, 212 pp… First Edition, £1. There you are!’

Rob came round and looked over Raymond’s shoulder. ‘Scroll down a bit.’ There were the usual anomalies – fine copy in fine dj, £2.50; ex-library, with no dj, damp-staining to rear boards, some light underlining, £18, with an excitable sales pitch, ‘Contains candid portraits of leading writers and artists A Huxley, Mary Gibbons, Lord Berners, Revd Ralph &c sensational account of teenage affair with WW1 Poet Dudley Valance.’

‘Wrong!’ said Raymond. ‘Right?’

‘Love Revd Ralph,’ said Rob. ‘Now that’s amusing. “Inscribed by the author ‘To Paul Bryant, April 18, 1980’.” ’ With it was the sixteen-page catalogue, which Garsaint sometimes had, for the Revel Ralph ‘Scenes and Portraits’ exhibition at the Michael Parkin Gallery in 1984, with a posthumous foreword by Daphne Jacobs – reassuringly unsigned: £25.

The final copy, from Delirium Books in LA, floated aloft in a bookman’s empyrean of its own: ‘Sir Dudley Valance’s copy, with his bookplate designed by St John Hall, inscribed and signed by the author “To Dudley from Duffel”, with numerous comments and corrections in pencil and ink by Dudley Valance. Book condition: fair. Dust-jacket, losses to head of spine, 1cm repaired tear to rear panel. In protective red morocco slipcase. An exceptional association copy. $1,500.’

‘Take your pick,’ said Raymond.

‘Mm, I will,’ said Rob. Jennifer Ralph’s description of the book as ‘rather feeble’ tugged against his more indulgent curiosity. Of course she would have known some of the figures whose portraits appeared in it, which made a difference. ‘And how much do you want for Hewitt?’

‘Hundred?’

Rob raised an eyebrow. ‘Raymond?’

‘You saw the Valance letters?’

‘I’m sorry…?’ Rob raised an eyebrow too, coloured slightly.

‘Oh, yes.’ And taking the book back from him, Raymond showed him that a few blank pages further on from the mid-volume FINIS there was another small section of transcribed letters, very different in tone. ‘That’s really the interest, Robson, my friend.’

‘Dear Hewitt,’ the first one began, in September 1913; modulating to ‘Dear Harry’ in the third letter, sent from France. Five letters in total, the last dated June 27, 1916, signed, ‘Yours ever, Cecil’.

‘Have these been published, I wonder?’

‘You’d have to check.’

‘I bet they haven’t.’ Rob looked over them as quickly as the writing allowed. The idea that Valance might have had a thing with Hewitt too… No sign of it, which was itself somehow suggestive. ‘And why did the old fool transcribe them – I mean, what did he do with the originals?’

‘Ah, you see, he failed to think of the needs of a twenty-first-century bookseller – quite a common failing of the past.’

‘Thanks for that.’ Rob looked at the last letter more narrowly.

It was bad luck you couldn’t get to up to Stokes’s – you would like him, I think. It occurred to me to send you the new poems before we get stuck in to the next big show – I will send them tomorrow, all being well, when I have gone over them once more. They are for your eyes only – you will see they are not publishable in my life-time – or England’s! Stokes has seen some (not all). One of them draws, you will see, on our last meeting. Let me know you have them safe. My love (is that too fresh?) to Elspeth the strict scholar.

Yours ever, Cecil.

‘So the house has been completely cleared, has it?’

‘They’re getting out the last stuff this week.’

‘Mm, what sort of stuff?’ Rob thought he saw the colour creep up behind Raymond’s beard as he turned away and rummaged on the desk – a distraction, though at first Rob thought it was a search for some further evidence.

‘I haven’t been down there myself. I think Debbie’s there now.’

‘Well, why didn’t you say so before?’ – to Rob the slow afternoon, the mild trance of autumn in North London, the musty otherworld of Chadwick’s shop, were revealed as a decoy, a disastrous waste of time, like the stifling obstacles and digressions of a certain kind of dream. ‘How far is it to the house?’

‘Well, how are you going?’

There was a taxi-rank down the road towards the school, as if ready to whisk the boys off to their homes, or the shops, or the airport… Rob ran down to the first car, but there was no driver: he was over the road, at the café, picking up a tea and a sandwich, and it was more than the driver of the second cab’s life was worth to take his fare… the cabbies’ tedious etiquette. Rob sensed there was something offputting in his own urgency, a hint of unwelcome trouble – he went grinning impatiently to the café, and after a minute the driver followed him out to the taxi. ‘It’s a house called Mattocks – was an old people’s home. Do you know it?’

‘Well, I did know it,’ said the cabbie, slow in the pleasure of his own irony. ‘There’s not much going on down there now.’

‘No, I know.’

‘They’ll have the wreckers’ balls down there, any day now.’ And he looked at Rob in the mirror as he slid into his seat, doubtless toying with some dismal joke.

‘Let’s see if we can get there first,’ said Rob. He leant coaxingly forward and saw his own eyes and nose in the mirror, in surreal isolation.

They turned and headed out north again, up through the most densely congested junctions of Harrow-on-the-Hill, the driver’s courtesy extending to any number of undecided road-crossers, reversing delivery-vans and anxious would-be joiners from side-roads; he was a great letter-in. Then in the leafy residential streets and avenues of the Weald his vaguely smiling dawdle on the brink of third gear suggested almost that he didn’t know where he was going. He started joking about something Rob seemed to have missed, Rob said ‘Sorry?’ and then saw he was talking on his phone, deploring something with a friend, laughing, the loud unguarded half of a conversation in which Rob’s needs seemed to shrink even further, the mere transient ticking of the fare. Above the pavements the tall horse-chestnuts were dropping their leaves, the oaks just beginning to rust and wither. So many of the big old houses had come down, their long gardens built over. There was a low wall with a sloped coping, the railings gone, a broken and leaning board fence behind. ‘Just a minute, Andy,’ said the driver, and set Rob down with a pleasant nod as he gave the change, a faint retroactive suggestion they’d had a nice time together.

Rob picked his way past the black puddles in the ruts of the drive. The house was set fifty yards back from the road, though its privacy had long been surrendered – on either side new developments looked in over the boundary walls. It was one of those big red-brick villas, of the 1880s perhaps, with gables and a turret, a lot of timber and tile-hanging, and very high ground-floor rooms that would take a fortune to furnish and heat, and so easily (Rob had seen them all over London) turned bleak and barely habitable in their latter-day lives. Now there were holes in the steep slate roof, small bushes seeded in the gutters, stripes of moss and slime down the walls. A JCB was backed up under the trees, and beside it a blue Focus presumably belonging to Debbie.

The front door was boarded up, and Rob made his way round to the side. There was a smell of smoke, cutting and toxic, not the good autumn-leaf smell. The ground sloped down, so that the broken veranda along the side of the house rose up to shoulder height. Then there was the round turret, and then a high brick wall with a door on to a tiny yard, the service entrance, the door here wide open – Rob slipped into the house through a dark scullery with huge tin sinks, a dim kitchen with a gas range, broken chairs, nothing worth salvaging. The floor was gritty underfoot, and there was a penetrating smell of raw damp – then he pushed open a fire-door into what must have been the dining-room and there was the smell of smoke again. He saw the awful wiring and boxing-in – the old house had been too disfigured thirty years before for any real sense of marvelment or discovery. He wrote it off. Into the hall – fire-doors again concealing the stairs, but light through double doors on to a room on the garden side of the house. He heard a child’s voice, the carefree note with its little edge of determination.

‘Are you Debbie?’ Out on the lawn, a shrubby tangle trampled back, a red-faced woman in jeans and a T-shirt was picking up items around the smouldering bonfire and throwing them on top – some old magazines caught, doubtfully, a moment of flame curling outwards as they slithered back down.

‘Don’t get too close, now’ – a boy of six or seven, red-faced too in his small anorak, bringing random things forward, a cardboard box, a handful of grass and twigs that fell back over his feet as he tossed it.

Debbie didn’t know who Rob was: he saw the curbing of curiosity, her provisional stance of responsibility for what was going on. ‘Raymond sent me down, I’m Rob.’

‘Oh, yes, right,’ said Debbie. ‘I was just about to call him, we’re nearly done.’

Rob looked into the fire, which seemed dense and half-digested, colour still showing in old floor-mats, were they? – that the fire had given up on, pink edges of a blackened curtain. ‘How long’s it been burning?’

‘What was it, Jack, day before yesterday?’

But the boy ran off at this to find something else to burn. Rob disguised his anxiety, picked up a stick and flipped some loose bits of wood back into the pyre. He had the almost absurd idea that other items might still be lying unconsumed at the bottom of it all; he saw them raking it out with a sense of excitement and purpose greater than that of the burning – already it seemed a story. ‘Raymond said you’d cleared the strong-room?’

Debbie had a wary eye out for the child. ‘Yes, that can go on, my love.’ Though little Jack had his own caprices and changes of mind.

‘I’m saving this one, Mummy.’

‘Well, all right…’ Debbie said, with a glance at Rob, the mime of patience. ‘Sorry… yes’ – he saw she was neither for him nor against him. ‘We got all that out on Monday – it was just old papers, account books.’ She snubbed her nose as she nodded. ‘Rubbish, no use to anyone.’

Rob looked round at the house rearing behind them, the curved flight of broken stone steps he had come down into the garden; and down which Harry Hewitt must have come a thousand times, and his beloved Hubert, now and then perhaps, before the Great War, having motored over in the Straker with his sister Daphne for protection.

‘Mind if I have a look round?’

‘Help yourself. Electric’s off, though – you won’t see much.’ She told him where the strong-room was, beyond the TV room, was it? – well, all the functions were muddled up. He wondered if he really wanted to go in.

‘Mum? Mum?’ Jack holding a wicker basket aloft in both hands.

‘No, that can go on – god, it’s Victorian, some of this stuff!’ – with a first look of humorous collusion with Rob. Jack had his own pile of salvage, items he was pointedly saving from the flames, and another pile of things to be gleefully thrown on. Sometimes an item was moved from one pile to the other with the proper arbitrariness of fate.

Back through the french doors into the sitting-room – with a shadowy hole in the wall: a fireplace Hector had rescued, perhaps. Through the door on the left into the TV room, lit up as if underwater by a small bramble-covered window; and beyond this a short passage, almost dark, with a white-painted door on the right standing open to reveal the black steel door of the strong-room immediately behind it, also just ajar. Rob’s curiosity was as much about the secret room as its contents, when he gripped the handle. He supposed a collector needed such a place, perhaps Hewitt was a hoarder who took more pleasure in possession than display. Well, it had kept one secret pretty closely, for ninety years. He wondered when he’d copied the letters out – as they arrived, or when he was grieving, or much later, in a painful search for lost feelings? With a wary murmur Rob slid his foot forward over the threshold, breathed the smell, unlike the rest of the place, dry wood. Then he thought of his phone, snapped it open and shone its faint spy’s light in front of him. The space was only an arm’s reach deep, slatted wooden shelves on three sides, like an airing-cupboard. A stone floor, a bulb hanging above. The phone’s light dimmed unwastefully and went out: he lit it again, ran it quickly round. Debbie had left nothing, except something whiteish on the floor, under the shelf on the left, a piece of newspaper. Rob picked it up, a sheet of the Daily Telegraph, and uncrumpled it: November 6, 1948. When the light went again, he stood for a moment, daring himself, in the near dark, testing the emptiness and the quickly stifled echo; then he got out. And puzzling vaguely over it as he came back into the relative brightness of the sitting-room, he realized from the stiffened folds that the page of the Telegraph had been used to wrap some square object, it was a wholly random survival, of no interest in itself. He took it out to throw on to the fire.

There was now quite a show, some broken chairs had been tossed on and the whole thing had a wild dangerous heat and snap to it, loud cracks and sparks, a roll of black smoke from a foam-rubber cushion. Little Jack was awed, standing back beside his mother, but with a look of calculation about dares of his own. They seemed to stretch ahead.

‘Find anything?’ said Debbie. Of course it was a sign of her excellence that he hadn’t. It occurred to him, as he went back down the drive and on to the unknown street, that Valance had never sent the promised letter, on the eve of the Somme, after all – if he had done, the careful memorious Hewitt would surely have transcribed it too. And now Rob had to get back into Town – he had a date at seven with… for a moment he couldn’t think of his name. He looked on his phone for the text, and caught the smell of smoke on his hands.