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By Root 1180 0

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