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By Root 1056 0

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