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.’