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 And then again, at first as if cloaked by emotion, the voice grew dry and withdrawn, and the long rising whine of a motorcycle speeding the length of Pall Mall lent a sudden sad sense of the world outside.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…’