Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

‘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.