He preferred the pub when it was quiet, which was the early afternoon, and sometimes he stayed long enough for the golden hour to kiss those sitting in the front bar. At the Union Hotel, in Fitzroy, there’s a time of day during certain parts of the year when that front bar is drizzled in glorious light.
Peter was already an old man when I first met him, about a decade ago, and whether bathed in golden light or not, he always sat upon the same stool. There were other constants. His heavy tweed jacket, for example, which he would always wear despite the weather, and upon the bar before him was always placed his book, newspaper, pot of Carlton Draught and battered Akubra.
One of those books was a biography of Dickens; another time he was reading the first volume of Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples. I remember that well, because he gave me a small reading. Peter always spoke very quietly, regardless of his passion, but his excitement about Churchill’s prose was obvious. He insisted that he read me a paragraph. “Please,” I said, and the lines he shared were Churchill’s description of the barbaric murder of Edward II. “For the King a more terrible death was reserved,” he read. “He was imprisoned in Berkeley Castle, and there by hideous methods, which left no mark upon his skin, was slaughtered. His screams as his bowels were burnt out by red-hot irons passed into his body were heard outside the prison walls, and awoke grim echoes which were long unstilled.”
I can quote that because I remember the poker, and I have the four volumes in my study. That it’s uncertain that this was, in fact, how Edward II died, was immaterial – Peter was insistent upon the quality of the prose. “No one writes like this anymore,” he told me.
That this quiet man felt that he could read from his book to me was made possible by several superficial things. When I saw him at the bar, he was often engaged with The Age’s cryptic crossword, and I told him that I’d bring an early copy of The Saturday Paper on a Friday so that he could try that one too.
He’d grunt his appreciation when I left a copy before him on a Friday evening, and I’d order us some draught. He was never impressed by the paper’s cryptic. They were too easy, he’d say, and I’d shrug.
Despite its undemanding puzzle, he never begrudged my delivery of the paper, and for many weeks I’d arrive at the pub with his copy in hand and we’d talk about the book he was reading or about the Collingwood Football Club with which he seemed engaged in a volatile relationship of admiration and disgust.
And then he told me about taking Samuel Beckett to a game of cricket.
*
As far as I know, Samuel Beckett is the only Nobel Prize winner with a listing in cricket’s statistical almanac Wisden. In fact, when he died there was an austere obituary recorded right there. “Samuel Barclay Beckett, who died in Paris on December 22, 1989, aged 83, had two first-class games for Dublin University against Northamptonshire in 1925and 1926, scoring 35 runs in his four innings and conceding 64 runs without taking a wicket.”
There’s the popular caricature of Beckett: the ascetic with the granite face who gorged upon Schopenhauer’s pessimism, claimed that his ambition was to “stupefy myself with useless words” and who warned a lover not to ask him to prise his heart open because “nasty black stuff would come out”.
So it’s pleasing to think of this strange lyricist of anguish as also being a man greatly tickled by games – cricket, rugby, chess. He also swam, cycled, played golf and tennis. As a young man he boxed fiercely; as an old man, when he struggled to sleep, he would play in his mind the first few holes of Dublin’s Carrickmines golf course. At the first international Beckett festival, held in 2012, alongside the theatre and readings there were several sporting events played in his honour.
In the 1960s, Peter told me, he was an editor at Penguin’s London office. In this capacity, Peter was asked to chaperone Beckett to Lord’s to watch a Test match. Beckett’s British publisher at the time was Faber & Faber, and so I wondered perhaps if Peter’s hospitality was part of a design to poach him. Peter was unhelpfully vague on the details.
Still, I thought, what a remarkable privilege it was to take Samuel Beckett to a game of cricket. Beckett enjoyed company, especially when it involved drink, but he was always wary of public scrutiny. He mostly opposed biographies of him, pleading with prospective writers that his life was nothing but his work and that he was a “very dull dog” and poor subject.
He withdrew from public attention, and ran from the Nobel Prize itself in 1969 – he declined to accept the award in person. His French publisher at the time, Jerome Lindon, told newspapers that Beckett was “grateful” but “annoyed at the publicity”. “There was apparently no pleasure in it at all for him,” Lindon said. “If it were anybody else… But there is no affection in him. He had no need either for the notoriety or for the money.”
And so here was dear Peter, escorting the man to Lord’s, where they would drink in the wan English sun and admire the gentle cover drives of Geoffrey Boycott.
*
I don’t believe in premonitions, even if I’ve experienced them. The first that I remember came in the form of a dream when I was a teenager. The dream was another chapter in a series of recurring nightmares that I’ve experienced from a young age and which continue today and involve various aircraft catastrophically stalling or exploding in the air.
I’m never a passenger, always a witness, and one who’s filled with impotent foreboding – I know the plane’s doomed well before its engines whine or the wings crack or the whole thing ignites. My anticipation and its uselessness is a fundamental quality of the dreams, which are recalled less for what happens than for the oppressive humidity of dread.
Anyway. On this particular night I dreamt that a Harrier jump jet hovered ominously above our surreally roofless house which was then hosting a dinner party. I looked up towards it and knew it was doomed, and likely us too, and sure enough it began to aggressively vibrate before shattering and fiery debris fell down upon us.
I woke terrified and wet and turned my radio on for comfort. It was set to the BBC’s World Service, to which an ABC station would transfer during the night, and as soon as I did there came breaking news: a Concorde had just crashed into a Parisian hotel and restaurant.
My other premonition was that Peter was dead. It was the second year of COVID and, having spent the majority of the previous year in lockdown, Melburnians were enjoying a reprieve from isolation. I met some friends at the Union, and we sat outside and spoke as I think most people at that time spoke when physically encountering friends they’d barely seen in a year: feverishly.
One of the bartenders we knew was on a shift break and he came and joined us. I asked him about Peter and he told me that he had died a few months previous. He wasn’t sure if it was COVID, but that he thought he’d been ill for a while regardless. Oddly, it felt like confirmation of something I already knew and I mumbled my regrets.
Then I asked him: was Peter an editor for Penguin in London in the 1960s and did he ever take Samuel Beckett to the cricket? I’d always had my suspicions about the story. There was the Faber & Faber discrepancy, but the brightest red flag was when I asked him, some months after he told me the suspiciously vague story, whether I might interview him about it for a possible story. Peter’s response, I thought, was one of nervousness and horror. I don’t recall his rationalisation for declining and, happy to help him preserve face, I left it there.
But privately thereafter, I wondered: was Peter a fabulist? The bartender couldn’t say, definitively, but he thought he’d heard a few tall tales from him over the years himself when a few pots of Draught had gone down and the golden light drizzled the bar. Not that it matters, he said: Peter was always a gentleman.
And so, I may never know. In fact, I don’t want to know. I’m happy for the story to hang suspended in the bar’s soft golden light, the light that seems to simultaneously evoke promise and goodbyes.
The story is just as interesting, if not more so, if he made it up.