by D. J. Taylor
Being somebody’s mistress—and this is the category in which she presumes herself to reside—is primarily a matter of gesture: a series of coded signals sent out to observers who may or may not be in the know, a private joke that half of you wants to keep to yourself and half of you wants to share with other people. There is a particular way in which Tyler Kent leaps forward with his lighter whenever she takes a cigarette from the packet and places it in her mouth that symbolises all this—its confidences, its conspiracies, its bleak assumptions. She assumes that doing what Anthea wants her to do will be a betrayal of a sort.
But what exactly is being betrayed? Tyler Kent is not going to marry her. That much is abundantly clear. In a year, or eighteen months, he will get another posting, and the maps of the Indian wars and the photographs of the Princeton sophomores will move on to Rome, or Madrid. Tyler Kent, as he is fond of pointing out, is a man without ties. Or rather a man whose ties can be severed whenever Tyler Kent feels like doing the severing. He was engaged once, to the daughter of a Delaware real-estate tycoon who owned half the properties in Martha’s Vineyard. He talks about it as the tightest of tight spots. Beating an honourable retreat needed all his dexterity to accomplish.
Cynthia puts her key in the door, which is full of rust and makes a crackling sound, like old leaves trampled underfoot. The flat is supposed to be empty. Lucy has gone off somewhere with her squadron leader. There will probably not be any food in the kitchen cupboard. Unexpectedly the door opens onto voices: Tyler Kent’s and Lucy’s. Walking into the sitting-room, she finds them both ensconced in armchairs. There is a bottle of wine, half-empty, on the table before them and the atmosphere, if not conspiratorial, is at any rate faintly exclusive, as if the joke Tyler Kent might have been about to tell before Cynthia’s arrival will still be told, but without the same level of attack.
‘Hi, Cynthia,’ Tyler Kent says. He has taken off the jacket of his charcoal-coloured suit to reveal fanciful light-blue braces that run over his shoulders in an inverted Y and looks far more natty and self-possessed than any Englishman found in the same circumstances could ever do. ‘I was just passing and thought I’d come by.’
Lucy, still wearing the thoroughly sensible coat that people in the office sometimes make jokes about, has a slightly far-away look in her eyes, as if the bottle of wine is a prelude to some Barmecidal feast that will suddenly drop from the rafters onto a dozen gleaming gold plates.
‘I thought you were going away somewhere with your chap,’ Cynthia says, who cannot quite remember if the squadron leader’s name is Roger or Rupert.
‘I was,’ Lucy says, ‘but he got called off to Biggin Hill on an exercise. He says he might be able to get up to town tomorrow.’
RAF officers lead erratic lives, Cynthia knows. There are stories in the press about their being thrown out of nightclubs and overturning cars, late at night, in the Sussex back-lanes. Their professional slang—‘kites’ and ‘prangs’ and ‘crates’—has been taken up by radio comedians. There are also jokes about ‘joysticks.’
Having established what Lucy and Tyler Kent are doing here at half-past four on a Friday afternoon, Cynthia’s gaze falls on the wine, which is not, as she first assumes, from North Africa but spectacularly ancient, the dust at its neck almost cobwebbed, as if it were first ordered up to celebrate the news from Trafalgar. ‘Where did you get that?’ she wonders.
‘The wine?’ Tyler says. ‘Oh, I was lunching with Logan. The old fellow’s taken a shine to me. Why don’t you have some?’
Logan is an elderly American expatriate, almost as ancient as the wine, whom Desmond sometimes talks about. It is extraordinary how many people end up taking a shine to Tyler Kent. The Belgravia hostesses aren’t the half of it. Extraordinary, too, how often they end up giving him things. Novels from Heywood Hill’s book-shop, ripe to be appreciated for their ‘Englishness.’ Gewgaws from the Burlington Arcade. Cynthia is not quite sure how much of this Englishness Tyler Kent wants. Essentially his attitude to England is that of the tourist, interested in these little sideshows got up for his diversion, but whose real concerns lie back across the border just crossed. He can take it or leave it.
But she accepts a glass of the wine which is, as she anticipated, quite astonishing: dense and mellow—practically the colour of blood—and containing countless little scents and intimations of other things. ‘It’s quite something, isn’t it?’ Tyler Kent says. He seems genuinely impressed, which is unusual. With Captain Ramsay he looks calculating, the New World bringing its managerial skills to right the deficiencies of the old. Logan’s wine cellar, on the other hand, has made him humble.
Wineglass in hand, Cynthia goes into the kitchen, which looks faintly ramshackle and unlived-in. What with Lucy’s squadron leader and Cynthia’s nights in Bishop’s Mansions, the girls are not often here. The cupboards are nearly bare, and the drift of flour on the square table has been there a week. Beneath her, the house is turning quieter. ‘I’ve no idea what we have to eat,’ she says, going back into the sitting-room, where Tyler Kent is explaining something to Lucy about the situation on the Franco-German border. ‘There’s hardly anything in the kitchen and the rest of the shepherd’s pie is definitely off.’
‘Then I shall insist, I shall absolutely insist,’ Tyler Kent says, who has drunk two glasses of the red wine, ‘on taking you young ladies out to supper.’
‘That would be a wonderful idea,’ Lucy says, for whom even one glass of wine is a dangerous incitement, and Cynthia bows her head meekly at the derailment of her evening.
‘I shall absolutely insist,’ Tyler Kent says again, with a little flourish of his cupped hands—a new gesture which Cynthia wonders if he has borrowed from Logan.
This is another difference between Tyler Kent and Englishmen: the fuss about hospitality given and received, the gratification involved in standing treat. Sometimes she imagines America as a kind of gigantic restaurant full of people desperately trying to pay for each other’s meals.
None of this, she acknowledges, is getting her any nearer to solving the problem of Tyler Kent who, if Anthea is to be believed, is in league with people whose activities could be regarded as treasonable. She wonders what some of the Belgravia hostesses whose invitation cards lie on Tyler Kent’s mantelpiece would say if they knew. But perhaps some of them are engaged in activities which could be regarded as treasonable. It is hard to tell.
There is post on the doormat: a postcard to a previous tenant with a picture of St Moritz on the front in which not one of the words is intelligible, and an air-mail letter with a Portuguese frank. Cynthia puts this aside to read later. In the past few weeks Mrs Kirkpatrick’s letters have grown terse and unrevealing. Cynthia has no idea whether her mother finds Portugal congenial or what she does there, but she knows that she has read a great deal of Trollope. She wonders what she would say if her mother were there in the room with her now and concludes that she would keep her information—and her suspicions—to herself, and that her moral judgements are for her alone.
Tyler Kent, meanwhile, has jumped up from his chair and is handing round the rest of the wine. He is nowhere near drunk, but there is definitely the air of a performing seal about these manoeuvres: a precariously balanced ball that may plunge to earth at any moment. The neck of the bottle clinks against Lucy’s glass as he pours. Lucy’s squadron leader has a Theology degree from Cambridge and a manner to match. It is difficult to imagine him at the controls of a Fairey Battle. ‘What happened at the office this afternoon?’ Lucy asks.
‘Oh, nothing very much,’ Cynthia says. ‘A solicitor’s clerk brought round a libel letter about that piece Teddy Chambers wrote called “London After Dark,” but Desmond says he thinks it will all blow over. Oh, and Anthea came in wearing one of her hats.’
‘What was it like this time?’ Lucy asks, whose awe of Anthea is even less qualifiable than her own.
‘Oh, like one of those Lalique gl
ass lanterns. Desmond practically bowed to her when she came through the door.’
‘That Anthea is quite a lady,’ Tyler Kent says, winding a little trail of irony around the word ‘lady.’ It occurs to Cynthia that, such is Tyler Kent’s absorption in his chosen milieu, he very probably knows what Anthea is. ‘Do you know,’ he goes on, ‘when I first came over here she used to be Ramsay’s secretary? But she was always more of a literary kind of a girl.’
The faint air of tension does not recede. It is a quarter to five now, far too early to go out. Seeing Lucy’s face bent over the rim of the wineglass, and her own wrist torpid on the chair-arm, she realises how painfully thin they have become. London is full of skimpy, undernourished girls queuing palely at bus stops. Even the women in the bakers’ shops have this wraith-like quality.
Tyler Kent, on the other hand, has grown sleek and prosperous: the embassy dinners and the late suppers with Lady Colefax seem to suit him. At night he complains about Cynthia’s sharp bones poking into his flanks. He is a restless sleeper, throwing out unexpected arms and legs, like a man trying to swim the backstroke, and, if woken, not above sending Cynthia to the kitchen to fetch him a glass of water.
There is a catchphrase doing the rounds—it began life in a variety-hall sketch and has now migrated to the newspapers—in which a woman exchanging confidences with her friend asks, ‘But, my dear, what do you see in him?’ Cynthia wonders what she sees in Tyler Kent. What she said to Anthea in the Bloomsbury café was not, of course, meant to mislead. The greater part of Tyler Kent’s attraction does lie in his not being English, in not having been to Winchester or Merchant Taylors’, in not being a subaltern in a Guards regiment, or having parents who wear stiff, formal clothes and sit all day in a villa near Goldalming hoping that the weather will soon be fine enough for a walk.
A bit more to it, she thinks, is to do with sophistication: that feeling of a series of dense, occluded worlds, each with its chain-link of secret protocols, whose end result is Tyler Kent ordering an exotic cocktail from a startled waiter, or stamping into a restaurant not quite as if he owned the place but as if the owner had asked his advice on decor and cuisine. Plus—and this is in marked contrast to every Englishman she has ever met—he not only likes her, but takes the trouble to tell her so. The only problem about Tyler Kent—in addition to the things that Anthea has told her about him—is that it is impossible to conceive of an English life for him other than the one he lives. She has tried to imagine him playing golf on the links at Brancaster or walking through the Wiltshire back-lanes, but it is never any good. Sophistication, she thinks, can only take you so far.
‘Goodness,’ Lucy says, plunging back into the chair from which she has half risen, ‘I do feel peculiar.’ Her skin is so white as to be almost translucent: the veins visible beneath it are like blue wires. There is a letter on the table next to the three-quarters empty wine bottle from Lucy’s parents enquiring about arrangements for the festive season. Mrs Kirkpatrick, too, always refers somewhat archly to the ‘festive season’ rather than Christmas. It is a caste-mark, like calling make-up ‘face powder.’ Lucy, it seems, with or without her squadron leader, will be going to her uncle’s in North Yorkshire. Cynthia wonders where she will end up.
There has been talk of The Bell at Aston Clinton, which is Tyler Kent’s idea of the country. Otherwise there is nowhere to go. Cynthia wonders what Christmas at The Bell at Aston Clinton will consist of. Tyler Kent, meanwhile, is relishing his captive audience. Possibly the other cipher clerks at the embassy are not so accommodating. Just now they are talking, or rather Tyler Kent is talking, about the tides of history, the incremental shifts in power and perspective that are changing the way the world works.
‘In thirty years’ time, even twenty years’ time,’ Tyler Kent is saying, ‘the whole idea of empire will be pretty much outdated. The white man’s burden? Well, the white man will have to start laying his burden down. And pretty soon he’ll find there are easier ways of getting what he wants out of the subject races. Now, America woke up to that fact a quarter of a century ago. It’s odd that Europe still thinks that if you want another place’s natural resources you have to go in and organise it. Take it from me, the new empires will be run at arm’s length, by invisible strings. They’ll cost less, and sometimes people won’t even know they’re there.’
Cynthia, having heard this kind of thing before, is not impressed by it, but Lucy, whose squadron leader presumably keeps to safer topics, is profoundly stirred. ‘But surely,’ Lucy says, ‘empires aren’t just about natural resources, oil and cotton and so on?’ (And tea, Cynthia thinks stoutly, remembering her father.)
‘Sure,’ Tyler Kent says, ‘they’re about territorial influence. But the time when fellows in pith helmets could come riding out of the jungle to scare the natives is over.’
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Lucy says, wide-eyed. ‘Roger says independence is the price we shall have to pay for keeping India on our side in the war.’ And Cynthia thinks of her mother’s worst nightmare, which is a procession of coolies, intent and evil-eyed, marching on their bungalow beneath lofted torches.
There is something not quite right about Tyler Kent as he finishes up the dregs of Logan’s wine in that practised oenophile’s sniff of his. Perhaps something has happened to him that nobody else knows about, some grandmother dead on the Pennsylvania porch, some ruined cipherene’s father making his presence felt. Helping the girls with their coats as they set out for the restaurant, he is unusually solicitous.
The staircases are sunk in gloom, and the push-button switches on the landings click back after a few seconds. Nun, literary agent, and diplomat: all have disappeared, and the locked doors are ghostly with reflected twilight. The mice run away at their approach: they can hear them scampering off into the darkness. In Ceylon the mongooses came out of the garden and lay by the veranda door all night, hoping for snakes. But there are no mongooses now, just Tyler Kent buttoning up his gentlemanly ambassador’s overcoat, and giving her one of those quizzical, semi-adroit looks that presumably in another world are used to subdue cipherene and ambassadorial eminence alike.
Down in the hallway it is bitterly cold and the traffic surges in the square. ‘I do think,’ Lucy says, with an unexpected screech of feeling, ‘that Roger could have got out of going to Biggin Hill.’ And Cynthia divines that someone else is prey to doubt, uncertainty, and rank suspicion.
‘Let’s not mind about Roger,’ Tyler Kent says, and Cynthia thinks his flamboyance is assumed in the same way as his Aquascutum overcoat and that beneath it is something much more vulnerable and compromised. Out in the square he commandeers a taxi—one of the countless taxis he has commandeered for her in the past six weeks—hailed, subdued, and bent to his will, like a cowboy lassoing a steer, and they are bouncing away in the direction of Soho, where for some reason, when not enslaved by the Belgravia ladies, Tyler Kent nearly always ends up having his supper.
For an isolationist, Tyler Kent is remarkably cosmopolitan in his attitude to food. He likes gay little Italian restaurants with salami hung up in the window, French cafés with Napoleonic waiters. Just now the gay little Italian waiters have grown nervous, on account of Mussolini, and display notices that read British owned or only British staff employed here.
Tonight’s destination is some sort of culvert off Wardour Street, behind boarded-up windows but vouchsafed for by an article Tyler Kent read in the Evening Standard. It is horribly dark and all the light seems to come from candle-stubs mounted in the necks of old wine bottles. They have not been there a moment when a voice says ‘Cynthia,’ and there is a tall girl, with a nose so retroussé that it barely disturbs the planes of her face, coming up effusively to clutch at her wrist, while a man in army uniform who is peeling off a pair of gloves that are too tight for him smiles benevolently in the background.
The girl is called Theresa Sinclair-Haddon, and at some infinitely remote point she att
ended the day school in South Kensington to which Cynthia was sent during Mr Kirkpatrick’s furloughs. There was nothing memorable about her except her nose, and there is nothing memorable about her now, but still they shake hands, and Cynthia is introduced to Simon, her fiancé and a captain in the RAMC. He has one of those spectacularly chiselled faces like the Spartan athletes in Lord Leighton’s paintings, as if he ought to have a laurel wreath over his forehead rather than a service cap.
‘Heavens,’ Cynthia says, when all this has been explained to her, twice, ‘didn’t you have a sister called Honoria?’ and a damp yet enticing blanket of complicity settles over the proceedings, and Simon, tugging off the final finger of his glove, gives a thankful nod, as if to say that here, in the depths of Soho, against pretty considerable odds, lurks some faint vestige of a world, and its citizens, with which he is familiar. Tyler Kent stands at the back, mutely attentive. He has taxi-fleets and ambassadorial telegrams at his command: he can cope with a noseless girl from Borehamwood and her statuesque fiancé.
There is, of course, no question of their not dining together. Theresa has begun on one of those mythologising performances that Cynthia has previously associated only with her own mother, in which quite ordinary incidents are blown up into events of profound symbolic significance, and girls Cynthia can hardly remember are roped into a vast, panoramic frieze of confabulation and triumph in which she and Theresa are the undoubted stars.
‘And then that time,’ Theresa says, ‘when somebody sent the toy mouse whirring into the cloakroom and Miss McNab was so cross she made us go without our luncheon.’
Who was Miss McNab? Where was the cloakroom? For a moment Cynthia wonders whether she isn’t the victim of some extravagant practical joke. But no, there is a look of absolute, seraphic conviction on Theresa’s face. Simon, meanwhile, is nodding, glad to see the girls amused. Tyler Kent, head bent over the menu card, black Oxfords drumming on the linoleumed floor, has grown quiet. Perhaps there are areas of English life that even he finds difficult to infiltrate.