An actress, accompanied by three men, and wearing a backless dress, makes her entrance into the lounge. She is resplendently pregnant. In answer to a journalist’s question, she gently pokes a finger to make a dimple in her belly, and says: The middle of June! The public applaud.
A waiter asks me whether I would like to order something. I do so. After a moment I hear Tyler’s voice: I regret to see that you have not improved your pronunciation. You are as lost in Spanish as you once were in English, he says.
I do my best, Sir.
You don’t listen to how other people talk. You never say to yourself: He speaks well, so I’ll listen to him and learn how to speak.
I listen all the time, Sir.
You don’t listen with enough patience.
I can listen for hours.
Then why do you pronounce so badly?
I don’t listen to their words, Sir.
Exactly.
During this conversation Tyler sips his wine and doesn’t glance in my direction for a second. Circe is eyeing him with some interest. She is probably telling herself that he is only half her age, and that he is so evidently a gentleman he will ignore the difference.
If you want to catch a ball, Tyler explained to us in the Green Hut, you don’t snatch at it in the air, you watch it coming and then place your hands accordingly. The Hut was roofed with corrugated iron which was painted green. It had a door that fitted badly and three small windows. There was no heating and no water. Tyler and I brought the water each day in his car. What did we do about shitting? I don’t remember. Maybe there was an earth closet outside. A vague memory of vomiting there once. This hut on the edge of a field was our school. Nobody, however, referred to it as such, because Tyler insisted that he was not a schoolmaster but a tutor. A tutor in a green hut.
A young government minister has arrived. He is surveying the lounge to see who else is there. In a minute he will decide whether to make his entrance straight away, or whether to wait for a moment in the Velásquez bar. His bodyguards too are surveying everyone in the lounge and in the entrance hall and at the hotel reception desk. For them to recognise a face, or place somebody, is already a distraction, for the shot, the blow, may come from anybody or anywhere in the world.
It was in the Green Hut before the eyes of Tyler, now eating his sandwiches decorated with parsley in the lounge of the Ritz Hotel, Madrid, that I first learnt to write. Earlier, at a nursery school, I had learnt to form the letters, all of them, from A to Z, belonging like moles or birthmarks or beauty spots to the pert, pretty, rounded body of my teacher, Lilles, whom I loved. Forming the letters, however, was not writing, as Tyler pointed out on my first day in the Green Hut. Writing involves spelling, straight lines, spacing, words leaning the right way, margins, size, legibility, keeping the nib clean, never making blots, and demonstrating on each page of the exercise book the value of good manners.
We were six boys, all from different families. Wood. Henry. Blagdon. Bowes-Lyon. And one I’ve forgotten. For every lesson we sat at the same small table. Tyler, when he wasn’t looking over our shoulders, stood behind the workbench on which, twice a week, we learnt carpentry.
Most educational establishments are mysterious, perhaps because teaching and folly share an interface. And the Green Hut was no exception. I still don’t know how the place began, how long it had existed before I was sent there, where Tyler came from. He coached boys to get into what were considered good schools. I don’t think my parents — unlike the others — paid any fees. I think he ate free in my mother’s café in exchange for his improving my English and making it possible to pass me off as a gentleman boy. We both recognised the hopelessness of the project — I was with him for two and a half years — and this was our secret, which made us, in a strange way, accomplices.
You’re going to make a mess of your life.
Why, Sir?
Because you can’t saw straight.
It’s difficult to hold, Sir.
Only because you’re scared of its teeth. Are you frightened of sawing your thumb off?
No, Sir.
Then saw straight.
Apart from carpentry, we learnt arithmetic, geometry, Latin, drawing, the history of the Royal Family, geography, physics and gardening.
How do you spell hyacinth?
With a ’y’, Sir.
Of course. But where is the ’y’? You’re in too much of a hurry. Let the question sink in. Take the measure of it.
During the winter in the Green Hut, the six of us suffered from the cold. There was only a portable paraffin stove, nothing more. And on certain days the can of paraffin was empty. Tyler would pretend he had forgotten, because he preferred us to think that he was absentminded rather than broke. We had red noses, chilblains on our fingers and toes, and sopping handkerchiefs stuffed into the pockets of our shorts. In the months of January and February Tyler often wore a long loosely knitted woollen scarf whose colours astounded us: white and lilac with little flecks of pink — the colours you see mixed with snot on your handkerchief after your nose has stopped bleeding.
After the last lesson of the afternoon in the Hut, driving in his car to his home, from where later I caught the bus to mine, he would offer me, as I sat beside him, half of this scarf.
Where did it come from, Sir?
You ask too many questions. You do it to draw attention to yourself.
I’m interested, Sir.
You never stop being interested, that’s where the trouble begins. Wrap this end around you, keep quiet, and put your gloves on.
Circe sits up, and, with a flick of her head, tosses her hair back.
Señor, she asks Tyler, do you find the sandwiches here good?
The bread is a little too thinly cut, but otherwise, yes, Señora.
She gazes at him shamelessly; the elegance and sadness of his reply allow it.
Tyler’s car was an Austin 7. The roof was a kind of tarpaulin, with brackets that folded. On winter mornings he had to start it by turning the crank handle. I sat in the driver’s seat, on the very edge, so that my right foot could touch the accelerator if the engine caught. Sometimes it took us ten minutes. I would shiver, and his moustache got frosted.
Tyler lived in two rented rooms on the ground floor of a large house with a rose garden he did not have the right to sit in. The house belonged to a widow whom I occasionally glimpsed wearing a fur coat or a floral summer dress. She, like Tyler, was a Catholic, which is why she agreed to rent him the two small rooms. He was allowed to leave his car in the drive, but only in one place, at the back of the house by the kitchen door where the dustbins were.
We’ll be leaving tomorrow, Circe says, touching the shoulder of Tyler’s tweed jacket, leaving for Huesca. I feel, Señor, that you would love Aragon. You might accompany us?
The cigar-smoker — Telegonus if he’s really the blonde’s son — is now helping to get Pasiphae out of her chair and on to her feet. It is a struggle, and they need both of her crutches, which fit under her elbows, to prop her upright. Once on her feet, she turns towards Tyler.
I think you would enjoy seeing our horses, she says.
Once more I wonder whether they come from a circus or a château.
Tyler’s two rented rooms smelt, like the Green Hut, of his cigarettes. He smoked a brand called De Resque Minor. On the windowsills of the two rooms he grew flowers in wooden boxes. On the mantelpiece, there were often plant-cuttings in tumblers, each with a little label attached to it, with its name written in his meticulous rounded handwriting: Red Campion. Sweet Sultan. Phlox. Larkspur.
It would have given him pleasure if I had been able to remember the Latin name of just one of them, but there, in his living quarters, lessons were out of the question. So larkspur remained larkspur. In the Green Hut Tyler demanded work and obedience; the smallest sign of what he called slackness would be punished by a rap over the knuckles with a knotted yew branch that hung on a hook beside the cupboard where he kept the rulers and exercise books. In his two living rooms slackness was ignored and he demanded only quiet and company.