Tavistock Square

By Elizabeth Cowley Tyler

Tavistock Square is a tale of roads taken, roads not taken, roads missed and last acts. The novel is a series of parallel narrations in which two long-lost lovers, Rebecca Janus, an American woman of a certain age, who comes at last to live in London, and Sydney Turner, a London actor and painter, almost twenty years her junior, make their way towards a longed-for reunion with unexpected and devastating consequences.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 26, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483605722

Elizabeth Cowley Tyler

Elizabeth Cowley Tyler lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from Elmira College and a Master of Arts in French from Middlebury College. She has lived and studied in London and Paris and has traveled extensively in France, Italy, England, Germany, and Russia. Prior published works includes a series of mystery novels: The Madeleine Murders, Murder at the Maison de Balzac, and Murder at Les Halles, featuring Inspector Henri Corbet of the Paris Police. Her literary novels include Pro Patri Mori, a Great War novel, Dark Angel, In Search of Chopin, a biographical novel. Hôtel Chopin, Tavistock Square, Vanishing Point, Italian Hours and Violet Hours are her most recent works.

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Copyright © 2013 by Elizabeth Cowley Tyler.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

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without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Rev. date: 06/12/2020

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Part I Roads Not Taken

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Part II Only The Trying

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Part III Unattended Moments

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Part IV Full Circle

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Epilogue

Bibliography

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Profound thanks to the glorious City of London, to Scott Handy for giving me an inside glimpse of the life of a London actor, to all the dead writers and artists mentioned in the book, to Donne, Hawthorne, Keats, Dickens, Tolstoy, James, Fitzgerald, Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Graham Greene, Edvard Munch, and to Tom Stoppard, a great living writer, who has inspired my creative endeavors since I saw his magnificent The Coast of Utopia ten years ago in London, to Beth and to Sophie, as always.

PROLOGUE

The wind whirls the brown-gold leaves about, but their rustle as they move over the vast expanse of Tavistock Square seems not to be heard by the tall man who stands before the statue of Virginia Woolf, which rests in a far corner of the square and faces the imposing structure of Connaught Hall, a university residence with which the man has had considerable prior acquaintance.

He cradles in his right arm a large brass urn, holding it like a baby. A closer view of the man reveals a long, equine face, more beautiful than handsome, the streaks of grey in his long, blonde hair only noticeable upon very close observation. His clothing is shabby chic, but not self-consciously so. An even closer view reveals tears sliding down his cheeks as he continues to hug the urn.

The accompaniment of the wind, leaves and grey sky stay always as background while the man at last takes the urn into both hands, peers into it, frozen in the study. After some time, he gently tips the urn forward and begins to scatter its contents around the base of the statue.

As he is spreading the ashes, his task is interrupted by an inquisitive pigeon who lights on Virginia Woolf’s head and shakes its feathers, mocking the man’s efforts. With the urn in both hands, he is unable to shoo the pigeon away as he might otherwise, but instead says, Oh for God’s sake, please go away. The pigeon’s response is to leave a black and white deposit on the statue’s head before taking its leave.

The man stops the spreading of the ashes by moving the urn back into its upright position. He gazes into the vessel to reassure himself that some of its contents remain, then shakes it a bit before hugging it again in his right arm. The wind and leaves gather force, blowing and swirling, at once applauding his efforts and joining in the grief of his shaking shoulders.

PART I

ROADS NOT TAKEN

I

How to begin to write a series of sketches or maybe a novella about one of the world’s greatest novelists? Rebecca Janus has a title, Last Act, and it will cover the last three years of Henry James’s life. The opening scene will find him sitting for his portrait at Sargent’s studio on Tite Street, just a few streets away from where she now walks along the Chelsea Embankment.

Her visit to the Carlyle House was a treat, and the women from the National Trust were almost too helpful as she trudged up the four stories of the brick edifice at 24 Cheyne Row to the top floor where Carlyle himself had his soundproof study with the great skylight letting in the sun when there was any.

Carlyle House was a kind of intellectual center of gravity for eminent Victorians in London. He knew everyone who was worth knowing: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Queen Victoria, George Eliot, and, yes, Henry James who said, "Carlyle and his wife were a most original and entertaining pair and their Chelsea history is as fascinating as a fairy-tale." Chopin even played on the pianoforte in his drawing room in 1848 when he visited England accompanied by his Scottish lady friend, Jane Stirling.

But this was not a fairy tale without its ghosts and goblins in the form of a constant turnover of domestic help of every ilk and of the hysterical and depressive outcries of Jane Carlyle through her many letters and conversations with the famous (and not-so-famous). Perhaps Virginia Woolf in her essay, Great Men’s Houses, best described the burden the Carlyle mania for cleanliness placed on that house without piped in water as giving the house a voice of pumping and scrubbing, of coughing and groaning. A great struggle for comfort and peace seemed to take place in this dwelling, and Woolf would attribute much of this to the lack of what she called laid in water, the season of the house, according to her, always being February.

But spring is now singing everywhere along the Embankment, with little groupings of red and yellow tulips, the mighty Thames contained in its slow, brown motion. The breeze slides across Rebecca’s face, and she inhales the fresh and wind-scented air. So good to walk, to stretch. She can see the elder Henry James gliding along the Embankment as he used to with his walking stick, not at a fast and furious pace, but at a pace that indicated some remaining vigor in the man of seventy years, who had taken a flat at 21 Carlyle Mansions to spend more time in London.

Chelsea, in particular this area, is haunted by the ghosts of great writers who came here to live and die—Henry James and George Eliot, in addition to Carlyle, who had lived there for many years, and later T.S. Eliot, who had lived for some ten years in a flat below the one in which Henry James had lived and died. These sacred sites were a great influence on Rebecca’s decision to reside in Chelsea, though not here on Cheyne Row, but rather in Sloane Square, in Sloane Gardens, near to all that was important in London.

She had considered Tavistock Square, the site of so much of her past time spent in London at seminars in Victorian Literature and on the Modernist Novel and Poetry and where she had experienced two important romantic encounters, albeit twenty years apart, first with Jonathan Goodwin and then with Sydney Turner. Thoughts of London would always take her back to Tavistock Square, but, in the end, she had chosen to live in Chelsea.

When she reaches the intersection, Rebecca turns left from the Embankment onto Tite Street to wander down past Number 34, which once housed the infamous Oscar Wilde, to Number 31 where Sargent had his studio and where Henry James went to sit for his portrait in May of 1913 after his friends had commissioned it by subscription in honor of his seventieth birthday.

She would need to be a fly on the wall, an eavesdropper into the mind and thoughts of the great James as he sat there, described so in his account to his brother, William, One is almost full-face, with one’s left arm over the corner of one’s chair back and the hand brought round so that the thumb is caught in the arm-hole of one’s waistcoat, and said hand therefore, with the fingers a bit folded, entirely visible and ‘treated’. How to enter that psychic space and tell her story? Nonetheless, she will begin tomorrow, get up early and just write what comes to her.

The writing of the past few years, only a few poems and short stories, allowed by time stolen from her busy teaching schedule at The Bard School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was no match for what she was about to undertake, what she knew she could never undertake if she were to remain in America, chained to a teacher’s schedule and salary.

That she had had the foresight to invest her modest inheritance from her father in property in Cambridge, which only increased in value during the real estate boom of the ’90s, had enabled her, with the proceeds of the sale and her modest pension from her years of service at the school, even with taking early retirement, to be able to afford to rent a flat in Chelsea and live comfortably, if somewhat under the radar.

There is a synchronicity which operates in life when one is on a path one seems destined to follow, and, so it was when Rebecca got the opportunity to live in the Chelsea Gardens flat for much less than the market rent because the owner trusted her to take very good care of it while he was living and working in Rome.

Winston Stronger, a man who had devoted his life to the study of the works of Henry James, was on an extended sabbatical from King’s College, Cambridge when Rebecca met him at a Henry James conference in Rome the year before she left America. When he heard of her proposed plan to move to England, he suggested the fortuitous flat arrangement, and Rebecca took this as a harbinger of good fortune to come from her decision to move to London.

Unlike most of her private school colleagues, she made it a point to attend conferences on the writers she loved most: Dickens, James, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, and T.S. Eliot. While she had no desire to be an academic and was perfectly happy trying to instill a love and appreciation of literature in the bright, young American students she taught at Bard School, Rebecca thought it very important to keep up with what scholars were saying about these beloved writers. Even when the presentations were dry, dusty and convoluted, as they often were, she could find some small kernel of insight to inspire a further look at the works in question.

Rebecca was also more than mildly aware that she was shadowing these great writers, not only because she admired their work, but because she wanted someday to be able to write her own works. But this was not something she told many people, and, in fact, for many years, she barely acknowledged it in her private heart.

The walk onto the King’s Road and down into Sloane Square brings her closer to the hustle and bustle of late morning in London. The exercise has made her hungry, and since she had only toast and tea for breakfast, she decides to go to her favorite Brasserie in Sloane Square for a late full breakfast of her favorite, scrambled eggs and smoked salmon, done to perfection by the establishment.

Lingering over her feast and sipping the fresh orange juice so it will last the meal, Rebecca knows she’s arrived at one of those points of no return in life, that tomorrow her life will be inexorably different from today, not just because that’s what happens in most lives with the passage of time, but because she will begin to write her sketches. She will begin to do something she has wished to do, planned to do, and wanted to do for such a long time, something she knows