Temporary Kings (8 page)

My mother, too, liked
these Continental trips. She enjoyed sightseeing, to which she brought a good deal
of general knowledge, wholly untouched by intellectual theory; except possibly
as provided by a much earlier, almost pre-Victorian tradition of upbringing.
Garlic apart, she too was well disposed to the menus of France and Italy, so
far as she ever allowed herself any self-indulgence; except perhaps indulgence
of an emotional kind, even that rather special in expression. More important,
for this last reason, was the manner in which foreign travel, at least in
theory, offered relaxation to my father from a pretty chronic state of tension
about his career, health, money, housing, hobbies, everything that was his; an
innate fretfulness of spirit that seemed automatically to generate good reason
to fret.

To emerge from a bank
in Rome, notecase filled a moment before with the relatively large sum drawn to
settle a week’s hotel bill for three persons, and buy tickets for the return
journey to England, then have your pocket picked while standing on the outside
platform of a crowded tram, is a misadventure to fall to anyone’s lot. On the
other hand, for a French porter’s carrying-strap to split assunder as he
mounted the gangway of a Channel steamer with two suitcases across his
shoulder, precipitating both into Dieppe harbour, was likely to befall only a
traveller in a peculiar degree subject to such tribulations. It was
additionally characteristic that the submerged suitcases (home forty-eight
hours later in the immutably briny condition of a sea-god’s baggage) contained
not only a comparatively new dinner jacket (then a feature of Continental
hotels), but also the two volumes of Pennells’
Life of Whistler
. Whistler
was a painter my father admired. He had bought the books in Paris because his
old friend Daniel Tokenhouse reported the French edition to have the same
illustrations as the English, the price appreciably cheaper. To recall that was
a reminder that I must make an effort to see Tokenhouse before I left Venice.

My father had few
friends. The cause of that was not, I think, his own ever smouldering irascibility.
People put up surprisingly well with irascibility, some even finding in it a
spice to life otherwise humdrum. There is little evidence that the irascible,
as a class, are friendless, and my father’s bursts of temper may, for certain
acquaintances, have added to the excitement of knowing him. It was more a kind
of diffidence, uncertainty of himself (to some extent inducing the
irascibility) that also militated against intimacy. Whatever the reason, by the
time he reached later life, he had quarrelled with the few old friends who
remained, or given them up as a matter of principle. Daniel Tokenhouse hung on
longer than most, possibly because he too was decidedly irascible. In the end a
row, brisk and rigorous, parted them for good.

Tokenhouse, going
back to earliest days, had been a Sandhurst contemporary, though friendship,
from the first tempered by squabbles, took root in the years after the South
African War. The relationship had some basis in a common leaning towards the
arts, a field in which Tokenhouse was the more instructed. It was strengthened
by a shared taste for arguing. Those were the similarities. They differed in
that Tokenhouse – like Uncle Giles – complained from the beginning that the
army did not suit him, while my father, addicted to grumbling like most
professional soldiers, never seriously saw himself in another role. Tokenhouse
had specific ambitions. My father put them in a nutshell.

‘For reasons best
known to himself, Dan always hankered after publishing picture books.’

At the outset of the ‘first’
war, Tokenhouse, serving with the Expeditionary Force, contracted typhoid. He
remained in poor health, through no fault of his own, doing duty in a series of
colourless military employments, which took him no further than the rank of
major. Whether or not he would have remained in the army had not some relation
died, I do not know. As it was, he was left just enough money to be independent
of his pay. He resigned his commission, taking immediate steps to gratify the
aspiration towards ‘picture books’. Tokenhouse did that with characteristic
thoroughness, learning the business from the beginning, then investing his
capital in a partnership of the kind he had in mind, a firm trafficking not
only in ‘the fine arts’, but also topography and textbooks. One consequence of
this was that I myself spent several years of early life in the same business,
Tokenhouse my boss. We got on pretty well together. He had an unusual flair for
that sort of publishing, making occasional errors of judgment – St John Clarke’s
Introduction to
The Art of Horace Isbister
one of the minor miscalculations – but
on the whole a mixture of hard work, shrewdness, backing his own often
eccentric judgment, produced successful results.

When it came to being
hasty in temper, idiosyncratic in conduct, my father and Tokenhouse could, so
to speak, give each other a game, but, acceptable as a brother-officer less
successful than himself, Tokenhouse became gradually less admissible as a very
reasonably prosperous civilian; more especially after my father himself was
forced to leave the army on account of ill health. Minor skirmishes between
them began to take on a note of increasing asperity.

‘Dan would have been
axed anyway,’ said my father. ‘Just as well there was a trade to which he could
turn his hand, and money enough to buy his way into it. Dan would never have
wriggled himself through the bottleneck for officers of his type and seniority.
You know, as a young man, old Dan seriously thought of going into the Church.
It was touch and go. Then some bishop made a public statement of which he
disapproved, and he decided for the army, which his family had always wanted.’

Whether or not that
was true, there could be no doubt Tokenhouse’s nature included an inveterate
puritanism, which army life had by no means decreased. Having abandoned the
idea of taking Holy Orders, he developed an absolutely fanatical hatred for
religion in any form, even the association of his own forename with a biblical
character, thereby suggesting involuntary commitment, becoming a vexation to
him. This puritanism also showed itself in dislike for any hint of sensuality
in the arts, almost to the extent of handicapping a capacity for making money
out of them. Even my parents, who knew him well, admitted that Tokenhouse’s sex
life had remained undisclosed throughout the years. Not the smallest interest
in women had ever been uncovered; nor, for that matter, in his own sex either.
He seemed quite unaware of the physical attributes of those he came across,
though perhaps an unusually good-looking lady would just perceptibly heighten
his accustomed brusqueness. That was my own impression after working for
several years in the same office, a condition that can reveal a colleague,
especially a superior, with an often devastating clarity.

This apparent
non-existence of sexual partiality could have been due to the fact that
Tokenhouse was aware of none. General Conyers (had they met, which never
happened) might have hazarded a favourite solution, ‘a case of exaggerated
narcissism’. The peculiarities of Tokenhouse’s subsequent conduct may have had
their roots there; reaction perhaps from too rigid control, physical and
emotional. The only personal relaxation he ever allowed himself, so far as was
known, consisted in fairly regular practice of sparetime painting. Otherwise he
was always engaged in business, direct or indirect in form.

Painting was a hobby
of long standing. The pictures, if a school had to be named, showed faintly
discernible traces of influence filtered down from the Camden Town Group.
Rising to no great heights as masterpieces of landscape, they did convey an
absolutely genuine sense of inner moral discomfort. A Tokenhouse canvas
possessed none of the self-conscious professionalism of Mr Deacon’s scenes from
Greek and Roman daily life, flashy in their way, even when handled without
notable competence. Tokenhouse, on the contrary, took pride in being an
amateur. He always made a point of that status. It was therefore a surprise to
his friends – matter of disapproval to my father – when he announced that he
was going to retire from publishing, and take up painting as a full-time
occupation. That was about six months before ‘Munich’. By that time I had left
the firm for several years.

For some little while
before taking that decision, Tokenhouse had been behaving in rather an odd
manner, having rows with publisher colleagues, laying down the law at dinner
parties, in general showing signs of severe nervous tension. This condition
must have come to a head when he exchanged publishing for painting; being
simultaneously accompanied by a comparatively violent mental crisis about
political convictions. No one had previously supposed Tokenhouse to possess
strong political feelings of any sort, his desultory grumblings somewhat
resembling those of Uncle Giles, even less coherently defined, if possible. To
invoke Mr Deacon again, Tokenhouse had never shown the least sign of leanings
towards pacifist-utopian-socialism. In making these two particular comparisons,
it should equally be remembered that neither Uncle Giles nor Mr Deacon had ever
showed any of Tokenhouse’s sexual constraint.

Whatever the reason
for this metamorphosis, the final row between Tokenhouse and my father took
place on the subject of ‘Munich’. It was an explosion of considerable force,
bursting from a substratum of argument about world strategy, detonated by
political disagreement of the bitterest kind. They never spoke again. It was
the final close of friendship, so that by the time of the Russo-German Pact in 1939
– when Tokenhouse suffered complete breakdown and retired to a psychiatric
clinic – there could be no question of going to visit him. There he stayed for
the early part of the war, emerging only after the German invasion of the USSR.
When I ran across him buying socks in London, not long after I came out of the
army, Tokenhouse said he was making preparations to live in Venice.

‘Always liked the
place. Couldn’t go there for years because of Mussolini. Now they’ve strung him
up, it may be tolerable again. Better than this country, and Attlee’s near-fascist
Government. Come and see me, if you’re ever there. Ha, yes.’

Although he had long
since shaved off the scrubby toothbrush moustache of his army days, the ghost
of its bristles still haunted his upper lip, years of soldiering for ever
perpetuating in Tokenhouse the bearing of a retired officer of infantry. He
must have carried out this migration expeditiously and in good order. Not long
after our meeting, letters with a Venetian address began to appear in the
papers, especially the weeklies, excoriating American foreign policy,
advocating the ‘Nuclear Campaign’, protesting about the conduct of British
troops in occupation of Germany, a great many kindred subjects too, signed ‘D.
McN. Tokenhouse, Maj. (retd)’. Once he sent me a roneo-ed letter of protest
about several persons imprisoned in South America for blowing up a power
station. Since then we had lost touch with each other.

Before coming to
Venice, I had felt that I should see Tokenhouse for old times’ sake, at least
speak with him on the telephone. We had not met for twenty years or more, so
that any such renewal of contact would require tactful handling. In short, I
had thought it best to send a note announcing date of my arrival. The
telephone, even if Tokenhouse had installed one, might seem too much like
holding a pistol to his head. He had always been a man to treat with caution. A
note gave time to think things over, make an excuse, also by letter, if he did
not wish the matter to be carried further. The
Conference he was likely to view with irony, if not open laughter. He had
always affected to find the goings-on of self-styled ‘intellectuals’
ridiculous, although not wholly detached from appertaining to that category
himself. I reckoned that Tokenhouse must be in his middle to late seventies.
One thought of the ancient singer. If he were really the same man, he was much
older than that, still going strong enough. His voice or another’s echoed on
the summer night.

Iamme,
iamme, via montiam su là.
Iamme, iamme, via montiam su là.
Funiculì funiculà, via montiam su là.

The bragadin palace
was approached
on foot. Gwinnett and I walked together. Shared acquaintance with some of the
circumstances of Trapnel’s life had not made Gwinnett’s behaviour less
reserved. If anything, he was more farouche than before. Possibly he felt that
to speak of the
Commonplace Book
had been indiscreet. Although he had emphasized that Trapnel’s
‘remains’ contained little of interest, many researchers in Gwinnett’s place
might have kept the fact of its existence to themselves. In that respect he
could not be called ‘cagey’, as Dr Brightman had characterized him at times.
This lack of response was something less crude than ‘caginess’, almost
suggesting terms like ‘alienation’ or ‘withdrawal.’ No doubt he was merely one
of those persons, not so very uncommon, with whom every subsequent meeting
after the first entails a fresh start from the beginning. The anxious air
always remained. I should have liked to probe his views on the Ferrand-Sénéschal
article, no more than skimmed, but something about Gwinnett’s manner made this
not the moment.

‘Did you run across
anyone you knew when you reconnoitred the Piazza last night?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘See anyone from the
Conference?’

Gwinnett wriggled his
neck.

‘No.’

He drawled out the
negative, making it sound as if he thought the question in itself uncalled for,
a trifle intrusive. I asked if he knew what the Palazzo would be like. Gwinnett
was more responsive to that. He began to speak of Venetian architecture, of
which he evidently knew something, going on to recommend the book written about
Venice by William Dean Howells when American consul here. Then he abandoned
porticos and pediments, and fell into a long silence, suggesting a mood to be
left alone. We made our way through narrow calles towards an area beyond the
Accademia. I wondered how best we could disembarrass ourselves of each other’s
company without too blatantly seeming to do so. Suddenly Gwinnett came out of
his dream with a sort of jerk, one of his characteristic nervous movements,
which were not necessarily resentful. He spoke now as if referring to a matter
he had been pondering for some little time, using that habitually low tone
often hard to catch.