Free Temporary Kings by Anthony Powell

to violent ups and
downs in foreign waters. Language, currency, timetables, passports, cabmen,
waiters, guides, touts, all the paraphernalia and hubbub incidental to travel,
were scarcely required for the barometer to register gale force. He was, at the
same time, always prepared to undertake any expedition, intricate or arduous,
in the interests of sightseeing – or ingenious economy, like sitting up on a
station platform for a special train in the small hours – though not
necessarily displaying a tolerant spirit while such excursions were in
progress. His aesthetic tastes were varied, sometimes comparatively daring,
sometimes stolidly conventional, but, once he had taken a fancy to a work of
art, monument, building, landscape, that another critic might set a lower value
on it than himself was altogether beyond his comprehension. He never stood in
front of the Mona Lisa without remarking that, in the eyes of trivial people,
the chief interest of Leonardo’s masterpiece was to have once been stolen from
the Louvre; thereby – as with much else in life – managing to have his cake and
eat it, taste the sweets of banality, while ostensibly decrying their flavour.
    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.