Free Temporary Kings by Anthony Powell Page A

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