Free Temporary Kings by Anthony Powell Page B

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