Temporary Kings - Anthony Powell [0]
TEMPORARY KINGS
A NOVEL
Book 11
A Dance to the Music of Time
HEINEMANN : LONDON
1
The smell of Venice suffused the night, lacustrine essences richly distilled. Late summer was hot here. A very old man took the floor. Hoarse, tottering, a few residual teeth, arbitrarily assembled and darkly stained, underpinning the buoyancy of his grin, he rendered the song in slower time than ordinary, clawing the air with his hands, stamping the floor with his feet, while he mimed the action of the cable, straining, creaking, climbing, as it hauled upward towards the volcanic crater the capsule encasing himself and his girl, a journey calculated to stir her ungrateful heart.
Iamme, iamme, via montiam su là.
Iamme, iamme, via montiam su là.
Funiculì funiculà, via montiam su là.
A first initiatory visit to Italy, travelling as a boy with my parents, had included a week at this same hotel. It overlooked the Grand Canal. Then small, rather poky even, its waterfront now extended on either side of the terrace, where, by tradition, the musicians’ gondola tied up. Near-tourist outfits replaced evening dress antique as the troupe itself, in other respects the pattern remained unaltered, notably this veteran and the ‘business’ of his song. Could he be the same man? A mere forty years – indeed three or four short of that – might well have passed without much perceptible transmutation in a façade already radically weathered by Time when first observed. The gestures were identical. With an operatic out-thrust of the body, he intimated the kingdoms of the earth ranged beneath funicular passengers for their delectation.
Si vede Francia, Procida, la Spagna,
E io veggo te, io veggo te.
The century all but within his grasp, the singer might actually recollect the occasion for which the song had been composed; on that great day, as the words postulated, himself ascended Vesuvius accompanied by his inamorata, snug together in the newly installed spaceship, auspicious with potentialities for seduction. Had a dominating personality, the suggestive rotations of the machinery, Procida’s isle laid out far below, like a girl spreadeagled on her back, all combined to do the trick? The answer was surely affirmative. Even if marriage remained in question – conceivably the librettist’s deference to convention – at least warmer contacts must have been attained.
The stylized movements of the hands were reminiscent of Dicky, Umfraville at one of his impersonations. He too should have harnessed his gift, in early life, to an ever renewing art from which there was no retiring age. To exhibit themselves, perform before a crowd, is the keenest pleasure many people know, yet self-presentation without a basis in art is liable to crumble into dust and ashes. Professional commitment to his own representations might have kept at bay the melancholy – all but chronic, Frederica and his stepchildren complained – now that Umfraville had retired from work as agent at Thrubworth. Sometimes, after a day’s racing, for example, he might return to the old accustomed form. Even then a few misplaced bets would bring the conviction that luck was gone for good, his life over.
‘Christ, what a shambles. Feeling my back too. Trumpeter, what are you sounding now? – Defaulters, old boy, if your name’s Jerry Hat-Trick. You know growing old’s like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.’
‘Which ones haven’t you committed?’ said Frederica. ‘You’ve never grown up, darling. You can’t grow old till you’ve done that.’
Sufferance, as well as affection, was implied, though Frederica had never tired of Umfraville, in spite of being often cross with him.
‘I feel like the man in the ghost story, scrambling over the breakwaters with the Horrible Thing behind him getting closer and closer. There hasn’t been a good laugh since that horse-box backed over Buster Foxe at Lingfield.’
As a rule Umfraville disliked mention of death, but the legend of Buster Foxe’s immolation under the wheels of a kind of Houyhnhnm juggernaut, travelling