Anthony Powell - The Acceptance World

If things had turned out as they should, The Art of Horace Isbister would have been on sale at the table near the door, over which a young woman with a pointed nose and black fringe presided. As things were, it was doubtful whether that volume would ever appear. The first person I saw in the gallery was Sir Gavin Walpole-Wilson, who stood in the centre of the room, disregarding the pictures, but watching the crowd over the top of huge horn-rimmed spectacles, which he had pushed well forward on his nose. His shaggy homespun overcoat was swinging open, stuffed with long envelopes and periodicals which protruded from the pockets. He looked no older; perhaps a shade less sane. We had not met since the days when I used to dine with the Walpole-Wilsons for ‘debutante dances’; a period now infinitely remote. Rather to my surprise he appeared to recognise me immediately, though it was unlikely that he knew my name. I enquired after Eleanor.

‘Spends all her time in the country now,’ said Sir Gavin. ‘As you may remember, Eleanor was never really happy away from Hinton.’

He spoke rather sadly. I knew he was confessing his own and his wife’s defeat. His daughter had won the long conflict with her parents. I wondered if Eleanor still wore her hair in a bun at the back and trained dogs with a whistle. It was unlikely that she would have changed much.

‘I expect she finds plenty to do,’ I offered.

‘Her breeding keeps her quiet,’ said Sir Gavin.

He spoke almost with distaste. However, perceiving that I felt uncertain as to the precise meaning of this explanation of Eleanor’s existing state, he added curtly:

‘Labradors.’

‘Like Sultan?’

‘After Sultan died she took to breeding them. And then she sees quite a lot of her friend, Norah Tolland.’

By common consent we abandoned the subject of Eleanor. Taking my arm, he led me across the floor of the gallery, until we stood in front of a three-quarter-length picture of a grey-moustached man in the uniform of the diplomatic corps; looking, if the truth be known, not unlike Sir Gavin himself.

‘Isn’t it terrible?’

‘Awful.’

‘It’s Saltonstall,’ said Sir Gavin, his voice suggesting that some just retribution had taken place. ‘Saltonstall who always posed as a Man of Taste.’

‘Isbister has made him look more like a Christmas Tree of Taste.’

‘You see, my father-in-law’s portrait is a different matter,’ said Sir Gavin, as if unable to withdraw his eyes from this likeness of his former colleague. ‘There is no parallel at all. My father-in-law was painted by Isbister, it is true. Isbister was what he liked. He possessed a large collection of thoroughly bad pictures which we had some difficulty in disposing of at his death. He bought them simply and solely because he liked the subjects. He knew about shipping and finance — not about painting. But he did not pose as a Man of Taste. Far from it.’

‘Deacon’s Boyhood of Cyrus in the hall at Eaton Square is from his collection, isn’t it?’

I could not help mentioning this picture that had once meant so much to me and to name the dead is always a kind of tribute to them: one I felt Mr. Deacon deserved.

‘I believe so,’ said Sir Gavin. ‘It sounds his style. But Saltonstall, on the other hand, with his vers de societé, and all his talk about Foujita and Pruna and goodness knows who else — but when it comes to his own portrait, it’s Isbister. Let’s see how they have hung my father-in-law.’

We passed on to Lord Aberavon’s portrait, removed from its usual place in the dining-room at Hinton Hoo, now flanked by Sir Horrocks Rusby, K.C., and Cardinal Whelan. Lady Walpole-Wilson’s father had been painted in peer’s robes over the uniform of a deputy-lieutenant, different tones of scarlet contrasted against a crimson velvet curtain: a pictorial experiment that could not be considered successful. Through french windows behind Lord Aberavon stretched a broad landscape — possibly the vale of Glamorgan — in which something had also gone seriously wrong with the colour values. Even Isbister himself, in his own lifetime, must have been aware of deficiency.

I glanced at the cardinal next door, notable as the only picture I had ever heard Widmerpool spontaneously praise. Here, too, the reds had been handled with some savagery. Sir Gavin shook his head and moved on to examine two of Isbister’s genre pictures. ‘Clergyman eating an apple’ and ‘The Old Humorists’. I found myself beside Clapham, a director of the firm that published St. John Clarke’s novels. He was talking to Smethyck, a museum official I had known slightly at the university.

‘When is your book on Isbister appearing?’ Clapham asked at once. ‘You announced it some time ago. This would have been the moment — with the St. John Clarke introduction.’

Clapham had spoken accusingly, his voice implying the fretfulness of all publishers that one of their authors should betray them with a colleague, however lightly.

‘I went to see St. John Clarke the other day,’ Clapham continued. ‘I was glad to find him making a good recovery after his illness. Found him reading one of the young Communist poets. We had an interesting talk.’

‘Does anybody read St. John Clarke himself now?’ asked Smethyck, languidly.

Like many of his profession, Smethyck was rather proud of his looks, which he had been carefully re-examining in the dark, mirror-like surface of Sir Horrocks Rusby, framed for some unaccountable reason under glass. Clapham was up in arms at once at such superciliousness.

‘Of course people read St. John Clarke,’ he said, snappishly. ‘Though perhaps not in your ultra-sophisticated circles, where everything ordinary people understand is sneered at.’

‘Personally, I don’t hold any views about St. John Clarke,’ said Smethyck, without looking round. ‘I’ve never read any of them. All I wanted to know was whether people bought his books.’

He continued to ponder the cut of his suit in this adventitious looking-glass, deciding at last that his hair needed smoothing down on one side.

‘I don’t mind admitting to you both,’ said Clapham, moving a step or two closer and speaking rather thickly, ‘that when I finished Fields of Amaranth there were tears in my eyes.’

Smethyck made no reply to this; nor could I myself think of a suitable rejoinder.

‘That was some years ago,’ said Clapham.

This qualification left open the alternative of whether St. John Clarke still retained the power of exciting such strong feeling in a publisher, or whether Clapham himself had grown more capable of controlling his emotions.

‘Why, there’s Sillery,’ said Smethyck, who seemed thoroughly bored by the subject of St. John Clarke. ‘I believe he was to be painted by Isbister, if he had recovered. Let’s go and talk to him.’

We left Clapham, still muttering about the extent of St. John Clarke’s sales, and the beauty and delicacy of his early style. I had not seen Sillery since Mrs. Andriadis’s party, three or four years before, though I had heard by chance that he had recently returned from America, where, he had held some temporary academical post, or been on a lecture tour. His white hair and dark, Nietzschean moustache remained unchanged, but his clothes looked older than ever. He was carrying an unrolled umbrella in one hand; in the other a large black homburg, thick in grease. He began to grin widely as soon as he saw us.

‘Hullo, Sillers,’ said Smethyck, who had been one of Sillery’s favourites among the undergraduates who constituted his salon. ‘I did not know you were interested in art.’

‘Not interested in art?’ said Sillery, enjoying this accusation a great deal. ‘What an idea. Still, I am, as it happens, here for semi-professional reasons, as you might say. I expect you are too, Michael. There is some nonsense about the College wanting a pitcher o’ me ole mug. Can’t think why they should need such a thing, but there it is. ‘Course Isbister can’t do it ‘cos ‘e’s tucked ‘is toes in now, but I thought I’d just come an’ take a look at the sorta thing that’s expected.’