The Naylors (14 page)

‘What I mean is,’ Simon said, ‘that I can tell, somehow, that you’re against the bomb: making it, and storing it, and deploying it, and everything else. Right?’

Hilda was silent for a moment. At Oxford she had discussed the bomb with friends often enough, and even debated it with strangers on some formal occasions. But she wasn’t quite sure that she wanted to be challenged about it by Christopher Prowse’s nephew and pupil in this oddly equivocal fashion. She wished she hadn’t got off her bicycle and been found staring at that stupid notice-board.

‘Well, yes,’ she said. ‘I’m against it in the sense that I find it wholly horrifying. Surely nearly everybody does.’

‘Are you prepared to take it lying down?’

‘Lying down?’

‘Literally, for that matter.’ There was now something almost malicious in Simon’s glance. ‘Suppose they decided to truck a missile of some sort into your park. Would you be prepared to say, “Over my dead body”, and lie down in front of it?’

‘It would be a silly and rhetorical thing to say. I’d know there wasn’t going to be any dead body – only some cops, male or female, hauling me out of the way. But the actual token physical resistance has more to be said for it. About myself, I don’t know. Perhaps it would depend on just how I felt at the time.’

Hilda judged that this, if a bit feeble, was at least honest. And Simon seemed quite to approve of it, although it was detectably in a rather inattentive fashion. In a different sense he was being attentive enough, collecting her bicycle from the wall against which it was leaning, and bringing it up to her. She decided that their conversation had taken the turn it had because he had supposed it would interest her, and that his more active thoughts lay elsewhere. Something of the sort now appeared.

‘I say!’ he said. ‘Can you tell me anything about tennis prospects in these parts? I’ve brought my things, but they don’t have a court at the vicarage. And, anyway, old Christopher doesn’t play.’

As there was a tennis court at the Park, and as Simon had probably heard of it, there was perhaps something a shade shameless in this request for information. But Hilda wasn’t offended. She found herself not knowing whether she liked Simon Prowse, but she was candidly aware that she liked the look of him.

‘Our own court is in quite decent order,’ she said. ‘And both my brothers are at home just now. You must come up some time and play with them. Charles, who’s the elder, is average, but it seems that Henry is going to be county standard, at least.’

‘It sounds intimidating.’ Simon paused, so that it was with a slightly unfortunate effect of afterthought that he asked, ‘And you?’

‘Oh, I knock the thing about at times. But I’m not serious.’

‘Ah, but I am. So it sounds quite splendid. I’ll be most grateful.’ Simon glanced at Hilda, and appeared to feel that this asseveration had been lacking in conviction. ‘Oh, I know!’ he said. ‘The Letters of Pliny the Younger and God knows what else with Christopher. I must put my neck in the collar if I’m to stick the course at Oxford and get so much as a half-blue for anything. You see, Hilda, one of nature’s playboys – that’s me.’

Pedalling home, Hilda was aware of perplexity which for some minutes she couldn’t explain to herself. Then she got it. There was surely something to think about in one of nature’s playboys who could, at the drop of a handkerchief, turn briskly informative on the Cappellone degli Spagnuoli in Santa Maria Novella. The wild young man, in fact, was disposed to make fun of her.

She wondered whether she resented this, or whether she welcomed it as something to take note of and analyse. Simon Prowse was barely an acquaintance as yet, so any sort of setting out to tease her hadn’t been quite mannerly. But had that been what he was about? Had he been saying to himself, ‘Here’s a jolly sort of girl I can start talking nonsense to at once’ – and fired off that rubbish about being a simple hearty with a mind only for things like tennis and half-blues? (It certainly wasn’t
true
of him: even without that inadvertent stuff about Andrea da Firenzi she’d somehow have been sure of that.) Had he decided she was herself an uncomplicated athletic type, and did he propose embarking upon improper designs on that basis? There would be a certain faint gratification to be extracted from this, but something hinted to her she wasn’t entitled even to such a crumb. Simon Prowse had no design upon her at all. Indefinably, but without doubt, his mind was on other things.

This was mysterious. But then young men were supposed to be just that in the regard of maidens standing with reluctant feet etc. It wasn’t a psychological fact accorded much prominence in novels and things nowadays, but it might be a fact all the same. She remembered being told – although she hadn’t checked up on it – that Jane Austen had never embarked upon a scene in which young men engaged in talk among themselves. Yet Miss Austen must have had plenty of scope for observation and even eavesdropping, having been endowed with five brothers older than herself – two of whom became admirals and one of whom lived to be ninety-one. (Much conscientious note-making as a student could still burden Hilda’s thinking with irrelevant detail.) She had only two brothers herself, but she didn’t feel that she’d be helpless if set to reproduce a good deal of their tête-à-tête conversation.

At this point, and as she shoved her bicycle away in its shed, Hilda had one of her ideas. Why not write a novel with quite a large cast, exclusively composed of males? It would be a test of virtuosity and invention, and some reviewers would call it silly and others would call it the cat’s whiskers. Its title could be simply
The Men.
Or it could be something sophisticated, like
Priapic Persons. Priapic Persons
by Hilda Naylor. Once more, Hilda had to charge herself as being of incurably flippant mind. It was with this weighing upon her that, rounding the house to enter by the front door, she ran into that least flippant of men, Father Hooker.

Hooker had presumably emerged to take the evening air, and possibly to engage in meditation or contemplation or some similar professional activity. He had resumed his clerical attire, no doubt in preparation for the dinner-table.

‘A perfect summer evening, Miss Naylor,’ Father Hooker said informatively. ‘I am thinking of a little stroll through your rose garden. It is remarkable how vivid the colours become as the sun drops towards the horizon. Have you by any fortunate chance a few minutes in which you are free to join me?’

This was rather on the formal side, but Hilda didn’t find herself objecting to it. Father Hooker was at least a brisk change from Simon Prowse.

‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘You must see the
Moyesii
.’ (Hilda had been properly brought up.) ‘Bronzy-scarlet – and with marvellous red hips later on.’

‘I think I know a red Cabbage when I meet one, but am not well-instructed beyond that. Like Coleridge, you see, I was a liveried schoolboy in the depths of the huge city pent.’ Hooker paused on this: it perhaps intimated that he had taken the trouble to find out how Hilda had occupied herself at Oxford. ‘Like Coleridge’ was rather comical. But Hooker must be given his due. It was easy to see him as indecently hounding Uncle George, but she must remember that, from his own standpoint, his mission was as important as a mission could be. It was difficult to hold on to that perception. Except perhaps for Henry, Hilda reflected, the rest of her family would have no grasp of it at all.

They were now among the roses. Father Hooker sniffed at them here and there – rather as he might have sniffed at an inhalant if he had a cold in the head. Hilda remembered that she had business to transact with him, and that here was an opportunity to get through with it in decent privacy.

‘I have a message for you,’ she said. ‘It’s from Mr Prowse. He’d like you to preach at matins next Sunday.’

Father Hooker came to a halt, frowning. He was obviously very much surprised.

‘Dear me!’ he said. ‘I am, of course, gratified. But why should your vicar think to employ an emissary – even one as charming as yourself?’

Hilda, although she thought this pretty awful, managed a friendly smile.

‘Christopher Prowse is a rather retiring sort of person,’ she said. ‘And my uncle has preached for him once or twice. He must have thought it would be nice to have a change – and that you would be quite a catch, of course.’

‘A catch, Miss Naylor?’ Not unreasonably, Father Hooker suspected he was being made game of.

‘I’m sorry. I mean that the chance of a distinguished preacher is probably something that particularly attracts Mr Prowse at present. Congregations have been becoming pretty thin, and he would like to see some of the new people in the district turning up. Especially the scientists from a research place of some sort that has opened up at Nether Plumley. Perhaps the Prowses are a shade naive in their hopes there. Scientists aren’t – are they? – too keen on religion as a general rule.’

‘My dear Miss Naylor, that, if I may say so, is a rash remark. That there is necessarily a conflict between religion and science must be indicted, indeed, as a vulgar error. I dislike it the more because – if I may interject a personal note – my own education was scientific in the first place. I graduated as a physicist.’

‘How very interesting.’ Hilda really did find it to be that. And although Father Hooker laboured under the social disability of being unable to talk other than like a book, she noted to herself the curious fact that she was coming to feel a certain respect for him. ‘And did you hold down a job as a physicist?’ she asked.

‘Certainly I did. I was twenty-seven before the conviction came to me that mine should be another vocation. Just what happens at Nether Plumley?’

‘I don’t know much about it. Nobody does, I think. But it’s called the Institute of Animal Genetics.’

‘Dear me! When I was still a boy almost every English university had a Professor of Oriental Languages. Animal Genetics suggests a similar sweep. But we stray from our subject, Miss Naylor – which is Mr Prowse’s very kind suggestion. Is he aware, do you know, of your uncle’s present difficulties?’

‘I’m almost sure he doesn’t know about Uncle George’s decision at all.’ Hilda came out firmly with what she judged to be the proper word. ‘So if you can’t act, he may invite Uncle George again. It might be embarrassing.’

‘Yes. Yes, indeed. I think I had better call on Mr Prowse and discuss the matter. In the wider context we are both so painfully aware of, Miss Naylor.’

‘I don’t know that I feel pain about it.’

‘No, no – I must speak only for myself. And I ought to say that I judge my position among you to be extremely delicate. It is not as if I were in any sense an old family friend. Or even a former college-mate or colleague of Dr Naylor’s. I really don’t think I ought to undertake to preach in your parish church. Of course I would make no reference whatever – no, not in the most oblique fashion – to the unhappy situation you and your parents and brothers are aware of. Nevertheless, it would be an aggressive thing to do, Miss Naylor. I should not be happy in it.’

At this point Hilda felt her newly fledged respect for Father Hooker increase. But she also –and very shockingly – felt a spirit of mischief stir in her.

‘I really think you should accept the vicar’s invitation,’ she said.

‘No!’ This time Father Hooker spoke quite sharply. ‘It is not my business to attempt to edify a rural congregation. I am here to bring your uncle back to the truth in Christ.’

‘Yes, of course.’ To Hilda this was startling language, and she told herself she had better belt up. But her sense of comedy was too much for her. ‘I suppose,’ she asked, ‘that my uncle
could
preach, if Mr Prowse were to ask him?’

‘I scarcely understand you.’

‘I mean, he hasn’t been prohibited or inhibited or in one way or another turfed out by a bishop or anything?’

‘Good heavens, no!’ Father Hooker was appalled. ‘Dr Naylor remains an ordained Anglican priest. And for that matter – as you must surely know, my dear young lady – a layman may with perfect propriety be invited to preach or deliver an address from an Anglican pulpit. Your uncle could certainly preach, and indeed take duty for the entire service. But, of course, he wouldn’t want to.’

‘Can we be sure?’

‘Sure! In his present sad state of mind it would be highly indecorous. Indeed, it would be reprehensible.’

‘Father Hooker, I think you are a keen observer of human character.’ Hilda produced this impertinent bouquet unblushingly. ‘You must have become aware that my uncle has at times a rather dangerous sense of fun?’

‘It may be so.’ Father Hooker appeared cautious, even a shade apprehensive. ‘
Hilaritas
is a quality proper in a Christian. Our Roman friends even require evidence of it when beatification is in question.’

‘What if Uncle George took
hilaritas
a bit far in St Michael and All Angels?’

‘Impossible! It would be totally out of character.’

Hilda was silent for a moment, since she knew this to be true. Then she tried something else.

‘But, Father Hooker, even if he remained quite serious, mightn’t it turn awkward? My uncle is rather impulsive.’

‘So he is.’ Father Hooker was perhaps recalling that sudden question directed at the business person in the train.

‘He might think he ought to explain himself to the congregation. He can be very direct, you know, and at times a little ingenuous as well. He might discuss, and rather unfavourably, what I believe are called the evidences of the Christian religion. It would be well above our rustic heads. But he wouldn’t think of that.’

‘You are perfectly right. We cannot be too careful. Occasion of scandal is above all things to be avoided.’ Father Hooker was now seriously alarmed. ‘It will be prudent for me to accept Mr Prowse’s invitation. I will call on him tomorrow morning and express my pleasure in the prospect. And I am most grateful to you, Miss Naylor:
most
grateful.’

Hilda managed only a mutter by way of concluding this extravagant episode. She ought, she felt, to have the grace to be ashamed of herself. But at least there was now no danger of Christopher Prowse’s inviting her uncle into his pulpit. And while it was nonsense to have pretended that Uncle George might have accepted such an invitation, it was very possible that he would have been distressed at receiving it.