The Naylors (16 page)

‘Have you known Simon for long?’ she asked, in what she took to be a ‘casual’ voice.

‘Only off and on,’ June said. ‘Have you?’

‘Far from it. I met him for the first time only the other day. It seems he hasn’t ever been to Plumley before. Have you?’

‘Only off and on.’

Before reiterating this useful phrase, June – or so it had seemed to Hilda – had glanced towards Simon, who was sitting nearby, almost as if for instructions. This was mysterious and unsatisfactory. Hilda, who had lately snubbed Edith Prowse for asking a string of questions, herself asked a third one straight away now.

‘Are you at Oxford, June?’

English idiom admits of only one interpretation of this; it means, ‘Are you a student at Oxford University?’ But June, after giving it a moment’s consideration, seemed to receive it in a more general sense.

‘Oxford?’ she reiterated vaguely. ‘No, I don’t live in Oxford. I know it a bit. Do you?’

This was sufficiently vexatious to make Hilda feel quite cross. She offered a brief affirmative, and fell to examining the handle of her tennis racket with care. What was the meaning of such uncivil reticence? It did really look as if something covert were going on between this girl and Simon Prowse – and perhaps something better to be described as an intrigue than a romance. But if Simon had come to Plumley in pursuit of June, this surely made it necessary to suppose that her home was not very far away. Yet again, if this were so, Simon was at least not fortune-hunting, since all persons of any substance were known to the Naylors for many miles around. In any case, ‘fortune-hunting’ was an obsolete idea, existing nowadays only in the vast and depressing acreage of ‘standard’ English plays and novels. It was more probable that Simon and June were having a love affair about which – and again the notion was an old-fashioned one – they wanted to keep quiet. But then why had Simon gone out of his way to parade the girl at the Naylors? Vanity and impudence, Hilda told herself at the conclusion of these discreditable and idle speculations.

So she avoided further conversation with June during the rest of the afternoon. But she did keep an eye on the supposed lovers, and believed herself to detect a further oddity in their relationship. June wasn’t altogether in Simon’s good books. At least he was keeping a wary eye on her, as if at any moment she might put a foot wrong – and had even, perhaps, done so not long ago. This was again tiresomely mysterious. It had nothing to do with social comportment – a trivial aspect of life which June commanded as sufficiently as did Hilda herself. And there was another thing. Neither Uncle George nor Father Hooker was playing tennis (although she suspected that Uncle George would have rather liked to do so) and they were sitting side by side in deck-chairs in a silence more companionable-seeming than Hilda at all cared for. But what chiefly struck her was that Uncle George seemed to be as interested in June Gale as she was herself. Interested and
puzzled.
The puzzlement was reassuring in a way. She wouldn’t have liked to think of her uncle as taking a certain sort of specific interest in a pretty girl. Anything of the kind would have made her feel jealous. And jealousy, for that matter, must be at work in her in all this brouhaha about the Gale female and Simon Prowse – a young man with whom she had exchanged no more than ten minutes’ conversation. This was humiliating – especially in one, like herself, dedicated to the dispassionate observations and appraisals proper in a promising novelist. The tennis party, she told herself, was a stupid affair.

Simon seemed to get on best with the youngest of the Naylors. This was perhaps because he and Henry were the strongest players on the court by quite a long way. Simon was first-class: the sort of player who, in any humdrum tennis, is obliged unobtrusively to contain his game in the interest of a general agreeableness. Simon himself was aware of this better than one might have expected in the light of other facets of his behaviour. Hilda found further perplexity here. The mindless hearty who had neither will nor ability to get up a batch of the Younger Pliny’s boring letters was, if quite amiably, in evidence, and there was no glimpse of the young man who knew what to look for in the churches of Florence. It was almost on what she thought of as her professional side that Hilda found herself worried by this small puzzle. When you were writing fiction it was possible suddenly to discover that you had committed yourself to making some quite important member of your dramatis personae behave ‘out of character’, and that you couldn’t see how to pull him or her together. But that in real life there should be alternative versions of Simon Prowse on offer made no sense.

Tea was followed by a singles between Simon and Charles, and Hilda watched it with interest. It didn’t last long, since Simon – naturally enough – abandoned the skilfully unaggressive game he had at times put up when playing mixed doubles. There were no more of the graceful but unpugnacious lobs which he had occasionally employed to mask his superiority. He was out to kill Charles’s game – but not quite outright. He had Charles running around, red-faced and sweating, rather more than was necessary simply to take a point. Hilda, who didn’t much go in for sympathising with her elder brother, might have watched this exhibition with satisfaction if it hadn’t been for June. June was following Simon’s superior dexterities with goggling admiration. So was it really a matter of predatory girl chasing desirable boy? But whatever was going on – Hilda had to repeat to herself – was no business of hers. She was annoyed by it, all the same. She was also, and even more absurdly, annoyed that Simon in unrumpled flannels no longer very adequately suggested the wild young man of her initial impression a few days before. She decided not to see much more of him during the remainder of his stay at the vicarage.

When the game was over Charles had almost ceased to be in decent command of himself, although he did just manage the requisite casual word or two to his opponent. Then, rather surprisingly, he made a bee line for his sister and flung himself down beside her.

‘This bloody racket,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to have it restrung.’

‘You’ll need more than a restrung racket if you’re going to make much impression on Simon Prowse. You’re not in the same street – and don’t you know it.’ Hilda was without any impulse to offer consolatory words.

‘Barging in – and bringing that trollop with him! Damned cheek.’

‘Miss Gale isn’t a trollop. You do mishandle words dreadfully.’

‘I admit
she’d
handle nicely. Jointed just right for this way and that.’ Charles, whose sexual experience was probably still all inside his head, occasionally tumbled into speech as gross as this. ‘What’s that chap Prowse doing in Plumley, in any case?’

‘You know perfectly well. He’s come to be coached by his uncle, Christopher Prowse.’

‘Good God!’ It was seemingly for the first time that Charles was taking in this information. ‘In how to write sermons?’

‘In some Latin texts, and stuff of that kind.’

‘Latin texts? It’s enough to make the cat laugh.’

‘Why not?’

‘Why not? Because I’ve recognised him, of course. But naturally he doesn’t recognise
me
.’

This, although it had the appearance of a further puzzle, didn’t entirely baffle Hilda.

‘Are you talking about Oxford?’ she asked.

‘Of course I am. Prowse was two years ahead of me at Trinity, and wouldn’t ever have noticed me. But he was quite the star, and must be there still – hogging all the prizes.’

‘Prizes? For high jumping and long jumping and hurdles and that kind of thing?’

‘Christ, no! For writing poems in ancient Greek, and rubbish of that sort. I suppose he’ll be taking Greats in June and becoming a Fellow of All Souls and what have you. Coached by Christopher Prowse? Coached by my arse! I’m going to have a shower.’

With this archaic impropriety, Charles hurried off to the house. Hilda wasn’t worried about him, knowing that he would quickly feel ashamed of himself, and inside fifteen minutes be back on parade in a dry shirt and a better mind. Just this did happen, and the tennis continued until six o’clock. Hilda didn’t play too well, being distracted on more fronts than one. Uncle George and Father Hooker were now conversing again, and although Uncle George occasionally interrupted himself to produce an appreciative ‘Good shot!’ or ‘Well served!’ it was clear that the serious debate had been resumed. And that this time the resumption should be virtually in public struck her, if irrationally, as ominous. It somehow suggested that they must be coming together at least in some degree. And as she couldn’t believe that Father Hooker was at all likely to be seduced into infidelity she had to conclude that it was Uncle George who was beginning to give way. Perhaps this was to be expected.

But Hilda’s more urgent thoughts were on another topic. She had, she persuaded herself, detected from the start something disingenuous in the picture of himself which Simon Prowse had offered her. Nevertheless what Charles had now revealed about the young man’s academic standing was little short of astounding. It was true that Charles didn’t remotely know his way about in the world of Fellowships of All Souls and the like, and he might be exaggerating the extent to which Simon was a high flyer in that field. But the essence of his account must be true. Simon was the kind of young man who quite naturally took Andrea da Firenzi and the Cappellone degli Spagnuoli in his stride, and he no more needed his uncle the vicar to help him through Tacitus or Pliny Junior than he needed a governess to teach him his
ABC.

What followed from this? It could, indeed, only be the sort of disgraceful deception that the idiotic Edith Prowse had fleetingly thought up a milk-and-water version of. Young men do, of course, pursue young women under various degrees of difficulty from time to time. In romances and comedies and farces such as clutter up literature they disguise themselves as clowns or dotards or serving-men or even serving-wenches, and get away with it amid general applause. But to pass oneself off on one’s uncle as an unlettered lad, mad as the mist and snow . . .

Hilda pulled herself up before this wild plunge into her favourite poet. The plain fact was that Simon Prowse had gone to extravagant lengths to disguise the true occasion of his need to be in the vicinity of Plumley – which was also, almost equally mysteriously, the vicinity of June Gale.
Simon
was definitely after
her.
One had to go back to seeing it that way on. Simon must be very
much
after the girl to have cooked up so crazy a situation. It couldn’t just be the ordinary thing of disapproving parents, and so forth. Was June, perhaps, already a married woman? Was there an adulterous relationship that had to be kept dark until a divorce or something had happened? Had Simon and June the misfortune to have been born brother and sister, like characters in a Jacobean melodrama? Or at least with one common parent, like Byron and what-was-her-name? These lurid speculations produced from Hilda two double faults in succession. She was glad when the tennis was wound up.

But the two visitors didn’t immediately take their leave, since this would not have accorded with Mary Naylor’s notions of proper hospitality. The tea things and the soft drinks had been cleared away and replaced by sherry and the like. Americans, Hilda seemed to recall, were fond of calling this fading of the day the Happy Hour. She didn’t want a Happy Hour herself, or even a happy ten minutes. A brief spell of solitude, she felt, would be useful in getting Simon Prowse and whatever nonsense he was involved with out of her system. But when the party did break up she found herself hailed by her uncle, and in consequence drawn into conversation with Father Hooker as well.

‘Hilda, my dear,’ Uncle George said, ‘do you happen to have Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
on your shelves? And, if so, might we borrow it?’

Hilda didn’t think much of that ‘we’, but she offered to fetch
War and Peace
at once.

‘Would you say,’ her uncle pursued, ‘that it’s a very great novel indeed?’

‘The greatest ever written,’ Hilda said firmly, and turned at once to Father Hooker. ‘Would you agree?’

‘It is rather a stiff question.’ Father Hooker seemed surprised but not displeased at being thus abruptly invoked. ‘And I fear my acquaintance with fiction in general is insufficiently extensive to admit of my embarking on large generalisation.’ Father Hooker didn’t say this in a snubbing way, and he sounded less pompous than his syntax might suggest. ‘What your uncle and I have been trying to recall is the argument of the long concluding section.’

‘A kind of philosophical essay?’ Hilda said. ‘I seem to remember not making much of it.’

‘Tolstoy is examining the concepts of freedom and necessity in the context of a theory of history. And your uncle and I have been discussing the issue of determinism and acts of the will.’

‘I see.’ Hilda now recalled a good deal. ‘What Tolstoy says is that the closer we are to an action in place and time, the more we are aware of the free will in it. And the further away we are, the more we see it as determined and unavoidable.’

‘Just so – and your uncle and I judge it might be of interest to revive our memory of the contention. Our own concern is with a related matter: the question of divine intervention in human affairs. We are wondering whether we are in agreement that, failing the acceptance of that intervention as veridical, a total fatalism or determinism is the only view of the nature of things that may rationally be entertained. Would that, my dear Naylor, be a fair summary of our position?’

‘No doubt,’ Uncle George said – almost absently. ‘But what really puzzled Tolstoy was why hundreds of thousands of men should march from west to east and east to west across Europe, slaughtering hundreds of thousands of other men as they go. And nowadays the slaughtering doesn’t even require the marching men. It’s a more urgent problem than whether I can, or cannot, raise my arm of my own free will.’

Hilda was about to say, ‘So it is’. In fact she said nothing, and went to fetch and hand over Tolstoy’s book. Actually to become involved in such discussions wouldn’t be her sort of thing at all. But Uncle George and Father Hooker were professionals, and it had now to be faced that they were equally in a state of intellectual satisfaction as they talked. At their own sort of tennis they were probably quite in the Simon Prowse class.