The Naylors (2 page)

Unfortunately George Naylor liked his slum. He liked it very much. Unable initially to resist being railroaded from it into a tiptop rural living, he had scandalously thrown this up after a couple of years to join an anomalous, even heterodox, ‘mission’ in the East End of London. As far as the family could make out, he had become a kind of curate again. There was no money in the thing, and a large part of its traffic appeared to be with street arabs whether pubescent or adult. When this latter fact transpired, male Naylors, men of the world, shook misdoubting heads. In fact George was only mildly attracted by young men. Having decided on celibacy, he had to learn at first hand a good deal about tormenting abstinence. Girls – alluringly honey-coloured rather than pinko-grey – habitually bobbed up on him in wet dreams. For a time he decided on a special devotion to the Blessed Virgin. Later he found that keeping up his theological scholarship was a better distraction from all that importunity of the flesh. His chosen field wasn’t exciting, since it had nothing to do with the cut-and-thrust of contemporary theology and even kept well on the far side of the tenth century. There was, indeed, plenty of acrimony among the comparatively small band of professional persons who studied the doctrinal polemics of the early church. But if sparks sometimes flew, any resulting conflagrations were not of a devouring order. In a sense, it had all been rather dull. But George’s ecclesiastical superiors, the remote ones right at the top, eventually judged that the quality of his labours upon the often rather odd pronouncements of the Fathers of the Church had to be acknowledged, and so George was dubbed a Doctor of Divinity. The street arabs and other juvenile persons at the mission, cottoning on to this, took to cheekily calling him Doctor or just Doc. It hurt George a little. Teasing aims to annoy and annoyance can shade into anger, and George believed anger to be a signpost towards sin far more often than not. So at the mission the joke became uncomfortable and was dropped. Back at Plumley, Edward Naylor would occasionally speak to acquaintances of ‘my brother Dr Naylor’ since it sounded a respectable sort of connection. George would have been touched had he heard of this.

Happening to get to Paddington early, he had secured a corner seat. But then the compartment filled up. A business man (or businessm’n, as the BBC now said) installed himself opposite

George, produced from a brief-case a sheaf of typewritten invoices, estimates, delivery schedules or whatever, and was poring over them even as the train pulled out past one of London’s innumerable ugly behinds. Then he got out a pocket calculator and fell to tapping its little keys with a kind of vicious satisfaction. George decided that the man was in a bad temper. Perhaps – for George sometimes engaged in idle speculation – it was because his employers, in trouble with their cash flow, were insisting that their wandering representatives and even ‘executives’ should travel second class, like professors and impoverished peers and Fellows of the Royal Society. George was pleased with this thought, or at least with the alliteration in ‘professors and impoverished peers’, and then equally he was dismayed that he should indulge such trivial ideas when in his present serious situation.

Next to the businessm’n were two women who had plainly been on a whirlwind shopping expedition. Above their heads and on their laps and at their feet were bulging plastic bags bearing the names of popular Oxford Street shops. These women were still perspiring freely from their exertions, and when they conversed together, which they did only intermittently, exhausted wheezings and contented sighs made a prominent part of the exchange. Disillusionment perhaps lay ahead of them when they unpacked, but meanwhile they were as triumphant as Alexander furnished with the spoils of Darius. One of them was enormously fat – she might herself have been an over-stuffed and unaccountably porous plastic bag – and, although the other was not of exceptional girth, between them they left little room for the fourth person in the row, whom George was in consequence only fleetingly aware of as a small and drab male. Beside George sat a third woman, this one being of professional appearance. Beyond her were two young workmen with the tools of their trade in the rack above them; their bare arms were folded over open shirts and bronzed chests; they sat immobile and blankly staring as if in a state of brute insentience; George had to remind himself that this appearance conceivably masked profound meditation on man’s nature, his destiny and his home.

George Naylor fell to meditation on his own account. It was naturally of a painful order. Just as once before, his loss of faith had crept up on him disguised as a grotesque loss of memory. He had awakened from a normal night’s sleep wondering about monophysites. What on earth were monophysites? Weren’t they something it was rather useful to have in the blood-stream? But no – that was phagocytes. What were monophysites? George had panicked before the blankness in his mind, obscurely knowing it to be portentous. He had pulled himself together and thought of other things, which is the correct technique when one has forgotten somebody’s name. And, sure enough, accurate knowledge almost at once bobbed up in his head. A monophysite believes that there is only one nature in the person of Jesus Christ. And George, in a happier time, had contributed to a theological journal a paper on Jacobus Baradaeus of Edessa, who had revived this pernicious Eutychian heresy in the sixth century. Perhaps in a sense the heresy might be said to have long harboured in the blood-stream of the Jacobite Church. Perhaps that was why he had thought of phagocytes. It had been a bad slip-up, all the same.

Then he had taken to forgetting all sorts of entirely commonplace things, and this morbid behaviour had persisted even after he had acknowledged what he was really up against. A couple of days ago he had been unable to recall whether or not he had prepared and eaten his breakfast. He knew that such amnesias often afflict the aged. But he wasn’t aged. He was forty-three. And although he had become aware that his nephew, Charles, referred to him as ‘the old boy’, he was in fact a well-preserved forty-three. So his mind oughtn’t so to misbehave. Even the petty awkwardnesses were discouraging. Only a few minutes ago he had been trying to remember whether he had or had not bought himself a railway ticket for the journey he was engaged upon.

George got to his feet. Rather, he found himself on his feet – somewhat insecurely, since the inter-city train was swaying on its axis. He found that he had brought his suitcase down from above his head, and was trying to open it with a minimum of inconvenience to the professional lady next to him. He didn’t manage this very well; the lid behaved awkwardly; the lady received a dig in the ribs.

‘I’m so sorry!’ George exclaimed. ‘I do apologise. I’m just making sure that I packed my . . . George was about to say, ‘shaving kit’. But he hesitated. About ‘shaving kit’ there was surely something just a shade indelicate, even a hint of what the young people called (quite inaccurately) ‘machismo’. So George said ‘comb’ instead. Realising that his behaviour was entirely idiotic, he shut down the suitcase in a fumbling fashion, and managed to return it to the rack. The cord of his pyjama trousers was now inelegantly depending from it.

‘I can lend you a comb, love,’ the fat woman said, and by manipulating several of her larger packages she managed to free her hand-bag. ‘And here it is!’ she said triumphantly. She was under the natural impression that her fellow-traveller wanted to attend to his hair there and then.

‘Thank you very much, indeed,’ George said, and tried to purge his acceptance of the comb of any tinge of distaste. It had a few hairs stuck in it; it might even have been a little scruffy. Being (or having lately been) a Christian as well as a gentleman, George passed the undesirable object firmly through his hair, and then returned it. ‘Thank you very much,’ he said again. He did manage not to sound falsely effusive. But unfortunately he happened to glance across at the businessm’n, and judged the fellow’s gaze to be singularly lacking in charity. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘may I ask whether you are a believing Christian?’

Nobody in the compartment was more astounded by this question than George Naylor himself. It was, of course, a good question to put. Any of the Apostles might have asked it of the first stranger met in the street, and for George himself it held its private urgency. Only the urgency had resulted in his no longer being approximated to an Apostle by exhibiting clerical dress. That morning – like John Henry Newman, he had recalled, in a related condition of doubt – he had put on a pair of grey flannel trousers. He had even – as is not recorded of Newman – adopted a turned-down collar and a quiet but incontestably secular tie. At the best he could only be regarded as one of those vexatiously evangelical laymen who pester with tracts and similar importunities entire strangers encountered on public conveyances.

George’s interlocutor reacted badly. Not, indeed, that he consented to be an interlocutor at all, since he simply remained silent and stared at George stonily as at a lunatic in no particular need of help. George, again conscious of outré behaviour but not feeling that this time he had anything for which to apologise, was silent too. And now the professional lady came briskly and surprisingly to his rescue.

‘Well, I am,’ she said. ‘I’m a member of the Catholic Church, and I go to mass fairly regularly.’

This information wasn’t offered aggressively. It was uttered without particular emphasis, and as if merely in continuation of normal chit-chat between casually encountering persons.

‘Well, now!’ the fat woman said comfortably.

‘A Catholic, are you?’ the woman of average proportions said in quite a different tone. ‘The trouble with you Catholics is that you’re Catholics first and Christians afterwards. Or that’s how it seems to me and I don’t mind saying so.’

George quite liked this. It was a preposterous remark, but at least the woman had ‘fired up’ in a context of serious religious discussion. She had convictions, and it was wonderful to have that. So George, whose experience in his mission had accustomed him to debate with unsophisticated people, suddenly felt almost at home in the railway carriage, and he began on a cordial note what might be called an enveloping movement against the stark Protestantism confronting him in the fat woman’s friend. But he didn’t get far with it. He was conscious of his thoroughly false personal position. The man opposite had resumed operations on his calculator: a defiant money-changer in this rocking and impromptu temple of the Word. Happening to glance aside, George detected the young workman in the corner, his own head correspondingly rotated, offering his companion a slow and appreciative wink. As for the fourth and imperfectly glimpsed man, he had produced a copy of The Times and retired unostentatiously but firmly behind it. George found himself simply conducting an untimely dialogue of a quasi-theological character with the woman who went to mass fairly regularly. She was clearly a normal and untroubled cradle Cat. George wished her well, but felt no real occasion to be talking to her. And then the train ran into Reading.

The cradle Cat got out with a goodbye to the company in general, but not without a special glance at George which made him feel she had been wondering about him. His sense of discomfort grew. He wished he was in the other sort of railway carriage, now more common at least in the second class, in which one’s near-anonymity is assured by dozens or scores of other passengers, instead of undergoing this boxed-up effect with four or five. The train was moving again and nobody else had got on. He cursed (or at least deplored) the impulsive start of pastoral curiosity by which he had set the whole embarrassing episode in motion. But now with any luck there would be silence at least as far as to Didcot or even Oxford. The man behind The Times seemed reliable; he had contrived to turn a page of the paper without lowering it from in front of his nose: technically a difficult feat which spoke of practice. About the two young workmen there was also something reassuring. A strain of feeling in George responded to them as wholesome and agreeable physical presences, and by this time the odd little flurry of talk would have passed out of their heads, even supposing it ever to have lodged there. The female shoppers had gone back to the proper area of their concern, the fat one having opened one of her shopping bags and produced a nondescript garment over a detected flaw in which they were tut-tutting in a kind of gratified indignation. The man opposite George was still occupied with his pocket calculator. It appeared to be occasioning him increasing displeasure. He was even emitting the sounds, or at least rendering the impression, of one grinding his teeth in fury. Then suddenly this emotional instability, although presumably generated by commercial considerations, found vent in a different and distinctly startling direction.

‘Bloody Nosy Parker!’ the businessm’n said to George. ‘What the hell did you mean by it?’

This unmannerly harking back to an exchange (if it could be called that) which had taken place 30 miles away caught George Naylor unawares. The ferocity of its expression seemed almost an invitation to fisticuffs. George, who belonged to a period in which the sport of boxing still obtained in schools for the sons of upper-class people, might have been willing to oblige but for the conjoined influences of the presence of ladies and the still automatically operative tenets of his late religion. As it was, he didn’t even find anything to say, and it was one of the young artisans who spoke.

‘Cool it, mate,’ he said easily to the businessm’n. ‘The gent only asked a civil question, didn’t he? A bit barmy, you may have thought it, but there’ll be things on which you’re a bit barmy yourself, likely enough. It’s just that we’re not all cracked down the same side of our heads. A civil answer would have been in order, chum, believe you me.’

George felt himself agreeing with much of this, and he was pleased – as at his mission he had always been – that an individual who had presumably been denied much education other than of the banausic sort should prove capable of speaking out in a forthright and cogent manner. But George was bothered as well. That impulsive and unseasonable question of his (prompted he couldn’t tell by what) was still heading him towards trouble. Its next instalment came from the fat woman.