The Naylors (21 page)

George couldn’t agree that it was the whole thing, or even approximately so. He was about to return to something like, ‘And does all that justify the disgraceful imposture you are practising upon your uncle?’ But he now saw that this, at least,
was
no concern of his. It wasn’t even as if he were an intimate of the Prowses. Moreover, any immediate
éclaircissement
on this front – his now entering the vicarage and denouncing Simon, for instance – would inevitably have the effect of exposing Christopher Prowse as a guileless ass, for what man of reasonably acute perceptions could be taken in by such a piece of nonsense for long? But the situation had, as it were, its public as well as its private aspect, and he ought now perhaps to tackle it from that direction. George was considering just how to do so, when Simon spoke again.

‘I understand about your nephew Charles,’ he said, ‘and his lately having been up at Trinity. But what puts it into your head to be on about marches and demonstrations?’

George wasn’t sure that the young man’s describing his being ‘on about’ something was altogether courteous in point of expression. But Simon, in addition to being clever and therefore attractive, was exhibiting decent manners, and the question was fair enough in itself.

‘It’s a matter of odd coincidence, Mr Prowse. Miss Gale, your slightly mysterious friend, happened to hand me a leaflet about the bomb in Oxford a few days ago.’

‘Ah, yes. June was staying in Oxford with an aunt. But she just can’t take time off the anti-nuclear activity.’

‘Nor can you?’

‘I manage a certain number of other things as well.’

If there was a hint of intellectual arrogance lurking in this, it was sufficiently dissimulated to be inoffensive on the young man’s part. So George tried again.

‘Just what are you aiming at – or organising against? Is it that place at Nether Plumley?’

‘I’m afraid, Dr Naylor, that I have nothing more to say.’

‘I think I have some right to be informed.’ George was about to add, ‘You and Miss Gale, after all, have been my brother’s guests.’ But he realised that this would be artificial and silly. And he had, in fact, got himself into a false position, and was in danger of talking nonsense. He had no right whatever to badger this young man, and by running round like an excited spaniel he was only making himself ridiculous. There wasn’t the slightest evidence that Simon Prowse and his friends proposed either to endanger life or damage property. They no doubt believed themselves – and it was an open and arguable issue – to be acting exactly in a contrary interest. George had been legitimately indignant over the prank played on the ingenuous Christopher Prowse; he had got this tangled up with his niece’s not very rational persuasions about what might be going on at Nether Plumley; and as a result here he was in the middle of the village street, doing his best to have a row with a young man he knew very little about.

In falling so abruptly for this revulsion of feeling George was not perhaps being quite fair to himself. Simon had shoved in among the Naylors and banged their tennis balls around most definitely under false colours, and with no other aim than to propagate in the district the conclusion that he was a harmless and agreeably athletic dullard. There was every justification for taking a good hard look at him. But it was George’s liability to have a lively sense of the other fellow’s point of view. And as the main business of his life at the moment was moderating this proclivity in the area of his debate with Hooker, it was perhaps to be expected that he would let Simon Prowse get away with something – and with rather more than Hilda would approve of. George saw this clearly enough, but was resigned to making no further progress with the young man. He was casting round for some reasonably seemly way of bringing the interview to a close when the matter was taken out of his hands in a rather disconcerting fashion.

The entire colloquy had occurred on the spot where the two contestants had suddenly encountered one another: beside the churchyard wall and opposite the side-road in which Simon had been buying his newspapers. This was little more than a lane ascending from Plumley village to a road that followed the line of the downs overlooking the vale in which the Plumleys lay. Up the lane George was conscious that Simon had suddenly turned a sharpened gaze. What had apparently attracted this was the roof of a car, still several hundred yards away, which would not become fully visible until it had advanced beyond a dip and a bend now immediately in front of it. But it could already be seen to be either a police car or an ambulance, since perched on top of it was that kind of diminutive lighthouse which can be set imperiously flashing at need.

‘On my way,’ Simon said abruptly. And George had just time to recall that he had heard these words from the young man spoken on this spot before when Simon turned round, vaulted over the wall behind him, and disappeared amid the various graves. George peered after him in vain. It was conceivable – he weirdly thought – that he had secluded himself within one of those lidless stone receptacles, somewhat larger than a cabin trunk, that witnessed to rural burial customs some centuries ago.

But more probably, of course, Simon had simply made his way rapidly back to the vicarage. George realised that he himself ought to make similar haste in returning to the Park, where luncheon would be on the table in some ten minutes’ time. He set off, therefore, at a brisk pace – and the more gratefully, perhaps, because he was leaving so unsatisfactory an episode behind him. But actually it was not a successful getaway.
He was being pursued!

George was instantly persuaded of this, although for no better reason than that the car that had occasioned Simon’s rapid departure had itself turned in the direction of Plumley Park and was now behind him. He glanced at it over his shoulder and saw that it was indeed a police car. There were uniformed constables in the two front seats. He walked on for some 20 paces, and realised that the car ought by now to have overtaken him and gone on ahead. He again looked over his shoulder, although it was a jumpy and almost guilty-seeming thing to do. The beastly car was kerb-crawling! There was no other expression for the thing. George found himself experiencing very much the sort of justified indignation that might be experienced by a virtuous female actually exposed to this indignity. More rationally, he had to suppose that there was some intention to alarm him; that these two policemen conceived themselves to be engaged in a war of nerves.

But now the car accelerated very slightly and drew level. George was constrained to look at it again; in face of its unaccountable behaviour it would have been unnatural not to do so. And both the policemen looked at him. Even the man at the wheel – surely very improperly – held him for whole seconds under a fixed regard. George couldn’t recall ever having been looked at quite like this before – unless it was by some abominably sadistic prefect in chapel at his public school. It occurred to him that what are called identikit portraits of wanted miscreants are probably best built up on the basis of professionally penetrating scrutinies such as he was going to be subjected to now.

George and the car continued to move forward at the same pace. The policeman on the near side – still keeping up that steely stare – lowered his window. He called out to George as a motorist may do who seeks information from a pedestrian. Involuntarily, George halted and looked at him inquiringly. The policeman said nothing more, but raised an arm. There was a faint click, and George oddly found himself wondering whether he had been shot. Then he realised he had been photographed. The window went up again, and the car accelerated and was gone.

George had not been so indignant since the regrettable incident at the entrance to the Bodleian Library.

The family was already at table, so George had no immediate opportunity to communicate to Hilda either the unsatisfactory character of his interview with Simon Prowse or the upsetting episode that had followed upon it. He felt, however, that this was just as well, since he might have exhibited himself as more nearly flustered than was sensible. And although he had arrived a little out of breath, nobody asked him what he had been up to.

This was perhaps because Father Hooker was proving to have a lot to say. Unlike those prudent divines of an earlier age who took an hour-glass into the pulpit with them, Hooker, it seemed, had been in trouble over the length of his sermon. He had been conscious, he said, of the danger of speaking at too great length to a simple auditory – he seemed unaware that his congregation had not included a thronging peasantry – and equally fearful that he hadn’t adequately satisfied the expectations of the better-informed. He had been particularly sketchy in the provision of historical background to his argument. His host, he said – with one of his shattering little bows to Edward Naylor at the foot of the table – may well have expected at least a passing reference to the Council of Narbonne. That had been in 1054 – the year, as it happened, in which Macbeth (and here Hilda got a bow) had been defeated by Malcolm at Dunsinane; and the year, for that matter, in which, on the 16th of July, there had occurred the definitive split between the Roman and Greek Churches. But the immediate point was that the Council of Narbonne, wrestling with the problem of the Just War, had enjoined that even such a blameless war must not be waged on Fridays, Sundays and Feasts of the Church – which was presumably about halfway to banning it altogether.

Edward Naylor, who was being particularly addressed, managed occasional weighty nods and monosyllabic acquiescences. When Hooker found something to say about the
De jure belli
of Grotius, Edward positively managed to repeat the name ‘Grotius’ as if he had been expecting it to turn up for some time.

All this made George uncomfortable. He realised that social tact wasn’t Hooker’s strong point, and that he had been elevated in more senses than one by climbing into a pulpit: perhaps because it was very little his weekly round or common task. When not sent by fiat from Tower Hamlets on missions like the present, he probably sat in solitude in a book-lined room and did theology all day. This was a depressing picture – but at the same time George was conscious of nursing something like a growing loyalty towards Hooker, who could surely be more profitably employed than by sitting awkwardly at the Naylors’ board in the interest of recapturing a most unimportant fugitive priest. Were his niece and nephews ten years younger – George reflected – they would by this time be struggling, as reasonably well brought-up children, to repress their giggles before so odd a guest. When his present afflatus sank in him Hooker would probably feel rather lonesome and out-on-a-limb. George hated the thought of this, and searched around in his head for suitable references to Origen and Aquinas in order to give some colouring of general discussion to Hooker’s inopportune performance.

No great success attended this endeavour, but at least the impulse was amiable. Nevertheless, George Naylor’s character at this point is not to be aspersed as improbably exemplary. He could be taxed with the frailty of harbouring weakly contradictory attitudes. He was still lurkingly disposed to resent the graceless expedition with which the Bishop of Tower Hamlets’ emissary had turned up on him, and even those aspects of Father Hooker’s comportment which seemed to verge, if not on the unmannerly, at least on the boring and insensitive. But while thus failing to rid himself of his sense of Hooker as a pest, he was increasingly coming to assume that he himself was the sole proper object of the man’s concern. Hooker, in fact, was being seduced into neglecting him a little. It could almost be said that the bomb – George thought of it as Hilda’s bomb – was threatening to take over the story. Of course it was abundantly entitled to do so – supposing it to be, so to speak – really
there.
Even after his encounter with Simon, and in spite of what Hilda had apparently come to believe, it had remained his own conviction that it wasn’t; that although Simon and an unknown number of presumably young people were certainly planning a demonstration against the Institute at Nether Plumley, it was on the strength of a totally mistaken notion of what went on in the place. What had happened to him on his walk back from the village had shaken his confidence about this, however; policemen, he felt, didn’t behave in quite that way except in circumstances of an exceptional order.

At the close of the meal there came into George’s head something he had read as a boy nearly 30 years before. An American novelist – it must have been William Faulkner – had been given the Nobel Prize for Literature and had made a speech. There are no longer problems of the spirit, he had said. There is only the question: When will I be blown up?

It occurred to George that Hilda – an author in search of a theme – might very fairly place her uncle at the centre of a small comedy turning on this proposition.

‘And we must keep a look out for the cats,’ Hilda said. She and Henry had set off immediately after lunch, armed with binoculars, to scour the countryside.

‘The cats?’ Henry repeated this absently and with a frown. He wasn’t yet sure that he thought much of the idea of hunting down potential demonstrators. He had come along, he told himself, only because he hadn’t yet managed to shake off the habit of taking orders from his sister. It was something he’d better get cracking on. ‘I don’t think we’ll see your wretched cats again,’ he said.

‘Don’t be so dismal. Jeoffry and Old Foss are much too clever to get run over.’

‘But not clever enough to avoid the stew-pots of our friends.’

‘And don’t be so silly.’

‘There’s nothing silly about it. Or not unless you’re imagining things, as you probably are. Camped in some mysteriously invisible way around the Plumleys is a horde of crackpot characters preparing for what’s called a riotous assembly. It stands to reason they’re living off the land. We’ll come on a bunch of them at any moment, asleep after a tremendous gorge on cat collops.’

‘How disgusting can we get.’