The Naylors (27 page)

‘An aversion.’ Achieving this less pathological nomenclature seemed to brace Hooker a little; he ceased shaking like a jelly, and something of his dignity returned to him. ‘A chair, if possible,’ he said. ‘And, if not inconvenient, a glass of water.’

These modest requests were complied with. George, who was much distressed, recalled that ‘aversion’ had manifested itself when the Plumley cats had thought to chum up with Hooker on the evening of his arrival at the Park. But this was much more disturbing. A congeries of scores of cats, suddenly come upon, was no doubt a pretty stiff experience.

‘But an aversion, I fear, that is indeed sadly irrational.’ The need for formal utterance had returned to Hooker. ‘The frailty must be attributed, no doubt, to some forgotten – or, as they say, “repressed” – episode in childhood.’

‘Very likely. But there’s not the slightest need, you know, to carry it to the grave with you.’ Scattergood now permitted himself to speak a shade impatiently. ‘Buy a picture-postcard.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Of a cat. Not a comic cat, but a realistic, if sentimental, one. Have it somewhere unobtrusively around the house. After a couple of weeks, put it on the mantelpiece in your sitting-room. Pause that way for about a month. Then substitute a small china cat – again a realistic one – for the postcard. Another month, and you’ll be able to live with a full-scale soft toy. Or – better, perhaps – there’s a kind of hollow cat you can keep your pyjamas in. In no time after that, you’ll be thinking of having a real live cat to snuggle up with.’ Scattergood paused on this, possibly aware of the incongruity, and even impropriety, of the image it conjured into being. ‘Good heavens!’ he said. ‘What’s that?’

It was a rhetorical question. About just what it was, there could be no doubt at all. Pandemonium had erupted outside the Institute. The demo had begun. And the Director of the Institute, who had not long before owned so dismissively to expecting ‘a spot of bother’, was now considerably perturbed. That was reasonable enough. Even at this remove – for the three men were almost at the centre of what was a very large building – it was at once clear that ‘spot’ was a singularly inapplicable word. What dominated the sudden racket was a loud chanting of a more or less controlled and orchestrated sort: much like that – George thought – which he recalled hearing from around football fields when, as a young man, he had explored for some months those fringes of civilisation that lie beyond the Atlantic Ocean. There was even now and then the suggestion of counter-chanting – a rah-rah-rah effect – which enhanced this comparison. Could the police, he wondered, be borrowing from Zulus and Ashantis and fuzzy-wuzzies generally the practice of accompanying with blood-curdling yells their endeavours to maintain the Queen’s peace? But the uproar wasn’t merely vocal. There appeared to be a brass band, incongruously suggestive of the Salvation Army, which could scarcely have chosen Nether Plumley for a parade-ground that afternoon. There was also a good deal of mechanical noise – a hooting of horns, revving up of engines, screeching of brakes – asserting that the twentieth century was well to the fore.

For a moment Scattergood had been at a loss – but it had been merely about what he was to do with his two visitors. He solved this problem by simply abandoning them, with no more than a hasty intimation that he was ‘going to look into it’.

So George and Father Hooker were left to themselves, apparently as the only representatives of
homo sapiens
amid a wilderness of monkeys, dogs, cats, newts and Chinese carp. It was noticeable, however, that this didn’t add to Father Hooker’s discomposure. He was still a badly shaken man, but nevertheless something of his normal manner was returning to him. This became evident in what he now found to say.

‘At least, my dear Naylor, we at length know where we are – and in the most literal acceptation of the term. The purposes of the Institute are clear to us, are they not?’

‘I can’t say they’re clear to me, except that I have a general feeling they’re rather sinister.’

‘That is certainly the persuasion of the mob outside. But do you seriously mean that, having been afforded a close view of a number of the laboratories here, you are still not cognizant of the activities pursued in them?’

‘You forget, Hooker, that I’m no sort of scientist. No doubt I simply don’t see what you see.’ George had to control a little irritation as he made this obvious point. ‘So tell me all about it, like a good fellow.’

‘Very simply, then, our friends here are immunologists. And they are concerned to extend the principles of immunology as they may be brought to bear in the field of radiation sickness. Do you follow me?’

‘Yes,’ George said slowly. ‘I rather think I do.’

‘I speak, of course, of ionising radiation.’

‘It’s all about how the body can dodge the long-term effects of the bomb?’

‘Crudely put, yes.’

‘It sounds a beneficent activity to me.’

‘It may be so. Or it may not.’ Hooker paused impassively. ‘I’d say the chances are vastly against there being anything in it at all. But popularly – and it may be this that our rulers have in mind – it would come down to the notion that one can dodge the effects of the bomb with a pill. Whether that would be a beneficent fantasy to propagate, I very much doubt.’

‘And just where do those animals come in?’

‘My dear Naylor, you must have remarked, surely, what the cats and dogs have depending from their necks?’

‘Some sort of identity-disks. Names and dates and numbers: that sort of thing.’

‘
Sancta simplicitas
!’ It appeared to be something like incredulity that drove Father Hooker to this ejaculation. ‘And you must be short-sighted – or purblind – as well. Geiger counters, Naylor.’

‘Geiger counters?’ George was bewildered. ‘I’m afraid I don’t very well keep up . . .’

‘God bless me! Geiger counters were clicking well before you were born. They measure the degree of radiation to which an organism has been exposed.’

‘So those dogs and cats . . .’

‘Yes, yes—of course.’

‘Would the creatures now themselves be a hazard if they—well, found their way out of this horrible place?’

‘I don’t know. Controlled contacts with the animals here are almost certainly harmless enough. About a roving mob of them, ‘I can’t say. You forget, Naylor, that I’m no sort of scientist either. I just recall a few things from long ago.’ Father Hooker stood up – still rather shakily. ‘But come, Naylor. We are neglecting our duty.’

George had forgotten about this. Hooker believed that, planted between hundreds of excited demonstrators and what would probably turn out to be the massed constabulary of the county, he could profitably and composingly discourse upon the doctrine of the Just War as it must be interpreted in the nuclear age. Something like that. It was a notion that would have done credit to Don Quixote. You had to give it to Hooker. George saw that he himself must – if only in the simple physical sense – stand by the chap.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Scattergood seems to have deserted us. We’ll go and see how the land lies.’

But George, although he spoke boldly, was inwardly much disturbed. Distressing though his private plight had recently been, there was a sense in which, at least intermittently, he had been able to savour it in terms of mild social comedy. That was the world to which, in his heart, he thought of his family as belonging; and it was the world in which the interplay of sympathy and incongruity in his relations with Hooker could harmlessly exercise itself. But now it was as if, quite suddenly – perhaps at the moment of that astounding conversation about the price of cats and dogs – the theatre had changed. Here was comedy no longer. Whether or not Scattergood and his colleagues laboured in good faith in their Institute, George didn’t know. But if he had understood Hooker rightly, the government, or whatever body funded the place, was eventually going to use them as instruments of thought-control.
Swallow this
– people would be told –
and you needn’t even shelter under the stairs.
Comedy couldn’t be got out of that. Only a rather savage sort of farce.

They went outside. Beyond the still-vacant compound protected by the perimeter-fence, it was as if a whole city had poured its population out upon the modest environs of Nether Plumley. George and Father Hooker, having found their way with some difficulty into open air, came to an astonished halt before the spectacle. Although from the doorway in which they stood they commanded only a sector of the scene, nearly a dozen motor-coaches were visible: the majority of them already immobile and empty; some still nosing cautiously forward through a milling sea of persons of either sex and every age. There were pensioners brandishing crutches and infants in arms waving rattles. One coach was disgorging a phalanx of citizens of years so tender as only recently to have found their feet, and at their head two agitated women were raising with difficulty a banner saying:

TODDLERS NOT TOMBS

Nearby was a perambulator-and-carry-cot brigade, with a similar banner announcing:

BABIES AGAINST BALLISTIC MISSILES

Not very perplexingly, there was a man with a placard declaring:

DUMB FRIENDS CALL FOR AID

while another placard, rather more aggressively, commanded:

HUNT DOWN FOX-HUNTING MAN

But a majority of these waving and flapping scrawls simply enjoined:

BAN THE BOMB

There was also in evidence, as was to be expected, a large force of police. Most of them were stationed, no doubt upon the soundest tactical principles, in small gossiping groups here and there around the scene. But at the rear of the crowd there was a whole coach-load of them as yet undeployed; crammed together in their blue uniforms they had much the appearance of cyanosed sardines in a tin; they were certainly enduring much discomfort in the interest of what the next day’s newspapers would call an unobtrusive presence or low profile.

But at least it was evident – as, indeed, George had already known – that Simon Prowse and his associates, however dramatically contrived had been their sudden irruption on the field, had failed of really effective surprise. Perhaps Dumb Friends’ Lib, which appeared to be an independently conducted concern, had neglected to mask their intentions as they should. And perhaps this explained a certain hostility between these two groups which a penetrating eye could already detect as generating itself within the total melee.

Not that much except chanting and singing was happening so far, and doubtless the less spirited among the demonstrators were hoping that ‘peaceful’ and ‘well-conducted’ would be among the terms eventually applied to the afternoon’s exercise. Indeed, it seemed to George – who, perhaps unlike Father Hooker, had witnessed demos before – that there might be no further very dramatic developments. The perimeter-fence seemed impregnable; those confronting it were not of the desperate sort that arrive armed with wire-cutters and mattresses; the chanting was certainly not increasing in volume, and it was even possible to detect a nascent sense of anti-climax as in the air. Perhaps, having made their point, both wings of the movement (as it might be expressed) would get into their coaches again and drive away.

But this sanguine expectation of a drift into sanity was not fulfilled. Instead, there were fresh arrivals on the scene. Simultaneously and from different points of the compass two television crews had turned up, and were now briskly tumbling their apparatus out of vans, each in evident competition with the other. The helicopter, which was still around, descended, hovered near them, apparently satisfied itself that they were authentic instruments of the media, and respectfully drew away again. The demonstrators, although so numerous and scattered over so large an area, became aware of this gratifying development at once, and took fresh heart from it. The police, similarly apprised, settled their helmets more firmly on their heads, assumed expressions of stolid worth, and prepared to take the air. The demo at Nether Plumley was now a national event, and all were keen to put their best foot forward. The scenario might have been improved, indeed, by the presence of, say, a Cabinet Minister, in the general direction of whom somebody could throw an egg or a bag of flour. But, on the whole, people were pleased, and willing to make do with what they had.

So everything was good-humoured, so far. ‘Good-humoured’, indeed, was no doubt what several common-or-garden reporters who had now turned up were busy scribbling in their notebooks. But again there was a development – although one, at its inception, not so much alarming as of curious psychological interest. As the camera teams advanced, many of the demonstrators, hitherto standing, sat down in front of them, some offering friendly and familiar waves – even, indeed, inviting and beckoning gestures – as they did so. The police, too, were affected. Moving forwards in twos and fours, they began hauling these sedentary persons away from their chosen site and gently depositing them again a dozen yards off – whereupon others would promptly take their place and be removed in turn. The cameras whirred meanwhile. It wasn’t, George knew, in the least an exhibitionistic performance or charade. Rather, it partook of the nature of ritual: perhaps a familiar and slightly jaded ritual, but one seriously undertaken, all the same. Only the television crews had positively theatrical exigencies in mind, in this interest uttering practised injunctions here and there.

So it was all still quite harmless enough. Yet such equivocal situations are always dodgy and productive of awkward turns. It was so now. Before the main gate – at the spot where George and Father Hooker had been informed of the current going rate for cats and dogs – there was for some reason an undisputed and vacant patch of roadway, and upon this suddenly appeared a small band of demonstrators differing in character from the generality. They were, in fact, one and all athletic young men, and at their head was Simon Prowse. It was clear that in some manner they proposed to storm the outer defences of the Institute. The effect upon the police was instantaneous. Constables produced and blew their whistles. Sergeants spoke urgently into walkie-talkies. And the coach in the background, bearing its large strategic reserve, sprang into life. At first nosing cautiously forward, it presently (and surely injudiciously) gathered speed, so that the milling crowd had to dodge hastily from its path. But it was only when it was close to the crisis point that things went badly wrong. Simon and his storm troops were moving at the double on an oblique course in front of the coach, which had to swerve to avoid them. But the swerve wasn’t going to be quite enough. The driver, confronted for a split second with the appalling prospect of mass slaughter, boldly accelerated as he swerved. This saved lives, but had the awkward consequence of projecting the vehicle full-tilt against the perimeter-fence, several yards of which were promptly levelled to the ground.