The Naylors (28 page)

The effect of such a spectacular event upon the demonstrators at large was instant and pervasive. A yell of triumph went up. When the mob before the Bastille believed itself about to free innumerable captives from their dungeons, or when the loyal soldiery of Queen Victoria had satisfied themselves that Sebastopol was down, a not dissimilar effect must have been created. And the yelling was swiftly followed by action. The whole body of demonstrators poured through the breach. The police drew their truncheons. What the papers would call ugly scenes were suddenly the order of the afternoon.

Gazing down on this arena (as it must now be called), Dr Scattergood’s two visitors not unnaturally experienced some alarm – the more so as Scattergood himself, who might have directed them to a place of security, remained an absentee. Perhaps, George thought, he was endeavouring to assuage with dog biscuits and cat food any agitation which the fracas was occasioning in the guests at his four-star hotel. Or perhaps he was on the telephone, insisting to the Lord Lieutenant of the county that an occasion had arisen requiring the calling out of the armed forces of the Crown. As it was, George and Father Hooker had to shift for themselves, and they did so to the moderate extent of withdrawing a little, and placing a door – although, as it happened, no more than a plain glass door – between themselves and the disturbing spectacle without.

What George first observed from this more circumspect position was an elderly woman with a placard demanding:

AMITY NOT ENMITY

– a praiseworthy injunction which he had just deciphered when the placard was abruptly brandished in air and brought down hard on another elderly woman’s head: this to the helpless dismay of a policeman evidently endeavouring to interpose in deprecation of violence and brutality. Thus alerted, George further saw that the whole extensive disorder before him was now definitely threatening to take on an internecine character. There seemed little sense in this, since the interests of the two parties involved, if not wholly coincident, at least substantially overlapped. But if sense was lacking, excitement was in abundant supply. And now George saw something else, alarming in a more intimate fashion. On the fringe of the crowd, but not so far off as to render immediate identification impossible, there had appeared and drawn up his niece’s venerable car. And instantly Hilda and both her brothers jumped out of it, together with a second girl whom George recognised as Simon Prowse’s devoted follower, June Gale. All four of them were in the sort of haste to be remarked in children who fear to miss the first turn in a circus.

Although the demonstration at Nether Plumley might perhaps be described as of a high-minded order, George didn’t at all care to think of his niece as getting involved with it, even as a detached observer of human vagary. But this thought wasn’t given leisure to dwell in his mind, since a fresh bizarre spectacle presented itself. Two men appeared in the middle of the crush shouldering a wooden contraption which George at first supposed to be a portable siege-engine of a primitive sort, such as Boadicea or some similarly insurgent Briton might have fondly imagined capable of assaulting the might of Rome. Then he saw that the contraption had been designed for a wholly pacific use; it was, in fact, a library ladder of a superior kind – the property, perhaps, of a nobleman whose great-grandfather had collected books. A Boadicea-like figure was nevertheless at hand, since the ladder, now planted on earth, was being mounted by the female Animal Liberator who had been so forcibly enjoined to turn from Enmity to Amity. She proceeded to deliver from this perch what the historian Gibbon might have called an allocution to the legions. And at once a surprising number of demonstrators desisted from their chanting and prancing to listen. The spectacle of this – George saw at once – profoundly affected Father Hooker. Hooker, indeed, disapproved – but his disapproval was directed at the sex of the orator; he would doubtless have agreed with Dr Johnson that a woman preaching is like a dog walking on his hinder legs. Equally clearly, Hooker was inspired; his ambition himself to harangue the assembly revived in him; he cast upon the library ladder a positively acquisitive eye.

George had only fleetingly become aware of this when something else happened. That Dumb Friends’ Lib should thus capture (as it was doing) the preponderant attention of the media was not at all to the taste of the rival organisation, which now deployed its ultimate reserve. Just as the police had brought up reinforcements in that near-fatal coach, so did these now bring their juvenile contingents to the fore. In two converging columns, that is to say, there advanced the anti-ballistic babies in their prams and the toddlers (the alternative to tombs) on their uncertain feet. The babies continued to wave their rattles. The toddlers, red-faced and shouting, brandished little sticks on the ends of which had been stuck diminutive cut-out cardboard coffins. This was an enormous success. The cameras whirred again like mad. Even the ranks of Dumb Friends’ Lib could scarce forbear to cheer.

George turned to Father Hooker with an exclamation of horror. But Hooker wasn’t there to hear him. Hooker, like Scattergood before him, had vanished. Supposing that he had begun a prudent retreat within the recesses of the Institute, George glanced behind him. He saw nothing but an empty corridor, from the far end of which were beginning to sound odd noises that he didn’t pause to analyse. He looked outward again, and there Hooker was. The crowd having given way before his Sunday clerical attire precisely as they would have done before a fireman flourishing an axe or ambulancemen with a stretcher, he had just succeeded in reaching the lady on the library ladder. Amazingly – for amazing things kept on happening, and were so to keep on for a little time yet – amazingly with only a few words spoken, the lady descended from her bookish rostrum, and Father Hooker took her place. He made a gesture commanding silence, and quite a number of people did, in fact, stop bellowing. Hooker began to hold forth, presumably on the doctrine of the Just War as it is to be interpreted in a nuclear age. He was speaking fluently. His morning’s sermon, after all, must still be fresh in his head.

But now George had to turn round again, since there was uproar behind him. Within seconds he realised that the Institute of Animal Genetics had somehow been stormed and taken from the rear. There were cheers, whistles, triumphant shouts – amid which the commands ‘Let them out!’ and ‘Let them go!’ were prominent. And suddenly George found himself skipping out of the way of the first of the dogs.

And of
all
the dogs. There could be no doubt whatever as to that. Dogs in their endless variety – such, assuredly, as Adam and Eve never had to put a name too – poured through doors and windows now thrown open in the Institute. Not a few clutched between their jaws their regulation issue of rubber bones, as if determined to cherish them as souvenirs of their stay. Even these contrived to growl. The rest barked, yelped, yapped or gave tongue according to their breed. On all the Geiger counters glittered in the sun.

On these liberated creatures the main body of their rescuers advanced with shouts of welcome and waving arms. Unfortunately the dogs didn’t care for this. After the decorous routines of the Institute an undisciplined throng of bipeds offended and alarmed them. First one dog, and then a second, and then the whole lot turned tail and slunk back in quest of their familiar bed-sits.

Not so the cats.

The cats were far more numerous than the dogs; there seemed to be a whole army of them. They were also less heterogeneous. Although most were common cats and a few were special cats with Persian or Siamese affiliations, they all seemed much of a muchness, mere coloration apart. All moved with the same menacing softness, so that the Geiger counters scarcely stirred at their necks. One could feel at once that they weren’t forgetting, even that their intentions were malign. (The cat is less magnanimous than the dog.) Although most appeared in excellent fettle, a few – perhaps senior residents – looked rather the worse for wear, like obscure persons recently released after helping police with their inquiries. All the cats now massed together before the Institute in what was, for the moment, a fixed and frozen way. Only their tails moved – very gently waving at the tip. Unaccountably (one may think) a certain hush fell upon the confused ranks of the demonstrators.

The cats, too, were ranked, but not in confusion. When they moved, as they now did, it was to wheel with the precision of a platoon of Guards. It may be asserted, without fear of exaggeration on the chronicler’s part, that here were several hundred people suddenly believing themselves under threat. Only Father Hooker, perched up on his ladder, might have felt tolerably secure. Yet Hooker was, of course, more scared than anyone else. His voice had died away. He was staring in horror at the advancing feline army. Above his dark parsonical attire his face was as white as a bleached rag on a line.

But because of his elevated perch, Father Hooker was the first to see what lay directly in the path of these long domesticated but now feral creatures as they raced ahead. It was the toddlers still holding aloft their coffins and the babies with their rattles still rattling hard. Numerous people had begun screaming – a sound disliked by cats, so it didn’t help. Father Hooker didn’t scream; he acted instead. Father Hooker, in fact, jumped down from his ladder and, waving his arms, made for the cats at the run. It is to be supposed that he had seen some possibility of heading them off. But, having started well out on a flank, he could have made no impact on the situation but for the two Plumley cats, Jeoffry and Old Foss. These creatures – perhaps because such recent arrivals at the Institute – were in the van, and they must have recalled Father Hooker as one to whom they had made friendly advances on a first encounter at Plumley Park. Forgetful or regardless of the fact that these advances had been repulsed with pathological distaste, Jeoffry and Old Foss swerved towards Father Hooker now. So, following them, did several score of their new companions.

It was thus that, within seconds, Father Adrian Hooker disappeared – buried beneath a pyramid of flailing, clawing and abundantly radioactive cats.

At the Park they had waited dinner for Charles. It was Charles who had gone to the hospital with the ambulance. When he came into the drawing-room nobody seemed to want to be the first to ask a question. So Charles himself broke the silence.

‘They weren’t saying much,’ Charles said. ‘God! Is there any gin? Or is it just that bloody sherry?’

There was gin. In such matters Edward Naylor was thoughtful and reliable. So Charles poured and drank.

‘But I nobbled a young houseman and pumped him,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘He said he’ll pull through so far as the shock goes, although not, perhaps, so as to be a hundred per cent in the top storey. And there may be a spot of trouble a good many years on. Hard luck on the poor bugger . . . I hope there’s a decent meal.’

Having thus managed a perfunctory (but perfectly sincere) expression of commiseration, Charles himself led the way to the dining-room. In his heart he was feeling that matters weren’t too bad. Since Uncle George was about as crazy as his minder, it might well have been Uncle George – which would have been even more horrible. And that afternoon there had been a marvellous telephone call from Scotland to say that he must certainly stay for the first week with the grouse. So things were looking up.

Uncle George was silent during the meal, and Hilda decided not to try to talk to him till the following morning. They would certainly discuss the strange catastrophe then. So after the ritual coffee-drinking she kissed him on the forehead and went straight up to her room. Her diary lay open on her writing-table, and beside it was her uncovered typewriter: both of them invitations to what had become an utterly pointless activity. The comedy was over, and the doomed puppets had better go back to their box. Hilda closed the diary, put its lid on the machine, and went to bed.

These titles can be read as a series, or randomly as standalone novels

1. The Gaudy (1974)
   
2. Young Pattullo (1975)
   
3. Memorial Service (1976)
   
4. The Madonna of the Astrolabe (1977)
   
5. Full Term (1978)
   

Published or to be published by House of Stratus

A. Novels

1. Mark Lambert’s Supper (1954)
   
2. The Guardians (1955)
   
3. A Use of Riches (1957)
   
4. The Man Who Won the Pools (1961)
   
5. The Last Tresilians (1963)
   
6. An Acre of Grass (1965)
   
7. The Aylwins (1966)
   
8. Vanderlyn’s Kingdom (1967)
   
9. Avery’s Mission (1971)
   
10. A Palace of Art (1972)
    
11. Mungo’s Dream (1973)
    
12. Andrew and Tobias (1980)
    
13. A Villa in France (1982)
    
14. An Open Prison (1984)
    
15. The Naylors (1985)
    

B. Short Story Collections

1. The Man Who Wrote Detective Stories (1959)
   
2. Cucumber Sandwiches (1969)
   
3. Our England Is a Garden (1979)
   
4. The Bridge at Arta (1981)
   
5. My Aunt Christina (1983)
   
6. Parlour Four (1984)
   

C. Non-fiction

1. Educating the Emotions (1944)
   
2. Character and Motive in Shakespeare (1949)
   
3. James Joyce (1957)
   
4. Eight Modern Writers (1963)
   
5. Thomas Love Peacock (1963)
   
6. Rudyard Kipling (1966)
   
7. Joseph Conrad (1968)
   
8. Shakespeare’s Lofty Scene (1971)
   
9. Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography (1971)
   

Plus a further 48 Titles published under the pseudonym ‘Michael Innes’

Staircase in Surrey

The Gaudy The first volume in J.I.M. Stewart’s acclaimed ‘A Staircase in Surrey’ quintet, (but the second in time), ‘The Gaudy’ opens in Oxford at the eponymous annual dinner laid on by the Fellows for past members. Distinguished guests, including the Chancellor (a former Prime Minister) are present and Duncan Pattullo, now also qualified to attend, gets to meet some of his friends and enemies from undergraduate days. As the evening wears on, Duncan finds himself embroiled in many of the difficulties and problems faced by some of them, including Lord Marchpayne, now a Cabinet Minister; another Don, Ranald McKenechnie; and Gavin Mogridge who is famous for an account he wrote of his adventures in a South American jungle. But it doesn’t stop there, as Pattullo acquires a few problems of his own and throughout the evening and the next day various odd developments just add to his difficulties, leading him to take stock of both his past and future.