The Naylors (19 page)

‘Certainly not.’ Edward Naylor’s tone was that of one who concurs in rebutting an aspersion. ‘Awkward fellow, though, in some ways, Hooker.’

‘He hasn’t come to Plumley, Edward, to display social accomplishments.’

‘No, no – one must grant him that.’ Edward was silent for a moment following this not wholly lucid remark. Then he apparently decided that he had been offered what might be termed a legitimate lead.

‘But as to what the beggar
is
here for,’ he said. ‘How do things go? Do you feel that you’re likely to—?’ Edward broke off for a moment. The words he had been about to use were ‘give in’, which seemed not quite felicitous. But he found himself seeking for some periphrasis in vain. ‘—give in?’ he said.

‘Dear me, no!’ George seemed to find this question merely surprising. ‘Hooker and I remain, I fear, sadly far apart. But we are having very interesting discussions, all the same. There are areas of contemporary thinking in which he is much more at home than I am. He even seems to me to possess a certain innovative power. I have been much struck by some of the things he has said about the kerygmatic Christ.’

‘Is that so?’ To Edward Naylor it would not have been surprising to learn that this personage inhabited an ashram in Mr Rushdie’s subcontinent. But he listened respectfully to his brother nevertheless.

‘And there’s another striking thing about Hooker. He is very much a kenoticist – which I take to be unusual in orthodox Anglican theologians today. He has even said to me . . .’ George broke off – perhaps as conscious that Edward himself might never much have reflected upon whether Jesus Christ was aware of being the Second Person of the Trinity. ‘But about what you were asking,’ he said. ‘About caving in and knuckling under. Definitely not.’

‘Capital!’ The vicar’s churchwarden appeared to experience no difficulty in uttering this decided commendation. ‘After all, it’s not a disaster, you know.’

‘A disaster?’

‘My dear fellow, you do have that small income from the shop. It’s not much, but it will serve to tide things over until I can get something fixed. It took several months with Charles, but I managed it. The only trouble in that quarter is that the boy doesn’t turn up very often. It worries the little managing chaps.’ Edward paused – almost as if expecting his brother to say, ‘They won’t have that trouble with me’. Not receiving this assurance, he went on, ‘I don’t know whether I’ve told you about Fiesta?’

‘Fiesta? I’m sure you haven’t.’

‘It’s the Italian word for a jollification of a churchy sort.’

‘Or might it be the Spanish?’ George suggested diffidently.

‘That’s right – the Spanish. Saints’ Days and the like are fiestas. Carnivals, you might say, with lots of entertainment laid on. Actually, I thought for a time of calling the company “Carnivals Limited”. But it sounds not quite right. Carnivals ought to be unlimited, don’t you think?’ Edward laughed happily at his own wit. ‘So I’ve chosen just “Fiesta” instead. Catches the eye better. The advertising wallahs have a saying, you know: “Six letters catch the eye”. Perfectly true.’

‘My dear Edward, whatever are you talking about?’

‘And do you know what put the whole idea in my head? Simply keeping my own eyes open on the Plumley home front. The Prowses and their unending bazaars and jumble sales. Dismal affairs – but the only church activities for which the village people turn out
en masse.
Scrabbling for rubbish from the lumber-rooms of their slightly more prosperous neighbours – but really rather wanting to let their hair down as well. You remember Jim Fenwick, the padre we had before this dim Christopher Prowse?’

‘Of course I remember Fenwick. He baptised all the children.’

‘A stout fellow, and a parson of the old school. Do you remember what he always took along to the bazaars and so forth? You might call it a gambling machine.’

‘A gambling machine?’

‘A kind of rustic roulette.’ Edward Naylor was plainly delighted with this linguistic happiness. ‘People bought numbered tickets at a bob a time. Then Fenwick would twirl a kind of arrow-affair on a board with the numbers disposed like the figures on a clock. If it stopped on your number you got a bottle of whisky or packet of tea or pin-cushion or whatever it was. The ploy would go on all afternoon with no shortage of takers. I suddenly saw it as a promising thing, just asking for development. That’s where Fiesta will come in. Hire out suitable arcade-type equipment to parishes on a short-term deposit and percentage basis. With a discreet religious slant to some of it – and that’s where you’d be invaluable, George: as religious adviser. For instance, I’ve thought of an electronic contraption with a string of mineral-water bottles seeming to pass across the screen. Press the right button at the right split second, and one of them turns to wine and bobs out on the winner. Endless scope for invention of that sort. Watch the Waves as Jesus Saves.’

‘
What
?’

‘You move him forward on a zigzag, trying to dodge the waves. You can’t control the waves, which are randomised, but only Jesus. If you let him hit one, he begins to sink, but if you get him in the clear again quickly enough, he walks on happily. How do you feel about it?’

‘I rather think Prowse might jib at having Plumley latch on to Cana – or to high jinks on the Sea of Galilee.’

‘Not in too good taste, perhaps?’ Edward Naylor, a reasonable man, considered this possible view of the matter soberly. ‘But that’s just where you’d be so much a key figure!’ he then said loyally. ‘So do think about it, old boy.’

An adequate response to this plea to think about the unthinkable eluded George for the moment, but he was saved from awkwardness by the arrival of his sister-in-law.

‘Edward,’ Mary Naylor asked, ‘do you happen to have seen Jeoffry and Old Foss?’

‘I don’t think I’ve set eyes on them either yesterday or today.’

‘I’m just a little worried about them.’

‘My dear, they do wander off from time to time. But here’s Hooker. We can ask him.’ Father Hooker was indeed approaching. He bore an abstracted air, and was perhaps going over in his mind the successive heads under which he would order his discourse on the following day. ‘Hooker, you don’t happen to have run into Jeoffry and Old Foss?’

‘I beg your pardon?’ It was almost with a start that Father Hooker had become aware he was being addressed. ‘Run into whom?’

‘Not exactly whom,’ George said with some amusement. ‘Jeoffry and Old Foss are the cats.’

‘Ah, the cats. I may perhaps be forgiven for being a little astray. The names are somewhat surprising, are they not?’

‘Far from it,’ George said. He was welcoming this diversion from his brother’s monstrous vision of a new-style church bazaar. ‘Two very distinguished cats have been so named, and it was my niece who called ours after them.’ (George said ‘ours’ entirely without self-consciousness, since at Plumley he knew he was at home.) ‘Edward Lear, who tells us that he has a runcible hat, tells us also that Old Foss is the name of his cat. But the original Jeoffry was more august. He belonged to Christopher Smart. “For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry,” Smart says.’

‘So he does – in the
Jubilate Agno.’
Father Hooker, whose dislike of cats in real life had made itself evident on his first evening at Plumley, was quite on terms with poetical cats – and moreover had a weakness for exhibiting himself as a well-read man. ‘Smart sees his cat as duly and daily serving the Living God.’

‘How very interesting!’ Mary Naylor said. ‘But it
was
rather odd of Hilda to choose such names, all the same.’ Mary was in fact rendered uncomfortable by this unaccountable bobbing up of religion in a domestic feline context. ‘And you can see that it
is
rather worrying,’ she went on. ‘Not their names, I mean, but their having disappeared for so long. So many get killed on the road.’

‘I wish I could reassure you,’ Father Hooker said. ‘But, unhappily, I have seen no cats of late.’

‘Happening all the time,’ Edward Naylor said robustly. ‘And there’s another thing. A car or van comes along, kills your cat, and leaves the mangled body in the middle of the road. Presently another fellow comes along, stops, and thinks he’s doing the decent thing by picking up the corpse and chucking it over a hedge or into the ditch. One of the farmers told me of its occurring only last week. He’s lost his cat, and knows pretty well what’s happened. But his kids are still hunting for the body. Old Foss and Jeoffry may have gone the same way at one swoop. Not but that, ten to one, nothing of the kind has occurred, and they’ll turn up again as usual.’

‘You don’t think,’ Father Hooker asked – and distinguishably with a faint wistfulness – ‘that they may have been devoured by a fox?’

‘My dear sir, foxes don’t devour cats.’ Edward was vastly entertained. ‘Foxes devour hens and geese. And all brutes are choosey. Cats themselves, for instance. A cat will stalk a pigeon right across the garden, but usually ignore a pheasant a couple of yards away. Unless it’s a wounded pheasant. I’ve known a cat go for one of them.’ Edward was very much the countryman as he produced this scarcely recondite information. ‘Is that the damned telephone?’ It was certainly the damned telephone, just audible as it rang in the house. ‘Both boys have gone off, and Hilda ignores the thing on principle – so there’s probably only that useless girl.’

‘I’ll go, dear,’ Mary said – and added, in case her husband’s evident immobility might appear a little lacking in propriety: ‘It’s sure to be Mr Rudkin about the bacon. He promised it for the week-end, but I expect Hilda may have to fetch it.’

Mary hurried away, and the three gentlemen continued to converse, perhaps more out of civility than inclination. George wanted to return to Rushdie, and Father Hooker to his sermon; Edward would have been quite content to chat, but couldn’t think of anything much to chat about. Surprisingly quickly, however, Mary reappeared on the lawn, and hurried towards them with the unmistakable air of one who brings information of moment.

‘Rather an extraordinary thing,’ she said. ‘I don’t know quite what to make of it. That was Edith Prowse. She rang up to ask whether, by any chance, Sinbad was paying a kind of visit to Jeoffry and Old Foss.’

‘Sinbad being a cat?’ George asked.

‘Yes, of course. And Sinbad has disappeared. But what’s really odd is about the Rudkins. The Rudkins’ boy has just delivered something at the vicarage: scrag-end, I think Edith said. And he’s on his way here with the bacon now – which is one comfort, at least. But what he told the Prowses was that Peter has vanished.’

‘Peter Rudkin?’ Father Hooker asked, suitably shocked. ‘A little boy?’

‘No, no—of course not. Peter is the Rudkins’ cat.’

Noon on the following day, Sunday, found George back in the garden. Again he had Mr Rushdie for company. Or he carried the possibility of that, at least, under his arm. But the book, although so beguiling, once more remained unopened. George was barely conscious that this was so. What he was conscious of was simply that he was waiting. He was waiting for the return of the Park contingent from church. And, more particularly, he was waiting for his niece. He recalled that on these occasions the Naylors frequently collected appropriate fellow-worshippers and brought them home for a glass of sherry by way of recruitment after the fatigues of devotion. He hoped this wouldn’t happen on the present occasion.

Nor did it. There was a small bustle from the direction of the house, and then Hilda came across the lawn alone.

‘Well?’ George said. ‘How did it go?’

‘I hardly know where to begin.’

‘Have a man come through a door with a gun,’ George suggested with a determined lightness of air.

‘That’s only for when one’s stuck.’ Hilda was still carrying a prayer-book, and this she now laid carefully on top of Mr Rushdie on the grass before she sat down.

‘Then start,’ her uncle said, ‘with what will prove to have been a pregnant utterance on the part of a major character.’

‘Very well. The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.’

‘You mean that Hooker took that as his text? No one quite like Isaiah for texts.’

‘It was certainly Hooker’s text, and I suppose a perfectly ordinary one. It was the application that rather surprised people. Would “application” be the right word?’

‘Certainly. One applies one’s text – or handles it.’

‘Hooker handled it, all right. His great light was first seen over some desert in America, and then over Hiroshima. And we all dwell in the land of the shadow of death.’

‘So he was as good as his word.’ George said this soberly. ‘And how did it go down?’

‘Not too badly – except with what you might term some of the regulars. They clearly judged it uncalled for. But there was quite a congregation. It was really rather odd. There wasn’t much time, after all, for word to get around that there was to be a noted metropolitan preacher.’

‘I hardly think, my dear, that Hooker would care to be thought of as just that. Perhaps the sticker on the notice-board about banning the bomb had stirred curiosity a little. There was a large crowd?’

‘Good heavens, no! Where would a large crowd come from in Plumley? But on one side of the aisle there were half a dozen young people, male and female, one had never seen before. And on the other side there was a small clump of more elderly women who were also total strangers. It made me think of a wedding, with the bride’s and bridegroom’s parties similarly disposed and glowering at each other.’

‘Were those people doing that?’

‘I did feel there was some kind of mutual hostility – or something like hostility – in the air. And Edith Prowse seemed to be feeling it too. The wretched woman was all of a twitter.’

‘Was she supported by Prowse’s nephew?’

‘No, there was no sign of Simon, nor of his female friend. But it was all mildly perplexing – even without the two men from the Institute.’

‘Without
what
?’

‘Yes, wasn’t it odd? At the end, you know, Christopher Prowse was standing at the door as usual, shaking hands and modulating into secular conversation. And with Hooker beside him. I was almost the last out, so Christopher told me about it. He was quite thrilled, and called it a breakthrough – meaning that at last he’d attracted the intellectual classes, and not just people like us. One of the boffins had introduced himself to Christopher. He’s called Scattergood, it seems – which is a rather overpoweringly beneficent name to go about with.’