The Naylors (22 page)

‘There’s that saying about cats having nine lives. Obsolete. Archaic. Do you know that in London nowadays no cat has as much as half a life? Your pussy has only to put a whisker outside the door never to be seen again. The pie-shop, the furrier, the lab: they’re all after poor puss. The going rate is fifty pence.’

‘Henry, you’re as idiotic as Hooker, who would like to think that cats are eaten by foxes.’

‘Hooker talked a good deal of tripe in that sermon.’ Henry had exhausted his interest in cats. ‘But he stopped short of ignominy. I think that’s the word. He didn’t say that we should turn up our moral noses at the thing and leave using it to the Yanks. I suppose that’s what your friend believes.’

‘Just what do you mean: my friend?’

As Hilda made this demand, she came abruptly to a halt. They had reached the end of the Plumley Park drive, and surroundings which witnessed to the consequence not of Naylors but of proprietors who had departed long ago. There were lofty and elaborate iron gates, decently painted but never to be coaxed or wrenched shut again; these hung from bulky and flaking stone pillars which were no longer quite perpendicular, and on each of which was perched what might have been a football, or a plum pudding, or even a bomb from the days in which such things enjoyed a primitive simplicity; on either side of the drive there crouched an untenanted lodge so diminutive that it might have passed as a commodious dog-kennel. To have this ensemble between oneself and the world always struck Hilda as depressing. That she should now have paused beside it suggested something particularly arresting, even offensive, in her brother’s conjecture.

‘Your friend Simon,’ Henry said. ‘Essentially, it seems to me we’re yearning after him now. Or you are. I can’t really see any other explanation of this jaunt. What he and his Gale girl and his elusive legion are up to isn’t any affair of ours.’

Hilda gave some moments to trying honestly to decide whether these were penetrating remarks. Alone of the family, after all, she was aware that Henry, although he could talk nonsense, was rather an able boy.

‘You mean,’ she said, ‘that you think I think him marvellous?’

‘Pretty well that.’

‘I don’t.’

‘Good. Let’s go on.’

Hilda realised that Henry had simply believed her at once. So
he,
in a way, was marvellous. And she felt some further explanation was due to him.

‘As a matter of fact,’ she said, ‘I was rather taken with Simon. No doubt you spotted my young palpitating heart. But I’ve come to think of him as a bit of a showman. What he’s up to – if he
is
up to it – seems a bit elaborate. I’m probably too stodgy for him. But we mustn’t conclude he isn’t serious about the bomb and stopping it. More serious than we are, if we pass by the mess on the other side.’

‘As Uncle George would say, it’s a point of view. And a point of view’s just what we need. We’ll take our field-glasses up to Tim’s Tump. From there you can command the whole terrain – Animal Genetics and all.’

Having thus taken command, Henry set off with long strides. Tim’s Tump was a long barrow, and it was improbable that a person called Tim had ever had anything to do with it – or not in any sort of respectable antiquity. It lay longitudinally on the crest of the down, and against the skyline suggested the proportions of a furry caterpillar. It had been excavated or rifled long ago; the Department of the Environment tidied it up from time to time; you could enter it, and even – on a wet day – hold a crouched sort of picnic in its interior. Arable land had crept up and around it in recent times, but here and there in the fields thus created lay great sarsen stones which no farmer had ever toiled to fragment by fire and remove. A few of them stood mysteriously erect, having been thus heaved up for unknown ritual purposes some thousands of years ago, and these had the air of sentries or outlying pickets set to guard an immemorially numinous region against intrusion. But all this still lay some 500 feet above the heads of Hilda and Henry, and there was a stiff climb to it. They were yet in the vale, and moving through a scattering of near hovels inhabited – Hilda declared – by retired witches and worn-out and discarded hinds and clowns, which nevertheless went by the imposing name of Plumley Ducis.

‘Agreed,’ Henry said suddenly, ‘that we’re not chasing the attractive Simon. What
are
we chasing? What’s this in aid of? It isn’t clear to me. This demo, or whatever: are you for it or against it?’

‘I don’t know. Uncle George seems to feel I ought to be one or the other. But, really, I just want to have a look. To see how it ticks. There isn’t much to watch ticking in Plumley. I’ve felt that, rather, since I came back to it.’

‘Then get away again. Find yourself a job. Or even a husband, if you can land a passable one.’

‘Thank you very much.’ Hilda paused, and decided not to be offended. ‘It’s a matter of a breathing-space, I think, and of looking around.’

‘The fact is, my girl, that the short story has gone to your head.’

‘What do you mean – the short story?’ Hilda had come to a halt, and was staring at her brother in dismay.

‘A chap at school showed it to me. As a matter of fact, I thought it rather good. Not that I’m a judge. It’s not my kind of thing.’

‘Henry, you haven’t told anybody?’ Hilda’s perturbation was now tinged with pleasure. Actually to
hear
even an off-hand commendation was something new to her.

‘Of course not. A gentleman can be trusted to conceal his sister’s shame.’ Henry paused for a moment. ‘Does one,’ he then asked curiously, ‘feel very protective about that sort of progeny?’

‘Yes.’

‘I wonder whether I’d feel like that if I discovered something? In maths, I mean. Probably not. Do you know what was the most marvellous moment in human history?’

‘You’d have to ask Hooker to get a quick answer to that one.’ Hilda was now walking on. ‘I suppose you’d say it was when some Arab, charging around the Sahara on his camel, found he’d invented the multiplication sign, or spotted that nought comes before one, two and three.’

‘Amazingly well-educated young women are nowadays. But, no – it wasn’t quite that. It was when scientists – experimental philosophers, as they said – stopped feeling protective about their achievements, and started letting on about them. Even mathematicians had imagined that their equations and things were valuable private property, to be held on to right to the grave. I suppose that was because most of them were astrologers as well, or could flog you the sums telling you how to aim a cannon or a catapult.
Publishing
your discoveries: that was the great turning-point in history.’

‘So now anybody can read about the bomb.’

‘Right! Of course there’s a lot more to it than reading up. But, by and large, any little tin-pot dictator or junta or what-have-you can get busy on the thing. If you want to think about the bomb at all – which isn’t particularly necessary in your case – you’d better begin from there.’

‘A woman’s sphere is the home.’ Hilda said this without much attending to it. She was digesting the fact that she had a more or less grown-up brother, and that it wasn’t the harmlessly oafish Charles. ‘If you begin from there,’ she asked, ‘how do you go on?’

‘Not by giving three cheers for Master Simon. Or I
think
not that, although one oughtn’t to be in a hurry to be dogmatic about it. In a way, it doesn’t much matter what one thinks. Catastrophe is so near-certain that thinking up ways to avoid it isn’t much more than an intellectual exercise.’

‘Henry, do you really believe that?’

‘Oh, probably. But one has one’s gut reactions as well as one’s wretched little brain.’

‘If enough people could be brought to think and act as Simon does . . .’

‘Yes – but they never will. The thing’s there – targeted on Paris, London, Moscow, New York. What’s also there is the balance of terror. Its less terrifying name is the balance of power. If one country wins too many battles, enough other countries get together to slow it up. That way, you got something that used to be called the Concert of Europe. There’s perhaps a faint gleam of hope in the balance of terror.’

‘Which you don’t think Simon much enlarges.’

‘Bother Simon. He’s not important. He wouldn’t be, even if he weren’t barking up the wrong tree.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘It’s rubbish that the Nether Plumley place can have anything to do with bombs. But I’ll tell you what’s important—or, at least, interesting. It’s the question of orders of magnitude. In that war with Hitler and the general nastiness surrounding it, about fifty million people were killed before Hiroshima was heard of. Just old-fashioned bullets and T.N.T., with occasionally a gas-chamber or the like thrown in, were adequate for the job. How many of your camel-jockey’s noughts have you to add if you’d get the sum right when the bomb drops now? Is it just a quantitative question, or something quite different? Oh, God! Look who’s bearing down on us.’

What had interrupted Henry Naylor’s lecture was not really sufficiently disconcerting or surprising to have justified him in thus invoking the Deity. It was no more than the appearance of Christopher Prowse and his wife, taking the afternoon air in Plumley Ducis. But there was something questing in their manner of looking around them, and Hilda noted this.

‘Not a single child,’ she said, ‘has turned up at Sunday School. Christopher and Edith are hunting down the truants.’

‘Sunday School? Surely that sort of thing doesn’t still happen?’ Henry was entirely sceptical. ‘I remember how as kids we agreed to go along once a month at five bob a time, and were told we were setting an example. But T.V. and video must have killed it stone dead.’

Hilda made no reply to this. She was engaged in reciprocating those gestures of gratified recognition which were automatic with the vicar on first sighting a parishioner.

‘I know!’ Henry suddenly went on. ‘They’re searching for Sinbad. Sinbad or Tinbad or Jinbad.’

‘Or Vinbad the Quailer or Linbad the Yailer.’ Momentarily, Hilda ignored the Prowses; she was recalling how, a few days before, Henry had incautiously admitted familiarity at least with the name of the author of
Ulysses.
It was another dimension in which her nearly-grown-up brother was revealing himself as a dark horse. If Uncle George went away – whether back to his mission or not – Henry might turn out to be a substantial conversational resource. They could, for instance, have further civilised talks about the bomb.

‘Hallo!’ Henry was saying with a cheerful and correct informality. ‘We’re guessing that you must be looking for Sinbad. Is that right?’

‘Well, Henry – yes.’ Christopher Prowse was oddly hesitant. ‘At least Sinbad is in our minds. Yes.’

‘We can’t help being a little anxious,’ Edith Prowse said.

‘That’s only natural.’ Hilda, whose mother was frequently a little anxious about one thing or another, produced a practised look of moderate concern. ‘But it’s my belief that those cats have gone off in a body about their own affairs, and will drift back discreetly one by one.’

‘But it isn’t only the cats.’ Mrs Prowse suddenly discovered herself as under a burden of anxiety which she was unable longer to conceal. ‘It’s Christopher’s nephew as well.’

‘Simon!’ Henry exclaimed. ‘He’s vanished with the cats?’

‘At least,
like
the cats.’ The vicar didn’t seem to offer this correction with any humorous intent. ‘It’s really rather disturbing. Simon has been restless ever since he came to us. Hurrying off here and there with very little explanation. We thought perhaps that he had archaeological interests.’

‘Or ornithological?’ Hilda asked. ‘That’s what I thought.’

‘Or perhaps it’s music,’ Henry said. ‘Perhaps Simon’s like the chap in Hamelin town: a latter-day Orpheus.’ (Henry thus revealed yet another dimension.) ‘He pipes, and the brute creation follows. He and all the cats of Plumley have now gone under the hill.’

The Prowses fortunately made nothing of this irresponsible mockery, their agitation being such that it passed over their heads.

‘Simon didn’t turn up in church,’ Christopher Prowse said, ‘and not to lunch either. And of course it has all interfered with his work most disastrously. If, indeed, it
is
his work.’

‘What do you mean?’ Henry asked quickly. ‘If it
is
his work?’

‘I wonder whether I may confide in you?’ The vicar asked this in a yearning sort of way which Hilda didn’t at all like. She asked herself whether she could hastily declare that her brother, although lately showing himself to be rather clever and well-informed, was not altogether wholly serious. But, in the name of family solidarity, she decided against this. Christopher Prowse must look after himself.

‘Yesterday afternoon, you see,’ Christopher went on, ‘when Simon was out, it occurred to me to go into his room and take a look at some of his notebooks.’ Christopher paused, as if aware that this was a shade awkward. ‘It had come into my head that I might get some notion of the more common errors to which his Latin is prone, and assist him in that way.’

‘A very helpful idea,’ Henry said. ‘So what?’

‘It was most perplexing, most unexpected. For instance, there was a whole notebook devoted to the
Bacchae
.’

‘Baccy? Something to do with smoking?’

‘No, no.’ Christopher seemed merely bemused before this extraordinary question. ‘The
Bacchae
is a tragedy by Euripides. And the notes were on some of the knottier problems in the Greek text.’

‘Oh, I see! But that’s your nephew’s line, isn’t it?’

‘Far from it. Simon professes to have elementary Latin, and no Greek at all.’

‘The other day,’ Edith Prowse interposed, ‘I
did
just
hint
to Hilda that we thought there may be a
romance
.’

Hilda, unlike her brother, was not here confronted by anything new. But, more forcibly than before, the disingenuous behaviour of Simon Prowse towards his relations struck her in an unfavourable light.

‘There’s no romance,’ she said. ‘There’s a plot. And you must face it, Christopher, that you could be represented as uncommonly easily taken in.’