The Naylors (23 page)

‘I’m sure it will all resolve itself in time.’ Christopher produced this vague response without conviction; he was plainly regretting the domestic disclosure he had offered. ‘But to return to the cats. Their disappearance is not connected with my nephew in any way. In fact, there is only one explanation – and it is a most distressing one, I fear. The hyena is active again.’

‘But of course!’ Henry said instantly. ‘How stupid of me. The hyena it is. Poor pussies.’

It was clear to Hilda that her brother didn’t believe in the hyena. Nor did she. Nor, for that matter, in the region of the Plumleys as a whole, did perhaps a majority of those who would at one time have been described as of the better sort. These regarded the brute as a phantom merely: a product of the kind of instant folklore that is created and propagated by the popular press. There had, indeed, twice appeared in print intelligence that the hyena had been encountered in broad daylight (and promptly ascribed to its species) by reliable members of the public: on the first occasion by William Pidduck, aged six, as he was walking home from school, and on the second by Mrs Goslin, aged eighty-three, while drawing water from a tap conveniently located at the bottom of her garden. These persons had become local celebrities for a time, and their photographs had even appeared in a national newspaper. And to a very large number of people over the months had come at least persuasive hints and intimations of the creature’s near-presence, commonly in the dark. The hyena had been heard snarling; it had been heard purring; it had been heard doing deep-breathing, like a maniac on the telephone; most frequently, of course, it had been heard giving vent to demoniac laughter. Its eyes had been observed burning bright in the copses and dingles of the vicinity.

One didn’t, perhaps, have to be wholly gullible to believe in the veridical status of the hyena. Wild beasts – or at least beasts that could plausibly be so described – did escape from time to time from private zoos. People who once had kept homing-pigeons or guinea-pigs in their back yard had many of them switched to lions and tigers. Indeed, at one point Edward Naylor, ever alert to the movement of plebeian minds, had briefly wondered whether it might be possible to promote packaged Adventure Playgrounds for Big Cats. So the Prowses are not to be ridiculed at this point in our story.

‘But this time, at least, the police have consented to be alerted,’ Christopher Prowse said. ‘Someone must have apprised them of the situation, and they have turned out half a dozen patrol cars at once. There goes one of them now. Just in front of the inn.’

This was true. Such a car, cruising slowly, was visible from where the Naylors and Prowses stood.

‘Did you say half a dozen?’ Henry asked.

‘Yes, indeed.’

‘You haven’t, perhaps, been seeing the same car several times?’

‘Certainly not.’ The vicar took the opportunity of avoiding unchristian irritation as he offered this firm denial.

‘In other words, just because somebody has reported to the police that the hyena has gone pussypophagous . . .’

‘Has
what
?’

‘Has taken to eating cats. Just because of that, the police have turned out six cars and a dozen men?’

‘Yes – and it shows most commendable thoroughness, does it not? No doubt they are armed. But it is to be hoped, of course, that they don’t have to kill or maim the creature. That would be most distressing.’

‘Particularly on a Sunday.’ Henry had the grace at once to be ashamed of this unseemly gibe. ‘Perhaps they have nets or things,’ he added rapidly.

‘Or darts carrying an anaesthetic charge. I have observed them in use in the great nature reserves of Africa. On television, of course. I sometimes regret that as a young man my thoughts didn’t turn to the mission field. One would have seen so much more.’

‘Well, yes – I imagine so.’ Henry, whom this irrelevant and wistful note suddenly rendered awkward, glanced at Hilda for help. ‘I suppose we should be getting along.’

‘We’ve promised ourselves to climb to the Tump,’ Hilda said. ‘It’s a marvellous afternoon for a view.’

‘And we must get back to the vicarage.’ Edith Prowse had glanced at her watch. ‘Simon may have returned there by now, and it may all prove to have been some stupid mistake. Even about the cats and that horrid hyena.’ The vicar’s wife, who spent much time urging desponding female parishioners to look on the bright side of things, appeared to extract genuine solace from these hazy hopes. ‘Please give my love to your parents, Hilda. It was delightful to see them in church this morning. And such a good congregation, too.’

There were further civil exchanges after this, since the Prowses seldom took their leave of anybody except in a lingering way. They were, Hilda supposed, a lonely couple. They had no children to return to – and on the present occasion not even a cat. Christopher Prowse, although a conscientious man, had little talent for being easily
en rapport
with his parishioners in their several classes, occupations, and domestic circumstances, and in addition to this the mere fact of being a clergyman nowadays involved a certain alienation from secular society. At the moment, the vicar and his wife had the company of their kinsman and parlour boarder. But even if they found Simon at home again on their return, he could no longer represent for them more than a vexatious and even alarming enigma. There was, of course, something irresistibly comical in the thought of Christopher with his rusty Latin suddenly finding himself confronted with a pupil well-seen in the text of th
e Bacchae
– and when Henry once or twice guffawed as he and Hilda resumed their walk it was no doubt this that was amusing him. But the entire situation was uncomfortable. Hilda, although she must have been aware of it as holding out unexpected promise for the exercise of literary talent, didn’t care for it at all.

They surmounted a stile, and walked diagonally across a field containing a herd of moodily munching bullocks. A number of these interrupted this tedious occupation and came nosing after them in a kind of stupid curiosity. Hilda had the discouraging thought that stupid curiosity was at present her own key-note. Simon Prowse was at least up to something, whether laudable and well-considered or not. As soon as they were back at the Park Henry, with whatever affected discontent, would take himself off to his all-absorbing maths. Even Charles would be busying himself purposively with his fishing tackle and his injuriously uninvited gun. As for Uncle George and Father Hooker, they were now – even across what must surely be the vast gulf sundering belief and disbelief – contentedly debating something they might call the philosophy of religious experience. She herself was simply wandering around in the interest of no sort of action whatever. Perhaps she had better take Henry’s advice, and set about landing a passable husband.

‘That hyena,’ she said abruptly. ‘You don’t believe in it, do you?’

‘Of course not.’ Henry was contemptuous. ‘And the police don’t believe in a cat-eating cat, either. Which doesn’t mean the fuzz don’t have to be explained. Good God! What’s that?’

‘That’ was a sudden loud noise overhead. They both looked up, and what they saw was a helicopter. It was coming from behind them, and flying low. For a moment they were actually in its shadow. Then it was hovering directly above them, and dropping lower still. It made a terrible din – a kind of dry clattering that set the bullocks bolting in all directions. Then it rose again, and flew away across the vale.

‘Bloody silly affairs,’ Henry said. ‘A jet can be shot to bits all round you, and you still have a chance. But if a rotor goes on one of those things, it’s curtains within five seconds. Icarus just not in it.’

‘Bother Icarus.’ Hilda was unimpressed by this further unexpected instance of her brother’s cultivation. ‘The thing pretty well buzzed us. Week-end skylarking idiots!’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Not play. Business. In fact, the fuzz again. They’re out in force, expecting trouble. No, don’t come to a stop and gape, girl. We go on to the top and have our own aerial view.’

Hilda obediently kept walking – and at a pace which for some minutes effectively discouraged speech. By this route it had become almost a scramble to gain Tim’s Tump. The smooth downland turf, pleasant to the tread on gentler inclines, now felt slippy and treacherous. Hilda told herself it was quite amusing to take orders from the younger of her brothers – and of course there was nobody present to witness this anomalous disposition of things.

‘So you agree it’s all true?’ she presently managed to gasp.

‘No, not all of it. It remains nonsense that they make bombs at Nether Plumley. You might as well imagine they make battleships. But they do
something,
and your friend Simon disapproves and is planning – or at least participating in – a massive protest on the spot.’

‘I don’t see how it can be massive. So far as we know, there’s only the Gale girl within the horizon. Of course, there was that scattering of strangers in church.’

‘Members of a kind of vanguard, perhaps, who happen to be given to devotion as well as demos. Two little batches of them.’

‘And not on very good terms with each other.’

‘Rival enthusiasts, no doubt. And I grant you that, apart from them, there’s no sign at all of strangers being around. Just a bunch of cops, drawing overtime and wasting petrol. Or so it seems. But – as I say – they’re expecting something. Here we are.’

They had scrambled across a ditch and through a hedge, and were standing on a high road. It was perhaps the most ancient of its kind in England: a broad ribbon of grass, here and there much rutted and muddied by the passage of agricultural machinery, which ran in gentle curves and undulations along the ridge of the downs as far as the eye could see in either direction. Primitive peoples, dressed in skins and reputedly daubed with woad, had created it through ages of tribal wars and small migrations; the Roman legions had tramped it; in the great days of the wool trade vast flocks of sheep had been driven on it from county to county. On either hand it was now lipped by a prosperous agriculture: cornfields and pasture, conifer wind-breaks, byres and barns. Beyond this, and on lower ground, it commanded peopled vistas: farmsteads and hamlets and villages and even distant towns; striding pylons; reticulated roads and lanes, and at one far remove a motorway.

From the motorway minute points of light flashed briefly like random heliographs as cruising windscreens caught the sun. On roads in the middle distance the sauntering traffic of Sunday afternoons, scaled down by distance to a Dinky-toy parade, was abundantly on view. Nearer at hand, on a winding and steeply-rising lane that quickly lost itself in a first fold of the downs, a line of cyclists, some in brightly-coloured T-shirts and others in sweaty semi-nakedness, dragged a slow length along in the manner of Pope’s wounded snake. It was (in the words of another poet) a field full of folk. But here on the immemorial ridgeway was solitude, day-long emptiness. Determined walkers, equipped with rucksacks and spiked sticks and compasses, bestrode it in clumpy boots from time to time. Intermittently, hordes of mechanic youths on Hondas and Suzukis drenched it in petrol vapour in the performance of a moto-cross. But that was all. It never occurred to the citizens of the Plumleys that here was a territory in which to walk abroad and recreate themselves. Was it not up a terrible great hill? Even in secure skylarking bands, the schoolchildren, too, avoided it. There was a spooky feel about Tim’s Tump and the forgotten artery that flowed past its mystery.

At some time in the eighteenth century the Tump had been improved by a local landowner (conceivably known to his intimates as Tim) with developed antiquarian tastes. Conjecturing, probably correctly, that here was the burial place of a personage even more important than himself – a Druid, perhaps, but of good family, as the higher clergy ought to be – he had embellished the site and enhanced its consequence in various appropriate ways. He had begun with a clump of oaks. But these being slow to mature, and showing small promise of answering well to the soil, he had added a short avenue of beeches, oriented to lead directly up to the entrance of the barrow. He then felt that the Druid’s ghost, surveying his demesne from beneath the massive capstone to his front door, would not be well served if the beech avenue simply ended off without display. He therefore caused two of the largest sarsens on his estate to be hauled up to the Tump, and there erected as if to support the two leaves of an adequately imposing iron gate. An actual gate would have been an absurdity, but the impulse to provide the seat of an important person with a suitably imposing approach was the same that displeased Hilda at the entrance to Plumley Park.

Hilda and Henry were not, at the moment, much interested in the Tump, let alone in these subsequent tinkerings. They had climbed to this eminence for the wide prospect it afforded, and upon that Henry was already directing his binoculars with all the gravity (which his sister didn’t fail to remark) of a great commander surveying the ground upon which whole armies must presently engage. But when he spoke it wasn’t to any warlike purpose.

‘All very agreeable,’ he said. ‘The coloured counties, and so forth. But just a little dull. Small effects of bustle here and there – or at least of distinguishable activity. A retired gent trimming a hedge, or dutiful young people taking granny on her Sunday jaunt.’ He swung the binoculars. ‘And if Plumley’s quiet, Nether Plumley’s quieter still.’

‘Nothing happening at the Institute?’

‘Nothing at all. A few cars parked inside their ring-fence. The building itself doesn’t seem much to go in for windows. Perhaps that’s sinister.’

‘It’s not much to go on.’ Hilda was focusing her own binoculars. ‘From up here,’ she said, ‘you’d almost think Nether Plumley a bit less unimportant than we are. More of the little roads – the older ones – converge on it. Those coming through the woodlands to the north, for instance. It had a market once, you know, and was quite a place. I seem to remember reading in the
Victoria County History
that Camden or somebody calls it
emporiolum non inelegans.
It’s a miserable little dump now.’