The Naylors (8 page)

This small sad comedy came quite quickly to an end. Standing upon his years, George shook hands with the young man as he thanked him and said goodbye. They didn’t exchange names. There would have been something exceeding the occasion in such a gesture.

George had reached Carfax before he remembered about Lewis, Rushdie and Storey. They were still hanging on that peg in the Camera. There was plenty of time in which to retrieve them. But what if, as he ascended those steps, the President of the British Academy, having concluded his researches, once more encountered him? George saw that he must take himself in hand. He turned round and was back in the Camera within five minutes. So, provided again with what was to constitute his ‘light’ reading during the inquisitions and persuasions of Father Hooker, he finally reached the railway station. He still had a quarter of an hour to wait, but he would spend the time on the platform. Reaching the man who would let him on, he felt in a pocket for his ticket. It was one of the large affairs that had become fashionable, and about the size of a luggage label. It seemed to be in rather a crumpled condition. He handed it to the collector, who glanced at it and impassively handed it back to him. He saw that it read:

THE WORLD NOW STANDS ON THE BRINK

OF THE FINAL ABYSS

‘But this man told us Uncle George was going to take a cab,’ Henry Naylor said.

‘Well, yes.’ Henry’s brother Charles was fiddling with a gun he rather hoped a college friend was going to invite him to bring to Scotland in August. ‘The man gave me that message as soon as I’d identified him on the platform. Which wasn’t difficult.’

‘But Hilda’s gone to the station all the same?’

‘Yes. We knew when the next train arrives, and I wasn’t keen on going back there myself.’ Charles tapped the gun, by way of showing that he had something weighty on his hands. ‘I said I thought you’d go – just by way of enjoying your driving licence.’ (It was only a few weeks since Henry had passed his driving test.) ‘But you weren’t around.’

‘I was doing bloody calculus.’ Henry, who enjoyed his maths, scowled insincerely. ‘Holidays just aren’t holidays any longer. Not in a post-A-level year. It’s swot, swot. Why should I go after a rotten scholarship? There’s pots of money.’

‘Scholarships don’t have much to do with money nowadays. It’s just petty prestige. Daddy likes the idea of any sort of prestige. He feels he himself is a thoroughly non-prestige City character. And a non-starter so far as the constituency is concerned. He’ll never win it. So he’s keen on nursing that odd scrap of ability you have for maths.’

‘He might do better to put his money on Hilda. Hilda’s tiresome, but she has something. I’d say it’s a certain command of dispassionate interest. Spectatorship as a
métier.
It’s why she sometimes mutters about Flaubert and Joyce.’

‘Never heard of them.’ Charles was always quick to resent what he thought of as a lurking egg-head quality in his brother. ‘Or was Joyce the chap who wrote some dirty books?’

‘Yes, he was.’

‘And the other chap, too?’

‘Flaubert? I know nothing about him.’ Henry had got it into his head that the distinguished thing was to have a flair for a single intellectual activity, so except when off his guard he regularly represented himself as a good deal less well-informed than he was. ‘Let’s get back to the current situation. Hilda and Uncle George will be here any time now. What about this minder – Hunter, is he, or Bunter?’

‘Hunter was the last one. This one is Hooker. It seems he likes to be called Father Hooker.’

‘Does that mean he’s high church?’

‘I don’t know whether he’s high or low. And I don’t know which Uncle George is, for that matter. It’s only Tweedledum and Tweedledee, isn’t it? By the way, where’s that Hookerdum now?’

‘He told mummy he must go and dress.’

‘Must
what
? Charles was startled.

‘Dress. For dinner, I imagine.’

‘Good God!’ Charles was horrified. ‘Get into a dinner-jacket?’

‘I suppose so. Or some clerical equivalent. All purple, perhaps.’

‘That’s only bishops and people – and for very grand sprees.’ Charles spoke with authority. ‘But didn’t mummy tell him we don’t?’

‘Definitely she didn’t. She was being rather inattentive, I think. He’d been talking to her for quite some time.’

‘But, Henry, it’s bloody awkward, isn’t it? If the chap comes down like that. He ought to have asked, of course.’

‘He makes old-fashioned assumptions out of books,’ Henry suggested, ‘because lacking actual contact with high society.’

‘To hell with high society!’ It was clearly not egalitarian feeling that moved Charles to this senseless exclamation. He was genuinely upset. ‘Here’s a wretched little black beetle turning up to rescue Uncle George – simply under the orders of some bigger beetle, I suppose – and the first thing we do is to embarrass the poor chap.’

‘We could send one of the maids up to his room with a message. As if that were a routine kind of thing.’

‘She’d muck it up. Giggle, perhaps.’ It was true that, although servants survived at Plumley, they were sometimes scarcely recognisable as such. ‘I’d better go and put on a dinner-jacket myself. Keep him in countenance. It’s the usual quick dodge when there’s been a balls-up. You, too.’

‘Hell I will.’ For a moment Henry looked merely obstinate. Then he laughed, and both brothers laughed together. ‘I’ll go up myself,’ he said. ‘Tap on the door and say, “By the way, we don’t wash or dress.” It should be quite easy.’

‘Don’t forget that Father business. It’s a harmless civility. Scat, young man.’ And Charles Naylor picked up his gun again.

Driving to the railway station in her own old car – declared by her brothers to have been a christening present – Hilda had been visited by a brilliant idea. This happened quite often, although it always turned out to be in a disappointingly short-term way. More particularly, it had been happening since she won her prize. It had been a startling pot to come by: well-distanced from any commercial racket, and awarded by judges acknowledged to be critics of the most austere sort. Her story had been printed in what her father might have called a prestige magazine. Publishers had written to ask whether she had a novel on the stocks, and a firm of literary agents had suggested it would be prudent to employ their services. Hilda knew that it might be just a flash in the pan – or told herself that she did. She had been overwhelmed for a time, all the same. Chiefly, she didn’t want her family to know. And they didn’t, since they and all their acquaintance lived as remote as Esquimaux from anything of the kind. She might have created a pride of lions to replace Landseer’s in Trafalgar Square, she thought, and nobody in the Plumley world would have been aware of it. So she was keeping mum and biding her time.

The idea that had come to her turned on the arrival of Uncle George and the new minder. There was to be a grown-up family like her own, only larger, with all its members convinced of the worth and rightness of their several absorbing interests and concerns. An Uncle George, a clergyman turned suddenly agnostic, was to return among them, followed by a minder like this man Hooker. But despite the efforts of the minder – or actually promoted by them in various highly ironical fashions she’d have to work out – the Uncle-George infection spread. One by one, the whole extended family lost whatever faith it had in one mundane thing or another. Universal aboulia (a splendid word) reigned. The only survivor was the Uncle George, who simply woke up one morning with his faith restored. The direst victim was the minder. Equally abruptly, he lost all confidence in his role, and went out and drowned himself in a pond.

As a project upon which to base a successful career as a novelist, this idea proved even more short-lived than many others. It was dead when Hilda was still a couple of miles from the station where she was to pick up her uncle. For one thing, if achieved, its existence couldn’t, as could that of the prize story, be kept from her family, and they would all be hurt in their minds by it. This must be a difficulty authors had to face regularly, and Hilda wondered whether anybody had written a book, or at least a thesis, about it. For a few moments she toyed with the idea herself. (Hilda had read English at Oxford.) But that kind of thing should be left to dons. And of course to critics. There
were
critics, and some of them could spot a reasonably decent short story when it was presented to them. Hilda, however, wasn’t going to be a critic any more than she was going to be a don. She was going to
write.

Uncle George’s carriage came to a stop almost opposite to where she was waiting for him on the platform, so she saw him while he was still opening the door. He had a suitcase and what appeared to be a parcel of books, and the one was getting in the way of the other. She debated, as she advanced, whether she should grab the suitcase and hold on to it. Charles or Henry could properly do that, but perhaps for her to do so would be to treat her uncle as an old man. It was one of those female disabilities a gaggle of women were nowadays making a fuss about. Hilda wondered whether she was right not much to fall for women’s lib. A great-aunt on her mother’s side had been a prominent suffragette. Was that different? She hadn’t thought about it, and it wasn’t a moment to think about it now. Observation first and reflection afterwards: that was the golden rule. So now she registered how her uncle’s expression as he caught sight of her contrived simultaneously to indicate pleasure and dismay.

‘Hilda!’ he shouted – and then gave a moment, for no apparent reason, to confusedly switching the suitcase and the parcel from one fist to the other. Almost simultaneously, however, he managed a kiss. ‘But I said I’d get a taxi!’ he then exclaimed. ‘There
is
a taxi – quite often.’

‘Charles came to fetch your friend, so I thought I’d come and fetch you. So as to be sure you were in time for dinner.’

‘My friend? Yes, of course. Hooker. Do you like him?’

‘No, not really.’

‘Oh, dear! He isn’t a friend, you know – or even an acquaintance. But he’s said to be very distinguished. I rather dodged him on that train. I thought, you see, that I’d just take a potter round Oxford. It was thoughtless of me. These two car trips! I
am
so sorry.’

‘Was it nice?’ Effecting a judicious compromise, Hilda had managed to relieve her uncle of the parcel of books. ‘Oxford, I mean.’

‘Yes, indeed.’ Uncle George said this with immediate conviction. ‘But changed in some ways since my time. Probably not since yours or Charles’s. It’s a pity Charles didn’t finish there.’

‘Charles simply refused to pass his Mods.’

‘Probably they can be very vexatious. Henry will have better luck. I think of him, you know, as a dark horse who may yet break clear of those maths blinkers.’

‘I rather agree.’ Hilda was now leading the way to her car. What was in her head was a humiliating realisation of the trashy character of the family fantasy she had been thinking up as fit for fiction. Uncle George was
real.
To flatten him out into a manikin in a yarn would be merely wanton. Yet you were always told that the material for novels and things had to be found not in books but in first-hand experience of life. And that wasn’t, as books were, easy to come by. Your family was your stock-in- trade, at least to start with.

Suddenly Hilda had another idea. Somebody publishes a novel crammed with her or his nearest relations, all satirically presented. And all the relations read it, are enthusiastic, and quite fail to spot either themselves or each other. I come out with bad ideas, Hilda told herself, as easily as a baby does with spots.

‘How is the tennis court?’ Uncle George asked. They were now seated in the car, and Hilda was revving up.

‘It has come out in spots.’ Hilda realised that this was an obscure remark. ‘Patches of moss or something that produce an odd bounce if the ball lands on them.’ It was like Uncle George to ask a conscientious question like this – even perhaps to think it up ahead. He was in the dumps about God and his immortal soul, both of which he now presumably believed to be old wives’ tales. But he felt he had to enter into others’ concerns, however trivial. The tennis court wasn’t prominent in Hilda’s mind, and she wasn’t too pleased that it should be supposed to be so. She was going to have serious talks with Uncle George. Meantime, there was no harm in thinking of him as an old dear, although he was only in what is called early middle age. It would be a precaution against any sense of annoyance. Charles and Henry were probably going to experience just that with their uncle, particularly since he had more or less brought along the man Hooker.

‘I have to be on the look out’ – George said with telepathic effect – ‘not to be harping on my own affairs. I expect you’ve heard about them.’

‘Yes, I have.’

‘In Oxford an engaging young woman handed me something about atom bombs.’ Uncle George didn’t seem to offer this as an inconsequent remark. ‘It’s a bit frightening, all that. Yet the magnitude of a possible catastrophe is not its true measure.’

‘How do you mean, uncle?’

‘Or the mere neutral magnitude of the universe as science – which means no more than your brains and mine – has revealed it. The distance between star and star has no significance in itself.’

‘Hasn’t it?’ They were now on the high road, but Hilda slowed down a little. ‘Pascal . . .’

‘Yes, of course.’ Uncle George was pleased. ‘Pascal was scared, certainly. But it wasn’t the immensities, you know. It was the silence in them. A quality, not a dimension. Dear me! We’ve got on tricky ground, Hilda.’

They drove on, silent for some time. Hilda, like Uncle George, was now pleased. There
were
serious talks ahead of them. The last time Uncle George had ‘lost his faith’ she had been too young to make much of it. There would be a difference this time. She was curious about religious feeling, and particularly about its apparent compulsiveness in some people and its total absence in others. But more interesting than that was its coming and going in a single individual – and here her uncle appeared to be a classic case. But she must be chary of taking any initiative in probing the matter. That, in present circumstances, would be indelicate. She must just watch out for a promising lead in. One had almost turned up already in that piece of chat about Pascal. And now, after the silence that had succeeded it, her uncle moved a little away from what he had called tricky ground.