George got to his feet. Rather, he found himself on his feet – somewhat insecurely, since the inter-city train was swaying on its axis. He found that he had brought his suitcase down from above his head, and was trying to open it with a minimum of inconvenience to the professional lady next to him. He didn’t manage this very well; the lid behaved awkwardly; the lady received a dig in the ribs.
‘I’m so sorry!’ George exclaimed. ‘I do apologise. I’m just making sure that I packed my . . . George was about to say, ‘shaving kit’. But he hesitated. About ‘shaving kit’ there was surely something just a shade indelicate, even a hint of what the young people called (quite inaccurately) ‘machismo’. So George said ‘comb’ instead. Realising that his behaviour was entirely idiotic, he shut down the suitcase in a fumbling fashion, and managed to return it to the rack. The cord of his pyjama trousers was now inelegantly depending from it.
‘I can lend you a comb, love,’ the fat woman said, and by manipulating several of her larger packages she managed to free her hand-bag. ‘And here it is!’ she said triumphantly. She was under the natural impression that her fellow-traveller wanted to attend to his hair there and then.
‘Thank you very much, indeed,’ George said, and tried to purge his acceptance of the comb of any tinge of distaste. It had a few hairs stuck in it; it might even have been a little scruffy. Being (or having lately been) a Christian as well as a gentleman, George passed the undesirable object firmly through his hair, and then returned it. ‘Thank you very much,’ he said again. He did manage not to sound falsely effusive. But unfortunately he happened to glance across at the businessm’n, and judged the fellow’s gaze to be singularly lacking in charity. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘may I ask whether you are a believing Christian?’
Nobody in the compartment was more astounded by this question than George Naylor himself. It was, of course, a good question to put. Any of the Apostles might have asked it of the first stranger met in the street, and for George himself it held its private urgency. Only the urgency had resulted in his no longer being approximated to an Apostle by exhibiting clerical dress. That morning – like John Henry Newman, he had recalled, in a related condition of doubt – he had put on a pair of grey flannel trousers. He had even – as is not recorded of Newman – adopted a turned-down collar and a quiet but incontestably secular tie. At the best he could only be regarded as one of those vexatiously evangelical laymen who pester with tracts and similar importunities entire strangers encountered on public conveyances.
George’s interlocutor reacted badly. Not, indeed, that he consented to be an interlocutor at all, since he simply remained silent and stared at George stonily as at a lunatic in no particular need of help. George, again conscious of outré behaviour but not feeling that this time he had anything for which to apologise, was silent too. And now the professional lady came briskly and surprisingly to his rescue.
‘Well, I am,’ she said. ‘I’m a member of the Catholic Church, and I go to mass fairly regularly.’
This information wasn’t offered aggressively. It was uttered without particular emphasis, and as if merely in continuation of normal chit-chat between casually encountering persons.
‘Well, now!’ the fat woman said comfortably.
‘A Catholic, are you?’ the woman of average proportions said in quite a different tone. ‘The trouble with you Catholics is that you’re Catholics first and Christians afterwards. Or that’s how it seems to me and I don’t mind saying so.’
George quite liked this. It was a preposterous remark, but at least the woman had ‘fired up’ in a context of serious religious discussion. She had convictions, and it was wonderful to have that. So George, whose experience in his mission had accustomed him to debate with unsophisticated people, suddenly felt almost at home in the railway carriage, and he began on a cordial note what might be called an enveloping movement against the stark Protestantism confronting him in the fat woman’s friend. But he didn’t get far with it. He was conscious of his thoroughly false personal position. The man opposite had resumed operations on his calculator: a defiant money-changer in this rocking and impromptu temple of the Word. Happening to glance aside, George detected the young workman in the corner, his own head correspondingly rotated, offering his companion a slow and appreciative wink. As for the fourth and imperfectly glimpsed man, he had produced a copy of The Times and retired unostentatiously but firmly behind it. George found himself simply conducting an untimely dialogue of a quasi-theological character with the woman who went to mass fairly regularly. She was clearly a normal and untroubled cradle Cat. George wished her well, but felt no real occasion to be talking to her. And then the train ran into Reading.
The cradle Cat got out with a goodbye to the company in general, but not without a special glance at George which made him feel she had been wondering about him. His sense of discomfort grew. He wished he was in the other sort of railway carriage, now more common at least in the second class, in which one’s near-anonymity is assured by dozens or scores of other passengers, instead of undergoing this boxed-up effect with four or five. The train was moving again and nobody else had got on. He cursed (or at least deplored) the impulsive start of pastoral curiosity by which he had set the whole embarrassing episode in motion. But now with any luck there would be silence at least as far as to Didcot or even Oxford. The man behind The Times seemed reliable; he had contrived to turn a page of the paper without lowering it from in front of his nose: technically a difficult feat which spoke of practice. About the two young workmen there was also something reassuring. A strain of feeling in George responded to them as wholesome and agreeable physical presences, and by this time the odd little flurry of talk would have passed out of their heads, even supposing it ever to have lodged there. The female shoppers had gone back to the proper area of their concern, the fat one having opened one of her shopping bags and produced a nondescript garment over a detected flaw in which they were tut-tutting in a kind of gratified indignation. The man opposite George was still occupied with his pocket calculator. It appeared to be occasioning him increasing displeasure. He was even emitting the sounds, or at least rendering the impression, of one grinding his teeth in fury. Then suddenly this emotional instability, although presumably generated by commercial considerations, found vent in a different and distinctly startling direction.
‘Bloody Nosy Parker!’ the businessm’n said to George. ‘What the hell did you mean by it?’
This unmannerly harking back to an exchange (if it could be called that) which had taken place 30 miles away caught George Naylor unawares. The ferocity of its expression seemed almost an invitation to fisticuffs. George, who belonged to a period in which the sport of boxing still obtained in schools for the sons of upper-class people, might have been willing to oblige but for the conjoined influences of the presence of ladies and the still automatically operative tenets of his late religion. As it was, he didn’t even find anything to say, and it was one of the young artisans who spoke.
‘Cool it, mate,’ he said easily to the businessm’n. ‘The gent only asked a civil question, didn’t he? A bit barmy, you may have thought it, but there’ll be things on which you’re a bit barmy yourself, likely enough. It’s just that we’re not all cracked down the same side of our heads. A civil answer would have been in order, chum, believe you me.’
George felt himself agreeing with much of this, and he was pleased – as at his mission he had always been – that an individual who had presumably been denied much education other than of the banausic sort should prove capable of speaking out in a forthright and cogent manner. But George was bothered as well. That impulsive and unseasonable question of his (prompted he couldn’t tell by what) was still heading him towards trouble. Its next instalment came from the fat woman.
‘It was religious,’ she said. Her tone could again have been described as comfortable, but now it held a hint of censure as well. ‘It was religious, and I’m as religious as anybody, although Mrs Archer
wouldn’t maybe agree.’ She had given a brief indicative nod towards her companion. ‘But I wouldn’t say it’s a thing to be talked about in a common way.’
‘It’s not everybody that’s called on to testify, Mrs Bowman.’ Mrs Archer said this in a tight-lipped fashion which she had not exhibited when discussing Debenhams and John Lewis with her companion.
‘That sort of thing should be left to the clergymen, to my mind,’ Mrs Bowman retorted. ‘I go to church as often as anybody else. Nowadays, that is. But as for talking about sin and repentance and the like, they should be let alone with it. They’ve had the training.’
‘What about your prayers, ma? Do you say them as often as anybody else too – always remembering that nowadays, of course? Down on your knees by your little bed? Those knees? You must be joking.’
This speech came from the second of the young workmen. It was the more disobliging in that a certain cogency attended upon its mention of Mrs Bowman’s anatomy. Her knees were on view only in the sense that they would have been visible had they assuredly existed. But so massive and columnar were her nether limbs that there was no evidence that they did. She reminded George of some mediaeval bestiary in which the elephant is described as ‘stondand’ because unprovided with joints admitting of any other posture. Here was a frivolous flight of fancy on George’s part. It was Mrs Archer who recalled him to the sobriety required in face of this bizarre conversation.
‘At the name of Jesus,’ Mrs Archer said, ‘every knee shall bow.’
‘Not nowadays, ducky. You have to face it, not nowadays. That right, Len?’
Len was, of course, the young electrician or plumber or whatever who had advised the businessm’n to cool it. He now, and with entire good humour, offered his mate similar counsel.
‘Belt up, Ron,’ he said. ‘What’s kaput with you may be kicking still with the lady. You’ve no call to make a monkey of her. And Jesus Christ may be as good a stand-by as the pub when it looks like you’re going to be short with the rent.’
‘Just that,’ Ron said. ‘The opium of the people, every time.’
George pricked up his ears at this. In Ron’s tone he had detected a hint of sardonic self-mockery which he was accustomed to take as evidence of a promisingly open mind. So with at least momentarily recovered confidence he chipped in.
‘Would you agree,’ he asked Ron, ‘that it’s natural to believe in something?’
‘The international solidarity of the working class,’ Len interjected. ‘That’s what our Ron believes in. Armed wage-slaves. And probably Noah in his ark as well. No harm in it in its place.’
The two young men were not, as George had casually assumed, much of a muchness. Even physically it wasn’t so. Len was fair and of a robust but relaxed musculature; Ron was dark, adrenaline-commanded, ready to spring but not knowing quite where to. George (who had for a space quite forgotten his lapsed condition) had another go – and with a swiftly assumed familiarity he had with some difficulty taught himself to get away with.
‘Come on, Ron,’ he said. ‘Nobody can get around without believing in one thing or another, if it’s only tomorrow’s breakfast. But what about when you take a larger look at the world? Do you really put your money on proletarian revolution imported from Russia?’
‘I don’t say all that hasn’t taken a bit of a clobbering.’ Ron was now giving George a keen but seemingly amiable once-over. If the young men did have something in common it appeared to be good humour. ‘But yes, in a general way. I wouldn’t mind a bash at manning a barricade or two.’
This was like old times, and the talk appeared to be drifting blessedly away from theological matters and into the field of politics. Ron was presumably a Trot, and George was quite prepared to discuss with him the pros and cons of world-wide socialist revolution. But this was not to be. It was blocked by Mrs Archer.
‘What do you mean?’ Mrs Archer demanded of Len. ‘About in its place?’
This was so baffling that even the man with the pocket calculator stared at Mrs Archer in perplexity. But its unaccountability was rapidly resolved by Ron.
‘Noah’s ark,’ Ron said. ‘The old trout means Noah’s ark.’ He appeared to apply this term to Mrs Archer without any derogatory intention.
‘Of course I do.’ Mrs Archer pointed accusingly at Len. ‘Didn’t that young man speak some profane nonsense about its place? Ararat was its place. It’s in the Bible.’
This weird inconsequence brought silence for several seconds. George found himself afflicted with one of his vexatious amnesiac episodes. Was Mount Ararat specifically mentioned in Genesis as the spot on which Noah’s vessel finally grounded? It was odd not to remember the answer to that one. George ought not, of course, to have been particularly perturbed. Unlike Mrs Archer, he knew that there are all sorts of errors and inconsistencies in the curious little Hebrew library collectively named the Old Testament. And as the yarn about Noah and the Deluge was to be received (if at all) only in a mysterious sense, it didn’t matter twopence whether the old gentleman found himself on Ararat or Mount Everest. Nevertheless George was worried – or rather he was even more worried than before. What if this simple woman herself fell into doubt about the biblical status of Ararat, and appealed to him? Would it not be improper in him not to be able to afford her instruction at once? Confronting this question, George again forgot that he had opted out of the entire business, and that if one has ceased to believe that in Zero AD God uniquely entered History one may be perfectly light-hearted in washing one’s hands of the patriarchs and all their kidney. Of course George knew that this didn’t really end the matter. Not nowadays, it didn’t. You could cease to believe almost anything so long as you continued to believe in something else. There had always been people who told you that religion could get along without Christianity, but recently it had apparently become fashionable to maintain that Christianity could get along without religion. It was a perplexing field. George hadn’t properly been keeping up with it.
‘What about the fish?’
‘They stopped in the sea, of course. Why shouldn’t they?’
‘The Bible tells you the size of the thing – in cubits or whatever they were? Or was that about the Temple, later on?’
‘You needn’t talk to me about cubits, young man. Who knows what a cubit was?’
‘But we’re talking about the ark, ma. All the beasts and birds could be got into it?’
‘Of course they could. Two by two. We’re told so.’
‘What about their feed, ma? Quite a lot would be needed. Think of the two elephants. They’d need a good deal more than the two humming birds. Even think of Mrs Noah having to make a shopping-list of everything required.’
George realised that he was listening to a species of disputation he’d heard often enough before. Such absurd questions could appear momentous in the minds of the folk. (They had also, of course, seemed momentous to Bishop Colenso in his day.) But at least Ron now advanced something George hadn’t ever heard at the mission.
‘Germs, ma,’ Ron said. ‘Do you know how many kinds of germs there are in the world? “Kills all known germs”, the bottle says. Probably true enough. But for every known germ on the books, believe you me, there are thousands waiting to get in. Micro-organisms and amoebas and filterable virus and all. Heard of species, ma?’
‘I take no account of species, young impudence, you. Species aren’t in holy writ.’
‘Of course they are. Adam named the animals, didn’t he? Probably even let Eve chip in now and then. Well, there are more whole species in the world, mark you, than there are individual human beings. Just think of that.’
This was news to George. He suspected it of being a wild travesty of some known scientific fact. But he didn’t interrupt. There was a horrid fascination in this demotic parody of grave debate.
‘And how could old Uncle Noah check them in?’ Ron demanded, pressing home his point. ‘How could he see them, see? He didn’t have a microscope, you know. That was inv
ented no time ago, by Galileo or some chum of his.’
Microscope or telescope, George thought, Ron did have a point. If, that is, you believed with Mrs Archer that the sole authorship of the Bible lay with the Holy Ghost.
‘That about germs,’ Mrs Bowman said. ‘Just fancy, now!’
This was Mrs Bowman’s only contribution to the argument. She seemed unaware that it was generating a certain heat. But this was only in her friend. Ron was merely amusing himself with Mrs Archer, although George suspected that he could rise to genuine passion on topics of a political or social sort. Len had resumed his appearance of mindless repose, and was looking rather handsome as a result; he had probably heard Ron on this ploy before, and found it a bit boring. The businessm’n wasn’t bored. In fact he was increasingly outraged, and even showed signs of gathering his possessions together preparatory to that definitive act of displeasure that consists in rising up and seeking another compartment. If George was calculating correctly, the man behind The Times had now been reading its Court page for ten minutes, and as this was something out of nature it had to be concluded that he too was an interested, if detached, listener. But now for some moments George’s own attention wavered – if only because he was anxiously asking himself whether he had a duty to intervene. Only a week before, it would certainly have been so. Ought he, from his new position, to offer some reflections of an elevating, although agnostic, character? He was in sore perplexity of mind and spirit.
It was at this point that Ron went too far.
‘So if that’s your Bible,’ Ron said, ‘forget it.’
George had failed to pick up just what occasioned the giving of this advice, but he had sufficient acquaintance with current demotic speech to know that it belonged to the tolerant-dismissive rather than the contemptuous order. Unfortunately Mrs Archer didn’t receive it that way. Only Satan, or at least one satanically possessed, could bid you forget your Bible. Mrs Archer knew instantly that it was her duty to ‘testify’. Even in his present lapsed state, George was bound to regard that as an honourable activity, and he was therefore the more appalled by the way in which this lurkingly loony woman (entrenched behind the bastions of her shopping-bags) went about it. Mrs Archer raved.
The Naylors Page 2