The Naylors

by J. I. M. Stewart

  George enjoyed certain rights at the college. Having as a young graduate hung on at Oxford for a time and tutored the college’s handful of theology students, he had been made an honorary member of its senior common room: an exiguous distinction, but one tacitly understood to be for life. He knew just what he could do – having once done it some ten years before. He would simply walk into the common room and push a bell. The common-room butler and under-butler would not be in attendance: they were probably touring the vineyards of Burgundy in pursuit of professional knowledge. But there would be some respectable elderly woman on duty; she would bring him tea (and even muffins); he would scribble his signature on a scrap of paper, and a term or two later receive a bill through the post. It was an alluringly arcane privilege – a tenuous but precious link, indeed, with an almost forgotten paradise.

  So George Naylor walked hopefully up to the wide portal of his Alma Mater. It was flanked, as not in the past, with notices recording in some detail the terms upon which visitors were welcome to enter. ‘Visitors’, clearly, was the dons’ civil near-synonym for ‘tourists’. And planted in the middle of the carriage-way was an elderly but muscular man wearing a bowler hat. George saw at once that in a non-academic context this person would be called a bouncer – or, in a slightly older terminology, a chucker-out. He was thus – if with an additional hint of aggressive proclivities – first-cousin to Sir Thomas Bodley’s man in the lidless box. But George stood his ground, or rather continued to cover it. And this intrepidity was at once rewarded. The bouncer raised the bowler hat and held it almost at arm’s length above his head.

  ‘Mr Naylor—sir!’ the bouncer said in a military (or perhaps naval) manner. ‘A long time since we’ve seen you, sir. But we had Mr Trelawny only last week—and Lord Tunsted and Mr Purnell (the younger one, that is: him they called Poodle) not long before that. All in your own year, Mr Naylor.’

  ‘That’s capital,’ George said, and if the words were chosen at random they came from a joyous heart. He hadn’t recognised Smithers, the college Head Porter. But Smithers had recognised him! Smithers, already a man of much consequence 20 years ago, was now not above taking on this bouncing job in place of a lesser servant now and then. ‘Visitors’ arriving by the coachload he would firmly and with perfect aplomb direct to some more appropriate entrance. And he knew about a proper welcome and didn’t let it linger on in gossip. The bowler was in place again. George entered the Great Quadrangle.

  There it all-majestically was: the uncertain proportions, the misguided crenellations, the cloisters that had never been built, Bernini’s fountain with its Neptune and Triton and dolphins stolen from he’d forgotten where. Nothing in the world could move George more, unless it was modest Plumley (acquired by his great-grandfather) screened by its grove of oaks. He skirted two sides of the quad (only the dons were allowed to walk on the grass, so of course they never did) and gained the typical Oxford tunnel in which the door of the senior common room stood.

  Only it didn’t. The tunnel harboured a permanent half-darkness, since there were a couple of obtuse angles to it as if it had been designed to promote optical experiment; it also possessed, presumably built in for fun, three or four stone steps, slant-wise set, which had for some centuries taken their toll of fractured limbs as bibulous Fellows toddled from their port-decanters to bed. So one moved cautiously. George had done so, and found no door. There seemed to be nothing but a blank wall. But this impression proved to be delusive, after all. There was a door of sorts, but it wasn’t the old and familiar door. It was a newfangled and unobtrusive door such as one notices on well-designed delivery vans – not swinging on a hinge but gliding on a rail beneath itself. And it was locked. All it presented to the world was a sunken handle and an aperture for a Yale key set in a metal disk about the size of a tenpenny piece.

  The common room was locked up! It took George’s breath away. The thing was beyond his experience. He could remember how, in his final and most Elysian year in the college, he had gone into the room at three o’clock in the morning to hunt up an envelope big enough to take his major contribution to the New Theological Quarterly. The place hadn’t been locked up then. It was outrageous that it should be locked up now. Or at least it was disheartening. For wasn’t he a member of common room, and thus being excluded in an arbitrary way?

  Suddenly there was somebody standing beside him. His eyes had got used to the gloom, and he saw that it was a young man, casually dressed. Somehow he knew about this young man instantly and exactly. He wasn’t an undergraduate, but he was the next thing to it. He was a young man so extremely clever – his features and his glance told George this at once – that he had been snapped up as a Junior Fellow within days of qualifying for a degree. To do that he had written nine three-hour papers, had a pleasant ten- or fifteen-minute chat called a viva with persons as clever as himself – and now here, if he cared to be, he was established for life. George’s indignation vanished. He found himself rejoicing in this youth’s good fortune just as he had rejoiced in the benediction of Smithers’ bowler hat. And the youth hesitated only for an appraising instant before deciding to speak.

  ‘Of course it’s the most awful nonsense,’ he said. ‘We’re security-mad. Burglars and so forth. Utterly bonkers! It’s true there’s the Tompion grandfather clock. But who could walk off with that?’

  ‘Or the scagliola table,’ George said. ‘Hideous affair.’ George hadn’t felt so at ease for weeks. ‘And the strap-work bookcase thought up by William Morris. You’d need a truck for it.’

  ‘Exactly.’ This time, it wasn’t even for a moment that the young man hesitated. ‘I say! Can I let you in?’ Already he had a key in his hand.

  ‘You’re very kind.’ A first twinge of misgiving beset George. It now seemed doubtful, somehow, that beyond this bleak barrier there would still be that respectable elderly woman prepared to produce tea – let alone muffins. Muffins didn’t go with Yale locks. Tempora mutantur, nos el mutamur in illis. But already the innovatory door was gliding past George’s nose.

  The two men (forty-three and possibly twenty-two) entered the common room together.

  It hadn’t changed. It wasn’t shabby with the shabbiness some of the minor colleges had to affect. In fact it was very splendid. From three of the walls there looked down on it with approval the portraits not of obscurely distinguished scholars but of prime ministers and persons of that sort. And George suddenly knew it wouldn’t do. To cross the room and punch a bell wouldn’t really do. Whatever his formal status, it would be a presuming and unbecoming action. Besides which, if the elderly woman really was there, this delightful young man would by now probably be saying, ‘What about a cup of tea?’

  ‘I’ll just take down an address or two from Members in Residence,’ George said – thus avoiding a positive fib. ‘It’s over on that table.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Now for the first time the young man did fractionally hesitate. ‘I have to write a note or two,’ he said. And he sat down at the escritoire that was said to have belonged to Marie-Antoinette.

  So the truth came to George. The young man wasn’t quite sure. He had a duty as a host to a stranger who was almost certainly an old member. But he had a duty to the college as well, and must respect its regulations, bonkers though they might be. He proposed to remain in the common room until George was prepared to leave it. It was as simple, it was as sensible, as that.

  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 han
d. 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

  II

  ‘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 carria
ge 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.’