‘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.
‘When I tumbled out of Oxford,’ he said, ‘and I mean not today but twenty years ago, I tumbled straight into the church. What are you now going to tumble into, Hilda?’
‘A job, I suppose, if I can find one. But’ – and Hilda took a plunge that surprised her – ‘I want to try to write.’
‘Excellent,’ Uncle George said. He seemed no more surprised than if she’d said she was going to take a course in cookery.
‘Only I haven’t told anybody at home yet.’
‘Then they won’t get it out of me.’ Uncle George said this so cheerfully that one fear that had been in Hilda’s mind was dispelled. He wasn’t going to moan and groan.
‘The snag, uncle, seems to me that I’ve seen so little. I keep telling myself that I need experience. Experientia docet.’
‘My dear child, you’ve got that wise saw wrong. Experientia docet stultos is what the chap said. The less stupid you are, the less you have to knock around for what you need. Not that knocking around isn’t great fun. I wish I’d managed more of it. Have you any plans which that way incline?’
‘Not really. Only I’m just back from three weeks in Italy.’ Hilda felt this wasn’t much of a claim. ‘With another girl,’ she added. This made it sound feebler still.
‘Where did you go?’
‘Florence, and then Arezzo . . .’
‘And San Sepolcro?’ her uncle asked.
‘Yes, we took a bus there.’
‘Good! Where else?’
‘Just Siena. As a matter of fact, it was something there that has chiefly stuck in my head.’
‘Not that fancy-dress horse race?’
‘Of course not. It wasn’t happening, anyway, during our week there. It was something in San Domenico. San Domenico’s just stuffing with Saint Catherine, you remember.’
‘So it is.’ Uncle George was far from solemn. ‘Those awfully important steps, for instance. Only three or four of them. But I expect she took them levitating.’
‘Yes, I know. I read quite a bit about her, as a matter of fact. But it wasn’t the steps. It was her skull.’
‘It would be that, of course.’ Uncle George was now a little more serious.
‘There it is, in a glass box in a very special little chapel. Glaring at you. Or not quite that, because I think they’ve put something dull behind the eye sockets. But what really shook me was two or three colour photographs they’d pinned up near it. You see, the Pope had been there a couple of weeks earlier. And there he was in the photographs, with an entourage of cardinals and bishops and people all in purple and scarlet. Venerating the skull.’
‘It struck you as remarkable?’ Uncle George asked gently.
‘I think he’s rather a good Pope.’ Hilda paused for a moment and drove more slowly: she was abashed at having produced this patronising testimonial. ‘Highly intelligent, and all taken up with ghastly things happening all over the world. And there he was, doing this venerating.’
‘Why not?’
‘Pigges’ bones.’
‘That’s good Chaucer, but not quite fair to His Holiness, Hilda. Or His Nibs, if you like. It is a human skull, you know.’
‘Yes, of course. You get a hand-out saying that another Pope set up a high commission or something of important medical people. And they said, Yes, it is a very old skull of rather a small woman and quale si osserva net tipo femminile senese. Think of that.’
‘It seems to have struck you in a distinctly unfavourable light.’ Uncle George said this in a puzzled voice, so that Hilda realised he was feeling he must proceed with caution. He probably had no clear idea whether his niece was now a sceptic, or a devout Christian of a firmly Protestant kind, or some sort of waverer between one thing and another. If this last, he would certainly not want to push his own new stance of unbelief on her. He was too diffident a person f
or that. ‘But consider, Hilda,’ he was now saying. ‘It may, for a start, very well be Catherine’s skull. The mortal remains of saints or persons tipped for sainthood were through some centuries pretty well dismembered and lodged here and there in bits and pieces.’ Uncle George paused on this. ‘Put that way,’ he said, ‘it sounds frivolous. But you know what I mean.’
‘Yes.’
‘Catherine of Siena is one of the most remarkable women in the history of the Christian church. Her only rival is Teresa of Avila. Catherine was the daughter of a dyer, and she ended up sorting out and rearranging the papacy. Of course, odd things, as you know, happened to her on the way. She received the stigmata, but concluded it would be impolitic to compete with St Francis on that particular ground, so she secured through prayer that the wounds would be invisible to other people. She can be seen as wildly hysterical and good for any number of laughs. But she was astounding. Over that business of getting the papal family back from Avignon she succeeded where Petrarch had failed – and Dante himself before that. And she wrote, it seems, like an angel in the purest Tuscan going.’
‘All right: Catherine was a paragon.’
‘Yes – but come back to your present Pope. Here, in front of him in Siena, is what millions believe to be the woman’s noddle. Call it that if you like.’
‘But I don’t like.’ Hilda was now becoming rather uncomfortable. ‘I don’t want to be mocking.’
‘I’m sure you don’t. But the point is that the Pope goes into this chapel with his clergy around him. And he contemplates the thing with respect and reverence. That’s all that ‘venerate’ means, you know. It doesn’t mean ‘worship’. Your colour photographs aren’t of a Golden Calf affair.’
‘Yes, I see.’ Hilda wondered whether to continue. She sensed in Uncle George the existence still of a divided mind, reluctant to write off the simplicities of naïve religious persuasions. He had probably been experiencing some rather desperate days or even weeks, but was cheering up now simply because he was coming home. And her knowing this did perhaps entitle her to go on. ‘But the whole business of relics,’ she said, ‘seems quite weird to me.’
‘Yes – but it doesn’t to a great many other people, Hilda, my dear. It’s something intertwined with centuries of catholic devotion. The Pope himself, as a child in Poland, may have been taught to venerate such things.’
‘Yes, of course. But in Siena there was something else.’ Hilda had resolved to be firm. ‘In the basement of the Palazzo Pubblico there was a marvellous exhibition of the Gothic in Siena. Il Gotico. All the swells were on view: Duccio, Simone Martini, the Lorenzetti, Sodoma – the lot. But there was also a good deal of hardware. And what I chiefly noticed was a reliquary. You know what I mean?’
‘Yes.’ Uncle George was slightly amused by this question.
‘This one was about the size of a decent bracket clock, but shaped more or less like a spire. All very golden and ornate. It had twelve uniform little circular glazed windows about as big as a man’s wrist-watch. There was a tiny relic – a scrap of bone or something – in each. Of course, it was all as old as the hills. But it had been brought up to date. Behind each relic was a minute printed label telling you just what you were looking at: perhaps a paring of Saint Somebody’s great toe.’
‘There’s a technical word for such things,’ Uncle George said composedly. ‘Exuviae.’
‘One had a place of honour right at the apex of the contraption. About half a centimetre of hair. And the label, the little printed label, said it was the Virgin Mary’s.’
‘It isn’t impossible, is it? The Blessed Virgin is rather a special case. That she was carried bodily up to Heaven has never become dogma, but in the Roman Church it is widely accorded the status of a pious opinion. No end of people would be deeply offended if you purported to exhibit the Virgin’s skull after the fashion of Saint Catherine’s. But that a stray hair or two may have floated down en route is quite in order and rather poetical.’
‘Uncle George, it’s all the greatest nonsense.’
‘And you sound almost indignant about it! Of course there’s a lot to perturb in Italy. Trollope’s Mrs Proudie was shocked to hear that they were pretty weak on Sabbath observance in Rome.’
Hilda was laughing at this before she realised that her uncle wasn’t quite composed, after all. He wasn’t yet out of the wood, and these small absurdities (as they surely were) made part of his problem. So she had been labouring them tactlessly. She tried to get away on a lighter note.
‘Of course,’ she said, ‘it’s only sensible for an immemorial institution to keep up to date. It’s how it has managed to survive century by century, after all. There was a church – I think in Arezzo, but I can’t really remember – which had rows of little electric candles in some of the chapels. They were penny-in-the-slot candles. You dropped in a hundred-lire coin and on flicked one candle.’
‘Sensible, as you say. And particularly attractive to the children – clutching their piaculative pence. Do you know that T.S. Eliot must have invented “piaculative”? The regular form is “piacular”.’
‘It wouldn’t scan.’
‘“Piaculary” would – which is another possibility, only obsolete.’
Hilda reflected that this was the sort of momentous information dished out in lectures she’d had to attend in Oxford. But she was also aware that, in some curious way, her uncle was temporising.
‘Arezzo and Borgo San Sepolcro,’ he now said. ‘But what about Monterchi?’
‘I’m afraid I’ve never heard of Monterchi.’
‘It’s on the way. His mother came from there.’
‘Whose mother, Uncle George?’
‘Piero’s, of course. There’s a little mortuary chapel, with his Madonna del Parto. Iconographically unusual, perhaps unique, in Italy. The child hasn’t been born, you know.’
‘I see.’
‘Anyway, San Sepolcro. You saw the picture?’
‘Of course. It was why we went there.’
‘Like many other people – since the painter became so fashionable.’ There was a moment’s silence. Uncle George was clearly unhappy at having produced this slightly caustic remark. Then he turned a troubled face to his niece as she sat at the wheel. ‘Do you know?’ he said. ‘I have come to think it a pack of fables from top to bottom, but I’d hate to drag anybody after me into that persuasion.’
‘Me, you mean. But I don’t know that I need any dragging. Haven’t I just indicated as much?’
‘We were only talking about some of the trimmings, Hilda.’ There was another silence. Then, strangely, Uncle George’s expression turned from distress to mischief. ‘But that picture,’ he said, ‘isn’t a trimming. It’s the one scrap of evidence I can’t get away from. Odd, isn’t it? Don’t tell Hooker.’
After this, not much was said for the rest of the drive, so Hilda had leisure to reflect on her uncle’s condition – soberly, this time, and without primitive literary designs on it. If you weren’t merely an occasional church-goer, muttering the Apostles’ creed on Sundays and remembering to bob your head at the right place in it, but had for long had the duty of climbing into the pulpit and saying, ‘In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, Amen,’ you had undoubtedly been in a very tight spot indeed before beginning to talk about a pack of fables. Uncle George’s track-record wasn’t very distinguished. There was undeniably a labile streak in his make-up. But he deserved better of her than she’d managed so far. She recalled with decent shame now, when her brother Charles had announced the present state of play, she had only managed to come out with something smart about it. She was making virtuous resolutions as she brought her car to a halt at Plumley.
‘How did you find him?’ Edward Naylor asked this nervously. He had waited at the foot of the staircase until Hilda came down from seeing her uncle installed in his bedroom. ‘A pretty worried man, eh?’
‘There’s a worried man there, daddy. But other men as well.’
; Edward Naylor frowned. His children were constantly making senseless remarks – even Charles and Henry, whose characters he thought he penetrated to pretty thoroughly. But most often it was Hilda. He believed that Hilda was cleverer than the boys, and as he was conscious of his own marked ability – as being the kind of man at whom others glance first when a sticky point turns up at a board meeting – he felt that he and his daughter ought to be the members of the family who fully understood each other. And Hilda tried. Whereas, when some occasion of cross purposes arose, Charles and Henry might just mutter about the generation gap and walk away, Hilda would at least stay put and continue talking. But he couldn’t be certain that it wasn’t chiefly on account of mere curiosity. Required to make a living – he had sometimes reflected – his daughter might go far in industrial espionage.
‘But the state of play?’ he asked. ‘Did you rumble it at all?’ (Edward Naylor probably believed this to be a very up-to-date expression, freely bandied about among the young.) ‘Is your uncle in trouble over the whole bag of tricks this time: the Immaculate Conception, and all those miracles, and the Sermon on the Mount and the Resurrection?’
The man Hooker, Hilda thought, would be pained by this shocking mix up; it was clear that her father hadn’t a clue as to what the Immaculate Conception was, and would feel far from enlightened if informed by his brother that as a Dominican tertiary Catherine of Siena would have been required to disbelieve in it.
‘I only know a bit about the Resurrection,’ she said. ‘It seems to be the crux at the moment.’ She was rather pleased at bringing in so apposite a word. ‘Because of a painting of the thing at a little place called Borgo San Sepolcro.’
‘Good heavens!’ Edward Naylor was now frankly bewildered. ‘You mean that just on the strength of looking at some picture – or more probably just recalling it – your uncle feels . . .?’
‘Just that.’
‘That there must be something in it?’
‘That it must be true, after all. At least I think that’s how his mind works on the thing. Daddy, just what do you want Uncle George to do? Stick to his job?’
The Naylors Page 7