‘Don’t make fun of me, Hilda.’ Edward Naylor could sometimes produce an unexpected remark. ‘What a man should stick to is his guns, even if it means packing in his job. I’m sticking to my own guns at the moment, as a matter of fact.’
‘Just how, daddy?’
‘Bingo.’ Hilda’s father made his transition to this topic, she saw, without the slightest difficulty. When he had on hand something that he regarded as important it was commonly in her that he first confided. ‘They say there’s not another six months in bingo: old women with pennies in their purses in crumbling abandoned cinemas. But it can be revamped in a perfectly recognisable form and channelled through the media. I’m certain of that. Expensive to mount and run, but lots of money in it, all the same.’
‘I see. Do you know? I think I’ll come into the business, just like Charles.’
This disconcerted Edward Naylor. Was it intended seriously? And Charles, ejected from Oxford in an untimely but not disgraceful fashion, hadn’t exactly ‘come into the business’. The business wasn’t structured in quite that way, and his father had been obliged to chat up a good many cronies before edging the young man into a niche of sorts with a reasonable screw. The idea of going through the same process for a daughter was preposterous – particularly as a woman, on reaching what was absurdly called la crème de la crème in a secretarial capacity, was at the end of the road so far as the business world was concerned. It was so preposterous that he saw he could afford to be jovial about it.
‘Not on your life,’ he said robustly – and then his expression changed. ‘But about your uncle,’ he said. ‘Something really awkward has happened. Do you remember a bit of talk about Prowse asking him to preach? Your mother said something about it, but didn’t recall this really awkward thing. It came into her head again only when that new parlour maid asked her some silly question about the dinner-table. It’s this evening that the Prowses are coming to dine. They’ll be ringing the door-bell any minute now.’
‘Well, that’s very nice, I suppose.’
‘I don’t feel it to be anything of the kind.’ Edward Naylor was now as disturbed about the Prowses as his son Charles had been at the prospect of Father Hooker’s arriving unsuitably attired at the family board. ‘Here is your uncle on his first night back home. It is home to him, you know, since he has never got married or anything of the sort.’
‘Or anything of the sort?’ Hilda repeated, perplexed. But her father went on.
‘And this Mr Hooker actually arrives before him. It’s hardly decent.’
‘But Uncle George himself was responsible for just that. He as good as confessed it was to give the man the slip for a time that he stopped off at Oxford.’
‘And quite right, too. What I feel is that they might at least have let my brother have a few days quietly to himself at Plumley before coming at him. It’s what happened last time.’
‘Yes, I know. But now there’s a new bishop, and I suppose he feels the thing to be so momentous – a single soul’s eternal destiny, and all that – that no time should be lost. And anyway, daddy, I don’t see what it has to do with the Prowses.’
‘It’s as if we were stacking up parsons against your uncle.’
For a moment Hilda found nothing to say. This, she was thinking, was what comes out of those absurd public schools. Obtuse business men like daddy, not all of them wholly scrupulous when in their offices, roam the land exhibiting a hypertrophied sense of fair play.
‘But Mr Prowse is just a parson,’ she asserted a shade impatiently. ‘Whereas Uncle George, before he took to the slums and so on, was on his way to being rather a good theologian. No doubt Father Hooker is that too. Even if they get going on the thing after dinner – which is extremely improbable in itself – Mr Prowse will simply keep mum and sip your port. He sips tea with the kind of old women who waste their pennies on your bingo, and he could probably give both the others points at that. But he won’t weigh in about Jesus Christ having perhaps been a sacred mushroom.’
Edward Naylor, although without the reading that might have enabled him to make something of this last crude remark, appeared reassured by his daughter’s picture of the situation, and he didn’t even resent that bit about bingo. The wholesale purveyors of leisure-time diversions were coming to stand where the wholesale purveyors of beer and stout had stood: in the socially impregnable position of those who make humble life bearable. He could afford the routine family jokes about the basis of the family prosperity.
‘And there’s the bell,’ he said. ‘I expect there’s only that gawky girl. You go.’
The dinner started off quite well. Father Hooker, counselled by Henry, had made only slight changes in his attire. That George Naylor was in mufti wouldn’t strike the Prowses as out of the way: it was normal enough in a clergyman on holiday. Christopher Prowse was in his usual frayed but well-laundered dog-collar: it was only his jacket and trousers that showed spotty in places – this because the Prowses had to think twice about dry-cleaning. The near-poverty of the Vicar of Plumley and his household was a source of embarrassment to Edward Naylor. It was difficult to do anything about it with proper tact. Edward had recently gathered that a ten-pound note put in the bag at Easter no longer goes prescriptively into the clerical pocket. The embarrassment was shared to some extent by George, who had felt unable (without ungraciousness) to divest himself of a small private income deriving from the family business. Even Mrs Naylor was not untouched by it. She had been obliged to arrange for a plain dinner on occasions like the present ever since she had heard her elder son say something coarse-grained about treating the poor devil to a square meal. To describe a clergyman as a devil struck her as peculiarly wrong.
That things went well was largely due to George, who talked with animation. Hilda saw with satisfaction that her uncle’s troubles were outweighed for the moment by the simple pleasure he took in a family gathering. She backed him up by taking a larger share in the conversation than was usual with her. Asked about her Italian trip by Mr Prowse, she gave a full account of it, avoiding the awkward issues that had cropped up in her discussion with Uncle George. This was a success. The vicar had visited Italy as a young man, and was given to recalling the occasion on a nostalgic note. He said it was a source of lasting regret to him that he had failed to see Assisi. The tour, he explained, hadn’t run to it. Hilda saw that Mr Prowse, like most Anglican parsons, was prepared to regard as of peculiar sanctity the city that had been the birthplace of St Francis.
But at this point Henry Naylor behaved badly by announcing, plainly with malicious intent, that he had heard Assisi was a well-run little place since the municipality had been taken over by the Communists. The claim, whether fact or invention, upset the Prowses, and it had to be George who came to the rescue. He embarked on a lively account of his afternoon in Oxford. Hilda suspected that her uncle, although he had so roundly endorsed it as having been a ‘nice’ occasion, had really found it variously discomfiting. But it was precisely on this that he seized now with a spirited account of some ludicrous episode connected with the Bodleian Library.
Hilda enjoyed the comedy, but was conscious of discontent as well. It seemed a shame that Uncle George, who could cheerfully represent himself as a figure of fun, should be fated to take matters of belief so desperately seriously as he undoubtedly did. Hilda believed she didn’t believe in beliefs. Whatever belief you subscribed to, you were left in the same spot in the end. It made no odds whether you swore by Genesis or the Big Bang: a point came at which the whole thing was incomprehensible and absurd. But from day to day you could still behave in a reasonably civilised fashion nevertheless. This, of course, was in effect the family ethos in which Hilda had been brought up, although she would perhaps have been indignant to be told so. She wondered how Christopher Prowse really felt about the human lot. He was a fairly recent arrival at Plumley, and she hadn’t yet got the hang of him. It didn’t seem likely to be a complicated hang. He was probably resigned to the sufficienc
y of the trivial round, the common task, and she ought, therefore, to approve of him. Inconsistently, however, she judged that he didn’t amount to much. You couldn’t say that of Uncle George.
Nor, conceivably, could you say it of Father Hooker, even although he continued at times to seem unlikeable. So far, he had been rather silent during the meal, perhaps because concerned to take the measure of this clutch of Naylors and their local spiritual guide. But now he caught on to the Bodleian business, and the other mild reverses to which Uncle George had similarly been lending a humorous turn. It had been his line that Dr Naylor would have been treated with more respect had he been properly dressed.
‘I was very pleased,’ Father Hooker had suddenly said to George, ‘to see you enjoying your ease – as indeed you are still doing now—in flannels. Dulce est desipere in loco. But in general – purely in general – there is surely an abnegation of responsibility in it. Except—’ and here Hooker gave a little bow to his hostess—’upon delightfully private and domestic occasions.’
For a couple of seconds silence obtained – no doubt from a feeling that the chap had said something out of turn. For one thing, it seemed deliberately to ignore the significance that George clearly attached to the shedding of clerical garments. Certainly it startled George himself. But it also prompted him to mischief.
‘My dear Hooker,’ he said (having presumably decided that a familiar mode of address was proper at his sister-in-law’s table), ‘would it be your impression that Christ turned up at the Last Supper in alb, stole and chasuble?’
‘Really, Dr Naylor . . .’
‘Or that the disciples went fishing in cassocks?’
Father Hooker must have reflected that here was a new George Naylor. Being doubtless a classical scholar, he may even have likened his latest apostate to Antaeus, who gained strength from planting his feet on native soil.
‘It is hardly matter for a jest,’ he said.
‘No, indeed. It’s a matter of serious and curious interest. I was reading an article about it in Theology not long ago. Most of our ecclesiastical habiliments were simply the ordinary wear of the upper classes in classical Rome. The clergy just held on to them. And the dog-collar, you know, which there are no end of jests about, is merely something we ourselves nobbled from the Romish clergy on the continent well within the present century. We’re sticking to it. They’re giving it up. Have you been in Rome itself lately?’
‘No,’ Father Hooker said with dignity. ‘I have not.’
‘I was there quite recently. It’s one’s impression at first that the whole priestly class has been driven from the streets. Not so. The regulars, of course, are as they were. But the seculars – your parish priest, and so on – have taken to mufti. They may just wear a little gold cross – rather as our athletes and footballers are fond of doing nowadays.’
Again there was silence. George’s kinsfolk probably felt that they had been required to listen to something impressively learned but not quite the thing. It was Mr Prowse who first ventured to speak.
‘Fascinating!’ he exclaimed – if with a certain lack of conviction. ‘Theology, did you say? I must look it up. One gets terribly rusty, you know, under pressure of parochial work.’
‘Particularly,’ Mrs Prowse added, ‘since we’ve had Cubs as well as Brownies.’
‘I suppose that must be so.’ This came from a George who looked suddenly abashed and his familiar diffident self. ‘Delicious fish,’ he said to his sister-in-law. ‘Turbot, isn’t it? You must have a marvellous cook, Mary.’
‘Bream, George,’ Mary Naylor whispered.
The domestic confidence pleased George. He had certainly come home.
III
‘You don’t think it’s going to rain?’ George Naylor asked his niece next morning. He and Hilda were first down to the breakfast table. ‘I’ve been out on the terrace, and there’s a low bank of cloud to the west.’
‘No, it’s not going to rain.’ Hilda tried not to sound amused. There had been something wistful in her uncle’s voice.
‘Good! I’ve arranged to go for a walk, as it happens, with—’ George braced himself for fun—’with this emissary from Tower Hamlets. I expect he’ll appear at any minute.’
‘How nice, Uncle George. I’ll come along too. When I’m at home I always walk the dogs after breakfast. It’s expected of me. One of my roles is kennel-maid.’
‘As a matter of fact, my dear . . .’
‘Yes, I know. And I won’t have it. Not at this indecent pace. Daddy agrees with me. He says they ought to let you have a breather, and my taking this first walk with you will perhaps be a hint of how we feel.’
‘But you mustn’t feel hostile towards Hooker. You see . . .’
‘Don’t you?’
‘Don’t I what, Hilda?’
‘Feel he’s a pain in the neck.’
‘Certainly not. I admit that, personally, I don’t find myself terribly attracted to him. But . . .’
‘So far, so good.’
‘Hilda, you must simply not take that line. For Father Hooker it’s a very serious matter, and we must at least be courteous to him. And I’m not sure I can quite rely on your brothers there. They might forget that he’s their parents’ guest.’
‘Willy-nilly, so far as we are concerned.’
‘We must put that out of our heads. And be fair to the chap.’
‘We must be fair with each other. So now then, Uncle George: honour bright. Why did you get off that train at Oxford?’
‘It was weak of me – and I was punished for it by finding the place isn’t even a comfortable bolt-hole any longer.’
‘Because its atmosphere is still heavy with Anglican piety? I can’t say I ever noticed it.’
‘Nothing of the kind. It was simply . . .’
But at this moment Father Hooker entered the room. Disconcertingly, he had, like Uncle George, put on a turn-down collar and a tie. In answer to Hilda’s prescriptive question, he said that he had slept very well. Country air, he told her, always agreed with him and gave him an appetite. With this jocular preface, he set about foraging for what appealed to him. Whatever his shortcomings, he couldn’t be called awkward or ill at ease. When the two cocker spaniels came lolloping in to claim their due he made their acquaintance cordially if inexpertly straight away. This was rather a surprise. There had been a positively awkward moment on the previous evening when he had betrayed an almost pathological aversion to the two Plumley cats. These creatures had at once detected that the visitor was no cat-lover, and after the manner of their kind had therefore proposed to climb affectionately all over him – whereupon he had repelled them in alarm and with almost unseemly violence. Now he was doing much better with the dogs. And it seemed to be with simple satisfaction that he heard of Hilda as proposing to join in the walk.
None of this softened Hilda. It was all policy, she told herself. If Church of England priests could become Jesuits, Hooker would be among the first to sign on. Although at dinner he had met another parson who was clearly on terms of intimacy with the Naylors, he probably regarded the whole household as hostile to him, and also as pretty closely-knit in any final analysis. So he had decided he must endeavour to stand well with everybody. To effect this he was prepared to be a bit of a turncoat – or at least of a turncollar. Last night he had talked about getting into mufti with that pompous nonsense about abnegations of responsibility. But now here he was doing it himself – just by way of cutting what he conceived to be an agreeable figure.
Hilda had got as far as this in her reflections before it came to her that they represented a small orgy of vulgar prejudice. If Uncle George asserted there was something to be said for Father Hooker it was her business to accept it as true. Uncle George, after all, ought to know. And if he had bolted at Oxford – which he didn’t deny – she certainly mustn’t make a standing joke of it.
So Hilda took care to fetch Father Hooker a third cup of coffee. Not very long after that, the walk began.
Theological discussion – if that were the right term for argument with an apostate – was ruled out. Father Hooker knew very well why George Naylor had been provided with an escort of a young woman and two dogs, and he resigned himself to the situation with reasonable address. Himself presumably unaccustomed to canine company, he could be detected, moreover, as having to give much of his mind to what he conceived as the difficult task of avoiding being tripped up by the friskings of Bill and Bess. These creatures were indeed not too well-trained. But Hilda was used to them, and her uncle appeared able literally to take them in his stride. When Father Hooker did manage to talk it was to deploy such resources in the way of rural interests as he possessed. He named trees accurately but for no particular reason. He inquired about crops and the prospects of the harvest. He commented in almost sub-Wordsworthian tones on some clouds and on the noises – presumably joyous – being made by a lark.
Hilda felt that it was going to be a pretty boring walk. She had hoped that Uncle George, who had so agreeably perked up at the dinner-table and startled Father Hooker with that nonsense about the disciples fishing in cassocks, might manage a little gamesomeness now. But Uncle George didn’t have much to say. He was made both happy and pensive, his niece thought, simply by the fact of walking through Plumley village again. It was like this when they came to the church.
The church wasn’t large, since at no time in its recorded history had Plumley been much of a place. But through the centuries plenty of people had died there, so there was a big churchyard, partly screened from the road by a low stone wall. There was also a lich-gate, which now served rather oddly as the front gate of the vicarage as well. Beside this there was a notice-board: quite an imposing twin-leaved affair protected by glass. Along the top of it one read in white paint:
THE CHURCH OF ST MICHAEL AND ALL ANGELS PLUMLEY
The Naylors Page 8