Hilda was thus able to conclude that she had done one good deed for the day. She performed a second by delivering her four lemons to Mrs Deathridge in her kitchen.
IV
‘Do you know what your mother’s up to?’ Henry Naylor asked his sister next morning. The Naylor young often said ‘your mother’ and ‘your father’ to one another, since it sounded amusingly old-world. ‘Garnishing the torture chamber for friend Hooker.’
‘What do you mean: the torture chamber?’
‘The smoking-room, as it used to be called. Nobody ever goes near it. It’s to be where Uncle George and the minder talk things out.’
‘I’ve gathered they’re more likely to do that during quiet walks on the downs.’
‘Well, yes. But when there was a religious caterpillar called Hunter here before, it seems there was a spell of bad weather during which the Inquisition applied the thumb-screws in the smoking-room. So your mother’s busy adorning it with roses now – just in case. She thinks it may assuage the agony.’
‘What a laboured joke. And Hooker won’t notice the roses unless they’re cabbages.’
‘Cabbages?’
‘Cabbage roses. Hooker recognises them at once.’
‘There can’t be roses called cabbages. Not even gardening females can have thought up anything so silly as that.’
‘Well, there are.’
‘Hilda Naylor, you lie.’
Absurd conversations of this sort were prescriptive between Hilda and her brothers from time to time. Hilda was commonly prepared to be amused by them. And although she felt merely impatient on the present occasion, she continued the game almost by rote.
‘Henry Naylor,’ she said, ‘you are an ignorant baboon.’
‘You’ll be telling me next that cabbage roses are an unhealthy green.’
‘They’re round and red and compact and double, as a matter of fact.’
‘Double? And a lot of toil and trouble?’
‘You can do sums, Henry. But that apart, you have a rag-bag mind.’
‘I haven’t, as a matter of fact.’ Henry appeared to offer this by way of whimsical confidence. ‘Any more sisterly chat?’
‘No – except that a young man wants to come and play tennis.’
‘With us, you mean?’
‘Yes, of course. He’s staying with the Prowses, and he pretty well invited himself.’
‘Wasn’t that a bit forward? What’s his name?’
‘He’s a Prowse, too – a nephew of the vicar’s. Simon, I think I gathered.’
‘Does he look any good?’
‘Oh, definitely. A clean-run athletic type, without much between the ears.’ Hilda remembered that this was a judgement that had to be qualified. ‘Though with some scraps of civilised information,’ she added concessively. ‘He’s to be coached or crammed by Christopher Prowse for Schools next year. Something involving some gobbets of Latin if he’s to scrape through. At least I rather gathered it’s like that.’
‘You mean he’s an undergraduate at Oxford?’ Being himself a postulant for that condition, Henry couldn’t give this question too censorious a tone.
‘Yes – but I haven’t gathered at what college.’
‘One would expect a Prowse to be somewhere pretty obscure.’ This reflection put Henry in immediate good humour. ‘I suppose we’d better have him along. But three men, and one woman getting on in life, aren’t much good on a tennis court. We’d need another wench, and I can’t think of any of the locals I’d particularly want to encourage. Do you think this Prowse could bring a girl with him?’
‘It’s most unlikely, I’d say.’ Unconsciously, Hilda spoke with a hint of satisfaction. ‘He only arrived a day or two ago, and he hasn’t ever been to Plumley before. Call on him this afternoon, Henry, and fix something.’
‘Call on him – me?’ This from Henry was mere ritual. Although only a woman, Hilda Naylor had learnt not to be submissive to her younger siblings. In fact she gave them orders when she wanted to.
At this moment the elder of them came into the room. Charles Naylor appeared to be in a bad temper. He had been oiling his gun, and then shoving it out of sight and mind. His invitation to Scotland had arrived. But, outrageously, it was for the first week of August and a bit of fishing.
‘Here comes young Sunshine,’ Henry said. Henry had got wind of his brother’s misfortune. ‘Lucky that we have this Hooker to hand. He can lay on the comforts of religion.’
‘To hell with Hooker and black-beetles all,’ Charles said morosely. ‘And we needn’t even except Uncle George, since he’s asking for his cards. A blameless ex-black-beetle henceforth.’
‘We can’t be sure of that yet,’ Henry said. ‘Hooker may win. The previous chap did. I don’t know that it was a calamity.’
‘I wish we could send Hooker packing. A regular pain in the neck is Hooker.’
‘I think, Charles, that we ought to stop talking about Father Hooker like that.’ Hilda, as she said this, wasn’t failing to remember that she had herself applied this expression to their guest in the not very distant past. Her view of the man was undoubtedly changing. ‘If we do it behind his back, the feeling will begin to show through in his presence. And that would be disgusting – let alone distressing Uncle George no end.’
This virtuous speech didn’t surprise the young men. They would have spoken of it as a turn Hilda sometimes put on, but were chastened by it, all the same. They may even have felt occasionally that their sister supplied something their mother came a little short on. But Hilda now felt she had been a bit of a prig, and sought to redress the balance.
‘As for the comforts of religion,’ she said, ‘they’re going to be offered you, Henry, on Sunday. Hooker is going to do Christopher’s preaching for him.’
There was a short silence while the brothers digested this, and then Henry spoke.
‘Good God!’ he said. ‘We’ll have to go.’
‘Certainly we shall. And considering that your father is the vicar’s churchwarden, that pew with its little stick has been untenanted recently more than is decent.’
‘What is a churchwarden?’ Charles asked. ‘I’ve never understood. And there’s another little stick on the other side of the aisle.’
‘That’s the parishioners’ churchwarden’s.’
‘Who’s he?’
‘Mr Rudkin, of course. You really are a shocking ignoramus, Charles.’
‘Naylor and Rudkin,’ Henry said. ‘The two commercial pillars of Plumley are its religious pillars too. What could be more proper?’
‘It seems that Christopher hankers after a few scientific pillars as well,’ Hilda continued. ‘He’d like to see some of the people from that affair at Nether Plumley show themselves in church.’
‘To profess themselves Christians?’ Charles asked. ‘Why, they don’t even profess themselves drinkers. Never seen in the pubs. The godly Christopher is being unreasonable.’
‘You’d certainly know about the pubs, Charles,’ Henry said ungraciously. Henry had only very lately attained the age at which pubs become legal territory, and being fresh-faced and consequently rather juvenile in appearance could still attract a misdoubting glance from a barman or (even more humiliatingly) a barmaid. Hilda, when annoyed with him, would quote a tag from some poet about the distress of boyhood changing into man, the unfinished man and his pain. Henry didn’t care for that at all.
The weather continued fine, so the smoking-room wasn’t brought into use. Nor did Uncle George and Father Hooker take those secluded walks over the downs. They either sat in a little arbour in full view of the house, or strolled up and down the terrace, similarly exposed to view. The terrace was the most impressive feature of Plumley Park, having been constructed by some past owner with ideas above his modest squirarchal station. There was a balustrade, somewhat inconveniently continuous in the interest of enhanced consequence, and terminated at either end by broad flights of shallow steps. There were half a dozen statues, three of which
had worn quite well; and a further embellishment had been admitted in the form of several large if not very meaningful stone urns. What saved the terrace from seeming pretentious was the view to be obtained from it. The view stood up to the terrace, and the terrace stood up to the view.
Plumley village, although quite close by, was concealed by a patch of rising ground, but even in summer respectfully intimated its presence by a few spirals of blue-grey smoke from the humble hearths of its inhabitants. Across the park the vista was interrupted only by the Plumley oaks: a senatorial company which seemed to have drawn unusually close together as if in resistance to a disturbing condition of things in the world without. Beyond this the terrain sloped down to Nether Plumley at a distance convenient for remarking through field-glasses that not much seemed to happen there – except, no doubt, in the scientific establishment lately planted down on its outskirts: a functional and graceless building like a large white plastic toy, from the centre of which rose a single tall dark chimney-stack suggestive of a finger pointing menacingly into the heavens.
Watching her uncle and his companion perambulating before this backdrop, Hilda found herself speculating with some uneasiness about just what was cooking. Nothing that could confidently be diagnosed as a dispute made itself evident. Disputation in the mediaeval and technical sense of the word was another matter. Each of the two scholars involved (to employ a term equally applicable, no doubt, to both Uncle George and Father Hooker) tended to speak at some length, his interlocutor listening attentively the while. There would then be a considering pause, which might last throughout a stroll from one end of the terrace to the other. Then there would be an equally long and obviously carefully phrased reply, similarly received with courteous concentration. The performance was occasionally varied by the two learned persons coming to a stop, turning to survey the landscape at large, and seemingly offering each other remarks of a topographical rather than a polemical order. Oxford dons – it occurred to Hilda – had probably behaved in this way in their quadrangles and gardens long ago, before the sick hurry and divided aims of the modern world had reduced them to a ceaseless scurrying here and there just like other people. There were eighteenth-century engravings and aquatints of the academic scene that exactly caught this effect.
It came to Hilda that Uncle George and Father Hooker were enjoying themselves! Could such a monstrous state of affairs really have arisen? (For the moment Hilda saw it as precisely that.) Could her uncle, hard upon passing through as searing an experience, surely, as could befall a serious man, possibly be deriving pleasure from theological chit-chat with Hooker? Did Hooker, whom her brothers regarded so confidently as an utter ass, and whom she herself had so lately been laughing at, have it in him to engage the respectful attention of Uncle George? Hilda hadn’t got far in asking herself these rhetorical questions before she identified what was actually vexing her. Was Hooker saying things like ‘Cerium est quia impossibile est’, and was Uncle George responding with ‘Distinguo’ – or perhaps with the merely vernacular ‘I reject Tertullian’s dreadful sentence’? She hadn’t a clue. She was going to be a writer. But to project herself into the minds of either of these men, to find words for them to say, was totally beyond both the range of her knowledge and the twitch of her imaginative tether. Even her uncle, whom she had known since a child, was a sealed book to her. Both of them were that. Fontes signati, as some wormy old phrase had it. Were those two, facetiously typed by Henry as at opposite ends of the stick in a torture chamber, birds of a feather at heart? Hilda didn’t know. She was without a net to cast over them and find out.
Quite soon she had to restrain herself from compulsively peeping through windows at the discoursing pair – almost as if through those aspidistra leaves and lace curtains which Simon Prowse had associated with observations undertaken in the vicarage by his uncle. And she continued struggling to supply them with plausible theological remarks. If the Fall – she made Hooker say – is to be regarded simply as a potent and persuasive aetiological myth, does it necessarily follow that the Incarnation or the Resurrection must be relegated to the same category? Hilda was quite pleased with ‘aetiological’ – it showed that she wasn’t exactly a dunce – but was cross that invention failed her when it came to providing Uncle George with an adequately learned reply. She had to acknowledge that her attitude to the whole thing was essentially emotional. She wanted Uncle George to ‘win’ partly because religious scepticism was an element in the received and unthinking stock-in-trade of her generation, but more essentially just because she was fond of him. She could see that whether it would do him any good to ‘win’ was an open question; that if Father Hooker ‘won’ as Dr Hunter had ‘won’, George Naylor might be a happier man for the rest of his days. It was all very well for Uncle George to speak robustly of ‘a pack of fables from top to bottom’ – but what if that sort of judgement had its origin in a comparatively superficial level of his mind? Wasn’t Uncle George, who could regard as profoundly evidential a picture by Piero della Francesca, quite as much anima naturaliter Christiana as she herself feared to be anima naturaliter Pym? All this was perplexing and disturbing. Hilda hated being out of her depth, and saw that she must turn to practical affairs. She went outside, avoided the terrace, ran to earth the garden boy, and commanded him to reline the tennis court.
The tennis party was a success, although not an unqualified success so far as Hilda was concerned. This was because Simon had, after all, found a girl and brought her along. Since he was, as Edith Prowse had explained, a stranger in those parts, it had to be inferred that he was a quick worker. There was, moreover, something enigmatical about his relationship with his recruit, since whether Simon had known her for long and in some different part of the country remained obscure. She went by the name of June Gale, and about this there was a disturbing element too. You told yourself that one scarcely expects gales in June: something like that. Otherwise June was an ordinary sort of girl – or she was that if you ignored the fact that she was attractive and would strip pretty. She played decent tennis, but didn’t give the impression that it was much her sort of thing. Hilda suspected that she was just one more Oxford character. It was odd that the fact didn’t transpire in such casual talk as took place. Eventually, and when play had come to a stop in the interest of a well-furnished tea-table set out in open air, Hilda went fishing about this. There had recurred to her Edith Prowse’s quaint persuasion (as it had appeared to be) that her parlour-boarder at the vicarage might have turned up at Plumley less for the purpose of mastering some Latin texts than in pursuit and furtherance of romance. The vicar’s wife was a silly woman, and it seemed a silly idea – besides being no business of Hilda’s. Hilda fished, all the same.
‘Have you known Simon for long?’ she asked, in what she took to be a ‘casual’ voice.
‘Only off and on,’ June said. ‘Have you?’
‘Far from it. I met him for the first time only the other day. It seems he hasn’t ever been to Plumley before. Have you?’
‘Only off and on.’
Before reiterating this useful phrase, June – or so it had seemed to Hilda – had glanced towards Simon, who was sitting nearby, almost as if for instructions. This was mysterious and unsatisfactory. Hilda, who had lately snubbed Edith Prowse for asking a string of questions, herself asked a third one straight away now.
‘Are you at Oxford, June?’
English idiom admits of only one interpretation of this; it means, ‘Are you a student at Oxford University?’ But June, after giving it a moment’s consideration, seemed to receive it in a more general sense.
‘Oxford?’ she reiterated vaguely. ‘No, I don’t live in Oxford. I know it a bit. Do you?’
This was sufficiently vexatious to make Hilda feel quite cross. She offered a brief affirmative, and fell to examining the handle of her tennis racket with care. What was the meaning of such uncivil reticence? It did really look as if something covert were going on between this girl and Simon Prowse – a
nd perhaps something better to be described as an intrigue than a romance. But if Simon had come to Plumley in pursuit of June, this surely made it necessary to suppose that her home was not very far away. Yet again, if this were so, Simon was at least not fortune-hunting, since all persons of any substance were known to the Naylors for many miles around. In any case, ‘fortune-hunting’ was an obsolete idea, existing nowadays only in the vast and depressing acreage of ‘standard’ English plays and novels. It was more probable that Simon and June were having a love affair about which – and again the notion was an old-fashioned one – they wanted to keep quiet. But then why had Simon gone out of his way to parade the girl at the Naylors? Vanity and impudence, Hilda told herself at the conclusion of these discreditable and idle speculations.
So she avoided further conversation with June during the rest of the afternoon. But she did keep an eye on the supposed lovers, and believed herself to detect a further oddity in their relationship. June wasn’t altogether in Simon’s good books. At least he was keeping a wary eye on her, as if at any moment she might put a foot wrong – and had even, perhaps, done so not long ago. This was again tiresomely mysterious. It had nothing to do with social comportment – a trivial aspect of life which June commanded as sufficiently as did Hilda herself. And there was another thing. Neither Uncle George nor Father Hooker was playing tennis (although she suspected that Uncle George would have rather liked to do so) and they were sitting side by side in deck-chairs in a silence more companionable-seeming than Hilda at all cared for. But what chiefly struck her was that Uncle George seemed to be as interested in June Gale as she was herself. Interested and puzzled. The puzzlement was reassuring in a way. She wouldn’t have liked to think of her uncle as taking a certain sort of specific interest in a pretty girl. Anything of the kind would have made her feel jealous. And jealousy, for that matter, must be at work in her in all this brouhaha about the Gale female and Simon Prowse – a young man with whom she had exchanged no more than ten minutes’ conversation. This was humiliating – especially in one, like herself, dedicated to the dispassionate observations and appraisals proper in a promising novelist. The tennis party, she told herself, was a stupid affair.
The Naylors Page 12