‘I know it sounds absurd,’ she said. ‘But listen. That coaching stuff at the vicarage is nonsense. Charles has turned out to remember something about this Simon Prowse at Trinity. He seems quite clear about it. The vicar’s nephew was, and is, a high-flying Mods and Greats type, and probably as good as booked for All Souls. He could coach the lights out of his uncle, if he wanted to. So he’s here under false pretences.’
‘I see.’ Uncle George hesitated for a moment. ‘Would I be right in thinking you find this Simon rather attractive?’
‘Well, yes – in a mild way.’ Hilda wasn’t comfortable. She was also guilelessly surprised that her uncle had an eye open on this kind of territory. ‘But don’t think I’m other than quite fancy-free.’
‘You can see my point. If Simon is deceiving those innocent vicarage people, the spectacle isn’t merely freakish but rather disagreeable as well. And its most likely occasion is . . .’
‘Yes, I know. That’s how I’ve been seeing it up till now. Some sort of irresponsible sexual escapade. Miss Gale is really Mrs Somebody, perhaps. But no doubt that’s just my inventive mind again. Let’s get back to the bomb. And Nether Plumley.’
‘And what, Hilda?’
‘That new Institute. Doesn’t “Institute” sound peculiarly innocuous? One thinks of Women’s Institutes at once! “Establishment” is the sinister word. So there are no new Establishments. Just Institutes.’
‘My dear, isn’t your imagination now running riot?’
‘Just think, Uncle George, and you’ll see it’s doing nothing of the kind. What did that girl hand you in Oxford?’
‘A nuclear disarmament thing. Vigorous in its expression.’
‘Good. Point one. And here she is at Plumley. And here’s our Simon, pretending to be mastering the details of Pliny’s stupid villa, and in fact snooping around with field-glasses.’
‘And furious when our June rashly surfaces, so to speak, on that notice-board?’
‘Capital, Uncle George. That’s just it! The Institute, incidentally, is a Government Agency. That means there can be any amount of clamping down on it. And – again incidentally – it now has a tremendous-great perimeter fence. And—’ Hilda had suddenly remembered another recent accession of knowledge—’its people don’t go into the pubs. So there’s a hush-hush suggestion about the whole thing. What goes on is supposed to be a ploy called animal genetics. But nobody has ever seen any animals.’
‘They keep out of the pubs, too?’
‘Do be serious, Uncle George. And you see what I think. They pretend it’s animals, but it’s really something about bombs.’
‘But wouldn’t that be an imposture very difficult to sustain?’
‘And you see what’s brewing.’ Hilda had happily ignored her uncle’s distinctly cogent question. ‘Simon and that girl belong to a group proposing to expose it in some way, or do a demo or even a sit-in. Simon with his binoculars is spying out the ground for something of the sort. He may even be the prime mover in the whole plan.’
‘Perhaps you’re right.’ Uncle George did now appear to be serious, but nevertheless not greatly concerned. ‘I don’t quite see that it’s any business of ours.’
‘The bomb-thing ought to be everybody’s business.’
‘I agree with you there. And there’s a sense in which everybody has to take sides about it. Do you want to do something, Hilda?’
This question pulled Hilda up.
‘What do you mean – do something?’ she asked evasively. ‘In this immediate context, I mean. What can I do?’
‘Communicate your suspicions to the local bobby. Or, alternatively, chase up Simon and tell him you want to sign on.’
‘Yes. And – do you know? – Simon virtually challenged me. I’ve just remembered that too. It was when he and I had come on that thing on the notice-board, and I wouldn’t let him tear it down. It led to our having a short, random sort of talk about the whole nuclear mess. He struck me as rather incoherent, as if he was confronting an unexpected situation and feeling his way in face of it. Then he asked me if I’d be prepared to lie down in front of a truck. A truck conveying the things, he meant.’
‘Quite so. And did you—?’
Rather abruptly, Uncle George broke off. Father Hooker, having conversed with the moon, had returned to the house and entered the room.
‘A magnificent night,’ Father Hooker said. ‘How astounding seem the heavens! The moon must be felt as neighbourly now, but even Mars and Venus are another matter – although lately, indeed, brought within the reach of projectiles contrived by Man. Yet we must view the planets of our little solar system as merely jostling one another in the street when we consider the stars. Were I to travel – I remind myself – at the speed of light for millions of years I should barely come up with them. Nevertheless, meditated on, these immensities but call my mind home to quietness.’
Hilda recalled Uncle George saying something about those immensities. He didn’t think them all that important, but he hadn’t said they called him home to quietness either.
‘A thousand ages in thy sight,’ she said, ‘being like an evening gone?’ Even as she spoke, she was abashed at having uttered so pert and senseless a quip. Uncle George, she felt, would be ashamed of her. But then Hooker wouldn’t decant this sort of stuff so copiously on Uncle George’s head. With him, he presumably talked hard theology – pious reflection being for old wives at tea parties, and ignorant girls.
Father Hooker, however, gave no sign of taking offence. He even glanced at Hilda as if he were genuinely capable of feeling amused.
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘Isaac Watts! Lewis Carroll very properly made fun of him – just as you make fun of me, Miss Naylor.’
‘Please call me Hilda.’ It was impossible not to be irritated by Father Hooker’s inappropriate formalities.
‘I shall be only too happy. Do you by any chance know the good Isaac’s Divine Songs for Children, Hilda?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘Some are merely comical. “How rude are the boys that throw pebbles and mire” is no doubt a virtuous reflection for well brought-up children to indulge in. But consider this:
Lord, I ascribe it to Thy grace,
And not to chance, as others do,
That I was born of Christian race,
And not a Heathen, or a Jew.’
‘I think that’s rather comical as well,’ Hilda said.
‘It may be so. But again:
There is a dreadful Hell,
And everlasting pains;
There sinners must with devils dwell
In darkness, fire, and chains.
Is it not extremely shocking that innocent children should have been required to mouth such stuff?’
‘I suppose it is.’ Hilda wondered whether it was orthodox in Father Hooker to regard children as innocent. ‘But it’s very mild, in its way. You should read the Jesuit’s sermon to schoolboys in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.’
‘But I have.’ Father Hooker said this in a quite neutral tone; again he was unoffended by a gauche performance. ‘A good deal of Joyce ought to be recommended reading for Christians. Naylor, you would agree with me?’
‘Certainly. And it’s always a satisfaction, Hooker, to agree with you now and then.’
All this rather silenced Hilda. Just what was the relationship – the intellectual and the personal relationship – developing between these two men appeared to be something she was more and more losing any sense of. It was a puzzle: another puzzle to add to the Simon Prowse one.
‘But, if the hour be not too late, there is something I’d value advice on.’ Father Hooker had sat down comfortably between uncle and niece. ‘It is a matter upon which you can both help: you, Naylor, from your pastoral experience, and you, Hilda, from your knowledge of local feeling. The vicar, as you know, has rather surprisingly asked me to preach for him on Sunday. It was with some hesitation that I decided to accept.’ Father Hooker paused on this, and Hild
a reflected, as she had done once before, that he could give a full-blooded Jesuit points from time to time. Hooker had agreed to preach because she had herself persuaded him (very absurdly) that Uncle George might otherwise do so, and to some embarrassing effect. ‘It is commonly supposed,’ Father Hooker went on, ‘that parsons carry sermons in their pockets, or at least in their suitcases. I do not. I happen to believe that every sermon should have its due and immediate occasion.’
‘John Donne,’ Uncle George said, ‘preached his own funeral sermon. I suppose that would fill your requirement well.’
‘I must not think to equate myself with a Dean of St Paul’s. Nor am I virtually in my shroud quite yet. Donne had himself depicted in his.’ Father Hooker lingered again on this – which he would classify, Hilda supposed, as a pleasantry. ‘And I always bear in mind an apophthegm of Archbishop Whately’s. “Preach not because you have to say something,” the Archbishop enjoins, “but because you have something to say.’”
‘Pretty good,’ Hilda said. ‘It goes for writers, too.’
‘Undoubtedly. So I am looking for a subject which I myself feel to be of special urgency at the present time, and which there is some reason to feel may be of equal interest to my hearers.’
Across Father Hooker’s chest, Hilda and her uncle exchanged an astonished glance. Was it conceivable . . .?
‘The other day before luncheon,’ Father Hooker went on, ‘I happened to take a short stroll through the village. The church notice-board caught my attention. Affixed to it was a small placard calling for the banning of the bomb.’
‘The bomb,’ Hilda said – and wondered what on earth had made her produce this stupid echo.
‘Indeed, the bomb. The word, I believe, is now chiefly taken to mean any long-range nuclear missile. Naturally, I debated with myself the likelihood of the placard’s having been posted by Mr Prowse himself. He might well have judged it to be his duty to do so.’
‘So he might,’ Uncle George said. ‘But I don’t think it was he who put it up, all the same.’
‘It came to me as a matter of some delicacy.’ (Delicacy, Hilda thought, was rather a thing with Hooker.) ‘I had half a mind to call at the vicarage and inquire. On weighty issues – and this issue is weighty indeed – one ought to know where one’s fellow labourers stand.’
‘Most certainly,’ Uncle George said.
‘I decided, however, on another course. It might be described, jestingly, as taking the temperature of the flock.’
‘The flock?’ Uncle George queried wonderingly.
‘The parishioners, Naylor. The cottage folk. I dropped into the pub.’
Had Father Hooker announced that he had stripped and plunged into the village pond he would scarcely have achieved as startling an effect as with this. It was true that he had been judging it tactful – ‘delicate’, perhaps – to continue wearing mufti for the greater part of the day. But that he should think successfully to hob-nob with smock-frock’d boors over a mug of ale in the local pot-house strained credulity. Was this the man – Uncle George might have asked himself – who had kept that outspread copy of The Times between himself and the plebeian world of Mrs Bowman and Mrs Archer, Len and Ron? Apparently it was. And it could be detected, moreover, that Father Hooker was unobtrusively entertained by the effect his disclosure had now created.
‘My dear Hooker,’ Uncle George asked wonderingly, ‘are we to understand that you entered into a discussion of nuclear fission, and unilateral disarmament and the like, with whoever happened to be at the bar?’
‘Certainly. There was a little resistance to be overcome at first. I believe it arose from a knowledge that I was staying here at the Park. Nor could I find that there was much interest in the little placard on the church notice-board. I gathered that the notice-board seldom engages the attention of the village people at all. One odd fact, however, did appear – and it makes me feel that the dangers arising from nuclear proliferation are, although it may be very obscurely, stirring in the minds even of rural societies. An elderly man of respectable if humble appearance assured me that the new Institute at Nether Plumley – about which you and I, Hilda, had a word lately – were nowt to do with animals, but only with such things as them atomics and the like. I believe I reproduce his precise words. And another elderly man agreed with him. It is, of course, most clearly a grotesque misconception, but not insignificant as suggesting that real anxieties about the arms race and so forth are abroad in other than intellectual circles.’
Father Hooker paused on this, perhaps only to take breath. But Hilda spoke at once.
‘Did you say something to us about seeking advice?’ she asked.
‘Yes, indeed. What has occurred to me is this: that on Sunday I might usefully speak in a measured way about the peculiar perils of our age, and the duty of Christians in confronting them. And I might take occasion to mention, lightly but firmly, the folly of indulging in absurd suspicions of doubtless beneficent activities which we are not well qualified to understand. What do you think?’
What Hilda thought was that the pulpit in St Michael and All Angels was not exactly an advantageous perch from which to reach the ears of Plumley’s populace at large. At matins on Sunday the congregation would consist of something under ten per cent of the local gentry and of nobody else whomsoever – except, indeed, for Mr Rudkin and an aged hireling who took the collection and rang the bell. The respectable if humble patron of the pub and his coeval supporter would not be present to be instructed.
‘I don’t see why not,’ Hilda said. ‘I, for one, would very much like to hear what you have to say about it all.’
‘And you, Naylor – what do you think?’
‘I think that if you manage to talk sense about those peculiar perils, Hooker, the occasion will be a notable one. I wish I could be there to hear it. But you and I have our meetings on that terrace, after all.’
So a question she had been asking herself – Hilda thought – was answered. Uncle George didn’t intend to go to church. And she saw – it is to be feared with satisfaction – that the two men were, for the moment, distanced again. Father Hooker got to his feet, made one of his impossible little stiff bows, and intimated that he would seek his host and hostess, to say good night to them before going to bed. Hilda watched him out of the room, before turning to her uncle.
‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘I’ll listen most attentively, and bring you the heads of the sermon.’ But she saw that Uncle George wasn’t very amused. ‘You really won’t come to church?’ she asked.
‘My dear, I must let Thomas Hardy speak for me. With that bright believing band I have no claim to be.’
V
George Naylor began the following day with a feeling of holiday. This was because it was Saturday, and Father Hooker had explained that he must devote it entirely to the composing of his sermon. The privilege of preaching, he said, came to him all too rarely, and he regarded every occasion of the sort as a heavy responsibility, to be prepared for with care. It was a statement not wholly consistent with what Hilda had reported of his attitude upon first hearing of Christopher Prowse’s invitation to edify a rural congregation. But George didn’t quarrel with it, being rejoiced (he believed) at the prospect of a day’s freedom. Almost as soon as breakfast was over, he took himself off to a corner of the garden for a long immersion in what Hooker would have described as light reading: the promisingly lengthy novel by Salman Rushdie he had picked up in Blackwell’s.
Mr Rushdie, it seemed, was an Oxford man, who chose to write about his native India. Rather well, George decided after a dozen pages. Very well, indeed, he told himself after a further dozen, and he settled back in his deck-chair with every prospect of complete absorption until lunch-time. But then, and very strangely, the mystery of midnight’s children ceased to command him. He took time off from it to think of something else; he did this not once but several times; eventually he had to recognise that what was distracting him was the behaviour of Father Hooker.
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He was feeling annoyed with Hooker. There was nothing new about this. The man had annoyed him from the start – from the very moment, it might be said, of his first lowering The Times from before his nose in the corner of that railway-carriage. But now it was a new sort of annoyance, and a surprising one. He was annoyed that Hooker should be wasting his time concocting a sermon for a gaggle of retired army men and garden-prattling women. Hooker’s proper business was discussing theology with George.
George wasn’t particularly alarmed by this discovery of how his own mind was moving. Hooker was making no headway with him, and almost certainly knew that he wasn’t. It was merely that Hooker represented something George had been going short of for several years: well-ordered discourse from a well-stocked mind. In his East End mission George’s speculative intelligence had slumbered; he had spent himself being wise and understanding and avuncular to immature and ill-informed and touchingly helpless and bewildered people. Hooker, although undeniably of a somewhat rebarbative personality, was a top man in his line. He would probably end up as Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at Oxford.
This was no doubt to exaggerate Hooker’s abilities. George really knew this. But he also knew that his liability to error in the matter was an index of the extent to which he had fallen out of touch with learned and scholarly persons. Yet he had been finding, in the course of his talks with Hooker, that Theology, if the Queen of the Sciences, is also to be likened to a bicycle. Once proficient, you are proficient for keeps. Mount even after long desuetude, and you don’t positively tumble. In arguing about Christian dogma with Hooker he had no sense of having to keep his end up. It was level-pegging most of the time. And on all sorts of interesting by-roads they were apt to look about them and discover common ground.
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