‘Goodness, Uncle George! What a coruscation of juvenile wit.’
‘Yes, indeed – and now I must be turning senile to reminisce about such nonsense. Go on about the after-church affair.’
‘Christopher gathered that the obliging Scattergood is the top boffin at the Institute, and when he told Hooker he’d delivered a most thought-provoking address our friend was as pleased as Punch. Uncle George, just how are you thought-provoked by all this?’
‘It occurs to me that these non-pub-frequenting gentlemen were rather belatedly trying to integrate themselves with the respectable church-going community.’
‘Well, yes—perhaps. But I think – although I know you’ll say I’m plot-mongering – that they’d heard about June Gale’s sticker on that notice-board, and come along to discover whether St Michael and All Angels is a centre of anti-nuclear ferment.’
‘And they actually got something like that from Hooker?’
‘Well, no—not exactly. Hooker was most judicious. Almost Laodicean, I’d say.’ Hilda paused to admire the appropriateness of this ink-horn term, and then saw that it wouldn’t do. ‘But that’s not quite fair,’ she said. Hooker did speak up.’
‘As I’d expect him to do. For I don’t, you know, share your sense of surprise whenever he gets a good mark.’
‘You think I’m prejudiced against him.’
‘Not exactly that. And if you do rather disapprove of him it’s my fault for not greatly taking to him at the start.’ George paused to consider whether this was an adequate account of the matter. ‘And I mustn’t pretend that I adore him now,’ he added humorously. ‘All the same, if he threw up the sponge and packed his bag tomorrow, I’d positively find myself missing his company. Not that I’m other than very happy just with the family. I’m very happy, indeed. And about Hooker I’ve been rather anxious, in a way.’
‘You’ve wanted him to acquit himself well in poor Christopher’s pulpit?’
‘Yes, I have. During the last hour I’ve been distinctly in suspense about it. I’d hate the Prowses to have landed themselves in any way with something other than they’d bargained for. But it seems to have gone off fairly painlessly. We may relax.’
‘Relax, Uncle George!’ Hilda was abruptly scandalised. ‘When we’ve discovered – you and I – the most frightful things about Simon Prowse, and the Gale girl, and the place that claims to be harmlessly engaged on something called animal genetics when it’s probably thinking up bigger and better bombs? Lies and humbug all round us, and something that looks like civil commotion dead ahead! What do we do?’
If George was surprised by this sudden vehemence, he was far from displeased by it. Nevertheless he produced what was perhaps a discouraging reply.
‘I don’t know about myself,’ he said. ‘I’ve done in my time a fair amount of labouring against disabling ignorance and stupidity, not to mention what are thought of as the evil passions. I have the habit of it, and perhaps I ought to go on. But isn’t it rather your thing to stand back and observe and record? Aren’t you the chield amang us taking notes?’
‘Don’t make fun of me, Uncle George.’
‘Certainly I will make fun of you whenever I can. But do just consider. One can’t tell how to act until one has decided where one stands. And that may be difficult when an issue comes at one out of the blue. It’s different if one has lived with it, off and on, for a long time. That’s my own case, you know – which has nothing to do with bombs. And this particular affair – a possible demonstration by young people which may be against a fair target or against a totally mistaken one – is intriguing, no doubt, but not of the first significance in itself. The real issue – and it’s a huge one – seems to me to require a good deal of thought before one starts running around.’
‘Simon Prowse may have given it a good deal of thought.’
‘That is certainly so. So, conceivably, may Miss Gale – although it’s also conceivable that she represents people merely going in for rather unfocused rebellion.’
‘So you’re not going to do anything?’
‘I didn’t say that. I was suggesting you don’t yourself throw your cap too hastily into the ring.’ George was aware that he sounded feeble. At bottom he felt that this unexpected local mystery, now so urgent in his niece’s mind, was a distraction from the issues that he and Father Hooker were committed – and now with an occasionally distinguishable co-operative intent – to clarifying to the best of their ability. It was all, he saw, rather bewildering. And bewilderment (although he regarded the condition as one of his chronic liabilities) was something George had been surprisingly little aware of in himself since the moment of his stepping off the train and being met by Hilda. It had dropped from him, just as had those bouts of amnesia. But its brief return now produced rather an odd reaction. ‘I’ll tell you one thing I’ll do,’ he said. ‘I’ll keep an eye on Hooker.’
‘In heaven’s name, Uncle George, what is there to keep an eye on in Hooker?’
‘There’s the fact that he’s a mystery man.’ Thus obscurely committed to talking nonsense, George persevered with it. ‘Or perhaps a mystery woman. Don’t you notice a hint of the transvestite in him? Perhaps he’s a witch. Think of those cats. Hooker seems to be the sort of person who has a pathological fear of cats. But that may be a blind. He may have a kind of malign power over the creatures, and be organising a cats’ coven. Thrice the brinded cat hath mewed, you know.’
‘Uncle George, are you making fun again of the kind of nonsense you think goes on in my would-be inventive head?’
‘No, no—and I apologise.’ George saw that his niece was a little offended, and he was quickly repentant. ‘It must just be that I’m developing an elderly and unseemly sense of comedy. As for doing anything, I don’t know. But I do think Simon Prowse’s imposture as practised on his uncle ought to be dropped on at once. If the young man is really organising something – whether laudable or not – which may run into trouble with the law, Prowse – who is a first-rate innocent – might be suspected of complicity in whatever the dark design may be.’ George found himself on his feet, and with that fleeting sense of bewilderment gone. ‘In fact, I’ll try hunting him up now.’
‘Jolly d.’ Hilda’s displeasure had vanished. ‘And I think I’ll hunt up something, too. Where did those odd bods in church come from? Nobody had a notion about them, but they must be lurking somewhere. I’m going to look. And I’ll take Henry with me. He badly needs time off from his infinitesimals, or whatever they are.’
‘You walk Henry,’ George said, ‘and I’ll hunt down Simon.’
It had been an impulsive resolution on George’s part, prompted by a wish to show his niece that he wasn’t wholly compounded of wise passiveness. But he was determined not to go back on it, and he therefore set off at once and before turning cool on the project. As a result, he was halfway down the village street before realising that his mission wasn’t a simple one.
Its entire basis, to begin with, rested on his nephew Charles’s assertion of the advanced character of Simon Prowse’s classical studies. What if Charles had got it all wrong – perhaps muddling one man with another? What if he had even made the whole thing up out of a misplaced sense of humour? If one accepted his story as true, one was accepting something the full freakishness of which George had perhaps failed to take the measure of. Even if the young man did want to be in the neighbourhood of Plumley in a picturesque undercover way, would he really have sought out this uncle and represented himself as a dunce in need of elementary tuition in construing Latin texts? The deception would be far from easy to sustain even for a couple of hours; and only a decidedly perverse delight in play-acting, surely, could prompt to it. Organising a demonstration against the proliferation of nuclear armaments – if that was really Simon’s concern – seemed to George a ticklish matter, properly to be entered upon only in a spirit of high seriousness, and this didn’t cohere at all with the prank he had been induced to suspect as going on at the vicarage.
George was so struck by the importance of this point that he actually came to a halt to consider it further. His conclusion was that he might well be wrong, that the very gravity of the main undertaking could be felt, in certain minds, to be wholesomely mitigated by a streak of outrageous fantasy. But this didn’t end his sense of the complexity of what he was undertaking. Why, for instance, was it he who was undertaking it? What standing in the matter did he possess, and mightn’t he fairly be told to mind his own business? Again, did his proposed interposition involve him to some extent in violating a confidence made to him – indirectly, it was true – by Charles Naylor? This particular scruple George was able to dismiss as fanciful, but at once yet a further question arose. Ought he – and actually within the vicarage – to tackle Simon Prowse himself head-on? Would it not be more proper to have a quiet talk with the young man’s uncle, and gently intimate a suspicion that things weren’t quite as they might seem?
Perpending these problems, George walked ahead. From cottages on either side of the road came occasional wafts as of incense which spoke of housewives basting the Sunday joint. On little driveways, or on the road itself, conscientious car-owners performed another of the day’s ritual duties, cleansing their vehicles of the week’s accumulated stains of mud and dust, washing them clean, assoiling them in preparation for another week’s contact with a fallen world. These activities, George reflected, went some way towards accounting for Christopher Prowse’s vacant pews. But even the intellectually unassuming classes must still wrestle at times with old-fashioned doubt. They hadn’t heard of the myth of the incarnate god, but reckoned there was a lot in the Bible that would seem uncommonly improbable if presented on television. So with the bright believing band they had no claim to be either.
But these sombre thoughts were aside from the business of the moment, which was the bad conduct of Simon Prowse. And suddenly Simon Prowse was in front of George, head-on – debouching from a side-road close to the church and vicarage, in which, it seemed, one bought Sunday papers: Simon had a sheaf of them under his arm. Thus confronted, George forgot about the perplexities he had been mulling over. He came to a halt before the young man, and then spoke.
‘Mr Prowse,’ he said, ‘can you extenuate in any way the gross deception you are imposing upon your uncle and aunt? If so, be so kind as to let me hear it.’
Abruptly taxed in this forthright fashion, Simon Prowse might well have been discomposed. Alternatively, or in addition, he might have been extremely angry. Had he there and then said, ‘And what the devil have my affairs to do with you?’ he would have been well within, if not his rights, at least the bounds of common expectation. But Simon took a moment before saying anything at all. He also removed from his head, with brisk and unconscious deference, a battered but serviceable straw hat.
‘Now, just who,’ he asked, ‘has been telling tales?’
‘My nephew, Charles Naylor, with whom you played tennis the other day, happens to have been an undergraduate at Trinity until a couple of terms ago.’
‘I can’t say I remembered him. I ought to, if he was in his third year.’
‘He was in his first, but has now gone down. That, however, is neither here nor there. May I have an answer to my question?’
‘I’m not quite sure.’ Simon Prowse now seemed entirely at ease – and this despite a certain pallor which had made itself evident upon his features. ‘I did enjoy playing tennis at your brother’s house. But I don’t quite see, sir, that it obliges me to stand and chat with you now. For one thing, it’s almost lunch-time, is it not?’
‘Come, Mr Prowse.’
Although there was no hint of indulgence in George’s manner of saying this, the effect was somehow composing. George Naylor, after all, was an old hand with young men.
‘I’ve been bound over,’ Simon said. ‘Are you shocked?’
George certainly wasn’t shocked. Again with young men – and occasionally with young women – who had been bound over in one sort of law court or another, his acquaintance was extensive and spread over a number of years.
‘And what,’ he asked, ‘would it be next time?’
‘A suspended sentence, I suppose. It would be a great nuisance, that.’
‘May I ask, Mr Prowse, whether this at all—well, affects your academic career? I understand it to be extremely promising.’
‘I’m most obliged to you.’ Simon made this eighteenth-centuryish response quite cheerfully. ‘And, no. The dons don’t mind a bit. They’d like to have the guts themselves.’
‘To march, and demonstrate, and sit in, and throw eggs?’
‘I wouldn’t be quite confident about the eggs. But, in a general way, yes. I expect you’ve met the sort of people, rather like your brother, only much more so: squirarchally disguised but really bankers and so forth in a hereditary way, who honestly believe that all professors and such like cattle are innately subversive? They’re probably quite right. Superficially, nothing looks more utterly conservative than, say, an Oxford senior common room. But in point of training and economic status, the whole clerkly class is essentially Jacobin, wouldn’t you say? Which means uncommonly dangerous.’
Thus urbanely invited to engage in intellectually sophisticated conversation, George was momentarily put to a stand. But he managed to come back to business.
‘Your being bound over to keep the peace,’ he said, ‘would debar you from taking part even in peaceful demonstrations?’
‘The beaks would certainly take that view. They’d say that a demo was inherently an invitation to disorder, or some rigmarole of that kind. And the fuzz, you know, have taken to picking you up on film, and filing you as having been in one place or another. They’ll even come at you from the air, like bloody recording angels. So I have to keep my head down, you see – and not even bowed in prayer in Christopher’s church, which is why I didn’t have the pleasure of listening to your friend this morning. That’s the whole thing.’
George couldn’t agree that it was the whole thing, or even approximately so. He was about to return to something like, ‘And does all that justify the disgraceful imposture you are practising upon your uncle?’ But he now saw that this, at least, was no concern of his. It wasn’t even as if he were an intimate of the Prowses. Moreover, any immediate éclaircissement on this front – his now entering the vicarage and denouncing Simon, for instance – would inevitably have the effect of exposing Christopher Prowse as a guileless ass, for what man of reasonably acute perceptions could be taken in by such a piece of nonsense for long? But the situation had, as it were, its public as well as its private aspect, and he ought now perhaps to tackle it from that direction. George was considering just how to do so, when Simon spoke again.
‘I understand about your nephew Charles,’ he said, ‘and his lately having been up at Trinity. But what puts it into your head to be on about marches and demonstrations?’
George wasn’t sure that the young man’s describing his being ‘on about’ something was altogether courteous in point of expression. But Simon, in addition to being clever and therefore attractive, was exhibiting decent manners, and the question was fair enough in itself.
‘It’s a matter of odd coincidence, Mr Prowse. Miss Gale, your slightly mysterious friend, happened to hand me a leaflet about the bomb in Oxford a few days ago.’
‘Ah, yes. June was staying in Oxford with an aunt. But she just can’t take time off the anti-nuclear activity.’
‘Nor can you?’
‘I manage a certain number of other things as well.’
If there was a hint of intellectual arrogance lurking in this, it was sufficiently dissimulated to be inoffensive on the young man’s part. So George tried again.
‘Just what are you aiming at – or organising against? Is it that place at Nether Plumley?’
‘I’m afraid, Dr Naylor, that I have nothing more to say.’
‘I think I have some right to be informed.’ George was about to add, ‘You and Mis
s Gale, after all, have been my brother’s guests.’ But he realised that this would be artificial and silly. And he had, in fact, got himself into a false position, and was in danger of talking nonsense. He had no right whatever to badger this young man, and by running round like an excited spaniel he was only making himself ridiculous. There wasn’t the slightest evidence that Simon Prowse and his friends proposed either to endanger life or damage property. They no doubt believed themselves – and it was an open and arguable issue – to be acting exactly in a contrary interest. George had been legitimately indignant over the prank played on the ingenuous Christopher Prowse; he had got this tangled up with his niece’s not very rational persuasions about what might be going on at Nether Plumley; and as a result here he was in the middle of the village street, doing his best to have a row with a young man he knew very little about.
In falling so abruptly for this revulsion of feeling George was not perhaps being quite fair to himself. Simon had shoved in among the Naylors and banged their tennis balls around most definitely under false colours, and with no other aim than to propagate in the district the conclusion that he was a harmless and agreeably athletic dullard. There was every justification for taking a good hard look at him. But it was George’s liability to have a lively sense of the other fellow’s point of view. And as the main business of his life at the moment was moderating this proclivity in the area of his debate with Hooker, it was perhaps to be expected that he would let Simon Prowse get away with something – and with rather more than Hilda would approve of. George saw this clearly enough, but was resigned to making no further progress with the young man. He was casting round for some reasonably seemly way of bringing the interview to a close when the matter was taken out of his hands in a rather disconcerting fashion.
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