The entire colloquy had occurred on the spot where the two contestants had suddenly encountered one another: beside the churchyard wall and opposite the side-road in which Simon had been buying his newspapers. This was little more than a lane ascending from Plumley village to a road that followed the line of the downs overlooking the vale in which the Plumleys lay. Up the lane George was conscious that Simon had suddenly turned a sharpened gaze. What had apparently attracted this was the roof of a car, still several hundred yards away, which would not become fully visible until it had advanced beyond a dip and a bend now immediately in front of it. But it could already be seen to be either a police car or an ambulance, since perched on top of it was that kind of diminutive lighthouse which can be set imperiously flashing at need.
‘On my way,’ Simon said abruptly. And George had just time to recall that he had heard these words from the young man spoken on this spot before when Simon turned round, vaulted over the wall behind him, and disappeared amid the various graves. George peered after him in vain. It was conceivable – he weirdly thought – that he had secluded himself within one of those lidless stone receptacles, somewhat larger than a cabin trunk, that witnessed to rural burial customs some centuries ago.
But more probably, of course, Simon had simply made his way rapidly back to the vicarage. George realised that he himself ought to make similar haste in returning to the Park, where luncheon would be on the table in some ten minutes’ time. He set off, therefore, at a brisk pace – and the more gratefully, perhaps, because he was leaving so unsatisfactory an episode behind him. But actually it was not a successful getaway. He was being pursued!
George was instantly persuaded of this, although for no better reason than that the car that had occasioned Simon’s rapid departure had itself turned in the direction of Plumley Park and was now behind him. He glanced at it over his shoulder and saw that it was indeed a police car. There were uniformed constables in the two front seats. He walked on for some 20 paces, and realised that the car ought by now to have overtaken him and gone on ahead. He again looked over his shoulder, although it was a jumpy and almost guilty-seeming thing to do. The beastly car was kerb-crawling! There was no other expression for the thing. George found himself experiencing very much the sort of justified indignation that might be experienced by a virtuous female actually exposed to this indignity. More rationally, he had to suppose that there was some intention to alarm him; that these two policemen conceived themselves to be engaged in a war of nerves.
But now the car accelerated very slightly and drew level. George was constrained to look at it again; in face of its unaccountable behaviour it would have been unnatural not to do so. And both the policemen looked at him. Even the man at the wheel – surely very improperly – held him for whole seconds under a fixed regard. George couldn’t recall ever having been looked at quite like this before – unless it was by some abominably sadistic prefect in chapel at his public school. It occurred to him that what are called identikit portraits of wanted miscreants are probably best built up on the basis of professionally penetrating scrutinies such as he was going to be subjected to now.
George and the car continued to move forward at the same pace. The policeman on the near side – still keeping up that steely stare – lowered his window. He called out to George as a motorist may do who seeks information from a pedestrian. Involuntarily, George halted and looked at him inquiringly. The policeman said nothing more, but raised an arm. There was a faint click, and George oddly found himself wondering whether he had been shot. Then he realised he had been photographed. The window went up again, and the car accelerated and was gone.
George had not been so indignant since the regrettable incident at the entrance to the Bodleian Library.
The family was already at table, so George had no immediate opportunity to communicate to Hilda either the unsatisfactory character of his interview with Simon Prowse or the upsetting episode that had followed upon it. He felt, however, that this was just as well, since he might have exhibited himself as more nearly flustered than was sensible. And although he had arrived a little out of breath, nobody asked him what he had been up to.
This was perhaps because Father Hooker was proving to have a lot to say. Unlike those prudent divines of an earlier age who took an hour-glass into the pulpit with them, Hooker, it seemed, had been in trouble over the length of his sermon. He had been conscious, he said, of the danger of speaking at too great length to a simple auditory – he seemed unaware that his congregation had not included a thronging peasantry – and equally fearful that he hadn’t adequately satisfied the expectations of the better-informed. He had been particularly sketchy in the provision of historical background to his argument. His host, he said – with one of his shattering little bows to Edward Naylor at the foot of the table – may well have expected at least a passing reference to the Council of Narbonne. That had been in 1054 – the year, as it happened, in which Macbeth (and here Hilda got a bow) had been defeated by Malcolm at Dunsinane; and the year, for that matter, in which, on the 16th of July, there had occurred the definitive split between the Roman and Greek Churches. But the immediate point was that the Council of Narbonne, wrestling with the problem of the Just War, had enjoined that even such a blameless war must not be waged on Fridays, Sundays and Feasts of the Church – which was presumably about halfway to banning it altogether.
Edward Naylor, who was being particularly addressed, managed occasional weighty nods and monosyllabic acquiescences. When Hooker found something to say about the De jure belli of Grotius, Edward positively managed to repeat the name ‘Grotius’ as if he had been expecting it to turn up for some time.
All this made George uncomfortable. He realised that social tact wasn’t Hooker’s strong point, and that he had been elevated in more senses than one by climbing into a pulpit: perhaps because it was very little his weekly round or common task. When not sent by fiat from Tower Hamlets on missions like the present, he probably sat in solitude in a book-lined room and did theology all day. This was a depressing picture – but at the same time George was conscious of nursing something like a growing loyalty towards Hooker, who could surely be more profitably employed than by sitting awkwardly at the Naylors’ board in the interest of recapturing a most unimportant fugitive priest. Were his niece and nephews ten years younger – George reflected – they would by this time be struggling, as reasonably well brought-up children, to repress their giggles before so odd a guest. When his present afflatus sank in him Hooker would probably feel rather lonesome and out-on-a-limb. George hated the thought of this, and searched around in his head for suitable references to Origen and Aquinas in order to give some colouring of general discussion to Hooker’s inopportune performance.
No great success attended this endeavour, but at least the impulse was amiable. Nevertheless, George Naylor’s character at this point is not to be aspersed as improbably exemplary. He could be taxed with the frailty of harbouring weakly contradictory attitudes. He was still lurkingly disposed to resent the graceless expedition with which the Bishop of Tower Hamlets’ emissary had turned up on him, and even those aspects of Father Hooker’s comportment which seemed to verge, if not on the unmannerly, at least on the boring and insensitive. But while thus failing to rid himself of his sense of Hooker as a pest, he was increasingly coming to assume that he himself was the sole proper object of the man’s concern. Hooker, in fact, was being seduced into neglecting him a little. It could almost be said that the bomb – George thought of it as Hilda’s bomb – was threatening to take over the story. Of course it was abundantly entitled to do so – supposing it to be, so to speak – really there. Even after his encounter with Simon, and in spite of what Hilda had apparently come to believe, it had remained his own conviction that it wasn’t; that although Simon and an unknown number of presumably young people were certainly planning a demonstration against the Institute at Nether Plumley, it was on the strength of a totally mistaken notion of what went
on in the place. What had happened to him on his walk back from the village had shaken his confidence about this, however; policemen, he felt, didn’t behave in quite that way except in circumstances of an exceptional order.
At the close of the meal there came into George’s head something he had read as a boy nearly 30 years before. An American novelist – it must have been William Faulkner – had been given the Nobel Prize for Literature and had made a speech. There are no longer problems of the spirit, he had said. There is only the question: When will I be blown up?
It occurred to George that Hilda – an author in search of a theme – might very fairly place her uncle at the centre of a small comedy turning on this proposition.
‘And we must keep a look out for the cats,’ Hilda said. She and Henry had set off immediately after lunch, armed with binoculars, to scour the countryside.
‘The cats?’ Henry repeated this absently and with a frown. He wasn’t yet sure that he thought much of the idea of hunting down potential demonstrators. He had come along, he told himself, only because he hadn’t yet managed to shake off the habit of taking orders from his sister. It was something he’d better get cracking on. ‘I don’t think we’ll see your wretched cats again,’ he said.
‘Don’t be so dismal. Jeoffry and Old Foss are much too clever to get run over.’
‘But not clever enough to avoid the stew-pots of our friends.’
‘And don’t be so silly.’
‘There’s nothing silly about it. Or not unless you’re imagining things, as you probably are. Camped in some mysteriously invisible way around the Plumleys is a horde of crackpot characters preparing for what’s called a riotous assembly. It stands to reason they’re living off the land. We’ll come on a bunch of them at any moment, asleep after a tremendous gorge on cat collops.’
‘How disgusting can we get.’
‘There’s that saying about cats having nine lives. Obsolete. Archaic. Do you know that in London nowadays no cat has as much as half a life? Your pussy has only to put a whisker outside the door never to be seen again. The pie-shop, the furrier, the lab: they’re all after poor puss. The going rate is fifty pence.’
‘Henry, you’re as idiotic as Hooker, who would like to think that cats are eaten by foxes.’
‘Hooker talked a good deal of tripe in that sermon.’ Henry had exhausted his interest in cats. ‘But he stopped short of ignominy. I think that’s the word. He didn’t say that we should turn up our moral noses at the thing and leave using it to the Yanks. I suppose that’s what your friend believes.’
‘Just what do you mean: my friend?’
As Hilda made this demand, she came abruptly to a halt. They had reached the end of the Plumley Park drive, and surroundings which witnessed to the consequence not of Naylors but of proprietors who had departed long ago. There were lofty and elaborate iron gates, decently painted but never to be coaxed or wrenched shut again; these hung from bulky and flaking stone pillars which were no longer quite perpendicular, and on each of which was perched what might have been a football, or a plum pudding, or even a bomb from the days in which such things enjoyed a primitive simplicity; on either side of the drive there crouched an untenanted lodge so diminutive that it might have passed as a commodious dog-kennel. To have this ensemble between oneself and the world always struck Hilda as depressing. That she should now have paused beside it suggested something particularly arresting, even offensive, in her brother’s conjecture.
‘Your friend Simon,’ Henry said. ‘Essentially, it seems to me we’re yearning after him now. Or you are. I can’t really see any other explanation of this jaunt. What he and his Gale girl and his elusive legion are up to isn’t any affair of ours.’
Hilda gave some moments to trying honestly to decide whether these were penetrating remarks. Alone of the family, after all, she was aware that Henry, although he could talk nonsense, was rather an able boy.
‘You mean,’ she said, ‘that you think I think him marvellous?’
‘Pretty well that.’
‘I don’t.’
‘Good. Let’s go on.’
Hilda realised that Henry had simply believed her at once. So he, in a way, was marvellous. And she felt some further explanation was due to him.
‘As a matter of fact,’ she said, ‘I was rather taken with Simon. No doubt you spotted my young palpitating heart. But I’ve come to think of him as a bit of a showman. What he’s up to – if he is up to it – seems a bit elaborate. I’m probably too stodgy for him. But we mustn’t conclude he isn’t serious about the bomb and stopping it. More serious than we are, if we pass by the mess on the other side.’
‘As Uncle George would say, it’s a point of view. And a point of view’s just what we need. We’ll take our field-glasses up to Tim’s Tump. From there you can command the whole terrain – Animal Genetics and all.’
Having thus taken command, Henry set off with long strides. Tim’s Tump was a long barrow, and it was improbable that a person called Tim had ever had anything to do with it – or not in any sort of respectable antiquity. It lay longitudinally on the crest of the down, and against the skyline suggested the proportions of a furry caterpillar. It had been excavated or rifled long ago; the Department of the Environment tidied it up from time to time; you could enter it, and even – on a wet day – hold a crouched sort of picnic in its interior. Arable land had crept up and around it in recent times, but here and there in the fields thus created lay great sarsen stones which no farmer had ever toiled to fragment by fire and remove. A few of them stood mysteriously erect, having been thus heaved up for unknown ritual purposes some thousands of years ago, and these had the air of sentries or outlying pickets set to guard an immemorially numinous region against intrusion. But all this still lay some 500 feet above the heads of Hilda and Henry, and there was a stiff climb to it. They were yet in the vale, and moving through a scattering of near hovels inhabited – Hilda declared – by retired witches and worn-out and discarded hinds and clowns, which nevertheless went by the imposing name of Plumley Ducis.
‘Agreed,’ Henry said suddenly, ‘that we’re not chasing the attractive Simon. What are we chasing? What’s this in aid of? It isn’t clear to me. This demo, or whatever: are you for it or against it?’
‘I don’t know. Uncle George seems to feel I ought to be one or the other. But, really, I just want to have a look. To see how it ticks. There isn’t much to watch ticking in Plumley. I’ve felt that, rather, since I came back to it.’
‘Then get away again. Find yourself a job. Or even a husband, if you can land a passable one.’
‘Thank you very much.’ Hilda paused, and decided not to be offended. ‘It’s a matter of a breathing-space, I think, and of looking around.’
‘The fact is, my girl, that the short story has gone to your head.’
‘What do you mean – the short story?’ Hilda had come to a halt, and was staring at her brother in dismay.
‘A chap at school showed it to me. As a matter of fact, I thought it rather good. Not that I’m a judge. It’s not my kind of thing.’
‘Henry, you haven’t told anybody?’ Hilda’s perturbation was now tinged with pleasure. Actually to hear even an off-hand commendation was something new to her.
‘Of course not. A gentleman can be trusted to conceal his sister’s shame.’ Henry paused for a moment. ‘Does one,’ he then asked curiously, ‘feel very protective about that sort of progeny?’
‘Yes.’
‘I wonder whether I’d feel like that if I discovered something? In maths, I mean. Probably not. Do you know what was the most marvellous moment in human history?’
‘You’d have to ask Hooker to get a quick answer to that one.’ Hilda was now walking on. ‘I suppose you’d say it was when some Arab, charging around the Sahara on his camel, found he’d invented the multiplication sign, or spotted that nought comes before one, two and three.’
‘Amazingly well-educated young women are nowadays. But, no – i
t wasn’t quite that. It was when scientists – experimental philosophers, as they said – stopped feeling protective about their achievements, and started letting on about them. Even mathematicians had imagined that their equations and things were valuable private property, to be held on to right to the grave. I suppose that was because most of them were astrologers as well, or could flog you the sums telling you how to aim a cannon or a catapult. Publishing your discoveries: that was the great turning-point in history.’
‘So now anybody can read about the bomb.’
‘Right! Of course there’s a lot more to it than reading up. But, by and large, any little tin-pot dictator or junta or what-have-you can get busy on the thing. If you want to think about the bomb at all – which isn’t particularly necessary in your case – you’d better begin from there.’
‘A woman’s sphere is the home.’ Hilda said this without much attending to it. She was digesting the fact that she had a more or less grown-up brother, and that it wasn’t the harmlessly oafish Charles. ‘If you begin from there,’ she asked, ‘how do you go on?’
‘Not by giving three cheers for Master Simon. Or I think not that, although one oughtn’t to be in a hurry to be dogmatic about it. In a way, it doesn’t much matter what one thinks. Catastrophe is so near-certain that thinking up ways to avoid it isn’t much more than an intellectual exercise.’
‘Henry, do you really believe that?’
‘Oh, probably. But one has one’s gut reactions as well as one’s wretched little brain.’
‘If enough people could be brought to think and act as Simon does . . .’
‘Yes – but they never will. The thing’s there – targeted on Paris, London, Moscow, New York. What’s also there is the balance of terror. Its less terrifying name is the balance of power. If one country wins too many battles, enough other countries get together to slow it up. That way, you got something that used to be called the Concert of Europe. There’s perhaps a faint gleam of hope in the balance of terror.’
The Naylors Page 17