‘Which you don’t think Simon much enlarges.’
‘Bother Simon. He’s not important. He wouldn’t be, even if he weren’t barking up the wrong tree.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘It’s rubbish that the Nether Plumley place can have anything to do with bombs. But I’ll tell you what’s important—or, at least, interesting. It’s the question of orders of magnitude. In that war with Hitler and the general nastiness surrounding it, about fifty million people were killed before Hiroshima was heard of. Just old-fashioned bullets and T.N.T., with occasionally a gas-chamber or the like thrown in, were adequate for the job. How many of your camel-jockey’s noughts have you to add if you’d get the sum right when the bomb drops now? Is it just a quantitative question, or something quite different? Oh, God! Look who’s bearing down on us.’
What had interrupted Henry Naylor’s lecture was not really sufficiently disconcerting or surprising to have justified him in thus invoking the Deity. It was no more than the appearance of Christopher Prowse and his wife, taking the afternoon air in Plumley Ducis. But there was something questing in their manner of looking around them, and Hilda noted this.
‘Not a single child,’ she said, ‘has turned up at Sunday School. Christopher and Edith are hunting down the truants.’
‘Sunday School? Surely that sort of thing doesn’t still happen?’ Henry was entirely sceptical. ‘I remember how as kids we agreed to go along once a month at five bob a time, and were told we were setting an example. But T.V. and video must have killed it stone dead.’
Hilda made no reply to this. She was engaged in reciprocating those gestures of gratified recognition which were automatic with the vicar on first sighting a parishioner.
‘I know!’ Henry suddenly went on. ‘They’re searching for Sinbad. Sinbad or Tinbad or Jinbad.’
‘Or Vinbad the Quailer or Linbad the Yailer.’ Momentarily, Hilda ignored the Prowses; she was recalling how, a few days before, Henry had incautiously admitted familiarity at least with the name of the author of Ulysses. It was another dimension in which her nearly-grown-up brother was revealing himself as a dark horse. If Uncle George went away – whether back to his mission or not – Henry might turn out to be a substantial conversational resource. They could, for instance, have further civilised talks about the bomb.
‘Hallo!’ Henry was saying with a cheerful and correct informality. ‘We’re guessing that you must be looking for Sinbad. Is that right?’
‘Well, Henry – yes.’ Christopher Prowse was oddly hesitant. ‘At least Sinbad is in our minds. Yes.’
‘We can’t help being a little anxious,’ Edith Prowse said.
‘That’s only natural.’ Hilda, whose mother was frequently a little anxious about one thing or another, produced a practised look of moderate concern. ‘But it’s my belief that those cats have gone off in a body about their own affairs, and will drift back discreetly one by one.’
‘But it isn’t only the cats.’ Mrs Prowse suddenly discovered herself as under a burden of anxiety which she was unable longer to conceal. ‘It’s Christopher’s nephew as well.’
‘Simon!’ Henry exclaimed. ‘He’s vanished with the cats?’
‘At least, like the cats.’ The vicar didn’t seem to offer this correction with any humorous intent. ‘It’s really rather disturbing. Simon has been restless ever since he came to us. Hurrying off here and there with very little explanation. We thought perhaps that he had archaeological interests.’
‘Or ornithological?’ Hilda asked. ‘That’s what I thought.’
‘Or perhaps it’s music,’ Henry said. ‘Perhaps Simon’s like the chap in Hamelin town: a latter-day Orpheus.’ (Henry thus revealed yet another dimension.) ‘He pipes, and the brute creation follows. He and all the cats of Plumley have now gone under the hill.’
The Prowses fortunately made nothing of this irresponsible mockery, their agitation being such that it passed over their heads.
‘Simon didn’t turn up in church,’ Christopher Prowse said, ‘and not to lunch either. And of course it has all interfered with his work most disastrously. If, indeed, it is his work.’
‘What do you mean?’ Henry asked quickly. ‘If it is his work?’
‘I wonder whether I may confide in you?’ The vicar asked this in a yearning sort of way which Hilda didn’t at all like. She asked herself whether she could hastily declare that her brother, although lately showing himself to be rather clever and well-informed, was not altogether wholly serious. But, in the name of family solidarity, she decided against this. Christopher Prowse must look after himself.
‘Yesterday afternoon, you see,’ Christopher went on, ‘when Simon was out, it occurred to me to go into his room and take a look at some of his notebooks.’ Christopher paused, as if aware that this was a shade awkward. ‘It had come into my head that I might get some notion of the more common errors to which his Latin is prone, and assist him in that way.’
‘A very helpful idea,’ Henry said. ‘So what?’
‘It was most perplexing, most unexpected. For instance, there was a whole notebook devoted to the Bacchae.’
‘Baccy? Something to do with smoking?’
‘No, no.’ Christopher seemed merely bemused before this extraordinary question. ‘The Bacchae is a tragedy by Euripides. And the notes were on some of the knottier problems in the Greek text.’
‘Oh, I see! But that’s your nephew’s line, isn’t it?’
‘Far from it. Simon professes to have elementary Latin, and no Greek at all.’
‘The other day,’ Edith Prowse interposed, ‘I did just hint to Hilda that we thought there may be a romance.’
Hilda, unlike her brother, was not here confronted by anything new. But, more forcibly than before, the disingenuous behaviour of Simon Prowse towards his relations struck her in an unfavourable light.
‘There’s no romance,’ she said. ‘There’s a plot. And you must face it, Christopher, that you could be represented as uncommonly easily taken in.’
‘I’m sure it will all resolve itself in time.’ Christopher produced this vague response without conviction; he was plainly regretting the domestic disclosure he had offered. ‘But to return to the cats. Their disappearance is not connected with my nephew in any way. In fact, there is only one explanation – and it is a most distressing one, I fear. The hyena is active again.’
‘But of course!’ Henry said instantly. ‘How stupid of me. The hyena it is. Poor pussies.’
It was clear to Hilda that her brother didn’t believe in the hyena. Nor did she. Nor, for that matter, in the region of the Plumleys as a whole, did perhaps a majority of those who would at one time have been described as of the better sort. These regarded the brute as a phantom merely: a product of the kind of instant folklore that is created and propagated by the popular press. There had, indeed, twice appeared in print intelligence that the hyena had been encountered in broad daylight (and promptly ascribed to its species) by reliable members of the public: on the first occasion by William Pidduck, aged six, as he was walking home from school, and on the second by Mrs Goslin, aged eighty-three, while drawing water from a tap conveniently located at the bottom of her garden. These persons had become local celebrities for a time, and their photographs had even appeared in a national newspaper. And to a very large number of people over the months had come at least persuasive hints and intimations of the creature’s near-presence, commonly in the dark. The hyena had been heard snarling; it had been heard purring; it had been heard doing deep-breathing, like a maniac on the telephone; most frequently, of course, it had been heard giving vent to demoniac laughter. Its eyes had been observed burning bright in the copses and dingles of the vicinity.
One didn’t, perhaps, have to be wholly gullible to believe in the veridical status of the hyena. Wild beasts – or at least beasts that could plausibly be so described – did escape from time to time from private zoos. People who once had kept homing-pigeons or guinea-pig
s in their back yard had many of them switched to lions and tigers. Indeed, at one point Edward Naylor, ever alert to the movement of plebeian minds, had briefly wondered whether it might be possible to promote packaged Adventure Playgrounds for Big Cats. So the Prowses are not to be ridiculed at this point in our story.
‘But this time, at least, the police have consented to be alerted,’ Christopher Prowse said. ‘Someone must have apprised them of the situation, and they have turned out half a dozen patrol cars at once. There goes one of them now. Just in front of the inn.’
This was true. Such a car, cruising slowly, was visible from where the Naylors and Prowses stood.
‘Did you say half a dozen?’ Henry asked.
‘Yes, indeed.’
‘You haven’t, perhaps, been seeing the same car several times?’
‘Certainly not.’ The vicar took the opportunity of avoiding unchristian irritation as he offered this firm denial.
‘In other words, just because somebody has reported to the police that the hyena has gone pussypophagous . . .’
‘Has what?’
‘Has taken to eating cats. Just because of that, the police have turned out six cars and a dozen men?’
‘Yes – and it shows most commendable thoroughness, does it not? No doubt they are armed. But it is to be hoped, of course, that they don’t have to kill or maim the creature. That would be most distressing.’
‘Particularly on a Sunday.’ Henry had the grace at once to be ashamed of this unseemly gibe. ‘Perhaps they have nets or things,’ he added rapidly.
‘Or darts carrying an anaesthetic charge. I have observed them in use in the great nature reserves of Africa. On television, of course. I sometimes regret that as a young man my thoughts didn’t turn to the mission field. One would have seen so much more.’
‘Well, yes – I imagine so.’ Henry, whom this irrelevant and wistful note suddenly rendered awkward, glanced at Hilda for help. ‘I suppose we should be getting along.’
‘We’ve promised ourselves to climb to the Tump,’ Hilda said. ‘It’s a marvellous afternoon for a view.’
‘And we must get back to the vicarage.’ Edith Prowse had glanced at her watch. ‘Simon may have returned there by now, and it may all prove to have been some stupid mistake. Even about the cats and that horrid hyena.’ The vicar’s wife, who spent much time urging desponding female parishioners to look on the bright side of things, appeared to extract genuine solace from these hazy hopes. ‘Please give my love to your parents, Hilda. It was delightful to see them in church this morning. And such a good congregation, too.’
There were further civil exchanges after this, since the Prowses seldom took their leave of anybody except in a lingering way. They were, Hilda supposed, a lonely couple. They had no children to return to – and on the present occasion not even a cat. Christopher Prowse, although a conscientious man, had little talent for being easily en rapport with his parishioners in their several classes, occupations, and domestic circumstances, and in addition to this the mere fact of being a clergyman nowadays involved a certain alienation from secular society. At the moment, the vicar and his wife had the company of their kinsman and parlour boarder. But even if they found Simon at home again on their return, he could no longer represent for them more than a vexatious and even alarming enigma. There was, of course, something irresistibly comical in the thought of Christopher with his rusty Latin suddenly finding himself confronted with a pupil well-seen in the text of the Bacchae – and when Henry once or twice guffawed as he and Hilda resumed their walk it was no doubt this that was amusing him. But the entire situation was uncomfortable. Hilda, although she must have been aware of it as holding out unexpected promise for the exercise of literary talent, didn’t care for it at all.
They surmounted a stile, and walked diagonally across a field containing a herd of moodily munching bullocks. A number of these interrupted this tedious occupation and came nosing after them in a kind of stupid curiosity. Hilda had the discouraging thought that stupid curiosity was at present her own key-note. Simon Prowse was at least up to something, whether laudable and well-considered or not. As soon as they were back at the Park Henry, with whatever affected discontent, would take himself off to his all-absorbing maths. Even Charles would be busying himself purposively with his fishing tackle and his injuriously uninvited gun. As for Uncle George and Father Hooker, they were now – even across what must surely be the vast gulf sundering belief and disbelief – contentedly debating something they might call the philosophy of religious experience. She herself was simply wandering around in the interest of no sort of action whatever. Perhaps she had better take Henry’s advice, and set about landing a passable husband.
‘That hyena,’ she said abruptly. ‘You don’t believe in it, do you?’
‘Of course not.’ Henry was contemptuous. ‘And the police don’t believe in a cat-eating cat, either. Which doesn’t mean the fuzz don’t have to be explained. Good God! What’s that?’
‘That’ was a sudden loud noise overhead. They both looked up, and what they saw was a helicopter. It was coming from behind them, and flying low. For a moment they were actually in its shadow. Then it was hovering directly above them, and dropping lower still. It made a terrible din – a kind of dry clattering that set the bullocks bolting in all directions. Then it rose again, and flew away across the vale.
‘Bloody silly affairs,’ Henry said. ‘A jet can be shot to bits all round you, and you still have a chance. But if a rotor goes on one of those things, it’s curtains within five seconds. Icarus just not in it.’
‘Bother Icarus.’ Hilda was unimpressed by this further unexpected instance of her brother’s cultivation. ‘The thing pretty well buzzed us. Week-end skylarking idiots!’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Not play. Business. In fact, the fuzz again. They’re out in force, expecting trouble. No, don’t come to a stop and gape, girl. We go on to the top and have our own aerial view.’
Hilda obediently kept walking – and at a pace which for some minutes effectively discouraged speech. By this route it had become almost a scramble to gain Tim’s Tump. The smooth downland turf, pleasant to the tread on gentler inclines, now felt slippy and treacherous. Hilda told herself it was quite amusing to take orders from the younger of her brothers – and of course there was nobody present to witness this anomalous disposition of things.
‘So you agree it’s all true?’ she presently managed to gasp.
‘No, not all of it. It remains nonsense that they make bombs at Nether Plumley. You might as well imagine they make battleships. But they do something, and your friend Simon disapproves and is planning – or at least participating in – a massive protest on the spot.’
‘I don’t see how it can be massive. So far as we know, there’s only the Gale girl within the horizon. Of course, there was that scattering of strangers in church.’
‘Members of a kind of vanguard, perhaps, who happen to be given to devotion as well as demos. Two little batches of them.’
‘And not on very good terms with each other.’
‘Rival enthusiasts, no doubt. And I grant you that, apart from them, there’s no sign at all of strangers being around. Just a bunch of cops, drawing overtime and wasting petrol. Or so it seems. But – as I say – they’re expecting something. Here we are.’
They had scrambled across a ditch and through a hedge, and were standing on a high road. It was perhaps the most ancient of its kind in England: a broad ribbon of grass, here and there much rutted and muddied by the passage of agricultural machinery, which ran in gentle curves and undulations along the ridge of the downs as far as the eye could see in either direction. Primitive peoples, dressed in skins and reputedly daubed with woad, had created it through ages of tribal wars and small migrations; the Roman legions had tramped it; in the great days of the wool trade vast flocks of sheep had been driven on it from county to county. On either
hand it was now lipped by a prosperous agriculture: cornfields and pasture, conifer wind-breaks, byres and barns. Beyond this, and on lower ground, it commanded peopled vistas: farmsteads and hamlets and villages and even distant towns; striding pylons; reticulated roads and lanes, and at one far remove a motorway.
From the motorway minute points of light flashed briefly like random heliographs as cruising windscreens caught the sun. On roads in the middle distance the sauntering traffic of Sunday afternoons, scaled down by distance to a Dinky-toy parade, was abundantly on view. Nearer at hand, on a winding and steeply-rising lane that quickly lost itself in a first fold of the downs, a line of cyclists, some in brightly-coloured T-shirts and others in sweaty semi-nakedness, dragged a slow length along in the manner of Pope’s wounded snake. It was (in the words of another poet) a field full of folk. But here on the immemorial ridgeway was solitude, day-long emptiness. Determined walkers, equipped with rucksacks and spiked sticks and compasses, bestrode it in clumpy boots from time to time. Intermittently, hordes of mechanic youths on Hondas and Suzukis drenched it in petrol vapour in the performance of a moto-cross. But that was all. It never occurred to the citizens of the Plumleys that here was a territory in which to walk abroad and recreate themselves. Was it not up a terrible great hill? Even in secure skylarking bands, the schoolchildren, too, avoided it. There was a spooky feel about Tim’s Tump and the forgotten artery that flowed past its mystery.
At some time in the eighteenth century the Tump had been improved by a local landowner (conceivably known to his intimates as Tim) with developed antiquarian tastes. Conjecturing, probably correctly, that here was the burial place of a personage even more important than himself – a Druid, perhaps, but of good family, as the higher clergy ought to be – he had embellished the site and enhanced its consequence in various appropriate ways. He had begun with a clump of oaks. But these being slow to mature, and showing small promise of answering well to the soil, he had added a short avenue of beeches, oriented to lead directly up to the entrance of the barrow. He then felt that the Druid’s ghost, surveying his demesne from beneath the massive capstone to his front door, would not be well served if the beech avenue simply ended off without display. He therefore caused two of the largest sarsens on his estate to be hauled up to the Tump, and there erected as if to support the two leaves of an adequately imposing iron gate. An actual gate would have been an absurdity, but the impulse to provide the seat of an important person with a suitably imposing approach was the same that displeased Hilda at the entrance to Plumley Park.
The Naylors Page 18