The Naylors
The Naylors
First published in 1985
Copyright: John Stewart Literary Management Ltd. 1985-2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The right of J.I.M. Stewart to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
This edition published in 2012 by House of Stratus, an imprint of
Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,
Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.
Typeset by House of Stratus.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.
| | EAN | | ISBN | | Edition | |
| | 0755130472 | | 9780755130474 | | Print | |
| | 0755133307 | | 9780755133307 | | Kindle | |
| | 0755133617 | | 9780755133611 | | Epub | |
This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.
Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.
John Innes Mackintosh Stewart (who also wrote as Michael Innes) was born in Edinburgh where his father was Director of Education. He attended Edinburgh Academy before going up to Oriel College, Oxford where he was awarded a first class degree in English and won the Matthew Arnold Memorial Prize and was named a Bishop Frazer scholar. After a short interlude travelling with AJP Taylor in Austria, including studying Freudian psychoanalysis for a year, he embarked on an edition of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays. This subsequently helped him secure a post teaching English at Leeds University.
In 1932, Stewart married Margaret Hardwick, who practised medicine, and they subsequently had three sons and two daughters. By 1935, he had been awarded the Jury Chair at the University of Adelaide in Australia as Professor of English and had also completed his first detective novel, ‘Death at the President’s Lodging’, published under the pseudonym ‘Michael Innes’. This was an immediate success and part of a long running series centred on ‘Inspector Appleby’, his primary character when writing as ‘Innes’. There were almost fifty titles completed under the ‘Innes’ banner during his career.
In 1946, he returned to the UK and spent two years at Queen’s University in Belfast, before being appointed Student (Fellow and Tutor) at Christ Church, Oxford. He was later to hold the post of Reader in English Literature of Oxford University and upon his retirement was made an Emeritus Professor. Whilst never wanting to leave his beloved Oxford permanently, he did manage to fit into his busy schedule a visiting Professorship at the University of Washington and was also honoured by other Universities in the UK.
Stewart wrote many works under his own name, including twenty-one works of fiction (which contained the highly acclaimed quintet entitled ‘A Staircase in Surrey’, centred primarily in Oxford, but with considerable forays elsewhere, especially Italy), several short story collections, and over nine learned works on the likes of Shakespeare, Kipling and Hardy. He was also a contributor to many academic publications, including a major section on modern writers for the Oxford History of English Literature. He died in 1994, the last published work being an autobiography: ‘Myself and Michael Innes’.
J.I.M. Stewart’s fiction is greatly admired for its wit, plots and literary quality, whilst the non-fiction is acknowledged as being definitive.
‘Have you heard the news?’
It was clear from Charles Naylor’s tone that he was sure they hadn’t. His hasty tumbling into the drawing-room might have been accounted for by his being late for whatever offered on the tea-table. But his question was obviously designed to startle. It had come with a mingling of gloom and glee.
‘Uncle George has lost his faith again.’ Grabbing the last scone, Charles directed this announcement chiefly at his father, Edward Naylor, who was George Naylor’s elder brother and the head of the family. ‘But not, of course, as with Clementine. Not lost and gone for ever. The article may be better described as simply mislaid.’
‘Ah!’ Edward Naylor said.
‘Perhaps it was to be expected,’ Mrs Naylor said. ‘But will it be with the same result as before?’
‘Definitely.’ The glee now frankly predominated in Charles, who was proving slow to reach a responsible age. ‘I’ve just taken a telephone call from Uncle George. He’ll turn up on Monday or Tuesday. And I’ll bet with a minder hotfoot in pursuit of him. So two more mouths to feed, mummy.’
The Naylors didn’t really have to consider mouths in quite that fashion. In a wider context Edward Naylor made it understood that he necessarily nursed financial anxieties, but nobody knew whether or not these were justified, since in business matters he kept his cards hard up against his chest. Hovering penury had therefore become a routine family joke.
‘Minder’ was a joke of Charles’s own. With a liveliness of fancy not particularly characteristic of him, he had come to posit the existence of a kind of corps of theological therapists maintained by the episcopate to cope with such spiritual crises as his uncle’s now. It was certain that a chap detailed from this Special Duties squad would arrive at Plumley in no time, settle in unobtrusively as a family friend, and get to work during walks in the garden or through the park. Just what pressure a minder applied, Charles didn’t profess to know. Presumably he didn’t simply take Uncle George behind a tree and twist his arm until he screamed that he was recanting his errors. It would be murmured stuff about the momentousness of the thing, and what after all
is
faith, and let us define our terms with clarity. That was probably how a minder started in. And being a skilled man at his job he pretty regularly came out on top.
‘We must do our best to support your uncle,’ Edward Naylor said with gravity. He had managed without much difficulty to be thus tolerant when the problem turned up on a previous occasion, perhaps because there was something reassuringly old-world about clergymen losing their faith. It had been a painful but perfectly respectable phenomenon in the Victorian period, and Edward, although vigorously operative in an up-to- the-minute industrial environment, was – at least when at home – a man of conservative mind.
‘Of course we must.’ Hilda Naylor gave her father instant approval. Hilda was the eldest child and only daughter. ‘I like Uncle George best when he gets in a fix. There’s something endearing in it. He improves with tribulation in the most orthodox and edifying way.’
‘So he does,’ Henry Naylor said. Henry was three years younger than his brother Charles, and in his final year at Rugby. ‘Uncle George is
much
improved . . .’
‘Quiet, Henry!’ Charles interrupted commandingly. He knew that Henry had enunciated the first line of a ribald quatrain in which ‘improved’ rhymed with ‘removed’ and Uncle George ended up singing soprano in the choir. Charles would have been perfectly ready to bawl out Fescennine songs on an appropriate occasion – a boat-club binge, say – but anything of the sort became smut when offered in the presence of women. You could make fun of Uncle George’s difficulties over his Saviour only so long as you kept it clean. And, of course, only behind his back. Charles would have considered it bad form to ‘cheek’ an older man, whether a relation or not. ‘Do you know,’ he asked, ‘that our dreary vicar has never registered the old boy’s previous wrestling with the demon Doubt? As soon as he hears of his turning up at Plumley he’ll invite him to preach to us. A difficult moment for Uncle George.’
‘But Mr Prowse is a comparative newcomer to the living,’ Mrs Naylor said. ‘It’s natural that your uncle’s problems should not be known to him. Perhaps your father should say a quiet word.’
‘I’d leave quiet words to the minder,’ Charles advised. ‘They’re his thing.’
If quiet words were not the Naylors’ thing, neither were loud and assertive ones. Naylors weren’t aggressive; they didn’t ‘create’; but on the other hand they seldom suggested diffidence. According to Hilda, who had an unprofitable disposition to reflect on such matters, diffidence, or an air of it, was an upper-crust thing and didn’t come, whether by nature or breeding, to people who were middle all the way through. And Naylors were just that: upper-middle, since it was a long time ago that they had hammered nails, and through several generations they had been
marchands en gros
rather than grocers. They ran a line in oddities occasionally: Uncle George, for instance, and, lurkingly, perhaps Hilda herself. But tribal solidarity was one constituent in their predominant self-confidence and sense of security. They could afford that joke about impending penury. They had plenty of property, and at Plumley they still had a servant or two. In the penultimate decade of the twentieth century this latter condition was a witness to tenacity as well as mere money in the bank.
They don’t sound very interesting, the Naylors of Plumley. It has to be confessed that they fail to look promising. Anybody disposed to make a book out of them (among their own number Hilda, as it happened) would have to scratch around for that sensitive awareness one of another, whether in family or social life, which so many books nowadays set out to exhibit. So what about each – as the poet says – confirming a prison, much absorbed at least in himself or herself, anxious about the individual destiny which one wakes up with in the morning and then companions until falling asleep at 10.30 p.m.? Sustained introspection is something that Naylors find little time for. Their days are taken up with routine activities neither disinterested and altruistic on the one hand nor of a naked rat-race order on the other, but which are pursued simply because they are what come along. They have a decent regard for one another’s physical well-being and undisturbed nervous tone; they converse, if sparely, upon indifferent topics; the younger among them even contrive to give some edge of gaiety to their talk. But the lid is kept down as a matter of good form. Needlessly, perhaps. Even if raised an inch or two it is probable that nothing very arresting would be glimpsed in the bucket.
But now a few days have gone by, and George Naylor is leaving London on a crowded train.
When George became a clergyman the family had felt it as no more than slightly out of the way. With people only a little grander than themselves it had once been the regular thing for a younger son to take orders. That had been because there awaited the devout youth, almost immediately after his adopting those minimal changes in attire which the nineteenth century deemed adequate to distinguish its Anglican priesthood, something like the clerical equivalent of a pocket borough. Even a century later the Naylors themselves could probably have made a certain amount of interest in the way of pushing George ahead. He had been at a promising Oxford college: one so endowed – indeed burdened – with ecclesiastical patronage that its dons had frequently to scratch around for a suitable man to shove into a benefice. Moreover, George was a strong candidate in his own right. He had taken an excellent degree, and while hanging on for a time at the university had shown marked talent as a theologian. He had dined with the Canons of Christ Church – a great thing, if Dr Johnson is to be believed – and when he did take orders had been hurried into that sort of ‘testing’ curacy – a species of trial by ordeal in a slummy city parish – which archbishops and bishops (who had been in their time fags in Arnoldian public schools) regarded as the right prelude to substantial preferment. There was no need for the Naylors to put a discreet hand in a pocket.