The Naylors (12 page)

‘Hardly had a decent word with you,’ he said. ‘You’re sure that fellow isn’t at the keyhole?’

‘No sugar, you remember,’ George said to Hilda. ‘My dear Edward, we mustn’t regard Hooker as a spy.’

‘Guardian angel, eh?’

‘Not quite that, either – or not from my point of view. We mustn’t forget that the poor fellow’s position is a difficult one.’

‘Difficult? I don’t suppose he has any anxieties about his next month’s screw.’

George was baffled for a moment by this apparent
non sequitur.
Then he remembered that the financial slant on things must be a constant preoccupation with Edward.

‘I mean, in particular, his having been set on me’ – George seemed to enjoy this expression – ‘so briskly. It must make his position with Mary and yourself feel awkward to him.’

‘Really, Uncle George!’ Hilda exclaimed. ‘Can’t you see he’s not that sensitive sort of person at all?’

‘I’ve very little idea of what sort of person he is. How could I have, after only a day’s acquaintance? So I must give him the benefit of every doubt.’

Edward Naylor endorsed this with an emphatic nod— presumably as being a proper sentiment on the part of a parson, or even ex-parson. But precisely this annoyed Hilda. Uncle George should take the freedom of his new position, and stop laying on Christian attitudes so freely. He was in danger of being hung up on them.

‘Of course, we all have our troubles,’ Edward Naylor said suddenly, and as if his mind had strayed elsewhere. ‘They’re not to be avoided –in business or out of it.’

‘Nothing going too badly, I hope?’ George asked. He realised that he had been presented with a cue for some such question as this.

‘Unemployment, George. It goes on and on, and up and up. It’s a tragedy.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ George said soberly.

‘Reached its optimum donkey’s ages ago.’

‘Its optimum?’ George had repeated the word in perplexity. Hilda’s interest sharpened. She was developing a theory that her father owned a dual personality. One personality made all the going while he was being a director of companies in London, and was entirely concerned with material interests and the main chance. The second took over here at home, where he made a very passable country gentleman, acknowledging all the proper responsibilities. With luck, Hilda thought, it might be possible to elaborate an entertaining comparison between this sort of Englishman (who must be fairly common) and those Japanese business men who were said to spend the day wearing bowler hats and carrying brief-cases and furled umbrellas, but then went home and dressed appropriately to a domestic set-up in which no hint of a modern world was permitted. What was particularly worth study in her father was the manner in which the two personalities occasionally played Bo-peep or hide-and-seek. Or at least they did this at Plumley, and with pleasing effects of incongruity as a result. Perhaps this was happening now.

‘Yes,’ Hilda said, backing up her uncle. ‘What’s optimum unemployment?’

‘The optimum comes just before the numbers reach the point at which government has to cut off the pocket-money element in the hand-out. Particularly to the youngsters. So long as they had time on their hands and a bit of money in their pockets, they were our best customers. And we were always coming up with something, you may be sure. The pin-tables and the fruit-machines and the one-armed bandits: they fell off a little, but along came the arcade video games. We looked like hitting the jackpot there. But they’re no good without that careless little pile of tenpenny bits, or whatever you call them. I’d no more sink big money in that sort of hardware now than I would in suburban cinemas. The discos are holding up best. You pay for the part of the noise you don’t make yourself, but all the fling-around is for free. Thank God we diversified there in time. They even put something in your own pocket, George, old boy.’

This was a genial reference to that little private income. George didn’t like it, and a hint of this must have shown on his face.

‘Not that I wholly approve of the discos,’ Edward Naylor went on rapidly. ‘It isn’t good for morality, all that near-hysteria. No better than bawdy-houses, some of them, I’m told.’

‘What nonsense!’ Hilda said. ‘Stick to the hard-nosed stuff, daddy, and cut out the rest.’

George now looked dismayed, but whether this was on account of what he took to be a failure in filial piety wasn’t clear. And Edward scarcely paused.

‘Or demos, now,’ he said. ‘Arid ground, if any ever was. Not a penny in them! I did try for a corner in anti-nuclear banners and badges, but a clever little oriental chap got ahead of me. And take stadium control. Bigger and better barriers on the terraces, and cut down on your police bills. Sound idea. But no sooner had we started writing the cheques than people stopped going to football matches at all, in case they got a brick or a bottle in the face. Cowardly. No longer any spirit in that whole class of society. I tell you, we’ve a hard row to hoe.’

‘Again, it’s a point of view,’ George said. ‘You know, I hate dire poverty. I hate the very idea of it. But it may be maintained that, in measure, it helps some people to discover that a good many of the best things in life come for free. It’s a subversive thought, of course, when the growth of leisure industries is in question.’

‘Well, yes. Quite worth thinking about.’ Edward Naylor wasn’t in the least offended by this clever, if almost incomprehensible talk on the part of his eccentric brother. Hilda, on the other hand, was not, on reflection, quite pleased. Uncle George was right to take her father’s innocent spouting not too seriously. But there was something a little facile in that stuff about the best things in life not bringing a bill along with them. It was Sunday Schoolish, in fact. A boy bathing in a stream was happy, but might be the happier for knowing that his new fishing-rod was waiting for him on the bank. If he believed that the possession of a fishing-rod was going to be beyond him for keeps, he mightn’t be happy at all. Hilda recalled how once at Oxford she had skimmed through something called a theodicy, written by an eighteenth-century bishop. Where the bishop might have written the word ‘poverty’ he wrote ‘freedom from riches’, and he had pointed out that if all you could afford was bread and water you weren’t likely to contract gout. Hilda saw that her line of thought here pointed – although a little uncertainly – to the possibility that Uncle George might find it harder to shed certain simple habits of mind and unexamined persuasions than a belief in the Holy Trinity or whatever. Stopping off being a priest was probably a pretty complex affair.

Presently her father was talking about the iniquitous tax you had to pay for the privilege of giving some incompetent new office-boy a job pretty well for life, and Uncle George was listening with every appearance of attention. If patience was regarded as a specifically Christian virtue (but she didn’t suppose it was: Stoics and people had recommended it) Uncle George would certainly need no urging by Father Hooker to retain it. Hilda herself being not all that patient, she made an excuse of clearing up the tea things for leaving the brothers together, and then she went off to her room.

She opened her diary and made some brief notes on what she had been listening to. She closed it and thought – again quite briefly – about Simon Prowse. (He was rather an attractive young man.) After this, she decided to address her mind more seriously to the question of her vocation.

Whenever she did this, it was Hilda’s habit to take the lid off the portable typewriter that stood on the desk beside the diary. She did this now – so that the machine was waiting, expectant, to record the comedy that she knew existed all round her. If only she could define it, catch it! She might begin, if not the actual composition, at least the thinking about it where she had left off, which had been with the difficulties of basing a novel on one’s own family set-up. But the difficulty she had seen was a moral rather than an aesthetic one: almost no more than the silly business of good taste. Now she saw what might be called the obverse of the proposition. It would all be too damned easy. Provided she distanced and contracted the element of actual theological debate (which was going to come her way very little, in any case) there was enough in the actual goings on around her to provide the material for quite a neat job. Supposing she had set a tape-recorder going during that recent tea-drinking, supposing she carried such a thing around with her through Plumley Park and its environs: supposing this, she would be in possession of what would make, with only a minimum of doctoring and editing, a very average sort of cheerful little modern novel. And what on earth would be the good of that? Of what was simply happening, of what happened all the time, we all had quite as much as we wanted. Straight realism, mere reportage (good word again) was dead boring, and remained so even if given a comic twist or two here and there.
You had to manage a much bigger twist.
That was it! Something out of common expectation, something eruptive and belonging essentially to the imagination, had to be haled in. And in the present case, in which there lurked matter of quite grave import within the Uncle George/Father Hooker charade, what you fished out of the hat had to be somehow equipollent (
meaty
word) with the underlying seriousness of Uncle George’s situation. An earthquake, Hilda thought rather wildly. A plague. An unexpected return of the Black Death.

At this point in her reflections there came a knock at Hilda’s door. Knocking at doors was prescriptive with the Naylors, and as each person’s knock tended to be of slightly different quality, you generally knew who was there even before the door opened. This time it was Hilda’s mother. She was at once revealed as wearing what Hilda thought of as her ‘vexatious little chore’ expression. It would be some
quite
small thing, but the daughter of the house had to provide the helping hand.

‘My dear,’ Mary Naylor said, ‘it’s lemons. It seems that Mrs Deathridge is proposing pancakes.’ Mrs Deathridge was the cook.

‘And there are no lemons. I see.’

‘It seems she used the last two lemons when we had those little scraps of smoked salmon the other day. Of course she ought to have put them on the shopping-list. But Mrs Deathridge, you know, is getting on.’

‘Aren’t we all? But I’ll go. I’ll go along on my bike.’

‘Yes, dear – but of course there’s no hurry.’ Mrs Naylor looked at her watch. ‘Mr Rudkin always keeps open till six.’ Mr Rudkin ran the village shop, which was also the post office. ‘I think you should get half a dozen, although I believe they are rather expensive nowadays.’

‘They oughtn’t to be. There were endless acres of the things coming along in Italy.’

‘It must be something to do with the Common Market.’ This was a favourite thought of Mary Naylor’s. ‘Mrs Deathridge says she has remembered that your uncle is fond of pancakes. So I didn’t like, you see, to suggest she give us something else.’

‘Of course we must support Uncle George in every way. Daddy keeps on saying so.’

‘And we must be civil, Hilda, to this rather pompous Father Hooker. It is such a serious thing he is trying to help your uncle about. Don’t you think?’

‘Well, yes – I suppose I do.’

‘I am afraid, at times, that your uncle may be tempted to make fun of him. George can be like that, even when much troubled in mind.’

‘So he can.’

‘And I’m a little worried about your brothers. It’s a shocking thing to say, but they can both at times be rather rude. I’m sure they don’t mean to be.’

‘You can’t be rude without meaning to be rude.’ Hilda reacted conscientiously and at once against woolly uses of language.

‘No, dear – of course not.’ Mrs Naylor was entirely pacificatory. ‘I wonder whether you could just give Charles and Henry a hint?’

‘No, mummy, I could not.’ Hilda said this decisively.

‘But mightn’t it come best from you? You are all young, and do so wonderfully understand one another.’

‘It would only be counter-productive.’ Hilda didn’t much care for this very current expression, but she was clear that nannying her brothers was a vexatious little chore that simply wasn’t on. ‘I think I’ll go for those lemons straight away.’

‘Good! But there is just one more thing.’ There was usually one thing more when Mrs Naylor conversed with her daughter, since she would have liked a fuller confidential relationship than in fact existed between them. ‘When you all met Mr Prowse at the church this morning did you get the impression that he
knows
?’

‘About Uncle George’s difficulties, you mean? I don’t think he does. But I suppose he’s bound to tumble to the situation sooner or later. I don’t see that just when is very important.’

‘What I’m wondering, Hilda, is whether Father Hooker may think it part of his own duty to tell our parish priest, and whether it mightn’t come better from one of ourselves.’

‘Christopher Prowse isn’t Uncle George’s parish priest. It’s none of his business, I’d suppose. And, in any case, it’s something that ought to be left to Uncle George himself.’

‘I’m sure you are right, dear.’ Mrs Naylor was quite a strong-minded woman in small patches, but with her family it was becoming one of her pleasures to do a good deal of giving in. ‘Perhaps,’ she added, ‘
four
lemons. Only the other day, your father was saying we must be careful. It was when Charles started talking about a new Mercedes. But I suppose what goes for motor cars goes for lemons as well.’

‘
Four
lemons, then,’ Hilda said, and prepared to set out on her errand.

Mr Rudkin’s shop lay at the far end of the village, just beyond the church and vicarage. On this occasion, as Hilda cycled past, there was no sign of Simon Prowse, whether peering through aspidistra leaves or otherwise. (But why should there be? Hilda judged it odd that she had thought of him.) In the shop, however, she came on Simon’s hostess, carrying a capacious basket. It was almost closing time, and Mr Rudkin’s messenger-boy was already fiddling with the shutters. Mr Rudkin himself was attending in an appropriately semi-deferential way upon the vicar’s wife. (He would a little step up the attitude when it came to Hilda’s turn.) Hilda had a notion – or perhaps now invented a notion – that Edith Prowse came into the shop regularly at this hour in the hope of acquiring at a reduced price the more perishable of its residual stock of vegetables. The Prowses had no children, so Hilda supposed they couldn’t be exactly desperate. But she knew that it wasn’t only mice that were free from riches (and consequently from the threat of gout) in churches. The knowledge didn’t make her feel exactly uncomfortable. It did, however, make her a little wary. She mustn’t, for example, embark now on her mother’s comical decision that it had better be four, and not six lemons. So she was still thinking up a line of harmless talk when Mrs Prowse addressed her with enthusiasm.