The Naylors (26 page)

‘Good afternoon!’ Hooker said in a loud voice. And when this was without effect, ‘My man!’ he said commandingly and in a voice louder still. This did have some result. Very deliberately, the porter got to his feet and set down his paper on a small table beside him. He then further studied it, as if to fix in his mind the precise point at which he was breaking off from its discourse. This achieved, he emerged from the sentry box, and from across the barrier eyed Father Hooker and George, Bill and Bess, with equal and comprehensive disfavour.

‘Not today,’ he said.

‘My good man,’ Hooker said (for he was still offended), ‘will you please . . .’

‘Take the brutes away,’ the porter said. ‘There’s nobody here on Sundays. Bring them back tomorrow, if you like. But I can tell you it won’t be more than a couple of quid for both. That’s the going rate at the moment. A quid for a dog and 50p for a cat. Talk of a black market! Every brat in the district has been collaring the creatures and bringing them along.’

How the gentlemen from Plumley Park would have proceeded in the face of this astounding intelligence will never be known, since their colloquy with this rough-hewn but not unhelpful person was abruptly terminated by a brisk toot upon a motor-horn immediately behind them. It had the effect of making the porter bob back into his box and throw up the barrier. A car then glided past; its driver glanced at the visitors, drew quickly to a halt, and at once jumped out to confront them.

‘Scattergood himself,’ Father Hooker murmured hastily to George. ‘A most fortunate circumstance.’

George had his doubts about this. Dr Scattergood was glancing at his companion with, for the moment, no sign of recognition. Only a few hours earlier, Hooker had preached at the man and subsequently received from him a polite expression of gratitude for his performance. So this blankness, however brief, could not be other than mortifying. And even the blankness was not quite entire, since Scattergood was scarcely concealing a sense of irritation at the untimely intrusion he had come upon. But then his glance turned from Father Hooker to George, and at once his expression changed.

‘Good Lord!’ he said. ‘George Naylor, surely? I have wondered whether the local people were relations of yours. Delighted to see you.’

‘Do-You!’ The ancient familiarity came to George’s lips at once, and he found himself shaking hands with this recovered school-fellow. Then he remembered what had just been happening. ‘Do-You,’ he repeated on a sterner note, ‘do you go in for vivisection in this place? Your porter seemed to think we wanted to sell you those dogs.’

‘How very absurd!’ Dr Scattergood – a dried-up and cerebral kind of man – instantly endeavoured to extend to Bill and Bess a regard indicative of sympathy and esteem, and to this the spaniels as instantly responded with piteously feeble tail-waggings,
oeillades,
and speaking looks. ‘Vivisection? Definitely not. But post-mortems, of course, often enough. We do have rather a high mortality, so far – which is why we’re in the market for any strays that are brought along. And I can assure you they have a whale of a time.’

George found no immediate reply, no doubt because he very reasonably suspected that Jeoffry and Old Foss were among the creatures enjoying a whale of a time at the moment, and that the same hospitality would be extended to Bill and Bess at the drop of a handkerchief. Father Hooker, who was clearly displeased at being a little left out of all this, took advantage of his silence.

‘May I reintroduce myself?’ he said to Scattergood with some formality. ‘Adrian Hooker.’

‘Yes—yes, of course.’ Scattergood’s glance had strayed away beyond his perimeter-fence, and it was evident that he was suppressing with difficulty a certain apprehensiveness as to what might lie there. ‘Yes, indeed,’ he said. ‘This morning. Yes, of course.’

‘Naylor and I have been walking the dogs, and had intended no more than a call. But various circumstances have invited in us the persuasion that something untoward may be afoot of which it might be well to apprise you. Naylor has even been photographed.’

‘Naylor has been photographed?’ Scattergood was perhaps as baffled by this apparently inconsequent announcement as by the unfamiliar choiceness of Father Hooker’s phraseology.

‘By the police.’

‘Oh, I see. We know that a spot of bother may be coming along. But the police are making too much of it – at least if it’s no more than the animal cranks, DFL, they call themselves. Dumb Friends’ Lib, I believe. Harmless enough. But we’re keeping a low profile, with everybody off the premises except the fellows who get our dumb friends their supper.’ Scattergood appeared to have reassured himself with these remarks. ‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘whether you’d care to look round? I believe there’s been growing gossip about the Institute. You’d perhaps be able to tell people that we don’t run to atrocities.’

George found himself not particularly attracted by this invitation, which he judged to be a little on the casual and graceless side. And, even so, he and Hooker had no title to receive it, since they had barged in on the place in the most unwarranted way. He saw, however, that it attracted Hooker, who had been some sort of scientist at the outset of his career and owned perhaps a lingering fondness for labs and stinks. So George declared that it would interest him to see something of what went on in the name of animal genetics. Then he wondered about Bill and Bess. It seemed peculiarly unsuitable that they should be included in the invitation, and at the same time difficult to see how they could be left behind. But this problem solved itself at once. They had been let off the leash, and had taken the opportunity to withdraw discreetly from what they plainly regarded as an insalubrious environment. In fact they could just be seen, already a quarter of a mile away, ambling composedly back to Plumley Park.

Determining this had taken all three men, together with the porter, beyond the gate. As they returned to it, Scattergood glanced up at the line of the downs.

‘At least we have a view,’ he said. ‘A lab with a view. It’s something . . . Dear me! Look at the Tump. Somebody having a picnic, I suppose, and letting a fire get a little out of hand.’

They all looked at the Tump – or, rather, at a small column of smoke rising close beside it. And, even as Scattergood spoke, the column broadened, thickened, climbed. It was a great white shaft in air. Momentarily, it mushroomed and spread; became as a cloud in the heavens shaped like the hand of Man. Then it was again a simple column of smoke, white in the sunlight. Almost to an effect of dialogue, of drama, it confronted, across the vale, the black smoke still issuing from the tall chimney-stack of the Institute of Animal Genetics.

‘Odd sort of effect,’ Scattergood said indifferently. ‘Now, come along inside.’

The interior of the Institute at once reminded George of a hospital. He was familiar with hospitals – not as ever having been a patient in one (since he had reached middle life without serious illness) but as having frequently visited in them sufferers having some claim – although frequently a slender claim – to be regarded as within the sphere of his mission. He had thus sat at the bedside of numerous men, women and children just not in sufficient pain to make the company of fellow-mortals meaningless, and of others who, although free from such immediate physical affliction, had been left by one trouble or another in a state of impenetrable depression. Despite these sombre experiences, George had always managed to like hospitals. They were surprisingly cheerful places on the whole. They were beautifully clean. And, whether or not it was consciously identified as such, there was a great deal of the Christian conduct of life going on in them.

The Institute had, for a start, the true hospital smell: one of common disinfectants in the main, but to the lay mind seeming to incorporate intriguing whiffs of chloroform or ether escaping from operating theatres and drifting down corridors. Yet in this place, somehow, they were disturbing smells, and George, as he walked round in the wake of Dr Scattergood (formerly prone to be addressed as Do-You on an interrogative note), wasn’t at all comfortable. In so far as his presence here was the consequence of a small social observance thought up by Hooker it was plainly ridiculous. If there was anything in Hooker’s more recently discovered notion of a kind of mediating ministry in the troubled field of Yes or No to nuclear missiles (‘guidance’ had been Hooker’s august word) then they were wasting time in trailing through a series of labs.

There were a lot of labs – all deserted and tidied up as at the close of play – and to George they were incomprehensible and boring. But not so with Father Hooker. To Father Hooker they were as is the renewed scent of battle wafted to the old war horse from afar. There could be no doubt about that, and it was interesting in its fashion. This hardened theologian (and windbag, in an uncharitable regard) had a soft spot for experimental philosophy, a nostalgic thought for the career he had renounced to become a parson. Put thus, the thing sobered George’s impatience at once. To a disenchanted view, Hooker was as absurd as the dogmas he had turned up at Plumley to argue for. But he kept on, as it were, dodging into postures and persuasions one had to respect. George again realised that when Hooker departed he would miss him quite a lot.

‘And now,’ Scattergood was saying, ‘you may care just to take a glance at the hotel. We call it that. And, as far as we can, we try to make it four-star.’

George knew at once what the hotel was. Had things fallen out differently, Bill and Bess might have checked into it. Jeoffry and Old Foss (and, for that matter, Sinbad and Peter) were probably accommodated in it now.

One whole side of the Institute, and a spacious courtyard within it, turned out to be devoted to this residential purpose, comprehensively conceived. It had already become clear that the place was a dogs’ home and a cattery: so much had been implicit in the tariff obligingly cited by the man in the glass box. But there were also rats and rabbits, hamsters and (perhaps as the totemic creature of the concern) guinea-pigs as well. Nor was it exclusively a mammalian hostelry. There was an aviary thronged with brightly-plumaged birds. There was an aquarium, chilly and dimly lit, in which were to be observed, through transparent panels conveniently disposed, fish dun and liveried, harlequin-like and monkish, darting, or mysteriously suspended with faintly flickering fins. If the Institute wasn’t positively a zoo, this was because there was nothing very large in it. There were several spider monkeys, but elephants and hippopotamuses were not in evidence. There appeared, indeed, to be a premium set on the medium-sized and the small. Very probably – George thought – there was a lavish provision of entities not visible at all, like the micro-organisms and amoebas so skilfully deployed by Len in his discussion with Mrs Archer during that railway journey not very long ago.

But the cats and dogs were – so to speak, and to vary the image – the parlour boarders. The dogs, in particular, were handsomely housed, their quarters having the appearance less of kennels than of cubicles – and indeed less of cubicles than of well-equipped bed-sits. This must have been a concession to sentiment, the Dog being the Friend of Man. In various ways individual tastes appeared to have been consulted in the appointments of these homes from home. But there was one exception to this. Every dog, of whatever breed or size (and the range was great), had been issued with an identical rubber bone – a simple point at which, one could feel, invention need not have failed. But none of the dogs was at present interested in its bone, because all the dogs were asleep – immobile in cushioned ease, save for those occasional twitches and yelps which reveal that dogs, too, may experience disturbing dreams.

The lighting was dim, and it was moments before George distinguished another uniformity than that of the innutritious bones. Each dog must have worn a collar, since from its neck depended a small glittering object which George couldn’t very clearly see. He supposed this to be an identity disk. It might, of course, be a long-service medal. All the dogs were beautifully groomed, and this was true, too, of the cats: a fact apparent even although all these creatures could be viewed only through expanses of glass.

The cats (a hundred or so, it seemed to be) were awake, although many of them seemed to spend a good deal of time with luxuriously closed eyes. The cats (equipped with the same obscure objects at the neck) radiated health and contentment. A curious susurration or hum, which George at first took to be the product of a superfluity of static electricity about the place, actually indicated that a quite wholesale purring was going on. Was it Rousseau who, amid the solitude and silence of the Alps, had become conscious of sounds, of reverberations, that proved to issue from a stocking manufactory? The cats were creating an effect rather like that. George attempted to identify from among them the missing Plumley Park couple, but failed to do so. He then reflected that it was all unconscious of their fate that the thronging feline victims uttered their monotonous little hymn of thanksgiving for an easy life.

This thought (the mildly edifying cast of which belonged to the lately discarded phase of George’s career) was suddenly banished by a disconcerting discovery. Father Hooker had disappeared, and so had Scattergood. The former (as Hooker himself would say) had bolted from the cats’ hotel, and the latter had solicitously followed him.

George hurried into the corridor, and found that the two men had not gone far. Father Hooker was standing only a few yards away: pale, trembling, and apparently on the verge of nervous prostration. Scattergood was studying him with curiosity and a decent element of concern.

‘Good God!’ George exclaimed. ‘Has Hooker been taken ill?’

‘Cat phobia, I think. Not an uncommon thing. But quite a severe attack. Interesting, if the sheer number of cats enhances the trouble. Deserves investigating.’ Scattergood turned to the sufferer. ‘That right?’ he said. ‘A phobia about cats?’ He spoke in a loud and urgent voice, as perhaps one does – George thought – to a person in danger of falling into coma.