George Naylor began the following day with a feeling of holiday. This was because it was Saturday, and Father Hooker had explained that he must devote it entirely to the composing of his sermon. The privilege of preaching, he said, came to him all too rarely, and he regarded every occasion of the sort as a heavy responsibility, to be prepared for with care. It was a statement not wholly consistent with what Hilda had reported of his attitude upon first hearing of Christopher Prowse’s invitation to edify a rural congregation. But George didn’t quarrel with it, being rejoiced (he believed) at the prospect of a day’s freedom. Almost as soon as breakfast was over, he took himself off to a corner of the garden for a long immersion in what Hooker would have described as light reading: the promisingly lengthy novel by Salman Rushdie he had picked up in Blackwell’s.
Mr Rushdie, it seemed, was an Oxford man, who chose to write about his native India. Rather well, George decided after a dozen pages. Very well, indeed, he told himself after a further dozen, and he settled back in his deck-chair with every prospect of complete absorption until lunch-time. But then, and very strangely, the mystery of midnight’s children ceased to command him. He took time off from it to think of something else; he did this not once but several times; eventually he had to recognise that what was distracting him was the behaviour of Father Hooker.
He was feeling annoyed with Hooker. There was nothing new about this. The man had annoyed him from the start – from the very moment, it might be said, of his first lowering The Times from before his nose in the corner of that railway-carriage. But now it was a new sort of annoyance, and a surprising one. He was annoyed that Hooker should be wasting his time concocting a sermon for a gaggle of retired army men and garden-prattling women. Hooker’s proper business was discussing theology with George.
George wasn’t particularly alarmed by this discovery of how his own mind was moving. Hooker was making no headway with him, and almost certainly knew that he wasn’t. It was merely that Hooker represented something George had been going short of for several years: well-ordered discourse from a well-stocked mind. In his East End mission George’s speculative intelligence had slumbered; he had spent himself being wise and understanding and avuncular to immature and ill-informed and touchingly helpless and bewildered people. Hooker, although undeniably of a somewhat rebarbative personality, was a top man in his line. He would probably end up as Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at Oxford.
This was no doubt to exaggerate Hooker’s abilities. George really knew this. But he also knew that his liability to error in the matter was an index of the extent to which he had fallen out of touch with learned and scholarly persons. Yet he had been finding, in the course of his talks with Hooker, that Theology, if the Queen of the Sciences, is also to be likened to a bicycle. Once proficient, you are proficient for keeps. Mount even after long desuetude, and you don’t positively tumble. In arguing about Christian dogma with Hooker he had no sense of having to keep his end up. It was level-pegging most of the time. And on all sorts of interesting by-roads they were apt to look about them and discover common ground.
Having thus reasoned things out, George decided it was amusing rather than sinister that he should want to hog Hooker. So he returned contentedly to Rushdie’s India, emerging from it only when the single syllable ‘Nosh!’, bellowed at him across the lawn by his nephew, Henry, told him that luncheon was on the table.
It was a dull meal, not accompanied by much conversation. Hilda tried a topic or two, but with, for her uncle, the detectable aim of eliciting absurdity in aid of professional note-taking. Charles was glum, perhaps wondering whether he could decently tote that gun as well as his fishing-rod to Scotland, just as a hint that he would like to be asked to stay on until the Glorious Twelfth arrived. Nor was Henry cheerful, and George asked himself whether his discontent was a matter of intellectual malaise. To a casual regard Henry was almost as Philistine as his brother. But it was evident that he worked hard at his maths, and perhaps he had got far enough with the discipline to realise that his own little play-pen therein had its bars; that being ‘good’ at maths at school, and even at a university, doesn’t make one in any weighty sense a mathematician. So Henry might well be feeling it was a waste of effort.
George had been thinking a good deal about waste. Waste had become one of his talking points with Hooker. The sheer vast wastefulness everywhere evident in nature was one of the things hardest to square with the conception of a beneficent creator. George had instanced (perhaps hoping to discompose his opponent) the spermatozoa: millions of the little brutes elbowing and jostling and wriggling in completely futile effort, with perhaps not one of them making it in the end. Hooker had welcomed the spermatozoa as affording a striking instance of the Divine Abundance. An empty phrase – George thought – but a resonant one. He again perceived that he was becoming rather addicted to Hooker as a disputant.
The children’s father, too, was pretty silent during the meal. Several times, indeed, Edward Naylor made as if to address his brother, and on each occasion failed to do so. There was something about this that alerted George, although he couldn’t quite tell why. And he was unprepared for what followed.
He had returned to the garden, proposing in Mr Rushdie’s company to make a further passage to India and its perplexing inhabitants: a far-away place, far-away peoples, about which and whom, after some centuries of messing around, we know less than we should. This sombre thought, perhaps a consequence of that general gloom at the luncheon-table, was quite comfortably with George as he settled himself again in his deck-chair. But the book remained unopened. It was because he observed his brother to be bearing down on him.
This description wouldn’t have satisfied Hilda. ‘Tacking towards him,’ was more accurate. Edward, that is to say, was approaching in a strolling and criss-cross fashion designed to suggest that actual contact with his brother would be unpremeditated and virtually fortuitous. When it had been achieved, however, Edward drew up a second chair and sat down on it.
‘It seems that chap Hooker’s going to preach tomorrow,’ he said.
‘Yes. He is.’
‘A bit out of turn, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Hooker rather felt that himself. But the Prowses were very keen on it, I gather, and he has allowed himself to be persuaded. At least he’ll be a change from your vicar. Prowse can’t exactly be described as having a very striking mental endowment.’
‘Certainly not.’ Edward Naylor’s tone was that of one who concurs in rebutting an aspersion. ‘Awkward fellow, though, in some ways, Hooker.’
‘He hasn’t come to Plumley, Edward, to display social accomplishments.’
‘No, no – one must grant him that.’ Edward was silent for a moment following this not wholly lucid remark. Then he apparently decided that he had been offered what might be termed a legitimate lead.
‘But as to what the beggar is here for,’ he said. ‘How do things go? Do you feel that you’re likely to—?’ Edward broke off for a moment. The words he had been about to use were ‘give in’, which seemed not quite felicitous. But he found himself seeking for some periphrasis in vain. ‘—give in?’ he said.
‘Dear me, no!’ George seemed to find this question merely surprising. ‘Hooker and I remain, I fear, sadly far apart. But we are having very interesting discussions, all the same. There are areas of contemporary thinking in which he is much more at home than I am. He even seems to me to possess a certain innovative power. I have been much struck by some of the things he has said about the kerygmatic Christ.’
‘Is that so?’ To Edward Naylor it would not have been surprising to learn that this personage inhabited an ashram in Mr Rushdie’s subcontinent. But he listened respectfully to his brother nevertheless.
‘And there’s another striking thing about Hooker. He is very much a kenoticist – which I take to be unusual in orthodox Anglican theologians today. He has even said to me . . .’ George broke off – perhaps as conscious that Edward himself might never much have reflected upon whether Jesus Christ was aware of being the Second Person of the Trinity. ‘But about what you were asking,’ he said. ‘About caving in and knuckling under. Definitely not.’
‘Capital!’ The vicar’s churchwarden appeared to experience no difficulty in uttering this decided commendation. ‘After all, it’s not a disaster, you know.’
‘A disaster?’
‘My dear fellow, you do have that small income from the shop. It’s not much, but it will serve to tide things over until I can get something fixed. It took several months with Charles, but I managed it. The only trouble in that quarter is that the boy doesn’t turn up very often. It worries the little managing chaps.’ Edward paused – almost as if expecting his brother to say, ‘They won’t have that trouble with me’. Not receiving this assurance, he went on, ‘I don’t know whether I’ve told you about Fiesta?’
‘Fiesta? I’m sure you haven’t.’
‘It’s the Italian word for a jollification of a churchy sort.’
‘Or might it be the Spanish?’ George suggested diffidently.
‘That’s right – the Spanish. Saints’ Days and the like are fiestas. Carnivals, you might say, with lots of entertainment laid on. Actually, I thought for a time of calling the company “Carnivals Limited”. But it sounds not quite right. Carnivals ought to be unlimited, don’t you think?’ Edward laughed happily at his own wit. ‘So I’ve chosen just “Fiesta” instead. Catches the eye better. The advertising wallahs have a saying, you know: “Six letters catch the eye”. Perfectly true.’
‘My dear Edward, whatever are you talking about?’
‘And do you know what put the whole idea in my head? Simply keeping my own eyes open on the Plumley home front. The Prowses and their unending bazaars and jumble sales. Dismal affairs – but the only church activities for which the village people turn out en masse. Scrabbling for rubbish from the lumber-rooms of their slightly more prosperous neighbours – but really rather wanting to let their hair down as well. You remember Jim Fenwick, the padre we had before this dim Christopher Prowse?’
‘Of course I remember Fenwick. He baptised all the children.’
‘A stout fellow, and a parson of the old school. Do you remember what he always took along to the bazaars and so forth? You might call it a gambling machine.’
‘A gambling machine?’
‘A kind of rustic roulette.’ Edward Naylor was plainly delighted with this linguistic happiness. ‘People bought numbered tickets at a bob a time. Then Fenwick would twirl a kind of arrow-affair on a board with the numbers disposed like the figures on a clock. If it stopped on your number you got a bottle of whisky or packet of tea or pin-cushion or whatever it was. The ploy would go on all afternoon with no shortage of takers. I suddenly saw it as a promising thing, just asking for development. That’s where Fiesta will come in. Hire out suitable arcade-type equipment to parishes on a short-term deposit and percentage basis. With a discreet religious slant to some of it – and that’s where you’d be invaluable, George: as religious adviser. For instance, I’ve thought of an electronic contraption with a string of mineral-water bottles seeming to pass across the screen. Press the right button at the right split second, and one of them turns to wine and bobs out on the winner. Endless scope for invention of that sort. Watch the Waves as Jesus Saves.’
‘What?’
‘You move him forward on a zigzag, trying to dodge the waves. You can’t control the waves, which are randomised, but only Jesus. If you let him hit one, he begins to sink, but if you get him in the clear again quickly enough, he walks on happily. How do you feel about it?’
‘I rather think Prowse might jib at having Plumley latch on to Cana – or to high jinks on the Sea of Galilee.’
‘Not in too good taste, perhaps?’ Edward Naylor, a reasonable man, considered this possible view of the matter soberly. ‘But that’s just where you’d be so much a key figure!’ he then said loyally. ‘So do think about it, old boy.’
An adequate response to this plea to think about the unthinkable eluded George for the moment, but he was saved from awkwardness by the arrival of his sister-in-law.
‘Edward,’ Mary Naylor asked, ‘do you happen to have seen Jeoffry and Old Foss?’
‘I don’t think I’ve set eyes on them either yesterday or today.’
‘I’m just a little worried about them.’
‘My dear, they do wander off from time to time. But here’s Hooker. We can ask him.’ Father Hooker was indeed approaching. He bore an abstracted air, and was perhaps going over in his mind the successive heads under which he would order his discourse on the following day. ‘Hooker, you don’t happen to have run into Jeoffry and Old Foss?’
‘I beg your pardon?’ It was almost with a start that Father Hooker had become aware he was being addressed. ‘Run into whom?’
‘Not exactly whom,’ George said with some amusement. ‘Jeoffry and Old Foss are the cats.’
‘Ah, the cats. I may perhaps be forgiven for being a little astray. The names are somewhat surprising, are they not?’
‘Far from it,’ George said. He was welcoming this diversion from his brother’s monstrous vision of a new-style church bazaar. ‘Two very distinguished cats have been so named, and it was my niece who called ours after them.’ (George said ‘ours’ entirely without self-consciousness, since at Plumley he knew he was at home.) ‘Edward Lear, who tells us that he has a runcible hat, tells us also that Old Foss is the name of his cat. But the original Jeoffry was more august. He belonged to Christopher Smart. “For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry,” Smart says.’
‘So he does – in the Jubilate Agno.’ Father Hooker, whose dislike of cats in real life had made itself evident on his first evening at Plumley, was quite on terms with poetical cats – and moreover had a weakness for exhibiting himself as a well-read man. ‘Smart sees his cat as duly and daily serving the Living God.’
‘How very interesting!’ Mary Naylor said. ‘But it was rather odd of Hilda to choose such names, all the same.’ Mary was in fact rendered uncomfortable by this unaccountable bobbing up of religion in a domestic feline context. ‘And you can see that it is rather worrying,’ she went on. ‘Not their names, I mean, but their having disappeared for so long. So many get killed on the road.’
‘I wish I could reassure you,’ Father Hooker said. ‘But, unhappily, I have seen no cats of late.’
‘Happening all the time,’ Edward Naylor said robustly. ‘And there’s another thing. A car or van comes along, kills your cat, and leaves the mangled body in the middle of the road. Presently another fellow comes along, stops, and thinks he’s doing the decent thing by picking up the corpse and chucking it over a hedge or into the ditch. One of the farmers told me of its occurring only last week. He’s lost his cat, and knows pretty well what’s happened. But his kids are still hunting for the body. Old Foss and Jeoffry may have gone the same way at one swoop. Not but that, ten to one, nothing of the kind has occurred, and they’ll turn up again as usual.’
‘You don’t think,’ Father Hooker asked – and distinguishably with a faint wistfulness – ‘that they may have been devoured by a fox?’
‘My dear sir, foxes don’t devour cats.’ Edward was vastly entertained. ‘Foxes devour hens and geese. And all brutes are choosey. Cats themselves, for instance. A cat will stalk a pigeon right across the garden, but usually ignore a pheasant a couple of yards away. Unless it’s a wounded pheasant. I’ve known a cat go for one of them.’ Edward was very much the countryman as he produced this scarcely recondite information. ‘Is that the damned telephone?’ It was certainly the damned telephone, just audible as it rang in the house. ‘Both boys have gone off, and Hilda ignores the thing on principle – so there’s probably only that useless girl.’
‘I’ll go, dear,’ Mary said – and added, in case her husband’s evident immobility might appear a little lacking in propriety: ‘It’s sure to be Mr Rudkin about the bacon. He promised it for the week-end, but I expect Hilda may have to fetch it.’
Mary hurried away, and the three gentlemen continued to converse, perhaps more out of civility than inclination. George wanted to return to Rushdie, and Father Hooker to his sermon; Edward would have been quite content to chat, but couldn’t think of anything much to chat about. Surprisingly quickly, however, Mary reappeared on the lawn, and hurried towards them with the unmistakable air of one who brings information of moment.
‘Rather an extraordinary thing,’ she said. ‘I don’t know quite what to make of it. That was Edith Prowse. She rang up to ask whether, by any chance, Sinbad was paying a kind of visit to Jeoffry and Old Foss.’
‘Sinbad being a cat?’ George asked.
‘Yes, of course. And Sinbad has disappeared. But what’s really odd is about the Rudkins. The Rudkins’ boy has just delivered something at the vicarage: scrag-end, I think Edith said. And he’s on his way here with the bacon now – which is one comfort, at least. But what he told the Prowses was that Peter has vanished.’
‘Peter Rudkin?’ Father Hooker asked, suitably shocked. ‘A little boy?’
‘No, no—of course not. Peter is the Rudkins’ cat.’
Noon on the following day, Sunday, found George back in the garden. Again he had Mr Rushdie for company. Or he carried the possibility of that, at least, under his arm. But the book, although so beguiling, once more remained unopened. George was barely conscious that this was so. What he was conscious of was simply that he was waiting. He was waiting for the return of the Park contingent from church. And, more particularly, he was waiting for his niece. He recalled that on these occasions the Naylors frequently collected appropriate fellow-worshippers and brought them home for a glass of sherry by way of recruitment after the fatigues of devotion. He hoped this wouldn’t happen on the present occasion.
Nor did it. There was a small bustle from the direction of the house, and then Hilda came across the lawn alone.
‘Well?’ George said. ‘How did it go?’
‘I hardly know where to begin.’
‘Have a man come through a door with a gun,’ George suggested with a determined lightness of air.
‘That’s only for when one’s stuck.’ Hilda was still carrying a prayer-book, and this she now laid carefully on top of Mr Rushdie on the grass before she sat down.
‘Then start,’ her uncle said, ‘with what will prove to have been a pregnant utterance on the part of a major character.’
‘Very well. The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.’
‘You mean that Hooker took that as his text? No one quite like Isaiah for texts.’
‘It was certainly Hooker’s text, and I suppose a perfectly ordinary one. It was the application that rather surprised people. Would “application” be the right word?’
‘Certainly. One applies one’s text – or handles it.’
‘Hooker handled it, all right. His great light was first seen over some desert in America, and then over Hiroshima. And we all dwell in the land of the shadow of death.’
‘So he was as good as his word.’ George said this soberly. ‘And how did it go down?’
‘Not too badly – except with what you might term some of the regulars. They clearly judged it uncalled for. But there was quite a congregation. It was really rather odd. There wasn’t much time, after all, for word to get around that there was to be a noted metropolitan preacher.’
‘I hardly think, my dear, that Hooker would care to be thought of as just that. Perhaps the sticker on the notice-board about banning the bomb had stirred curiosity a little. There was a large crowd?’
‘Good heavens, no! Where would a large crowd come from in Plumley? But on one side of the aisle there were half a dozen young people, male and female, one had never seen before. And on the other side there was a small clump of more elderly women who were also total strangers. It made me think of a wedding, with the bride’s and bridegroom’s parties similarly disposed and glowering at each other.’
‘Were those people doing that?’
‘I did feel there was some kind of mutual hostility – or something like hostility – in the air. And Edith Prowse seemed to be feeling it too. The wretched woman was all of a twitter.’
‘Was she supported by Prowse’s nephew?’
‘No, there was no sign of Simon, nor of his female friend. But it was all mildly perplexing – even without the two men from the Institute.’
‘Without what?’
‘Yes, wasn’t it odd? At the end, you know, Christopher Prowse was standing at the door as usual, shaking hands and modulating into secular conversation. And with Hooker beside him. I was almost the last out, so Christopher told me about it. He was quite thrilled, and called it a breakthrough – meaning that at last he’d attracted the intellectual classes, and not just people like us. One of the boffins had introduced himself to Christopher. He’s called Scattergood, it seems – which is a rather overpoweringly beneficent name to go about with.’
‘So it is.’ Uncle George was amused. ‘Do you know? There was a Scattergood in my House at school. And a boy in the same year with the unfortunate name of Chumworthy. They used to be addressed as Do-You and Are-You. And – what was more extraordinary – there was a House Tutor named Rainwater. We called him the Drip.’
‘Goodness, Uncle George! What a coruscation of juvenile wit.’
‘Yes, indeed – and now I must be turning senile to reminisce about such nonsense. Go on about the after-church affair.’
‘Christopher gathered that the obliging Scattergood is the top boffin at the Institute, and when he told Hooker he’d delivered a most thought-provoking address our friend was as pleased as Punch. Uncle George, just how are you thought-provoked by all this?’
‘It occurs to me that these non-pub-frequenting gentlemen were rather belatedly trying to integrate themselves with the respectable church-going community.’
‘Well, yes—perhaps. But I think – although I know you’ll say I’m plot-mongering – that they’d heard about June Gale’s sticker on that notice-board, and come along to discover whether St Michael and All Angels is a centre of anti-nuclear ferment.’
‘And they actually got something like that from Hooker?’
‘Well, no—not exactly. Hooker was most judicious. Almost Laodicean, I’d say.’ Hilda paused to admire the appropriateness of this ink-horn term, and then saw that it wouldn’t do. ‘But that’s not quite fair,’ she said. Hooker did speak up.’
‘As I’d expect him to do. For I don’t, you know, share your sense of surprise whenever he gets a good mark.’
‘You think I’m prejudiced against him.’
‘Not exactly that. And if you do rather disapprove of him it’s my fault for not greatly taking to him at the start.’ George paused to consider whether this was an adequate account of the matter. ‘And I mustn’t pretend that I adore him now,’ he added humorously. ‘All the same, if he threw up the sponge and packed his bag tomorrow, I’d positively find myself missing his company. Not that I’m other than very happy just with the family. I’m very happy, indeed. And about Hooker I’ve been rather anxious, in a way.’
‘You’ve wanted him to acquit himself well in poor Christopher’s pulpit?’
‘Yes, I have. During the last hour I’ve been distinctly in suspense about it. I’d hate the Prowses to have landed themselves in any way with something other than they’d bargained for. But it seems to have gone off fairly painlessly. We may relax.’
‘Relax, Uncle George!’ Hilda was abruptly scandalised. ‘When we’ve discovered – you and I – the most frightful things about Simon Prowse, and the Gale girl, and the place that claims to be harmlessly engaged on something called animal genetics when it’s probably thinking up bigger and better bombs? Lies and humbug all round us, and something that looks like civil commotion dead ahead! What do we do?’
If George was surprised by this sudden vehemence, he was far from displeased by it. Nevertheless he produced what was perhaps a discouraging reply.
‘I don’t know about myself,’ he said. ‘I’ve done in my time a fair amount of labouring against disabling ignorance and stupidity, not to mention what are thought of as the evil passions. I have the habit of it, and perhaps I ought to go on. But isn’t it rather your thing to stand back and observe and record? Aren’t you the chield amang us taking notes?’
‘Don’t make fun of me, Uncle George.’
‘Certainly I will make fun of you whenever I can. But do just consider. One can’t tell how to act until one has decided where one stands. And that may be difficult when an issue comes at one out of the blue. It’s different if one has lived with it, off and on, for a long time. That’s my own case, you know – which has nothing to do with bombs. And this particular affair – a possible demonstration by young people which may be against a fair target or against a totally mistaken one – is intriguing, no doubt, but not of the first significance in itself. The real issue – and it’s a huge one – seems to me to require a good deal of thought before one starts running around.’
‘Simon Prowse may have given it a good deal of thought.’
‘That is certainly so. So, conceivably, may Miss Gale – although it’s also conceivable that she represents people merely going in for rather unfocused rebellion.’
‘So you’re not going to do anything?’
‘I didn’t say that. I was suggesting you don’t yourself throw your cap too hastily into the ring.’ George was aware that he sounded feeble. At bottom he felt that this unexpected local mystery, now so urgent in his niece’s mind, was a distraction from the issues that he and Father Hooker were committed – and now with an occasionally distinguishable co-operative intent – to clarifying to the best of their ability. It was all, he saw, rather bewildering. And bewilderment (although he regarded the condition as one of his chronic liabilities) was something George had been surprisingly little aware of in himself since the moment of his stepping off the train and being met by Hilda. It had dropped from him, just as had those bouts of amnesia. But its brief return now produced rather an odd reaction. ‘I’ll tell you one thing I’ll do,’ he said. ‘I’ll keep an eye on Hooker.’
‘In heaven’s name, Uncle George, what is there to keep an eye on in Hooker?’
‘There’s the fact that he’s a mystery man.’ Thus obscurely committed to talking nonsense, George persevered with it. ‘Or perhaps a mystery woman. Don’t you notice a hint of the transvestite in him? Perhaps he’s a witch. Think of those cats. Hooker seems to be the sort of person who has a pathological fear of cats. But that may be a blind. He may have a kind of malign power over the creatures, and be organising a cats’ coven. Thrice the brinded cat hath mewed, you know.’
‘Uncle George, are you making fun again of the kind of nonsense you think goes on in my would-be inventive head?’
‘No, no—and I apologise.’ George saw that his niece was a little offended, and he was quickly repentant. ‘It must just be that I’m developing an elderly and unseemly sense of comedy. As for doing anything, I don’t know. But I do think Simon Prowse’s imposture as practised on his uncle ought to be dropped on at once. If the young man is really organising something – whether laudable or not – which may run into trouble with the law, Prowse – who is a first-rate innocent – might be suspected of complicity in whatever the dark design may be.’ George found himself on his feet, and with that fleeting sense of bewilderment gone. ‘In fact, I’ll try hunting him up now.’
‘Jolly d.’ Hilda’s displeasure had vanished. ‘And I think I’ll hunt up something, too. Where did those odd bods in church come from? Nobody had a notion about them, but they must be lurking somewhere. I’m going to look. And I’ll take Henry with me. He badly needs time off from his infinitesimals, or whatever they are.’
‘You walk Henry,’ George said, ‘and I’ll hunt down Simon.’
It had been an impulsive resolution on George’s part, prompted by a wish to show his niece that he wasn’t wholly compounded of wise passiveness. But he was determined not to go back on it, and he therefore set off at once and before turning cool on the project. As a result, he was halfway down the village street before realising that his mission wasn’t a simple one.
Its entire basis, to begin with, rested on his nephew Charles’s assertion of the advanced character of Simon Prowse’s classical studies. What if Charles had got it all wrong – perhaps muddling one man with another? What if he had even made the whole thing up out of a misplaced sense of humour? If one accepted his story as true, one was accepting something the full freakishness of which George had perhaps failed to take the measure of. Even if the young man did want to be in the neighbourhood of Plumley in a picturesque undercover way, would he really have sought out this uncle and represented himself as a dunce in need of elementary tuition in construing Latin texts? The deception would be far from easy to sustain even for a couple of hours; and only a decidedly perverse delight in play-acting, surely, could prompt to it. Organising a demonstration against the proliferation of nuclear armaments – if that was really Simon’s concern – seemed to George a ticklish matter, properly to be entered upon only in a spirit of high seriousness, and this didn’t cohere at all with the prank he had been induced to suspect as going on at the vicarage.
George was so struck by the importance of this point that he actually came to a halt to consider it further. His conclusion was that he might well be wrong, that the very gravity of the main undertaking could be felt, in certain minds, to be wholesomely mitigated by a streak of outrageous fantasy. But this didn’t end his sense of the complexity of what he was undertaking. Why, for instance, was it he who was undertaking it? What standing in the matter did he possess, and mightn’t he fairly be told to mind his own business? Again, did his proposed interposition involve him to some extent in violating a confidence made to him – indirectly, it was true – by Charles Naylor? This particular scruple George was able to dismiss as fanciful, but at once yet a further question arose. Ought he – and actually within the vicarage – to tackle Simon Prowse himself head-on? Would it not be more proper to have a quiet talk with the young man’s uncle, and gently intimate a suspicion that things weren’t quite as they might seem?
Perpending these problems, George walked ahead. From cottages on either side of the road came occasional wafts as of incense which spoke of housewives basting the Sunday joint. On little driveways, or on the road itself, conscientious car-owners performed another of the day’s ritual duties, cleansing their vehicles of the week’s accumulated stains of mud and dust, washing them clean, assoiling them in preparation for another week’s contact with a fallen world. These activities, George reflected, went some way towards accounting for Christopher Prowse’s vacant pews. But even the intellectually unassuming classes must still wrestle at times with old-fashioned doubt. They hadn’t heard of the myth of the incarnate god, but reckoned there was a lot in the Bible that would seem uncommonly improbable if presented on television. So with the bright believing band they had no claim to be either.
But these sombre thoughts were aside from the business of the moment, which was the bad conduct of Simon Prowse. And suddenly Simon Prowse was in front of George, head-on – debouching from a side-road close to the church and vicarage, in which, it seemed, one bought Sunday papers: Simon had a sheaf of them under his arm. Thus confronted, George forgot about the perplexities he had been mulling over. He came to a halt before the young man, and then spoke.
‘Mr Prowse,’ he said, ‘can you extenuate in any way the gross deception you are imposing upon your uncle and aunt? If so, be so kind as to let me hear it.’
Abruptly taxed in this forthright fashion, Simon Prowse might well have been discomposed. Alternatively, or in addition, he might have been extremely angry. Had he there and then said, ‘And what the devil have my affairs to do with you?’ he would have been well within, if not his rights, at least the bounds of common expectation. But Simon took a moment before saying anything at all. He also removed from his head, with brisk and unconscious deference, a battered but serviceable straw hat.
‘Now, just who,’ he asked, ‘has been telling tales?’
‘My nephew, Charles Naylor, with whom you played tennis the other day, happens to have been an undergraduate at Trinity until a couple of terms ago.’
‘I can’t say I remembered him. I ought to, if he was in his third year.’
‘He was in his first, but has now gone down. That, however, is neither here nor there. May I have an answer to my question?’
‘I’m not quite sure.’ Simon Prowse now seemed entirely at ease – and this despite a certain pallor which had made itself evident upon his features. ‘I did enjoy playing tennis at your brother’s house. But I don’t quite see, sir, that it obliges me to stand and chat with you now. For one thing, it’s almost lunch-time, is it not?’
‘Come, Mr Prowse.’
Although there was no hint of indulgence in George’s manner of saying this, the effect was somehow composing. George Naylor, after all, was an old hand with young men.
‘I’ve been bound over,’ Simon said. ‘Are you shocked?’
George certainly wasn’t shocked. Again with young men – and occasionally with young women – who had been bound over in one sort of law court or another, his acquaintance was extensive and spread over a number of years.
‘And what,’ he asked, ‘would it be next time?’
‘A suspended sentence, I suppose. It would be a great nuisance, that.’
‘May I ask, Mr Prowse, whether this at all—well, affects your academic career? I understand it to be extremely promising.’
‘I’m most obliged to you.’ Simon made this eighteenth-centuryish response quite cheerfully. ‘And, no. The dons don’t mind a bit. They’d like to have the guts themselves.’
‘To march, and demonstrate, and sit in, and throw eggs?’
‘I wouldn’t be quite confident about the eggs. But, in a general way, yes. I expect you’ve met the sort of people, rather like your brother, only much more so: squirarchally disguised but really bankers and so forth in a hereditary way, who honestly believe that all professors and such like cattle are innately subversive? They’re probably quite right. Superficially, nothing looks more utterly conservative than, say, an Oxford senior common room. But in point of training and economic status, the whole clerkly class is essentially Jacobin, wouldn’t you say? Which means uncommonly dangerous.’
Thus urbanely invited to engage in intellectually sophisticated conversation, George was momentarily put to a stand. But he managed to come back to business.
‘Your being bound over to keep the peace,’ he said, ‘would debar you from taking part even in peaceful demonstrations?’
‘The beaks would certainly take that view. They’d say that a demo was inherently an invitation to disorder, or some rigmarole of that kind. And the fuzz, you know, have taken to picking you up on film, and filing you as having been in one place or another. They’ll even come at you from the air, like bloody recording angels. So I have to keep my head down, you see – and not even bowed in prayer in Christopher’s church, which is why I didn’t have the pleasure of listening to your friend this morning. That’s the whole thing.’
George couldn’t agree that it was the whole thing, or even approximately so. He was about to return to something like, ‘And does all that justify the disgraceful imposture you are practising upon your uncle?’ But he now saw that this, at least, was no concern of his. It wasn’t even as if he were an intimate of the Prowses. Moreover, any immediate éclaircissement on this front – his now entering the vicarage and denouncing Simon, for instance – would inevitably have the effect of exposing Christopher Prowse as a guileless ass, for what man of reasonably acute perceptions could be taken in by such a piece of nonsense for long? But the situation had, as it were, its public as well as its private aspect, and he ought now perhaps to tackle it from that direction. George was considering just how to do so, when Simon spoke again.
‘I understand about your nephew Charles,’ he said, ‘and his lately having been up at Trinity. But what puts it into your head to be on about marches and demonstrations?’
George wasn’t sure that the young man’s describing his being ‘on about’ something was altogether courteous in point of expression. But Simon, in addition to being clever and therefore attractive, was exhibiting decent manners, and the question was fair enough in itself.
‘It’s a matter of odd coincidence, Mr Prowse. Miss Gale, your slightly mysterious friend, happened to hand me a leaflet about the bomb in Oxford a few days ago.’
‘Ah, yes. June was staying in Oxford with an aunt. But she just can’t take time off the anti-nuclear activity.’
‘Nor can you?’
‘I manage a certain number of other things as well.’
If there was a hint of intellectual arrogance lurking in this, it was sufficiently dissimulated to be inoffensive on the young man’s part. So George tried again.
‘Just what are you aiming at – or organising against? Is it that place at Nether Plumley?’
‘I’m afraid, Dr Naylor, that I have nothing more to say.’
‘I think I have some right to be informed.’ George was about to add, ‘You and Miss Gale, after all, have been my brother’s guests.’ But he realised that this would be artificial and silly. And he had, in fact, got himself into a false position, and was in danger of talking nonsense. He had no right whatever to badger this young man, and by running round like an excited spaniel he was only making himself ridiculous. There wasn’t the slightest evidence that Simon Prowse and his friends proposed either to endanger life or damage property. They no doubt believed themselves – and it was an open and arguable issue – to be acting exactly in a contrary interest. George had been legitimately indignant over the prank played on the ingenuous Christopher Prowse; he had got this tangled up with his niece’s not very rational persuasions about what might be going on at Nether Plumley; and as a result here he was in the middle of the village street, doing his best to have a row with a young man he knew very little about.
In falling so abruptly for this revulsion of feeling George was not perhaps being quite fair to himself. Simon had shoved in among the Naylors and banged their tennis balls around most definitely under false colours, and with no other aim than to propagate in the district the conclusion that he was a harmless and agreeably athletic dullard. There was every justification for taking a good hard look at him. But it was George’s liability to have a lively sense of the other fellow’s point of view. And as the main business of his life at the moment was moderating this proclivity in the area of his debate with Hooker, it was perhaps to be expected that he would let Simon Prowse get away with something – and with rather more than Hilda would approve of. George saw this clearly enough, but was resigned to making no further progress with the young man. He was casting round for some reasonably seemly way of bringing the interview to a close when the matter was taken out of his hands in a rather disconcerting fashion.
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 – it 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.’
‘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-pigs 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.
Hilda and Henry were not, at the moment, much interested in the Tump, let alone in these subsequent tinkerings. They had climbed to this eminence for the wide prospect it afforded, and upon that Henry was already directing his binoculars with all the gravity (which his sister didn’t fail to remark) of a great commander surveying the ground upon which whole armies must presently engage. But when he spoke it wasn’t to any warlike purpose.
‘All very agreeable,’ he said. ‘The coloured counties, and so forth. But just a little dull. Small effects of bustle here and there – or at least of distinguishable activity. A retired gent trimming a hedge, or dutiful young people taking granny on her Sunday jaunt.’ He swung the binoculars. ‘And if Plumley’s quiet, Nether Plumley’s quieter still.’
‘Nothing happening at the Institute?’
‘Nothing at all. A few cars parked inside their ring-fence. The building itself doesn’t seem much to go in for windows. Perhaps that’s sinister.’
‘It’s not much to go on.’ Hilda was focusing her own binoculars. ‘From up here,’ she said, ‘you’d almost think Nether Plumley a bit less unimportant than we are. More of the little roads – the older ones – converge on it. Those coming through the woodlands to the north, for instance. It had a market once, you know, and was quite a place. I seem to remember reading in the Victoria County History that Camden or somebody calls it emporiolum non inelegans. It’s a miserable little dump now.’
‘Can you see any of those police cars?’ Henry was unimpressed by this exhibition of learning.
‘None at all. Perhaps they’re having their tea.’
‘Or have gone into ambush.’ Henry turned away from the view and faced the Tump. ‘Hell’s bells!’ he said. ‘What are you doing here?’
This unmannerly demand was made of June Gale, who had appeared as if from nowhere. But that (Hilda might have told herself) was a facile cliché and inaccurate as well. To be thus suddenly on the scene, June must have emerged from the Tump itself. There was plenty of room for her there. The barrow could hold, indeed, a whole committee of conspiring persons.
‘Oh, hallo!’ It seemed that Miss Gale was less aware of the tone in which she had been addressed than of the mere surprising fact of the Naylors’ presence. And to this her reaction was a not very intelligent question. ‘Has Simon sent you?’
‘Yes, he thought we might lend a hand.’ Henry said this promptly. ‘Are any of the others here?’
‘Oh, no. Just me. Manning the command post.’ Miss Gale spoke with a complacency judged by Hilda to be highly absurd. But if the expression was extravagant it was nevertheless evident that Simon Prowse had indeed entrusted the girl with some job of a responsible character. And as she was (as Hilda believed) thoroughly thick, and as she had only recently earned herself a bad mark for her assault on the church notice-board, it was impossible not to conclude that Simon was besotted with her. Even potential Fellows of All Souls, it seemed, could be fondly overcome with female charm. Hilda was more scandalised by this aspect of the situation than she was even by her brother’s high-speed command of a blank lie. Henry, moreover, had committed her to some course of deception herself – which she must now sustain, since it was unthinkable to let him down. But for the moment she thought to temporise, and she searched for something to say of a non-committal sort.
‘Have you been here long?’ she asked.
‘Only Simon at the vicarage – you know about him – and myself with friends about ten miles away. Oh, and some people camping up on the downs somewhere: rather an elderly and churchy lot. We have all sorts.’
‘I believe the churchy ones were in church this morning. But what I meant was, have you been up here long?’
‘Since just after dark last night. So that we shouldn’t be observed, you know.’
‘Do you mean you slept here?’
‘Yes – in that tomb-thing.’ June pointed back at the Tump. ‘Of course I had my sleeping-bag and a thermos of coffee and some sandwiches. It was quite snug.’
‘The associations of the place didn’t disturb you at all?’
At this, June looked first blank, and then faintly suspicious, as if such a question could occur only to an alien mind.
‘I didn’t know you belonged,’ she said. ‘To us, I mean.’
‘Ah! It’s the principle of the cell, you know.’ This was Henry in immediate top gear again. ‘Small groups unaware of each other’s identity. Simon must have told you about it.’
‘Yes, of course.’ June had hesitated for a moment before producing this, since she lacked Henry’s facility in uttering fibs. ‘I thought,’ she said, ‘you might be tied up with the other lot.’
‘Oh, them!’ Henry had, unhesitatingly, a contemptuous view of the other lot.
‘They’re quite idiotic, of course, and not our sort of thing at all. But Simon believes some of them are around.’
‘Elderly and churchy, too?’ Hilda asked.
‘Oh, yes – a good many of them.’
‘Then I think they were in the congregation this morning as well.’
‘So they were – the silly old creatures!’ Henry said robustly. ‘But just what would they be up to, do you think? The same as us?’
To these questions – unfortunately, since answers would have been so informative – no answers came. June had looked at her watch, and as a result she gave a screech of dismay.
‘But you’ve made me late!’ she cried. ‘Three minutes late! Come on! Oh, come on!’
With this, June Gale turned and ran the length of the barrow, tugging at something in the pocket of tight-fitting jeans as she went.
‘Best from behind, I’d say,’ Henry said. ‘And when in brisk movement. There’s one of your learned words for it. Callipygous, I think.’
‘Don’t be so revolting, Henry Naylor. And we’d better follow her, as it seems to be what she wants.’ And Hilda began to run.
‘It certainly is.’ Henry caught up with his sister in a stride. ‘June’s big moment has come. God knows what it is – but having an audience for it is a bonus we mustn’t cheat her of. Well, I’m damned!’
It was nothing very startling that had elicited this exclamation. Just beyond the far end of the Tump was a sizeable plot of ground which had some appearance of having been artificially levelled long ago. Perhaps the eighteenth-century improver had effected this with the thought of erecting a belvedere or gazebo from which to survey the broad prospect beneath. Or perhaps the operation had been of much higher antiquity, and here was a kind of bowling-green expressly created for the funeral games of some monarch of the Megalithic Age. Positioned precisely in its centre there now lay a pile of brushwood such as might result from a hedging operation nearby. Only there were no hedges within several hundred yards. Henry’s surprise had resulted from his making a simple inference. Here was preparation for a bonfire – or, better, for a beacon.
By the time Hilda had absorbed these facts, June was bending over the pile with a box of matches in her hands.
‘Isn’t it cunning?’ she cried out excitedly. ‘You’d never think! Just a heap of twigs and leaves and things. But the real stuff’s scattered underneath. Simon says it’s absolutely fab. We’ll see.’ She struck a match and poked it rather gingerly into the foot of the pile. The twigs and leaves and things weren’t much interested. Nevertheless, there was almost instantly a small puff of smoke. It grew so rapidly that June had to jump back from it. It thickened to the girth of a barrel, rose to the height of a house. Incredibly, it had become a great shaft in the sky. For a moment some downward draught of air flattened it, squashed it at the peak, so that it mushroomed out into a similitude of the most sinister image known to modern man. Then it was a clear white pillar again. It was as if the empyrean had become a kind of St Peter’s Square, and from a celestial Sistine Chapel cardinals like demigods were signalling the election of Christ’s new Vicar on Earth.
‘Pulling out all the stops,’ Henry said. ‘Your blasted Simon ought to be in film. He has the touch.’ Henry paused on this, and scowled at June. ‘Well?’ he said. ‘The cue’s been given, hasn’t it? So what?’
‘Wait!’ June was staring out over the vale. ‘There!’ she said, and pointed into distance.
All that had appeared was a motor-coach: a toy motor-coach to the naked eye, and presumably carrying toy people. It had emerged from the woodland territory to the north, and was heading towards Nether Plumley. But now there was another one, moving at a brisker pace along a road similarly oriented. One after another, further motor-coaches appeared, and the extent to which Nether Plumley was indeed at the hub of a small system of unimportant thoroughfares became plain. Hilda found herself trying to remember whether she had read of ants or beetles behaving in this way – converging in columns upon the stronghold of some adversary. Of course the present spectacle was much more simply military in suggestion. Almost, while one looked, one transformed those harmless conveyances into armoured vehicles, pumping out shell-fire as they moved.
And now there was a hint of real confrontation. Some of the police cars had appeared: two of them shooting out from some lurking-place within the perimeter fence of the Institute, and two more from the direction of Plumley itself.
‘Far too much barging around to make a happy afternoon,’ Henry said, and raised his binoculars. ‘Christ! Just take a look.’
Hilda focused her own glasses, and surveyed what was happening. There had been a collision between two of the coaches at an intersection; one of them had been tipped on its side; people, apparently uninjured but angry, were tumbling out of both – some of them awkwardly burdened with placards attached to long poles. It was evident, even at this remove, that a furious altercation was developing between the two parties. Some of the placards were waved defiantly in air; others were being used as outright weapons in deplorable breach of the Queen’s peace. A police car drove up hastily; three or four constables tumbled out of it, and began waving their arms as if dealing amateurishly with a flock of sheep. And a faint bruit came up to the Tump, so there must have been a great deal of shouting as well.
‘Have a dekko at your pals,’ Henry said to June, and handed her his glasses. ‘Perhaps you can tell if all’s going according to plan. I’m not sure there isn’t a spot of civil war.’
‘There can’t be anything Simon isn’t prepared for.’ Having made this loyal declaration, June surveyed the scene presumably in security of mind. ‘No end of pigs,’ she said. ‘There’ll be splendid pictures in all the papers tomorrow. Even in The Times.’
It took Hilda a moment to realise that the pigs were not the research material of the animal geneticists but merely the police. But presumably there were members of the brute creation incarcerated in the Institute, since it would scarcely be possible to geneticise without them. She was surprised that she hadn’t adequately reflected on this before. She lowered her binoculars and stared at June.
‘I say!’ she said. ‘Are you Cruelty to Animals people? Is that it?’
‘That’s them.’ June said this with a good deal of contempt. ‘Dumb Friends’ Lib.’
‘Then I ought to tell you that I’m all for libbing dumb friends. It’s a much simpler issue than the bomb.’
‘But a damned sight less important. Cease your chattering, women.’ Henry must have been a good deal excited by the spectacle of turmoil at Nether Plumley. ‘Time to join the party. So get moving. We can be home inside twenty minutes, and in Nether Plumley five minutes after that. Even in your awful old car. Are you game?’
‘Yes, of course.’ Hilda spoke with a firmness she didn’t quite feel. Dispassionate observation – she may have judged – wouldn’t have much of a spin in the middle of a riot. ‘We’d better see the thing through.’
‘And will you take me?’ June asked. ‘I’m expected to get back on my own.’
‘Why not? We’ll restore you to the arms of your great commander. Just yank your sleeping-bag out of that bloody great coffin, and I’ll carry it down for you.’
‘Oh, Henry, I think you’re fab!’
This was not, of course, quite Hilda’s estimate of her brother. It was true that Henry showed signs of being, as Uncle George had prophesied, her family’s dark horse. But he would be very much a donkey if he signalised his growing up by falling for the callipygous June Gale.