Presently her father was talking about the iniquitous tax you had to pay for the privilege of giving some incompetent new office-boy a job pretty well for life, and Uncle George was listening with every appearance of attention. If patience was regarded as a specifically Christian virtue (but she didn’t suppose it was: Stoics and people had recommended it) Uncle George would certainly need no urging by Father Hooker to retain it. Hilda herself being not all that patient, she made an excuse of clearing up the tea things for leaving the brothers together, and then she went off to her room.
She opened her diary and made some brief notes on what she had been listening to. She closed it and thought – again quite briefly – about Simon Prowse. (He was rather an attractive young man.) After this, she decided to address her mind more seriously to the question of her vocation.
Whenever she did this, it was Hilda’s habit to take the lid off the portable typewriter that stood on the desk beside the diary. She did this now – so that the machine was waiting, expectant, to record the comedy that she knew existed all round her. If only she could define it, catch it! She might begin, if not the actual composition, at least the thinking about it where she had left off, which had been with the difficulties of basing a novel on one’s own family set-up. But the difficulty she had seen was a moral rather than an aesthetic one: almost no more than the silly business of good taste. Now she saw what might be called the obverse of the proposition. It would all be too damned easy. Provided she distanced and contracted the element of actual theological debate (which was going to come her way very little, in any case) there was enough in the actual goings on around her to provide the material for quite a neat job. Supposing she had set a tape-recorder going during that recent tea-drinking, supposing she carried such a thing around with her through Plumley Park and its environs: supposing this, she would be in possession of what would make, with only a minimum of doctoring and editing, a very average sort of cheerful little modern novel. And what on earth would be the good of that? Of what was simply happening, of what happened all the time, we all had quite as much as we wanted. Straight realism, mere reportage (good word again) was dead boring, and remained so even if given a comic twist or two here and there. You had to manage a much bigger twist. That was it! Something out of common expectation, something eruptive and belonging essentially to the imagination, had to be haled in. And in the present case, in which there lurked matter of quite grave import within the Uncle George/Father Hooker charade, what you fished out of the hat had to be somehow equipollent (meaty word) with the underlying seriousness of Uncle George’s situation. An earthquake, Hilda thought rather wildly. A plague. An unexpected return of the Black Death.
At this point in her reflections there came a knock at Hilda’s door. Knocking at doors was prescriptive with the Naylors, and as each person’s knock tended to be of slightly different quality, you generally knew who was there even before the door opened. This time it was Hilda’s mother. She was at once revealed as wearing what Hilda thought of as her ‘vexatious little chore’ expression. It would be some quite small thing, but the daughter of the house had to provide the helping hand.
‘My dear,’ Mary Naylor said, ‘it’s lemons. It seems that Mrs Deathridge is proposing pancakes.’ Mrs Deathridge was the cook.
‘And there are no lemons. I see.’
‘It seems she used the last two lemons when we had those little scraps of smoked salmon the other day. Of course she ought to have put them on the shopping-list. But Mrs Deathridge, you know, is getting on.’
‘Aren’t we all? But I’ll go. I’ll go along on my bike.’
‘Yes, dear – but of course there’s no hurry.’ Mrs Naylor looked at her watch. ‘Mr Rudkin always keeps open till six.’ Mr Rudkin ran the village shop, which was also the post office. ‘I think you should get half a dozen, although I believe they are rather expensive nowadays.’
‘They oughtn’t to be. There were endless acres of the things coming along in Italy.’
‘It must be something to do with the Common Market.’ This was a favourite thought of Mary Naylor’s. ‘Mrs Deathridge says she has remembered that your uncle is fond of pancakes. So I didn’t like, you see, to suggest she give us something else.’
‘Of course we must support Uncle George in every way. Daddy keeps on saying so.’
‘And we must be civil, Hilda, to this rather pompous Father Hooker. It is such a serious thing he is trying to help your uncle about. Don’t you think?’
‘Well, yes – I suppose I do.’
‘I am afraid, at times, that your uncle may be tempted to make fun of him. George can be like that, even when much troubled in mind.’
‘So he can.’
‘And I’m a little worried about your brothers. It’s a shocking thing to say, but they can both at times be rather rude. I’m sure they don’t mean to be.’
‘You can’t be rude without meaning to be rude.’ Hilda reacted conscientiously and at once against woolly uses of language.
‘No, dear – of course not.’ Mrs Naylor was entirely pacificatory. ‘I wonder whether you could just give Charles and Henry a hint?’
‘No, mummy, I could not.’ Hilda said this decisively.
‘But mightn’t it come best from you? You are all young, and do so wonderfully understand one another.’
‘It would only be counter-productive.’ Hilda didn’t much care for this very current expression, but she was clear that nannying her brothers was a vexatious little chore that simply wasn’t on. ‘I think I’ll go for those lemons straight away.’
‘Good! But there is just one more thing.’ There was usually one thing more when Mrs Naylor conversed with her daughter, since she would have liked a fuller confidential relationship than in fact existed between them. ‘When you all met Mr Prowse at the church this morning did you get the impression that he knows?’
‘About Uncle George’s difficulties, you mean? I don’t think he does. But I suppose he’s bound to tumble to the situation sooner or later. I don’t see that just when is very important.’
‘What I’m wondering, Hilda, is whether Father Hooker may think it part of his own duty to tell our parish priest, and whether it mightn’t come better from one of ourselves.’
‘Christopher Prowse isn’t Uncle George’s parish priest. It’s none of his business, I’d suppose. And, in any case, it’s something that ought to be left to Uncle George himself.’
‘I’m sure you are right, dear.’ Mrs Naylor was quite a strong-minded woman in small patches, but with her family it was becoming one of her pleasures to do a good deal of giving in. ‘Perhaps,’ she added, ‘four lemons. Only the other day, your father was saying we must be careful. It was when Charles started talking about a new Mercedes. But I suppose what goes for motor cars goes for lemons as well.’
‘Four lemons, then,’ Hilda said, and prepared to set out on her errand.
Mr Rudkin’s shop lay at the far end of the village, just beyond the church and vicarage. On this occasion, as Hilda cycled past, there was no sign of Simon Prowse, whether peering through aspidistra leaves or otherwise. (But why should there be? Hilda judged it odd that she had thought of him.) In the shop, however, she came on Simon’s hostess, carrying a capacious basket. It was almost closing time, and Mr Rudkin’s messenger-boy was already fiddling with the shutters. Mr Rudkin himself was attending in an appropriately semi-deferential way upon the vicar’s wife. (He would a little step up the attitude when it came to Hilda’s turn.) Hilda had a notion – or perhaps now invented a notion – that Edith Prowse came into the shop regularly at this hour in the hope of acquiring at a reduced price the more perishable of its residual stock of vegetables. The Prowses had no children, so Hilda supposed they couldn’t be exactly desperate. But she knew that it wasn’t only mice that were free from riches (and consequently from the threat of gout) in churches. The knowledge didn’t make her feel exactly uncomfortable. It did, however, make her a little wary. She mustn’t, for example, embark now on her mother
’s comical decision that it had better be four, and not six lemons. So she was still thinking up a line of harmless talk when Mrs Prowse addressed her with enthusiasm.
‘Oh Hilda, how particularly nice to run into you! To have the opportunity, I mean, of saying what a delightful dinner that was. Do tell your mother how much Christopher and I enjoyed it. In my own mother’s time – do you know? – one wrote little notes, or at least left cards, after dining with friends. It’s a pity, in some ways, that such punctilios have died out. And yet our own casual informalities have their merit. Don’t you think?’
Hilda allowed herself to agree that casual informalities are to be commended. It was rather a line of Edith Prowse’s, she remembered, to hint at small grandeurs in her family background.
‘My uncle and his friend Father Hooker,’ she said in the correct Plumley chit-chat manner, ‘were delighted to make the acquaintance of your nephew. Am I right that his name is Simon? I didn’t quite catch it.’ This untruth surprised Hilda in the utterance.
‘Yes – Simon. A delightful young man. Quite an acquisition, indeed. And so totally unexpected!’
‘Unexpected, Edith?’
‘Well, we hadn’t heard from him for a long time. Indeed, Hilda, I don’t believe we had ever heard from him at all. Except, of course, for Christmas cards.’
‘There are lots of people like that – who feel that a card at Christmas is a sufficient link with relations.’
‘I suppose so. Christmas does mean something to everybody, don’t you think?’
‘Well, yes—I suppose it does.’
‘So Simon’s proposal turned up quite out of the blue: that he should come to the vicarage and that Christopher should help him with his exam.’
‘It seems a very good idea.’
‘Yes, but Christopher has become a little uneasy about it. I don’t mean about his own ability to coach Simon. Christopher keeps up his scholarship very well.’
‘I’m sure he does, Edith. Even although he’s so busy a man.’
‘Yes, indeed. Well, only this afternoon he persuaded Simon to produce his books, and they looked at them together. And Christopher felt that Simon has a long way to go.’ Edith Prowse hesitated for a moment here. ‘He doesn’t feel that Simon can really have been doing any serious work at all.’
‘But doesn’t that make Simon Prowse’s decision to have some coaching all the more sensible?’
‘I suppose, Hilda, one can look at it that way.’ Mrs Prowse glanced cautiously round Mr Rudkin’s shop. But they were now the only customers, and Mr Rudkin himself was helping with the shutters. Even so, Mrs Prowse lowered her voice. ‘We have even begun to wonder whether there may not be a romance.’
‘A romance?’ Hilda repeated a shade coldly.
‘A lady in the case – and in the neighbourhood.’ Mrs Prowse now glanced at Hilda as with a suddenly inspired suspicion. ‘Simon does a great deal of telephoning. But not from the vicarage. He says he doesn’t want to muck up our account. He telephones from the kiosk outside this shop.’
‘Well, he doesn’t telephone to me,’ Hilda said tartly.
‘My dear Hilda!’ Mrs Prowse seemed overwhelmed with confusion. ‘I’d never dream . . .’
‘Of course not, Edith. But do you really suspect that Mr Prowse may be carrying on—well, an intrigue of some sort from the shelter of your house? It would be most dishonourable.’ Hilda was about to add, ‘And wholly unworthy of him’. But she stopped herself, reflecting that as she had appeared to be uncertain even of the young man’s Christian name she was not in a position to make so bold a statement. ‘Perhaps,’ she suggested ingeniously, ‘Mr Prowse has been bitten by what they call the turf, and comes down here to telephone his bets.’
‘Oh, dear! That would be just as bad. But we must simply hope for the best.’ Edith Prowse was now looking at a single fatigued lettuce lingering in one of Mr Rudkin’s boxes, and she might almost have been referring to it. Hilda felt that perhaps their conversation was over, and she walked across to another box and possessed herself of four quite healthy lemons. But Mrs Prowse followed her.
‘Christopher and I both felt,’ she said, ‘that Dr Naylor is looking a little strained. Settlement work must be so exhausting! I hope he has come to you on quite a substantial visit?’
‘I hope so too.’
‘And Father Hooker – such an interesting man! Christopher looked him up in Crockford. Are they friends of long standing?’
‘Uncle George and Father Hooker? I haven’t inquired, Edith. I’m afraid I haven’t the trick of asking questions.’ Hilda was conscious that this had been an unkind and unnecessary barb to direct upon a harmless woman. ‘I think they have concerns in common.’
‘Of course they all do, don’t they?’ Mrs Prowse was here referring, a shade archly, to the cloth in general. ‘Do you know? Christopher has had such a bold idea! I hardly venture to mention it. But perhaps I may be allowed to take soundings.’ Mrs Prowse made a pause on this, but elicited no response.
‘Christopher is wondering whether he might venture to ask Father Hooker to preach next Sunday.’
‘Oh, I see.’ Hilda remembered there had been family anxiety lest the vicar should make this request of Uncle George, with possibly an embarrassing result. But the Prowses now had their eye, it seemed, on what they conceived to be superior talent. Hilda wasn’t pleased. ‘I don’t know why not,’ she said. ‘The man should be flattered at being asked, I suppose. And he needn’t accept if he doesn’t want to.’
‘Yes, of course. But we could put up such an attractive notice if he did! And congregations have been so very poor recently that it’s really quite disheartening.’
Hilda saw that it must be that, and was conscious that she herself had of late been doing little in the way of church-going.
‘We have had considerable hopes,’ Edith Prowse went on, ‘from that new place at Nether Plumley, which has to do with being very scientific about animals – although we don’t quite know how. A government department – is it Health and Social Security? – has bought up a lot of houses round about to provide accommodation for the staff. Very highly qualified university people for the most part, we understand. So, naturally, we might have hoped. . .’
‘Certainly, you might.’ Hilda had interrupted simply because she found this innocence about the drift of the modern scientific mind rather alarming. ‘Look,’ she said impulsively. ‘If you like, I’ll ask Father Hooker for you this evening. Take soundings, as you call it.’
‘Christopher will be so grateful! And I must fly.’ Mrs Prowse, deciding to reject the lettuce, hurried over to settle her affairs with a respectfully impatient Mr Rudkin. Hilda, feigning to meditate a further purchase, gave her a couple of minutes to be clear of the shop. She then paid for the lemons and went out to her bicycle.
Encounters like that, she told herself, make me feel like a character in Barbara Pym. Perhaps that’s what I am: anima naturaliter Pym. Having succumbed to an unacknowledged passion for Christopher Prowse, I shall become his most assiduous parishioner, never absent from any of the goings-on in his church. I shall preside over tea-urns and embroider hassocks – or perhaps even slippers for the adored one – as a Victorian lady would do. I shall make an edifying end, and Edith Prowse will particularly mourn me as having been, next to herself, her husband’s staunchest stay. Such is to be the destiny of Hilda Naylor, who for a brief span in youth gave promise of larger things. At the moment, out of mere good nature, I have engaged myself to ask Father Hooker to preach a sermon in St Michael and All Angels. Angelic of me, is it not.
But seriously – she asked herself as she began to pedal – might something not be done with the parish as mise en scène? It would be territory a little less contracted than the family, but still eminently compassable. Cranford stuff. Her tutor had once told her to read a book called Annals of the Parish by a certain John Gait. Of course she had failed to do so. But what about New Annals of the Parish, by Hilda Naylor? Or – to be quite sple
ndidly old-world – by Miss Naylor? Or, yet again and with a splendid fantasy, by (some equivalent of) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell?
The church was at the head of a short rise, and Hilda changed gear: she had rather a developed bicycle, much less elderly than her car. It was tiresome to own so flippant a mind. The hopeless snag about New Annals would be having to accept as a datum the fact that in the parish nothing ever happens. It takes a Chekhov to get along on nullibiety (marvellous word) and even Chekhov takes a break: a shot is fired and a man senselessly dies; another shot achieves comic futility; there is the sound of an axe biting into a tree. No such resources in Plumley.
She was now abreast of the vicarage. It was still broad daylight on this summer evening, but there was a light in an attic window. Had a reformed Simon, inspired by his studious uncle, symbolically turned up the lamp and applied himself to his books? Even that would be quite something in this obscure village. But where are the eagles and the trumpets? Where that eruptive, that equipollent thing?
There was no light in the church, since it wasn’t business hours. Hilda glanced at the familiar notice-board. Vicar: The Revd C. Prowse M.A. There was still the announcement about the autumn bazaar. But now there was another notice, balancing the first one on the other half of the board. Perhaps just because Edith Prowse had made a remark about putting up a notice, Hilda’s attention was caught by this. It was something brief and boldly lettered, but she couldn’t quite read it as she rode. So she dismounted and took a closer look. What the thing said was:
BAN THE BOMB
‘What the bloody hell!’
Startled by this exclamation close to her left ear, Hilda turned her head. Simon Prowse was standing beside her. He was staring at the notice-board, and clearly in a state of considerable indignation.
‘Oh, good evening,’ Hilda said.
‘Hallo, Miss Naylor. Sorry if I made you jump.’
‘You didn’t make me jump.’ Hilda resented being aspersed as a nervous female. ‘It is a little odd, isn’t it? That printed sticker, I mean. One sees them here and there. But I haven’t seen one on a church notice-board before.’
The Naylors Page 10
