The Naylors

by J. I. M. Stewart

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘An aversion.’ Achieving this less pathological nomenclature seemed to brace Hooker a little; he ceased shaking like a jelly, and something of his dignity returned to him. ‘A chair, if possible,’ he said. ‘And, if not inconvenient, a glass of water.’

  These modest requests were complied with. George, who was much distressed, recalled that ‘aversion’ had manifested itself when the Plumley cats had thought to chum up with Hooker on the evening of his arrival at the Park. But this was much more disturbing. A congeries of scores of cats, suddenly come upon, was no doubt a pretty stiff experience.

  ‘But an aversion, I fear, that is indeed sadly irrational.’ The need for formal utterance had returned to Hooker. ‘The frailty must be attributed, no doubt, to some forgotten – or, as they say, “repressed” – episode in childhood.’

  ‘Very likely. But there’s not the slightest need, you know, to carry it to the grave with you.’ Scattergood now permitted himself to speak a shade impatiently. ‘Buy a picture-postcard.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Of a cat. Not a comic cat, but a realistic, if sentimental, one. Have it somewhere unobtrusively around the house. After a couple of weeks, put it on the mantelpiece in your sitting-room. Pause that way for about a month. Then substitute a small china cat – again a realistic one – for the postcard. Another month, and you’ll be able to live with a full-scale soft toy. Or – better, perhaps – there’s a kind of hollow cat you can keep your pyjamas in. In no time after that, you’ll be thinking of having a real live cat to snuggle up with.’ Scattergood paused on this, possibly aware of the incongruity, and even impropriety, of the image it conjured into being. ‘Good heavens!’ he said. ‘What’s that?’

  It was a rhetorical question. About just what it was, there could be no doubt at all. Pandemonium had erupted outside the Institute. The demo had begun. And the Director of the Institute, who had not long before owned so dismissively to expecting ‘a spot of bother’, was now considerably perturbed. That was reasonable enough. Even at this remove – for the three men were almost at the centre of what was a very large building – it was at once clear that ‘spot’ was a singularly inapplicable word. What dominated the sudden racket was a loud chanting of a more or less controlled and orchestrated sort: much like that – George thought – which he recalled hearing from around football fields when, as a young man, he had explored for some months those fringes of civilisation that lie beyond the Atlantic Ocean. There was even now and then the suggestion of counter-chanting – a rah-rah-rah effect – which enhanced this comparison. Could the police, he wondered, be borrowing from Zulus and Ashantis and fuzzy-wuzzies generally the practice of accompanying with blood-curdling yells their endeavours to maintain the Queen’s peace? But the uproar wasn’t merely vocal. There appeared to be a brass band, incongruously suggestive of the Salvation Army, which could scarcely have chosen Nether Plumley for a parade-ground that afternoon. There was also a good deal of mechanical noise – a hooting of horns, revving up of engines, screeching of brakes – asserting that the twentieth century was well to the fore.

  For a moment Scattergood had been at a loss – but it had been merely about what he was to do with his two visitors. He solved this problem by simply abandoning them, with no more than a hasty intimation that he was ‘going to look into it’.

  So George and Father Hooker were left to themselves, apparently as the only representatives of homo sapiens amid a wilderness of monkeys, dogs, cats, newts and Chinese carp. It was noticeable, however, that this didn’t add to Father Hooker’s discomposure. He was still a badly shaken man, but nevertheless something of his normal manner was returning to him. This became evident in what he now found to say.

  ‘At least, my dear Naylor, we at length know where we are – and in the most literal acceptation of the term. The purposes of the Institute are clear to us, are they not?’

  ‘I can’t say they’re clear to me, except that I have a general feeling they’re rather sinister.’

  ‘That is certainly the persuasion of the mob outside. But do you seriously mean that, having been afforded a close view of a number of the laboratories here, you are still not cognizant of the activities pursued in them?’

  ‘You forget, Hooker, that I’m no sort of scientist. No doubt I simply don’t see what you see.’ George had to control a little irritation as he made this obvious point. ‘So tell me all about it, like a good fellow.’

  ‘Very simply, then, our friends here are immunologists. And they are concerned to extend the principles of immunology as they may be brought to bear in the field of radiation sickness. Do you follow me?’

  ‘Yes,’ George said slowly. ‘I rather think I do.’

  ‘I speak, of course, of ionising radiation.’

  ‘It’s all about how the body can dodge the long-term effects of the bomb?’

  ‘Crudely put, yes.’

  ‘It sounds a beneficent activity to me.’

  ‘It may be so. Or it may not.’ Hooker paused impassively. ‘I’d say the chances are vastly against there being anything in it at all. But popularly – and it may be this that our rulers have in mind – it would come down to the notion that one can dodge the effects of the bomb with a pill. Whether that would be a beneficent fantasy to propagate, I very much doubt.’

  ‘And just where do those animals come in?’

  ‘My dear Naylor, you must have remarked, surely, what the cats and dogs have depending from their necks?’

  ‘Some sort of identity-disks. Names and dates and numbers: that sort of thing.’

  ‘Sancta simplicitas!’ It appeared to be something like incredulity that drove Father Hooker to this ejaculation. ‘And you must be short-sighted – or purblind – as well. Geiger counters, Naylor.’

  ‘Geiger counters?’ George was bewildered. ‘I’m afraid I don’t very well keep up . . .’

  ‘God bless me! Geiger counters were clicking well before you were born. They measure the degree of radiation to which an organism has been exposed.’

  ‘So those dogs and cats . . .’

  ‘Yes, yes—of course.’

  ‘Would the creatures now themselves be a hazard if they—well, found their way out of this horrible place?’

  ‘I don’t know. Controlled contacts with the animals here are almost certainly harmless enough. About a roving mob of them, ‘I can’t say. You forget, Naylor, that I’m no sort of scientist either. I just recall a few things from long ago.’ Father Hooker stood up – still rather shakily. ‘But come, Naylor. We are neglecting our duty.’

  George had forgotten about this. Hooker believed that, planted between hundreds of excited demonstrators and what would probably turn out to be the massed constabulary of the county, he could profitably and composingly discourse upon the doctrine of the Just War as it must be interpreted in the nuclear age. Something like that. It was a notion that would have done credit to Don Quixote. You had to give it to Hooker. George saw that he himself must – if only in the simple physical sense – stand by the chap.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Scattergood seems to have deserted us. We’ll go and see how the land lies.’

  But George, although he spoke boldly, was inwardly much disturbed. Distressing though his private plight had recently been, there was a sense in which, at least intermittently, he had been able to savour it in terms of mild social comedy. That was the world to which, in his heart, he thought of his family as belonging; and it was the world in which the interplay of sympathy and incongruity in his relations with Hooker could harmlessly exercise itself. But now it was as if, quite suddenly – perhaps at the moment of that astounding conversation about the price of cats and dogs – the theatre had changed. Here was comedy no longer. Whether or not Scattergood and his colleagues laboured in good faith in their Institute, George didn’t know. But if he had understood Hooker rightly, the government, or whatever body funded the place, was eventually going to us
e them as instruments of thought-control. Swallow this – people would be told – and you needn’t even shelter under the stairs. Comedy couldn’t be got out of that. Only a rather savage sort of farce.

  They went outside. Beyond the still-vacant compound protected by the perimeter-fence, it was as if a whole city had poured its population out upon the modest environs of Nether Plumley. George and Father Hooker, having found their way with some difficulty into open air, came to an astonished halt before the spectacle. Although from the doorway in which they stood they commanded only a sector of the scene, nearly a dozen motor-coaches were visible: the majority of them already immobile and empty; some still nosing cautiously forward through a milling sea of persons of either sex and every age. There were pensioners brandishing crutches and infants in arms waving rattles. One coach was disgorging a phalanx of citizens of years so tender as only recently to have found their feet, and at their head two agitated women were raising with difficulty a banner saying:

  TODDLERS NOT TOMBS

  Nearby was a perambulator-and-carry-cot brigade, with a similar banner announcing:

  BABIES AGAINST BALLISTIC MISSILES

  Not very perplexingly, there was a man with a placard declaring:

  DUMB FRIENDS CALL FOR AID

  while another placard, rather more aggressively, commanded:

  HUNT DOWN FOX-HUNTING MAN

  But a majority of these waving and flapping scrawls simply enjoined: