The Naylors (3 page)

‘It was religious,’ she said. Her tone could again have been described as comfortable, but now it held a hint of censure as well. ‘It was religious, and I’m as religious as anybody, although Mrs Archer wouldn’t maybe agree.’ She had given a brief indicative nod towards her companion. ‘But I wouldn’t say it’s a thing to be talked about in a common way.’

‘It’s not everybody that’s called on to testify, Mrs Bowman.’ Mrs Archer said this in a tight-lipped fashion which she had not exhibited when discussing Debenhams and John Lewis with her companion.

‘That sort of thing should be left to the clergymen, to my mind,’ Mrs Bowman retorted. ‘I go to church as often as anybody else. Nowadays, that is. But as for talking about sin and repentance and the like, they should be let alone with it. They’ve had the training.’

‘What about your prayers, ma? Do you say them as often as anybody else too – always remembering that nowadays, of course? Down on your knees by your little bed? Those knees? You must be joking.’

This speech came from the second of the young workmen. It was the more disobliging in that a certain cogency attended upon its mention of Mrs Bowman’s anatomy. Her knees were on view only in the sense that they would have been visible had they assuredly existed. But so massive and columnar were her nether limbs that there was no evidence that they did. She reminded George of some mediaeval bestiary in which the elephant is described as ‘stondand’ because unprovided with joints admitting of any other posture. Here was a frivolous flight of fancy on George’s part. It was Mrs Archer who recalled him to the sobriety required in face of this bizarre conversation.

‘At the name of Jesus,’ Mrs Archer said, ‘every knee shall bow.’

‘Not nowadays, ducky. You have to face it, not nowadays. That right, Len?’

Len was, of course, the young electrician or plumber or whatever who had advised the businessm’n to cool it. He now, and with entire good humour, offered his mate similar counsel.

‘Belt up, Ron,’ he said. ‘What’s kaput with you may be kicking still with the lady. You’ve no call to make a monkey of her. And Jesus Christ may be as good a stand-by as the pub when it looks like you’re going to be short with the rent.’

‘Just that,’ Ron said. ‘The opium of the people, every time.’

George pricked up his ears at this. In Ron’s tone he had detected a hint of sardonic self-mockery which he was accustomed to take as evidence of a promisingly open mind. So with at least momentarily recovered confidence he chipped in.

‘Would you agree,’ he asked Ron, ‘that it’s natural to believe in something?’

‘The international solidarity of the working class,’ Len interjected. ‘That’s what our Ron believes in. Armed wage-slaves. And probably Noah in his ark as well. No harm in it in its place.’

The two young men were not, as George had casually assumed, much of a muchness. Even physically it wasn’t so. Len was fair and of a robust but relaxed musculature; Ron was dark, adrenaline-commanded, ready to spring but not knowing quite where to. George (who had for a space quite forgotten his lapsed condition) had another go – and with a swiftly assumed familiarity he had with some difficulty taught himself to get away with.

‘Come on, Ron,’ he said. ‘Nobody can get around without believing in one thing or another, if it’s only tomorrow’s breakfast. But what about when you take a larger look at the world? Do you really put your money on proletarian revolution imported from Russia?’

‘I don’t say all that hasn’t taken a bit of a clobbering.’ Ron was now giving George a keen but seemingly amiable once-over. If the young men did have something in common it appeared to be good humour. ‘But yes, in a general way. I wouldn’t mind a bash at manning a barricade or two.’

This was like old times, and the talk appeared to be drifting blessedly away from theological matters and into the field of politics. Ron was presumably a Trot, and George was quite prepared to discuss with him the pros and cons of world-wide socialist revolution. But this was not to be. It was blocked by Mrs Archer.

‘What do you mean?’ Mrs Archer demanded of Len. ‘About in its place?’

This was so baffling that even the man with the pocket calculator stared at Mrs Archer in perplexity. But its unaccountability was rapidly resolved by Ron.

‘Noah’s ark,’ Ron said. ‘The old trout means Noah’s ark.’ He appeared to apply this term to Mrs Archer without any derogatory intention.

‘Of course I do.’ Mrs Archer pointed accusingly at Len. ‘Didn’t that young man speak some profane nonsense about its place? Ararat was its place. It’s in the Bible.’

This weird inconsequence brought silence for several seconds. George found himself afflicted with one of his vexatious amnesiac episodes. Was Mount Ararat specifically mentioned in Genesis as the spot on which Noah’s vessel finally grounded? It was odd not to remember the answer to that one. George ought not, of course, to have been particularly perturbed. Unlike Mrs Archer, he knew that there are all sorts of errors and inconsistencies in the curious little Hebrew library collectively named the Old Testament. And as the yarn about Noah and the Deluge was to be received (if at all) only in a mysterious sense, it didn’t matter twopence whether the old gentleman found himself on Ararat or Mount Everest. Nevertheless George was worried – or rather he was even more worried than before. What if this simple woman herself fell into doubt about the biblical status of Ararat, and appealed to him? Would it not be improper in him not to be able to afford her instruction at once? Confronting this question, George again forgot that he had opted out of the entire business, and that if one has ceased to believe that in Zero AD God uniquely entered History one may be perfectly light-hearted in washing one’s hands of the patriarchs and all their kidney. Of course George knew that this didn’t really end the matter. Not nowadays, it didn’t. You could cease to believe almost anything so long as you continued to believe in something else. There had always been people who told you that religion could get along without Christianity, but recently it had apparently become fashionable to maintain that Christianity could get along without religion. It was a perplexing field. George hadn’t properly been keeping up with it.

‘What about the fish?’

‘They stopped in the sea, of course. Why shouldn’t they?’

‘The Bible tells you the size of the thing – in cubits or whatever they were? Or was that about the Temple, later on?’

‘You needn’t talk to me about cubits, young man. Who knows what a cubit was?’

‘But we’re talking about the ark, ma. All the beasts and birds could be got into it?’

‘Of course they could. Two by two. We’re told so.’

‘What about their feed, ma? Quite a lot would be needed. Think of the two elephants. They’d need a good deal more than the two humming birds. Even think of Mrs Noah having to make a shopping-list of everything required.’

George realised that he was listening to a species of disputation he’d heard often enough before. Such absurd questions could appear momentous in the minds of the folk. (They had also, of course, seemed momentous to Bishop Colenso in his day.) But at least Ron now advanced something George hadn’t ever heard at the mission.

‘Germs, ma,’ Ron said. ‘Do you know how many kinds of germs there are in the world? “Kills all known germs”, the bottle says. Probably true enough. But for every known germ on the books, believe you me, there are thousands waiting to get in. Micro-organisms and amoebas and filterable virus and all. Heard of species, ma?’

‘I take no account of species, young impudence, you. Species aren’t in holy writ.’

‘Of course they are. Adam named the animals, didn’t he? Probably even let Eve chip in now and then. Well, there are more whole species in the world, mark you, than there are individual human beings. Just think of that.’

This was news to George. He suspected it of being a wild travesty of some known scientific fact. But he didn’t interrupt. There was a horrid fascination in this demotic parody of grave debate.

‘And how could old Uncle Noah check them in?’ Ron demanded, pressing home his point. ‘How could he see them, see? He didn’t have a microscope, you know. That was invented no time ago, by Galileo or some chum of his.’

Microscope or telescope, George thought, Ron did have a point. If, that is, you believed with Mrs Archer that the sole authorship of the Bible lay with the Holy Ghost.

‘That about germs,’ Mrs Bowman said. ‘Just fancy, now!’

This was Mrs Bowman’s only contribution to the argument. She seemed unaware that it was generating a certain heat. But this was only in her friend. Ron was merely amusing himself with Mrs Archer, although George suspected that he could rise to genuine passion on topics of a political or social sort. Len had resumed his appearance of mindless repose, and was looking rather handsome as a result; he had probably heard Ron on this ploy before, and found it a bit boring. The businessm’n wasn’t bored. In fact he was increasingly outraged, and even showed signs of gathering his possessions together preparatory to that definitive act of displeasure that consists in rising up and seeking another compartment. If George was calculating correctly, the man behind The Times had now been reading its Court page for ten minutes, and as this was something out of nature it had to be concluded that he too was an interested, if detached, listener. But now for some moments George’s own attention wavered – if only because he was anxiously asking himself whether he had a duty to intervene. Only a week before, it would certainly have been so. Ought he, from his new position, to offer some reflections of an elevating, although agnostic, character? He was in sore perplexity of mind and spirit.

It was at this point that Ron went too far.

‘So if that’s your Bible,’ Ron said, ‘forget it.’

George had failed to pick up just what occasioned the giving of this advice, but he had sufficient acquaintance with current demotic speech to know that it belonged to the tolerant-dismissive rather than the contemptuous order. Unfortunately Mrs Archer didn’t receive it that way. Only Satan, or at least one satanically possessed, could bid you forget your Bible. Mrs Archer knew instantly that it was her duty to ‘testify’. Even in his present lapsed state, George was bound to regard that as an honourable activity, and he was therefore the more appalled by the way in which this lurkingly loony woman (entrenched behind the bastions of her shopping-bags) went about it. Mrs Archer raved.

There were particularly desperate nonconformist sects, George knew, meeting in conventicles furnished not with pulpits but with platforms or podia, in which vehement outpourings of Bible-based jargon were held to be uplifting and indeed regenerative. Mrs Archer – here in this small railway compartment, where one was squashed up with one’s fellow-travellers hip to hip – was proving herself a mistress of this sort of thing. George found himself wondering whether she was of Scottish extraction and descended from those fanatic Covenanting windbags made well-bred fun of by Walter Scott. But they at least had whole extents of moorland and bog to absorb their outpourings, whereas here there was only this reverberating and insistently, if faintly, jolting box. So Mrs Archer’s behaviour was not merely embarrassing, but unseemly as well. And George had the mortification of knowing that he had himself precipitated the whole thing.

‘And large-limbed Og He did subdue!’ Mrs Archer shouted. ‘Is He going to have much difficulty with
you
?’

This recourse to the 136th psalm as mangled by John Milton was scarcely apposite as directed against Ron. It was Mrs Bowman, the stondand elephant, who might have been better likened to Og. But who was Og? George seemed to remember that Milton rhymed ‘subdue’ with ‘crew’. Og had a crew. He had an over-something crew. Could it be an over-hearty crew? That seemed hardly possible. George realised that this trivial lapse-of-memory business was coming to worry him in a pathological way. Instead of badgering himself about Og he ought, in common charity, to be doing something to calm down this frenetic woman. What was required was firm but courteous speech.

‘Madam,’ George said, ‘pray compose yourself.’

‘Please’ might have been better than ‘pray’. Prayer being one of Mrs Archer’s things, she went off on it at once. But Ron had decided that enough was enough.

‘Can’t you see,’ he demanded, ‘that the reverend gent wants you to shut your gob?’

This was not courteous. In fact it was extremely rude. But the horror George now felt was occasioned by something else. Laterally across the compartment, Ron had thrust out a confident and indicative finger at him. Preternaturally, this disputatious young plebeian (whom it had been so pleasant to distinguish as intelligent beyond his station) had pierced through (if it may be so put) the grey flannel trousers, had stripped away the lay collar and tie, and acclaimed George Naylor in his true clerical character. And now Mrs Bowman, who had maintained a placid silence during the theological debate, addressed George in a tone of surprised respect.

‘Fancy, now!’ Mrs Bowman said. ‘And are you really a clergyman, sir?’

The nub of this question – although Mrs Bowman wasn’t aware of the fact – decidedly lay in that ‘really’. George just didn’t know, so for a moment he couldn’t think what to say. In law he was undoubtedly a clergyman still. But morally regarded, even philosophically regarded, he had surely forfeited his claim to any such status. So what could he say?

‘No,’ George said. ‘I am not.’

There was a rather prolonged silence, conceivably produced by a general perception that the gent, whether reverend or common-or-garden, was mysteriously in distress. George himself almost expected to hear a cock crow. What actually happened was that the train produced its newfangled whistle, decelerated with virtuoso precision, and within seconds was at a halt at Didcot junction. Then, quite suddenly, nobody was interested in George Naylor and his condition any more. Len and Ron with their tool-kits, the businessm’n with his documents and pocket calculator, Mrs Archer and Mrs Bowman with their innumerable packages draped around them: they all bundled into the corridor and vanished like a dream. It was an unspeakable relief, and it was not within George’s power to refrain from an audible pious ejaculation.