The Naylors (4 page)

‘Thank God!’ George said, and sank down in relaxation in his corner. The train was moving again; its next stop would be Oxford; only the harmless and silent man with The Times remained in the compartment.

But the harmless man now lowered his paper and spoke.

‘It is interesting to speculate,’ he said, ‘what our young friend Ron would be like had he gone up to, say, Balliol.’

‘Is it? I mean, yes, certainly.’ George stared at his remaining fellow-traveller with an obscure premonition of yet further discomfort about to accrue on this disastrous journey.

‘But I think it is Dr Naylor, is it not? Allow me to introduce myself. I am Adrian Hooker.’

‘How do you do?’ This conventional enquiry George managed to utter in a commonplace way. But he was conscious of now gazing at Father Hooker (for he knew him instantly to be that) much as if here were the Devil himself suddenly sprung up before him. Father Hooker was of course nothing of the sort. He was the high-powered pro sent to cope with the apostasy of his totally unimportant self.

‘Your brother was kind enough to ring me up immediately he received the Bishop’s letter.’ Father Hooker said this pleasantly enough, but accompanied the words with a faintly disconcerting small bow. ‘Although it must have been a surprise to him.’

‘Well, no.’ George spoke out. He was conscious he mustn’t mumble. ‘It has happened before.’

‘Ah, yes. I am sure Plumley will be a delightful setting for our talks. There is something very bracing in the sanctity of the family and the home.’

‘Perhaps that’s so.’ George found himself having to repel the thought that this had been a disagreeably canting kind of remark. ‘I am glad to be going back to Plumley. But I’m not sure that it’s in order to be braced.’

‘It was in my mind’ – Father Hooker continued, ignoring this –’to suggest a meeting in Oxford, where so many would be willing to receive us. And there came into my head – inconsequently enough, I suppose – the last meeting there of poor Newman and Mark Pattison. You will recall it.’

‘No,’ George said. Newman having been recently in his head – although in what context he couldn’t remember – this had startled him.

‘It was many years after Newman had left us, and he had never been in Oxford again. But now he heard that his old friend Pattison, who had been for a number of years Rector of Lincoln, was on his death-bed in the college, and much troubled in mind. Newman visited him. He travelled from Birmingham to Oxford virtually incognito. Attended, it is said, by only two chaplains.’ Father Hooker did something with his eyebrows that perhaps signalled an ironical view of this provision. ‘It was almost what we now call an ecumenical gesture. He was a cardinal, after all, by that time. They had tagged him, I seem to recollect, Cardinal of St George in Velabro.’

‘He was certainly that,’ George said a shade stiffly.

‘Even two chaplains were a little awkward for the Pattison household as it then was. Miss Pattison had to scratch round for a couple of fowls for them. Or such is the story.’

‘Two men wouldn’t eat two fowls.’

‘Dr Newman himself was extremely ascetic – although indeed it is said that at an earlier time he had introduced the Oriel Common Room to the pleasures of claret. His chaplains may well have been kept on short commons at the Oratory. That is as it may be. The sad part of the story is that there proved to be no possible meeting of those two minds: the Rector’s and the Cardinal’s.’

‘Yes,’ George said. He had realised that he was listening to an anecdote in fact familiar to him, and variously recounted in various places. Only his own extreme disarray had caused him to forget this.

‘Newman supposed that it must be some obscure point of doctrine – some patristic quiddity, my dear Naylor, of the sort you know far more about than I do – by which Pattison was perturbed as his last hours approached. That it could be anything worse than that was beyond Newman’s comprehension, and he braced himself, competent theologian as he was, to clear the matter up for his old friend in a jiffy.’ Father Hooker paused on this, as if to let his command of the more colloquial uses of language sink in. ‘But the truth was that Pattison’s loss of faith had become absolute. So sunk was he in hardened agnosticism that he had even continued to celebrate Holy Communion in the college chapel long after concluding it to be mumbo-jumbo. To cease doing so, he felt, would create needless fuss. And I suppose he was anxious to guard his position as a scholar. He had spent a good deal of time in Germany and brought back notions of severe Gelehrsamkeit.’

‘It was a very desirable import at that time, so far as the English universities were concerned.’ George said this with a sharpness he at once regretted. ‘And so,’ he added in a more responsive tone, ‘Newman returned to Birmingham sadly conscious of the failure of a mission.’

‘Just so. He had been suddenly confronted with dereliction and apostasy, and it had not been granted to him to counter it.’

‘Dereliction?’ George repeated misdoubtingly – and realised that he was in danger of being lured (like Mrs Archer) into debate. But his query was met only with an impressive (if slightly uncivil) silence. This gave him leisure to tell himself that he had not taken a hasty dislike to Father Hooker.

But now Father Hooker, having sufficiently if obliquely expressed his sense of the gravity of his fellow-priest’s lapsed condition, turned to general conversation. George supposed that he judged this to be the urbane thing. He also led the conversation, as a North Oxford lady might do with an awkward undergraduate at a tea-party. As he was younger than George, this didn’t seem quite right. But George didn’t resent it. The situation was as difficult for Father Hooker as for himself, and as the chap was a specialist in running down and rounding up lost sheep, he was entitled to his own techniques. Yet George, as he managed adequate chat on the weather and politics and cricket matches and ‘light’ reading and other insignificant topics, did find himself wondering what had prompted the Bishop to choose this personally unappealing professional apologist in the present instance, and to set him on the hunt with such indecent expedition. The discreet spiritual counsellor provided on a previous occasion, old Dr Hunter, had been a quietly humorous Scot, and also one of the Hunters of Drumdrummie. There certainly wasn’t a spark of humour in Hooker. And as for Drumdrummie – although this was, of course, totally beside the point – Hooker wouldn’t recognise the place if he saw it.

George was properly perturbed by the snobbish slant in his thought here. Nevertheless it was perhaps still active in the back of his mind when he now went on to reflect that the Bishop might have acted with an eye to wholesome and deterrent penance. George had done it once too often, so let Hooker be loosed on him. Perhaps the Bishop had first thought of old Father Fisher in Cambridge, whose exquisitely adroit handling of such conditions as George’s within the Anglican communion scarcely fell short of that achieved by his uncle, Father Fisher of Oxford, who had turned to Rome long after the John Henry Newman of this Hooker’s so evidently standard anecdote, but with scarcely less éclat. George felt that, as a kind of recidivist or at least as an obstinate case, he had in a sense earned the top treatment of Father Fisher of Cambridge. But now there had come this horrid thought. It was almost a picture, indeed. There was the Bishop at his desk in his archaically denominated palace; in front of him was a memorandum; he wrote in its margin the single word ‘Hooker’, leaned back in his chair, and murmured to himself, ‘That will teach him.’

All this was unfair to Father Hooker, about whom George still knew little, and whose only fault so far revealed was a certain heavy-handedness incompatible with the customary amenities of polite intercourse. But now George’s thoughts took a more relevant and sensible turn. Why should the Bishop of Tower Hamlets be much bothering about George Naylor (a totally obscure labourer in his thronged diocese) at all? There were two possible explanations. Either the Bishop felt that the loss of faith suffered by even a single Christian soul was a matter of infinite moment, to be striven against with the united might of Christians everywhere, etc., or he had acted merely in aid of the swift obviating or damping down of a very minor ecclesiastical scandal. Could these two motives be rationally linked or combined, or did each belong to a scheme of things incompatible with the other? George realised that here was a difficult question. He was going to plunge into a bog of difficult questions with Father Hooker.

And this was to begin almost at once. In fact it had begun already. George had a considerable regard for the Bishop of Tower Hamlets. He was a man admirably equipped for his sacred office: courteous, tactful but tenacious, a clear-headed and expeditious administrator. But George wished he had been a little less expeditious on the present occasion. George always took pleasure in a return to Plumley, whatever might be the circumstances of his visit. There was a good deal of creature comfort, for one thing: plenty of hot water and warm dry towels, excellent food of an uncomplicated sort, the space and privacy of the park with its not disagreeable suggestion of consequence in the county. As a break from life at the mission, all this had its charm. But what George chiefly liked was his family. His elder brother, Edward, although possessed of less sense of religion or even of the numinous than a Hottentot or probably a Neanderthal man, always treated him with a kind of puzzled respect, even deference, which was pleasing because entirely genuine; his sister-in-law was a reliable woman who seldom gushed or fussed; his nephews, although probably regarding his persuasions (or late persuasions) as chimerical, were friendly enough; his niece, Hilda, was attentive to his conversation and had indeed an air of considering him worth a good deal of thought. George liked everything about the lot of them, down to those no-nonsense Christian names, a taste for which had resulted in his own ‘George’ when he might have been Mervyn or Evelyn or Tarquin or something of the sort.

And now his present arrival was going to be wrecked by Hooker. It did have to be put as strongly as that. One Hooker or another was, of course, inevitable. He was part of a debriefing process (as the laity might call it) not properly to be declined or escaped. Last time, and under the guidance of old Dr Hunter, George had, as it were, debriefed his debriefing and rejoined the fold. George believed that nothing of the sort would happen this time. And he recalled that Dr Hunter had turned up at Plumley at a seemly interval after his own arrival. There had been correspondence, a written invitation from George’s sister-in-law to his clerical colleague and friend: that sort of thing. But this time it all seemed to be hustle and huddle and hugger-mugger. (George repeated these uneuphonious words to himself almost resentfully.) He was going to return home under a species of wardenship – or wardership, if there were such a word – exercised by Father Hooker. Not even, so to speak, on parole! George remembered that his nephew Charles had some comical word for anybody exercising Father Hooker’s office, although he couldn’t for the moment recall what it was.

With only a short warning from reflections of this sort, it came to George that he very much didn’t want to arrive at Plumley in the custody of Father Hooker. It would be indecorous – as if he had taken to something like compulsively pinching young women’s bottoms in the street and had to be kept an eye on round the clock if there weren’t to be little paragraphs in the papers with the word ‘clergyman’ in a headline. It would be just like that. Successive trains, perhaps yes. But the same train, decidedly no.

No sooner had this resolution been formed than their present joint train slowed down again. On a number of small placards in succession appeared the word, ‘Oxford’. Wasting no time, yet without flurry, George Naylor stood up and reached down his suitcase. He took a moment to relish Father Hooker’s surprise and displeasure, and then explained himself without recourse even to a shade of equivocation.

‘I think I’ll get off here,’ he said. ‘Please tell Mary’ – Mary was the name of Edward’s wife – ‘that I’ll be on the early-evening train and get a cab out to Plumley. You’ll find one of my nephews, I think, waiting for you at the station with the car.’

And thus George found himself in his old university town. Like Cardinal Newman on that abortive visit to Mark Pattison, he hadn’t been there for quite some time.

It was the middle of the Long Vacation, and Oxford would therefore be ‘empty’ in the sense that London used to be described as ‘empty’ when people had gone off to watch yachts at Cowes or to shoot small birds in Scotland. But as much here as in London the ‘empty’ concept was purely notional, industry and tourism between them having swamped anything of academic appearance or disappearance on the streets. Only the large number of moderately ancient and for the most part architecturally unimaginative buildings distinguished the place from any other English city of equivalent size.

George parked his suitcase in one of a nest of metal lock-up boxes, not without a thought (for such is the era of our narrative) that a time-bomb might be ticking next door, or even ingeniously programmed to explode as he operated on his own box. He then headed for the dreaming spires. The first spire was presumably dreaming of Lord Nuffield, who late in the day had insisted upon its incongruous superimposition upon the tower of the college he had donated to the university and later come grimly to refer to as the Kremlin. Presumably, George thought, Nuffield’s first batch of dons had turned out to show a faint tinge of pink.

Knowing that he ought not thus to have thought frivolously of a major benefactor who had once been a bicycle boy, George took off his hat to Nuffield College as he walked past its little gateway on New Road. He was feeling almost light-hearted. Here in Oxford, after all, were men of his own sort. Even now, at the waning of the twentieth century, the place was still thronged with theologians, some of whom had thought up and fortified behind impregnable bastions of polemical subtlety positions more coherently agnostic than George himself had yet got round to. It would be fun, he told himself irresponsibly, if a super Father Hooker, a Hooker of larger than King Kong dimensions, could be let loose on them. He began to chant aloud as he walked that tremendous passage in Paradise Lost descriptive of the backside of the world over which in windy vanity are blown embryos and idiots, eremites and friars, black, white and grey, and all their company. But this, of course, was near-delirium, and George was surprised at himself. Besides which, people were turning and staring at him as they went past. So George quietened down, and arrived at Carfax in a more sober manner. But he was still in high spirits, and he wondered whether this was entirely the result of his at least temporary release from Father Hooker. It seemed a bit mean to rejoice at being quit of the man when he was only endeavouring to do his job. And the railway journey, although certainly trying in one aspect, had been full of interest. He had liked Len and Ron, and would have enjoyed an undisturbed chat with them.