The Naylors by J.I.M. Stewart Page A

had to be George who came to the rescue. He embarked on a lively account of his afternoon in Oxford. Hilda suspected that her uncle, although he had so roundly endorsed it as having been a ‘nice’ occasion, had really found it variously discomfiting. But it was precisely on this that he seized now with a spirited account of some ludicrous episode connected with the Bodleian Library.
    Hilda enjoyed the comedy, but was conscious of discontent as well. It seemed a shame that Uncle George, who could cheerfully represent himself as a figure of fun, should be fated to take matters of belief so desperately seriously as he undoubtedly did. Hilda believed she didn’t believe in beliefs. Whatever belief you subscribed to, you were left in the same spot in the end. It made no odds whether you swore by Genesis or the Big Bang: a point came at which the whole thing was incomprehensible and absurd. But from day to day you could still behave in a reasonably civilised fashion nevertheless. This, of course, was in effect the family ethos in which Hilda had been brought up, although she would perhaps have been indignant to be told so. She wondered how Christopher Prowse really felt about the human lot. He was a fairly recent arrival at Plumley, and she hadn’t yet got the hang of him. It didn’t seem likely to be a complicated hang. He was probably resigned to the sufficiency of the trivial round, the common task, and she ought, therefore, to approve of him. Inconsistently, however, she judged that he didn’t amount to much. You couldn’t say that of Uncle George.
    Nor, conceivably, could you say it of Father Hooker, even although he continued at times to seem unlikeable. So far, he had been rather silent during the meal, perhaps because concerned to take the measure of this clutch of Naylors and their local spiritual guide. But now he caught on to the Bodleian business, and the other mild reverses to which Uncle George had similarly been lending a humorous turn. It had been his line that Dr Naylor would have been treated with more respect had he been properly dressed.
    ‘I was very pleased,’ Father Hooker had suddenly said to George, ‘to see you enjoying your ease – as indeed you are still doing now—in flannels. Dulce est desipere in loco. But in general – purely in general – there is surely an abnegation of responsibility in it. Except—’ and here Hooker gave a little bow to his hostess—’upon delightfully private and domestic occasions.’
    For a couple of seconds silence obtained – no doubt from a feeling that the chap had said something out of turn. For one thing, it seemed deliberately to ignore the significance that George clearly attached to the shedding of clerical garments. Certainly it startled George himself. But it also prompted him to mischief.
    ‘My dear Hooker,’ he said (having presumably decided that a familiar mode of address was proper at his sister-in-law’s table), ‘would it be your impression that Christ turned up at the Last Supper in alb, stole and chasuble?’
    ‘Really, Dr Naylor . . .’
    ‘Or that the disciples went fishing in cassocks?’
    Father Hooker must have reflected that here was a new George Naylor. Being doubtless a classical scholar, he may even have likened his latest apostate to Antaeus, who gained strength from planting his feet on native soil.
    ‘It is hardly matter for a jest,’ he said.
    ‘No, indeed. It’s a matter of serious and curious interest. I was reading an article about it in Theology not long ago. Most of our ecclesiastical habiliments were simply the ordinary wear of the upper classes in classical Rome. The clergy just held on to them. And the dog-collar, you know, which there are no end of jests about, is merely something we ourselves nobbled from the Romish clergy on the continent well within the present century. We’re sticking to it. They’re giving it up. Have you been in Rome itself lately?’
    ‘No,’ Father Hooker said with dignity. ‘I