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

station. He still had a quarter of an hour to wait, but he would spend the time on the platform. Reaching the man who would let him on, he felt in a pocket for his ticket. It was one of the large affairs that had become fashionable, and about the size of a luggage label. It seemed to be in rather a crumpled condition. He handed it to the collector, who glanced at it and impassively handed it back to him. He saw that it read:
     
    THE WORLD NOW STANDS ON THE BRINK
    OF THE FINAL ABYSS

II
    ‘But this man told us Uncle George was going to take a cab,’ Henry Naylor said.
    ‘Well, yes.’ Henry’s brother Charles was fiddling with a gun he rather hoped a college friend was going to invite him to bring to Scotland in August. ‘The man gave me that message as soon as I’d identified him on the platform. Which wasn’t difficult.’
    ‘But Hilda’s gone to the station all the same?’
    ‘Yes. We knew when the next train arrives, and I wasn’t keen on going back there myself.’ Charles tapped the gun, by way of showing that he had something weighty on his hands. ‘I said I thought you’d go – just by way of enjoying your driving licence.’ (It was only a few weeks since Henry had passed his driving test.) ‘But you weren’t around.’
    ‘I was doing bloody calculus.’ Henry, who enjoyed his maths, scowled insincerely. ‘Holidays just aren’t holidays any longer. Not in a post-A-level year. It’s swot, swot. Why should I go after a rotten scholarship? There’s pots of money.’
    ‘Scholarships don’t have much to do with money nowadays. It’s just petty prestige. Daddy likes the idea of any sort of prestige. He feels he himself is a thoroughly non-prestige City character. And a non-starter so far as the constituency is concerned. He’ll never win it. So he’s keen on nursing that odd scrap of ability you have for maths.’
    ‘He might do better to put his money on Hilda. Hilda’s tiresome, but she has something. I’d say it’s a certain command of dispassionate interest. Spectatorship as a métier. It’s why she sometimes mutters about Flaubert and Joyce.’
    ‘Never heard of them.’ Charles was always quick to resent what he thought of as a lurking egg-head quality in his brother. ‘Or was Joyce the chap who wrote some dirty books?’
    ‘Yes, he was.’
    ‘And the other chap, too?’
    ‘Flaubert? I know nothing about him.’ Henry had got it into his head that the distinguished thing was to have a flair for a single intellectual activity, so except when off his guard he regularly represented himself as a good deal less well-informed than he was. ‘Let’s get back to the current situation. Hilda and Uncle George will be here any time now. What about this minder – Hunter, is he, or Bunter?’
    ‘Hunter was the last one. This one is Hooker. It seems he likes to be called Father Hooker.’
    ‘Does that mean he’s high church?’
    ‘I don’t know whether he’s high or low. And I don’t know which Uncle George is, for that matter. It’s only Tweedledum and Tweedledee, isn’t it? By the way, where’s that Hookerdum now?’
    ‘He told mummy he must go and dress.’
    ‘Must what ? Charles was startled.
    ‘Dress. For dinner, I imagine.’
    ‘Good God!’ Charles was horrified. ‘Get into a dinner-jacket?’
    ‘I suppose so. Or some clerical equivalent. All purple, perhaps.’
    ‘That’s only bishops and people – and for very grand sprees.’ Charles spoke with authority. ‘But didn’t mummy tell him we don’t?’
    ‘Definitely she didn’t. She was being rather inattentive, I think. He’d been talking to her for quite some time.’
    ‘But, Henry, it’s bloody awkward, isn’t it? If the chap comes down like that. He ought to have asked, of course.’
    ‘He makes old-fashioned assumptions out of books,’ Henry suggested, ‘because lacking actual contact with high society.’
    ‘To hell with high society!’ It was clearly not egalitarian feeling that moved Charles to this