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

senseless exclamation. He was genuinely upset. ‘Here’s a wretched little black beetle turning up to rescue Uncle George – simply under the orders of some bigger beetle, I suppose – and the first thing we do is to embarrass the poor chap.’
    ‘We could send one of the maids up to his room with a message. As if that were a routine kind of thing.’
    ‘She’d muck it up. Giggle, perhaps.’ It was true that, although servants survived at Plumley, they were sometimes scarcely recognisable as such. ‘I’d better go and put on a dinner-jacket myself. Keep him in countenance. It’s the usual quick dodge when there’s been a balls-up. You, too.’
    ‘Hell I will.’ For a moment Henry looked merely obstinate. Then he laughed, and both brothers laughed together. ‘I’ll go up myself,’ he said. ‘Tap on the door and say, “By the way, we don’t wash or dress.” It should be quite easy.’
    ‘Don’t forget that Father business. It’s a harmless civility. Scat, young man.’ And Charles Naylor picked up his gun again.
     
    Driving to the railway station in her own old car – declared by her brothers to have been a christening present – Hilda had been visited by a brilliant idea. This happened quite often, although it always turned out to be in a disappointingly short-term way. More particularly, it had been happening since she won her prize. It had been a startling pot to come by: well-distanced from any commercial racket, and awarded by judges acknowledged to be critics of the most austere sort. Her story had been printed in what her father might have called a prestige magazine. Publishers had written to ask whether she had a novel on the stocks, and a firm of literary agents had suggested it would be prudent to employ their services. Hilda knew that it might be just a flash in the pan – or told herself that she did. She had been overwhelmed for a time, all the same. Chiefly, she didn’t want her family to know. And they didn’t, since they and all their acquaintance lived as remote as Esquimaux from anything of the kind. She might have created a pride of lions to replace Landseer’s in Trafalgar Square, she thought, and nobody in the Plumley world would have been aware of it. So she was keeping mum and biding her time.
    The idea that had come to her turned on the arrival of Uncle George and the new minder. There was to be a grown-up family like her own, only larger, with all its members convinced of the worth and rightness of their several absorbing interests and concerns. An Uncle George, a clergyman turned suddenly agnostic, was to return among them, followed by a minder like this man Hooker. But despite the efforts of the minder – or actually promoted by them in various highly ironical fashions she’d have to work out – the Uncle-George infection spread. One by one, the whole extended family lost whatever faith it had in one mundane thing or another. Universal aboulia (a splendid word) reigned. The only survivor was the Uncle George, who simply woke up one morning with his faith restored. The direst victim was the minder. Equally abruptly, he lost all confidence in his role, and went out and drowned himself in a pond.
    As a project upon which to base a successful career as a novelist, this idea proved even more short-lived than many others. It was dead when Hilda was still a couple of miles from the station where she was to pick up her uncle. For one thing, if achieved, its existence couldn’t, as could that of the prize story, be kept from her family, and they would all be hurt in their minds by it. This must be a difficulty authors had to face regularly, and Hilda wondered whether anybody had written a book, or at least a thesis, about it. For a few moments she toyed with the idea herself. (Hilda had read English at Oxford.) But that kind of thing should be left to dons. And of course to critics. There were critics, and some of them could spot a reasonably decent short story when it was