The Naylors by J.I.M. Stewart Read Free Book Online

even managed to bear that burden of books along with him. ‘It’s some time since we met, my dear Naylor,’ this abraded patriarch said. ‘I don’t forget a pupil. I don’t forget a pupil, I say. I don’t forget a pupil.’
    Warden Gumphy (for George knew him to have become that) was (like George himself?) a clergyman. He had never been George’s tutor of the ordinary workaday sort, having already become too senior a fellow of the college for such labour. But he had been George’s moral tutor. He had seen George, that is, for a few minutes at the beginning of each term and inquired about his vacation reading. Not what he had been reading specifically for Schools, but his general reading. ‘In a general sense. In a general sense, I say,’ the Gumpher would insist, as he removed his spectacles, polished them vigorously, and returned them to his nose. It was less the Gumpher’s self-evident nonagenarian standing than his retention of that particular idiom or trope that rolled back the years for George now. George found himself trying to secrete his two bulky novels beneath the inadequate cover of C.S. Lewis’s belligerent fable. Then it struck him that the Gumpher would probably hold a poorer opinion of Lewis than even of Salman Rushdie or David Storey, so he abandoned this attempted concealment and sought for the proper thing to say.
    ‘It’s delightful, Mr Warden, to see you looking so well.’ George felt that this, if conveyed without too much undercurrent of surprise, couldn’t be far wrong.
    ‘The daily constitutional, Naylor. The daily constitutional, I say. And how is the business, Naylor? Is it looking up? Is it looking up, I say?’
    This was perplexing. The Warden was presumably referring to the business of pastoral care. Was George attracting good congregations when he preached at matins on Sundays? Was he attracting anybody at all to weekday affairs? These were natural and proper questions for a concerned priest to ask. But here again the Gumpher’s idiom had been, like his person, a shade odd.
    ‘I’ve had a small flutter on that stable myself,’ the Warden said. ‘Yes, a flutter, I say. Since people are to have more and more free time for it all, more and more free time.’
    The Gumpher believed himself to be talking to George’s father! As George realised this, his head swam a little. His father had been in on the first major expansion of those leisure industries which were now understood to be the main concern of George’s brother, Edward. And George could recall that his moral tutor’s having formerly been his father’s tutor for some Honour School had been a point of minor college curiosity. Such linkings and continuities were not uncommon. And the Gumpher (who would surely be a centenarian quite soon) might very readily slip a generation when recalling his dealings with Naylors. They had neither of them, George or his father, been particularly memorable undergraduates. But this didn’t make the present situation, here in Blackwell’s shop, other than a bit dodgy. To say baldly, ‘I’m not John Naylor; I’m his younger son George’, might be disconcerting and almost, indeed, discourteous.
    ‘And I warned you, I say,’ the Gumpher was saying.
    ‘I beg your pardon, Mr Warden?’ It was evident that George in his bewilderment had let his attention wander.
    ‘But I was wrong,’ the Gumpher said, with that ready confession of error that marks (or ought to mark) the true scholar. ‘At a Gaudy, it was. You remember it, Naylor? The first Gaudy we held after the Armistice, it must have been. Not ill fare, considering the times. And still plenty of sound wine.’
    ‘The Armistice?’ George repeated stupidly. He now felt that inside his head something was going awkwardly numb. ‘In 1918?’
    ‘Young and confident, Naylor. I was young and confident. You must remember that. I had only just got my fellowship. And I did approve of your buying land with that bit of family money.