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

Nothing like it. Nothing like it, I say. But proposing to cover it with golf-courses was another matter. I was justified in urging caution upon you there. However, it all turned out well. Well, I say, well. Though to my mind still, Naylor, not quite a game for gentlemen. Cads and caddies, we used to say. Cads and caddies.’
    A caddie had once been a cadet, George recalled. The semantic change showed what happens to younger sons. But this thought was only fleetingly in his mind. For now the full truth had come to him. He was being mistaken by this awful old man not for his father but for his grandfather. His grandfather had been at the college too – and had been the first founder of those family fortunes depending on golf-courses and bowling-greens and ‘public’ tennis courts. George’s head was still swimming, but he managed a little chronology. The thing was feasible. The Gumpher had seen not two generations of Naylors through the college but three. Three. Somebody would probably root out the fact and refer to it as edifying when the place held Warden Gumphy’s memorial service.
    George, as he got away from this weird colloquy, felt that he ought (inwardly of course) to be laughing. In fact he was rather frightened. The Gumpher had by no means been a clown all his days. In early old age he had been notable in the streets of Oxford as a person of grave consequence. In perambulating infancy he had been patted on the head by Matthew Arnold, probably with a little extra unction because the Gumphys were understood to have owned the greater part of Cumberland. Having become Head of a college, he had no doubt at some time served his term as Vice-Chancellor of the university. He would have been perfectly up to hob-nobbing with visiting Royalty and Ministers of the Crown. And now this: an old creature with generation upon generation squashed up and muddled in his disintegrating grey matter. ‘Distressing’ was the decorous word for the unexpected encounter.
    This was certainly an unbalanced view of the episode. Warden Gumphy wasn’t really comprehensively gaga. His memories, if they had re-sorted themselves oddly, could hardly be called straitened. Leaving Blackwell’s, he would return home to the villa of his retirement somewhere in North Oxford; read, and it might be pungently annotate, the books he had bought; and probably consume a satisfactory dinner. No, one needn’t be upset about the Gumpher.
    But of course George Naylor was revisiting Oxford in a vulnerable frame of mind, and this was still his condition when he took his purchases up to the pay-desk. Handed a bill by the young woman coping with him, he put a hand in a pocket and (since he was habitually inclined to be vague about such things) supposed that it had conveniently come in contact with a banknote. This he presented to the young woman. She glanced at it without apparent surprise, and then turned it round so that George could inspect it too. So he read:
     
    IN THE EVENT
    OF A
    NUCLEAR WAR
    there will be no chances,
    there will be no survivors—
    all will be obliterated—
    nuclear devastation is not science fiction—
    it is a matter of fact.
     
    This was embarrassing. George offered apologies, mumbled explanations, and produced a pocket-book. The young woman smiled at him kindly, and even provided a free plastic bag – a kind of academic first cousin to the receptacles so abundantly carried by the Mesdames Bowman and Archer – for the labours of Lewis, Rushdie and Storey. George, having manoeuvred this through the narrow door, found himself back in Broad Street.
     
    It now came into his head that it would be pleasant to drop into the Bodleian Library, a place in which random conversations weren’t allowed. Readers did occasionally utter to one another – but almost furtively, and only upon matters of immediate learned concern. There wouldn’t be time in which to order any books, but George knew of catalogues and check-lists and bibliographies