The Naylors Read Free

loss of faith had crept up on him disguised as a grotesque loss of memory. He had awakened from a normal night’s sleep wondering about monophysites. What on earth were monophysites? Weren’t they something it was rather useful to have in the blood-stream? But no – that was phagocytes. What were monophysites? George had panicked before the blankness in his mind, obscurely knowing it to be portentous. He had pulled himself together and thought of other things, which is the correct technique when one has forgotten somebody’s name. And, sure enough, accurate knowledge almost at once bobbed up in his head. A monophysite believes that there is only one nature in the person of Jesus Christ. And George, in a happier time, had contributed to a theological journal a paper on Jacobus Baradaeus of Edessa, who had revived this pernicious Eutychian heresy in the sixth century. Perhaps in a sense the heresy might be said to have long harboured in the blood-stream of the Jacobite Church. Perhaps that was why he had thought of phagocytes. It had been a bad slip-up, all the same.
    Then he had taken to forgetting all sorts of entirely commonplace things, and this morbid behaviour had persisted even after he had acknowledged what he was really up against. A couple of days ago he had been unable to recall whether or not he had prepared and eaten his breakfast. He knew that such amnesias often afflict the aged. But he wasn’t aged. He was forty-three. And although he had become aware that his nephew, Charles, referred to him as ‘the old boy’, he was in fact a well-preserved forty-three. So his mind oughtn’t so to misbehave. Even the petty awkwardnesses were discouraging. Only a few minutes ago he had been trying to remember whether he had or had not bought himself a railway ticket for the journey he was engaged upon.
    George got to his feet. Rather, he found himself on his feet – somewhat insecurely, since the inter-city train was swaying on its axis. He found that he had brought his suitcase down from above his head, and was trying to open it with a minimum of inconvenience to the professional lady next to him. He didn’t manage this very well; the lid behaved awkwardly; the lady received a dig in the ribs.
    ‘I’m so sorry!’ George exclaimed. ‘I do apologise. I’m just making sure that I packed my . . . George was about to say, ‘shaving kit’. But he hesitated. About ‘shaving kit’ there was surely something just a shade indelicate, even a hint of what the young people called (quite inaccurately) ‘machismo’. So George said ‘comb’ instead. Realising that his behaviour was entirely idiotic, he shut down the suitcase in a fumbling fashion, and managed to return it to the rack. The cord of his pyjama trousers was now inelegantly depending from it.
    ‘I can lend you a comb, love,’ the fat woman said, and by manipulating several of her larger packages she managed to free her hand-bag. ‘And here it is!’ she said triumphantly. She was under the natural impression that her fellow-traveller wanted to attend to his hair there and then.
    ‘Thank you very much, indeed,’ George said, and tried to purge his acceptance of the comb of any tinge of distaste. It had a few hairs stuck in it; it might even have been a little scruffy. Being (or having lately been) a Christian as well as a gentleman, George passed the undesirable object firmly through his hair, and then returned it. ‘Thank you very much,’ he said again. He did manage not to sound falsely effusive. But unfortunately he happened to glance across at the businessm’n, and judged the fellow’s gaze to be singularly lacking in charity. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘may I ask whether you are a believing Christian?’
    Nobody in the compartment was more astounded by this question than George Naylor himself. It was, of course, a good question to put. Any of the Apostles might have asked it of the first stranger met in the street, and for George himself it held its