The Naylors Read Free Page A

private urgency. Only the urgency had resulted in his no longer being approximated to an Apostle by exhibiting clerical dress. That morning – like John Henry Newman, he had recalled, in a related condition of doubt – he had put on a pair of grey flannel trousers. He had even – as is not recorded of Newman – adopted a turned-down collar and a quiet but incontestably secular tie. At the best he could only be regarded as one of those vexatiously evangelical laymen who pester with tracts and similar importunities entire strangers encountered on public conveyances.
    George’s interlocutor reacted badly. Not, indeed, that he consented to be an interlocutor at all, since he simply remained silent and stared at George stonily as at a lunatic in no particular need of help. George, again conscious of outré behaviour but not feeling that this time he had anything for which to apologise, was silent too. And now the professional lady came briskly and surprisingly to his rescue.
    ‘Well, I am,’ she said. ‘I’m a member of the Catholic Church, and I go to mass fairly regularly.’
    This information wasn’t offered aggressively. It was uttered without particular emphasis, and as if merely in continuation of normal chit-chat between casually encountering persons.
    ‘Well, now!’ the fat woman said comfortably.
    ‘A Catholic, are you?’ the woman of average proportions said in quite a different tone. ‘The trouble with you Catholics is that you’re Catholics first and Christians afterwards. Or that’s how it seems to me and I don’t mind saying so.’
    George quite liked this. It was a preposterous remark, but at least the woman had ‘fired up’ in a context of serious religious discussion. She had convictions, and it was wonderful to have that. So George, whose experience in his mission had accustomed him to debate with unsophisticated people, suddenly felt almost at home in the railway carriage, and he began on a cordial note what might be called an enveloping movement against the stark Protestantism confronting him in the fat woman’s friend. But he didn’t get far with it. He was conscious of his thoroughly false personal position. The man opposite had resumed operations on his calculator: a defiant money-changer in this rocking and impromptu temple of the Word. Happening to glance aside, George detected the young workman in the corner, his own head correspondingly rotated, offering his companion a slow and appreciative wink. As for the fourth and imperfectly glimpsed man, he had produced a copy of The Times and retired unostentatiously but firmly behind it. George found himself simply conducting an untimely dialogue of a quasi-theological character with the woman who went to mass fairly regularly. She was clearly a normal and untroubled cradle Cat. George wished her well, but felt no real occasion to be talking to her. And then the train ran into Reading.
    The cradle Cat got out with a goodbye to the company in general, but not without a special glance at George which made him feel she had been wondering about him. His sense of discomfort grew. He wished he was in the other sort of railway carriage, now more common at least in the second class, in which one’s near-anonymity is assured by dozens or scores of other passengers, instead of undergoing this boxed-up effect with four or five. The train was moving again and nobody else had got on. He cursed (or at least deplored) the impulsive start of pastoral curiosity by which he had set the whole embarrassing episode in motion. But now with any luck there would be silence at least as far as to Didcot or even Oxford. The man behind The Times seemed reliable; he had contrived to turn a page of the paper without lowering it from in front of his nose: technically a difficult feat which spoke of practice. About the two young workmen there was also something reassuring. A strain of feeling in George responded to them as wholesome and agreeable physical presences, and