The Naylors Read Free Page B

by this time the odd little flurry of talk would have passed out of their heads, even supposing it ever to have lodged there. The female shoppers had gone back to the proper area of their concern, the fat one having opened one of her shopping bags and produced a nondescript garment over a detected flaw in which they were tut-tutting in a kind of gratified indignation. The man opposite George was still occupied with his pocket calculator. It appeared to be occasioning him increasing displeasure. He was even emitting the sounds, or at least rendering the impression, of one grinding his teeth in fury. Then suddenly this emotional instability, although presumably generated by commercial considerations, found vent in a different and distinctly startling direction.
    ‘Bloody Nosy Parker!’ the businessm’n said to George. ‘What the hell did you mean by it?’
    This unmannerly harking back to an exchange (if it could be called that) which had taken place 30 miles away caught George Naylor unawares. The ferocity of its expression seemed almost an invitation to fisticuffs. George, who belonged to a period in which the sport of boxing still obtained in schools for the sons of upper-class people, might have been willing to oblige but for the conjoined influences of the presence of ladies and the still automatically operative tenets of his late religion. As it was, he didn’t even find anything to say, and it was one of the young artisans who spoke.
    ‘Cool it, mate,’ he said easily to the businessm’n. ‘The gent only asked a civil question, didn’t he? A bit barmy, you may have thought it, but there’ll be things on which you’re a bit barmy yourself, likely enough. It’s just that we’re not all cracked down the same side of our heads. A civil answer would have been in order, chum, believe you me.’
    George felt himself agreeing with much of this, and he was pleased – as at his mission he had always been – that an individual who had presumably been denied much education other than of the banausic sort should prove capable of speaking out in a forthright and cogent manner. But George was bothered as well. That impulsive and unseasonable question of his (prompted he couldn’t tell by what) was still heading him towards trouble. Its next instalment came from the fat woman.
    ‘It was religious,’ she said. Her tone could again have been described as comfortable, but now it held a hint of censure as well. ‘It was religious, and I’m as religious as anybody, although Mrs Archer wouldn’t maybe agree.’ She had given a brief indicative nod towards her companion. ‘But I wouldn’t say it’s a thing to be talked about in a common way.’
    ‘It’s not everybody that’s called on to testify, Mrs Bowman.’ Mrs Archer said this in a tight-lipped fashion which she had not exhibited when discussing Debenhams and John Lewis with her companion.
    ‘That sort of thing should be left to the clergymen, to my mind,’ Mrs Bowman retorted. ‘I go to church as often as anybody else. Nowadays, that is. But as for talking about sin and repentance and the like, they should be let alone with it. They’ve had the training.’
    ‘What about your prayers, ma? Do you say them as often as anybody else too – always remembering that nowadays, of course? Down on your knees by your little bed? Those knees? You must be joking.’
    This speech came from the second of the young workmen. It was the more disobliging in that a certain cogency attended upon its mention of Mrs Bowman’s anatomy. Her knees were on view only in the sense that they would have been visible had they assuredly existed. But so massive and columnar were her nether limbs that there was no evidence that they did. She reminded George of some mediaeval bestiary in which the elephant is described as ‘stondand’ because unprovided with joints admitting of any other posture. Here was a frivolous flight of fancy on George’s part. It was Mrs Archer who recalled him