The Naylors by J.I.M. Stewart

presented to them. Hilda, however, wasn’t going to be a critic any more than she was going to be a don. She was going to write.
    Uncle George’s carriage came to a stop almost opposite to where she was waiting for him on the platform, so she saw him while he was still opening the door. He had a suitcase and what appeared to be a parcel of books, and the one was getting in the way of the other. She debated, as she advanced, whether she should grab the suitcase and hold on to it. Charles or Henry could properly do that, but perhaps for her to do so would be to treat her uncle as an old man. It was one of those female disabilities a gaggle of women were nowadays making a fuss about. Hilda wondered whether she was right not much to fall for women’s lib. A great-aunt on her mother’s side had been a prominent suffragette. Was that different? She hadn’t thought about it, and it wasn’t a moment to think about it now. Observation first and reflection afterwards: that was the golden rule. So now she registered how her uncle’s expression as he caught sight of her contrived simultaneously to indicate pleasure and dismay.
    ‘Hilda!’ he shouted – and then gave a moment, for no apparent reason, to confusedly switching the suitcase and the parcel from one fist to the other. Almost simultaneously, however, he managed a kiss. ‘But I said I’d get a taxi!’ he then exclaimed. ‘There is a taxi – quite often.’
    ‘Charles came to fetch your friend, so I thought I’d come and fetch you. So as to be sure you were in time for dinner.’
    ‘My friend? Yes, of course. Hooker. Do you like him?’
    ‘No, not really.’
    ‘Oh, dear! He isn’t a friend, you know – or even an acquaintance. But he’s said to be very distinguished. I rather dodged him on that train. I thought, you see, that I’d just take a potter round Oxford. It was thoughtless of me. These two car trips! I am so sorry.’
    ‘Was it nice?’ Effecting a judicious compromise, Hilda had managed to relieve her uncle of the parcel of books. ‘Oxford, I mean.’
    ‘Yes, indeed.’ Uncle George said this with immediate conviction. ‘But changed in some ways since my time. Probably not since yours or Charles’s. It’s a pity Charles didn’t finish there.’
    ‘Charles simply refused to pass his Mods.’
    ‘Probably they can be very vexatious. Henry will have better luck. I think of him, you know, as a dark horse who may yet break clear of those maths blinkers.’
    ‘I rather agree.’ Hilda was now leading the way to her car. What was in her head was a humiliating realisation of the trashy character of the family fantasy she had been thinking up as fit for fiction. Uncle George was real. To flatten him out into a manikin in a yarn would be merely wanton. Yet you were always told that the material for novels and things had to be found not in books but in first-hand experience of life. And that wasn’t, as books were, easy to come by. Your family was your stock-in- trade, at least to start with.
    Suddenly Hilda had another idea. Somebody publishes a novel crammed with her or his nearest relations, all satirically presented. And all the relations read it, are enthusiastic, and quite fail to spot either themselves or each other. I come out with bad ideas, Hilda told herself, as easily as a baby does with spots.
    ‘How is the tennis court?’ Uncle George asked. They were now seated in the car, and Hilda was revving up.
    ‘It has come out in spots.’ Hilda realised that this was an obscure remark. ‘Patches of moss or something that produce an odd bounce if the ball lands on them.’ It was like Uncle George to ask a conscientious question like this – even perhaps to think it up ahead. He was in the dumps about God and his immortal soul, both of which he now presumably believed to be old wives’ tales. But he felt he had to enter into others’ concerns, however trivial. The tennis court wasn’t prominent in Hilda’s mind, and she wasn’t too