The Children of Men (17 page)

And then he heard the footsteps. He looked round but waited until Julian moved beside him. Her hair was uncovered but she was wearing a padded jacket and trousers. When she spoke, her breath rose in small bursts of mist.

“I’m sorry I’m late. I cycled and got a puncture. Did you see him?”

There was no greeting between them and he knew that, for her, he was just a messenger. He moved away from the showcase and she followed, looking from side to side, hoping, he supposed, to give the impression, even in this obvious emptiness, of two visitors who had casually met. It wasn’t convincing and he wondered why she bothered.

He said: “I saw him. I saw the whole Council. Later I saw the Warden alone. I did no good; I may have done some harm. He knew that someone had prompted my visit. Now if you do go ahead with your plans, he’s been warned.”

“You explained to him about the Quietus, the treatment of the Sojourners, what’s happening on the Isle of Man?”

“That’s what you asked me to do and that’s what I did. I didn’t expect to be successful and I wasn’t. I know him. Oh, he may make some changes, although he gave no promises. He’ll probably shut down the remaining porn shops, but gradually, and liberalize the regulations for compulsory semen testing. It’s a waste of time, anyway, and I doubt whether he’s got the lab technicians to keep it going on a national scale much longer. Half of them have stopped caring. I missed two appointments last year and no one bothered to check up. I don’t think he’ll do anything about the Quietus except, perhaps, to ensure that in future it’s better organized.”

“And the Man Penal Colony?”

“Nothing. He won’t waste men and resources on pacifying the island. Why should he? Setting up the Penal Colony is probably the most popular thing he’s ever done.”

“And the treatment of the Sojourners? Giving them full civil rights, a decent life here, the chance to stay?”

“That seems very unimportant to him compared to what is important: the good order of Britain, ensuring that the race dies with some dignity.”

She said: “Dignity? How can there be dignity if we care so little for the dignity of others?”

They were close now to the great totem pole. Theo ran his hands over the wood. Not bothering to look at it, she said: “So we shall have to do what we can.”

“There’s nothing you can do except in the end get yourselves killed or sent to the island—that is, if the Warden and the Council are as ruthless as you apparently believe. As Miriam can tell you, death would be preferable to the island.”

She said, as if considering a serious plan: “Perhaps if a few people, a group of friends, got themselves exiled to the island deliberately, they could do something to change things. Or if we offered to go there voluntarily, why should the Warden forbid us, why should he care? Even a small group could help if they arrived in love.”

Theo could hear the contempt in his voice. “Holding up the Cross of Christ before the savages, as the missionaries did in South America. Like them, get yourselves butchered on the beaches? Don’t you read any history? There are only two reasons for that kind of folly. One is that you have a yearning for martyrdom. There’s nothing new in that, if it’s the way your religion takes you. I’ve always seen it as an unhealthy mixture of masochism and sensuality but I can see its appeal to a certain cast of mind. What is new is that your martyrdom won’t even be commemorated, won’t even be noticed. In seventy-odd years it will have no possible value because there will be no one left on earth to give it value, no one even to put up a small wayside shrine to the new Oxford martyrs. The second reason is more ignoble and Xan would understand it very well. If you did succeed, what an intoxication of power! The Isle of Man pacified, the violent living in peace, crops sown and harvested, the sick cared for, Sunday services in the churches, the redeemed kissing
the hands of the living saint who made it all possible. Then you’ll know what the Warden of England feels every waking moment, what he enjoys, what he can’t do without. Absolute power in your little kingdom. I can see the attraction of that; but it won’t happen.”

They stood together for a moment in silence, then he said quietly: “Let it go. Don’t waste the rest of your life on a cause that is as futile as it’s impossible. Things will get better. In fifteen years’ time—and that’s such a little space—90 per cent of the people living in Britain will be over eighty. There won’t be the energy for evil any more than there will be the energy for good. Think what that England will be like. The great buildings empty and silent, the roads unrepaired, stretching between the overgrown hedges, the remnants of humanity huddling together for comfort and protection, the running-down of services of civilization and then, at the end, the failure of power and light. The hoarded candles will be lit and soon even the last candle will flicker and die. Doesn’t that make what’s happening on the Isle of Man seem unimportant?”

She said: “If we are dying we can die as human beings, not as devils. Goodbye, and thank you for seeing the Warden.”

But he had to make one more effort. He said: “I can’t think of any group less equipped to confront the apparatus of state. You’ve no money, no resources, no influence, no popular backing. You haven’t even a coherent philosophy of revolt. Miriam is doing it to avenge her brother. Gascoigne, apparently, because the Warden has appropriated the word Grenadiers. Luke out of some vague Christian idealism and a yearning for such abstracts as compassion, justice and love. Rolf hasn’t even the justification of moral indignation. His motive is ambition; he resents the Warden’s absolute power and would like it for himself. You’re doing it because you’re married to Rolf. He’s dragging you into dreadful danger to satisfy his own ambitions. He can’t compel you. Leave him. Break free.”

She said gently: “I can’t not be married to him. I can’t leave him. And you’re wrong, that isn’t the reason. I’m with them because this is something I have to do.”

“Yes, because Rolf wants you to.”

“No, because God wants me to.”

He wanted to bang his head against the totem pole in his frustration.
“If you believe He exists, then presumably you believe that He gave you your mind, your intelligence. Use it. I thought you would have been too proud to make such a fool of yourself.”

But she was impervious to such facile blandishments. She said: “The world is changed not by the self-regarding, but by men and women prepared to make fools of themselves. Goodbye, Dr. Faron. And thank you for trying.” She turned without touching him and he watched her leave.

She hadn’t asked him not to betray them. She didn’t need to, but he was glad all the same that the words hadn’t been spoken. And he could have given no promise. He didn’t believe that Xan would condone torture, but for him the threat of torture would have been enough, and it struck him for the first time that he had, perhaps, misjudged Xan for the most naïve of reasons; he couldn’t believe that a man who was highly intelligent, who had humour and charm, a man he had called his friend, could be evil. Perhaps it was he, not Julian, who needed a lesson in history.

The group didn’t wait long. Two weeks after his meeting with Julian he came down to breakfast and found among the scatter of post on the mat a sheet of folded paper. The printed words were headed by the precisely drawn picture of a small herring-like fish. It was like a child’s drawing; trouble had been taken. Theo read the message underneath with exasperated pity.

The words confronted him in their simplicity, their reasonableness, their essential humanity. Why was he so certain, he wondered, that they had been written by Julian? And yet they could do no good. What were the Five Fishes proposing? That people should march in force on their Local Council or should storm the old Foreign Office building? The group had no organization, no basis of power, no money, no apparent plan of campaign. The most they could hope for would be to make people think, to provoke discontent, to encourage men not to attend their next semen testing and women to refuse their next medical examination. And what difference would that make? The examinations were becoming increasingly perfunctory as hope died.

The paper was of cheap quality, the message amateurishly printed. Presumably they had a press hidden in some church crypt or remote but accessible forest shed. But how long would it remain secret if the SSP troubled to hunt them down?

Once more he read the five demands. The first was unlikely to worry Xan. The country would hardly welcome the expense and disruption of a general election but, if he called one, his power would be confirmed by an overwhelming majority whether or not anyone had the temerity to stand against him. Theo asked himself how many of the other reforms he might have achieved had he stayed as Xan’s adviser. But he knew the answer. He had been powerless then and the Five Fishes were powerless now. If there had been no Omega, these were aims which a man might be prepared to fight for, even to suffer for. But if there had been no Omega, the evils would not exist. It was reasonable to struggle, to suffer, perhaps even to die, for a more just, a more compassionate society, but not in a world with no future where, all too soon, the very words “justice,” “compassion,” “society,” “struggle,” “evil,” would be unheard echoes on an empty air. Julian would say that it was worth the struggle and the suffering to save even one Sojourner from ill-treatment or prevent even one offender from being deported to the Man Penal Colony. But whatever the Five Fishes did, that wouldn’t happen. It wasn’t within their power. Rereading the five demands he felt a draining-away of his initial sympathy. He told himself that most men and women, human mules deprived of posterity, yet carried their burden of sorrow and regret with such fortitude as they could muster, contrived their compensating pleasures, indulged small personal vanities, behaved with decency to each other and to such Sojourners as they met. By what
right did the Five Fishes seek to impose upon these stoical dispossessed the futile burden of heroic virtue? He took the paper into the lavatory and, after tearing it precisely into quarters, flushed them down the bowl. As they were sucked, swirling, out of sight he wished for a second, no more, that he could share the passion and the folly which bound together that pitiably unarmoured fellowship.

Saturday 6 March 2021

Today Helena rang after breakfast and invited me to tea to see Mathilda’s kittens. She had sent me a postcard five days ago to say that they had arrived safely but I hadn’t been invited to the birthing party. I wondered whether there had been one, or whether they had kept the birth as a private indulgence, a shared experience which would belatedly celebrate and consolidate their new life together. Even so, it seemed unlikely that they would forgo what is generally accepted to be an obligation, the opportunity to let your friends witness the miracle of emerging life. A maximum of six people are usually invited to watch, but from a carefully judged distance so as not to fret or disturb the mother. And afterwards, if all goes well, there is a celebratory meal, often with champagne. The arrival of a litter is not untinged with sadness. The regulations regarding fecund domestic animals are plain and rigorously enforced. Mathilda will now be sterilized and Helena and Rupert will be allowed to keep one female from the litter for breeding. Alternatively, Mathilda will be permitted one more litter and all but one male kitten will be painlessly destroyed.

After Helena’s call I switched on the radio to listen to the eight o’clock news. Hearing the date broadcast, I realized for the first time that it is exactly one year today since she left me for Rupert. It is, perhaps, an appropriate day for my first visit to their home. I write “home” instead of “house” because I’m sure that is how Helena would describe it, dignifying a commonplace edifice in North Oxford with the sacramental importance of shared love and shared washing-up, commitment to total honesty and to a well-balanced diet, a new hygienic
kitchen and hygienic sex twice a week. I wonder about the sex, half deploring my prurience, but telling myself that my curiosity is both natural and permissible. After all, Rupert is now enjoying, or perhaps failing to enjoy, the body which I once knew almost as intimately as I know my own. A failed marriage is the most humiliating confirmation of the transitory seduction of the flesh. Lovers can explore every line, every curve and hollow, of the beloved’s body, can together reach the height of inexpressible ecstasy; yet how little it matters when love or lust at last dies and we are left with disputed possessions, lawyers’ bills, the sad detritus of the lumber-room, when the house chosen, furnished, possessed with enthusiasm and hope has become a prison, when faces are set in lines of peevish resentment and bodies no longer desired are observed in all their imperfections with a dispassionate and disenchanted eye. I wonder whether Helena talks to Rupert about what went on between us in bed. I imagine so, not to would require greater self-control and greater delicacy than I have ever seen in her. There is a streak of vulgarity in Helena’s carefully nurtured social respectability and I can imagine what she would tell him.

“Theo thought he was a wonderful lover, but it was all technique. You’d think he’d learned it from a sex manual. And he never talked to me, not really talked. I could be any woman.”