The Children of Men (20 page)

He moved down to the drawing-room and walked restlessly about the wide room, mysteriously aware of the unlit and empty storeys above and beneath him as if each of those silent rooms held a menace. He paused at a window overlooking the street and looked out over the wrought-iron balcony. A thin rain was falling. He could see silver shafts falling against the street lights and, far below, the dark tackiness of the pavement. The curtains opposite had been drawn and the flat stone façade showed no sign of life, not even a chink where the curtains met. Depression settled on him like a familiar heavy blanket. Weighted with guilt and memory and anxiety, he could almost smell the accumulated rubbish of the dead years. His confidence drained away and fear strengthened. He told himself that during the encounter he had thought only of himself, his safety, his cleverness, his self-respect. But they weren’t primarily interested in him, they were seeking Julian and the Five Fishes. He had given nothing away, he need feel no guilt about that, but still they had come to him, which meant they suspected he knew something. Of course they did. The Council had never really believed that his visit was entirely of his own volition. The SSP would come again; the next time the veneer of politeness would be thinner, the questions more searching, the outcome possibly more painful.

How much more did they know than Rawlings had revealed? Suddenly it seemed to him that they hadn’t already pulled in the group for questioning. But perhaps they had. Was that the reason for the call today? Were they already holding Julian and the group and testing how far he was involved? And surely they could get on to Miriam quickly enough. He remembered his question to the Council about conditions on the Isle of Man, and the reply: “We know; the question is, how do you?” They were looking for someone who had knowledge of conditions on the island; and with visitors forbidden and no letters to or from the island permitted, no publicity, how could that knowledge have been gained? The escape of Miriam’s brother would be on record. It was remarkable that once the Five Fishes began acting they hadn’t taken her in for questioning. But perhaps they had. Perhaps even now she and Julian were in their hands.

His thoughts had come full circle and he felt for the first time an extraordinary loneliness. It wasn’t an emotion with which he was familiar. He both distrusted and resented it. Looking down over the empty street, he wished for the first time that there was someone, a friend he could trust, in whom he could confide. Before she had left him, Helena had said: “We live in the same house, but we’re like lodgers or guests in the same hotel. We never really talk.” Irritated by such a banal, predictable complaint, the commonplace lament of discontented wives, he had answered: “Talk about what? Here I am. If you want to talk now, I’m listening.”

It seemed to him that it would be a comfort even to talk to her, to hear her reluctant and unhelpful response to his dilemma. And mixed with the fear, the guilt, the loneliness, there was a renewed irritation—with Julian, with the group, with himself that he had ever become involved. At least he’d done what they’d asked. He’d seen the Warden of England and then he’d warned Julian. It wasn’t his fault that the group hadn’t taken the warning. No doubt they would argue that he had an obligation to get a message to them, to let them know they were in danger. But they must know that they were in danger. And how could he warn them? He knew none of their addresses, where any of them worked or at what. The only thing he could do if Julian was taken would be to intercede with Xan on her behalf. But would he even know when she was arrested? It should be possible, if he searched, to find one of the gang, but how could he safely inquire without making the search obvious? From now on the SSP might even be keeping him under secret surveillance. There was nothing he could do but wait.

Friday 26 March 2021

I saw her today for the first time since our meeting in the Pitt Rivers Museum. I was buying cheese in the covered market and had turned from the counter with my small, carefully wrapped packets of Roquefort, Danish blue, Camembert, when I saw her only a few yards from me. She was choosing fruit, not shopping as I was for the increasingly finicky taste of one, but pointing out her choice without hesitation, holding out an open canvas bag with liberality to receive fragile brown bags almost bursting with the golden, pitted globes of oranges, the gleaming curves of bananas, the russet of Cox’s Orange Pippins. I saw her in a glow of effulgent colour, skin and hair seeming to absorb radiance from the fruit, as if she were lit not by the hard glaring lights of the store, but by a warm southern sun. I watched while she handed over a note, then counted out coins to give the storekeeper the exact money, smiling as she handed it over, watched still as she hoisted the wide strap of the canvas bag over her shoulder, sagging a little with the weight. Shoppers shuffled between us but I stood rooted, unwilling, perhaps unable to move, my mind a tumult of extraordinary and unwelcome sensations. I was seized with a ludicrous urge to dash to the flower-stall, press notes into the florist’s hands, seize from their tubs the bundles of daffodils, tulips, hot-house roses and lilies, pile them into her arms and take the bag from her encumbered shoulder. It was a romantic impulse, childish and ridiculous, which I hadn’t felt since I was a boy. I had distrusted and resented it then. Now it appalled me by its strength, its irrationality, its destructive potential.

She turned, still not seeing me, and made her way towards the exit
into the High Street. I followed, weaving my way through the Friday morning shoppers with their baskets on wheels, impatient when my path was momentarily blocked. I told myself that I was behaving like a fool, that I should let her pass out of sight, that she was a woman I had met only four times and on none of them had she shown any interest in me except an obstinate determination that I should do what she wanted, that I knew nothing about her except that she was married, that this overwhelming need to hear her voice, to touch her, was no more than the first symptom of the morbid emotional instability of solitary middle age. I tried not to hurry, a demeaning acknowledgement of need. Even so, I managed to catch her up as she turned into the High Street.

I touched her shoulder and said: “Good morning.”

Any greeting would have seemed banal. This at least was innocuous. She turned towards me and for a second I was able to deceive myself that her smile was one of joyous recognition. But it was the same smile she had given to the greengrocer.

I laid my hand on the bag and said: “May I carry this for you?” I felt like an importunate schoolboy.

She shook her head and said: “Thank you, but the van is parked very close.”

What van? I wondered. For whom was the fruit intended? Surely not just for the two of them, Rolf and herself. Did she work in some kind of institution? But I didn’t ask, knowing that she wouldn’t have told me.

I said: “Are you all right?”

Again she smiled. “Yes, as you see. And you?”

“As you see.”

She turned away. The action was gentle—she had no wish to hurt me—but it was deliberate and she meant it to be final.

I said in a low voice: “I have to speak to you. It’s important. It won’t take long. Isn’t there somewhere we can go?”

“It’s safer in the market than here.”

She turned back, and I walked at her side casually, not looking at her, two shoppers in the crowd forced into temporary proximity by the press of shuffling bodies. Once in the market she paused to look into a window where an elderly man and his assistant were selling flans and tarts fresh from the oven. I stood beside her, pretending an interest in the bubbling cheese, the seeping gravy. The smell came to me, savoury
and strong, a remembered smell. They had been baking pies here since I was an undergraduate.

I stood watching as if considering what was on offer, then said very quietly into her ear: “The SSP have been to see me—they may be very close. They’re looking for a group of five.”

She turned from the window and walked on. I kept to her side.

She said: “Of course. They know there are five of us. There’s no secret about that.”

Standing at her shoulder, I said: “I don’t know what else they’ve found out or guessed. Stop now. You’re doing no good. There may not be much time. If the others won’t stop then get out yourself.”

It was then that she turned and looked at me. Our eyes met for only a second but now, away from the flaming lights and the richness of the gleaming fruit, I saw what I hadn’t noticed before: that her face looked tired, older, drained.

She said: “Please go. It’s better that we don’t see each other again.”

She held out her hand, and in defiance of risk I took it. I said: “I don’t know your surname. I don’t know where you live or where to find you. But you know where to find me. If you ever need me send for me at St. John Street and I’ll come.”

Then I turned and walked away so that I need not watch her walking away from me.

I am writing this after dinner, looking out from the small back window towards the distant slope of Wytham Wood. I am fifty years old and I have never known what it is to love. I can write those words, know them to be true, but feel only the regret that a tone-deaf man must feel because he can’t appreciate music, a regret less keen because it is for something never known, not for something lost. But emotions have their own time and place. Fifty is not an age to invite the turbulence of love, particularly not on this doomed and joyless planet when man goes to his last rest and all desire fades. So I shall plan my escape. It isn’t easy for anyone under sixty-five to get an exit permit; since Omega only the aged can travel as they will. But I don’t expect any difficulty. There are still some advantages in being the Warden’s cousin, even if I never mention the relationship. As soon as I’m in touch with officialdom it is known. My passport is already stamped with the necessary travel permit. I shall get someone to take my summer course, relieved to be spared that
shared boredom. I have no new knowledge, no enthusiasm to communicate. I shall take the ferry and drive, revisit the great cities, the cathedrals and temples of Europe while there are still roads that are passable, hotels with sufficient staff to provide at least an acceptable standard of comfort, where I can be reasonably sure of buying petrol, at least in the cities. I shall put behind me the memory of what I saw at Southwold, Xan and the Council, and this grey city, where even the stones bear witness to the transience of youth, of learning, of love. I shall tear this page from my journal. Writing these words was an indulgence; to let them stand would be folly. And I shall try to forget this morning’s promise. It was made in a moment of madness. I don’t suppose she will take it up. If she does, she will find this house empty.

He returned to Oxford on the last day of September, arriving in mid-afternoon. No one had tried to prevent him from going and no one welcomed him home. The house smelt unclean, the basement dining-room damp and musty, the upper rooms unaired. He had instructed Mrs. Kavanagh to open the windows from time to time but the air, with its disagreeable sourness, smelt as if they had been tightly closed for years. The narrow hall was littered with post; some of it looked as if the flimsy envelopes were adhering to the carpet. In the drawing-room, its long curtains drawn against the afternoon sun as if in the house of the dead, small chunks of rubble and gouts of soot had fallen from the chimney, and were ground into the rug under his unwary feet. He breathed in sootiness and decay. The house itself seemed to be disintegrating before his eyes.

The small top room, with its view of the campanile of St. Barnabas Church and the trees of Wytham Wood tinged with the first hues of autumn, struck him as very cold but unchanged. Here he sat and listlessly turned over the pages of his diary where he had recorded each day of his travels, joylessly, meticulously, mentally ticking off each of the cities and sights he had planned to revisit as if he were a schoolboy fulfilling some holiday task. The Auvergne, Fontainebleau, Carcassonne, Florence, Venice, Perugia, the cathedral at Orvieto, the mosaics in San Vitale, Ravenna, the Temple of Hera at Paestum. He had set out in no mood of excited anticipation, had invited no adventures, sought no unfamiliar primitive places where novelty and discovery could more than compensate for monotonous food or hard beds. He had moved in
organized and expensive comfort from capital to capital: Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Rome. He hadn’t even been consciously saying farewell to the beauty and splendours he had first known in youth. He could hope to come again; this needn’t be a final visit. This was a journey of escape, not a pilgrimage in search of forgotten sensations. But he knew now that the part of him from which he most needed to escape had remained in Oxford.

By August Italy had become too hot. Fleeing from the heat, the dust, the grey company of the old who seemed to shuffle through Europe like a moving fog, he took the twisting road to Ravello, strung like an eyrie between the deep blue of the Mediterranean and the sky. Here he found a small family-run hotel, expensive and half-empty. He stayed for the rest of the month. It couldn’t give him peace, but it did give him comfort and solitude.

His keenest memory was of Rome, standing before the Michelangelo
Pietà
in St. Peter’s, of the rows of spluttering candles, the kneeling women, rich and poor, young and old, fixing their eyes on the Virgin’s face with an intensity of longing almost too painful to witness. He remembered their outstretched arms, their palms pressed against the glass protective shield, the low continual mutter of their prayers as if this ceaseless anguished moan came from a single throat and carried to that unregarding marble the hopeless longing of all the world.

He returned to an Oxford which lay bleached and exhausted after a hot summer, to an atmosphere which impressed itself upon him as anxious, fretful, almost intimidating. He walked through the empty quads, their stones gold in the mellow autumn sun, the last gauds of high summer still flaming against their walls, and met no face he knew. It seemed to his depressed and distorted imagination that the previous inhabitants had been mysteriously evicted and that strangers walked the grey streets and sat like returning ghosts under the trees of the college gardens. The talk in the Senior Common Room was forced, desultory. His colleagues seemed unwilling to meet his eyes. Those few who realized that he had been away inquired about the success of the trip, but without curiosity, a mere sop to politeness. He felt as if he had brought back with him some foreign and disreputable contagion. He had returned to his own city, his own familiar place, yet was revisited by that peculiar and unfamiliar unease which he supposed could only be called loneliness.