The Children of Men (28 page)

She said: “Luke’s. The child is Luke’s.”

Rolf’s voice was very quiet: “Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

He shone the torch down on Luke’s body and scrutinized it with the cold professional interest of an executioner checking that the condemned is dead, that there is no need for the final
coup de grâce
. Then,
with a violent motion he turned away from them, stumbled between the trees and flung himself against one of the beeches, encircling it with his arms.

Miriam said: “My God, what a time to ask! And what a time to be told.”

Theo said: “Go to him, Miriam.”

“My skills aren’t any use to him. He’ll have to cope with this by himself.”

Julian still knelt by Luke’s head. Theo and Miriam, standing together, stared fixedly at that dark shadow as if afraid that, unmarked, it would disappear among the darker shadows of the wood. They could hear no sound but it seemed to Theo that Rolf was rubbing his face against the bark like a tormented animal trying to rid itself of stinging flies. And now he was thrusting his whole body against the tree as if venting his anger and agony on the unyielding wood. Watching those jerking limbs in their obscene parody of lust reinforced for Theo the indecency of witnessing so much pain.

He turned away and said quietly to Miriam: “Did you know that Luke was the father?”

“I knew.”

“She told you?”

“I guessed.”

“But you said nothing.”

“What did you expect me to say? It was never my practice to inquire who fathered the babies I delivered. A baby is a baby.”

“This one is different.”

“Not to a midwife.”

“Did she love him?”

“Ah, that’s what men always want to know. You’d better ask her.”

Theo said: “Miriam, please talk to me about this.”

“I think she was sorry for him. I don’t think she loved either of them, neither Rolf nor Luke. She’s beginning to love you, whatever that means, but I think you know that. If you hadn’t known it, or hoped for it, you wouldn’t be here.”

“Wasn’t Luke ever tested? Or did both he and Rolf give up going for their sperm test?”

“Rolf has, at least during the last few months. He thought that the
technicians had been careless or that they’re just not bothering to test half the specimens they take. Luke was exempt from testing. He had mild epilepsy as a child. Like Julian, Luke was a reject.”

They had moved a little apart from Julian. Now, looking back at her dark kneeling shape, Theo said: “She’s so calm. Anyone would think she’s having this child under the best possible circumstances.”

“What are the best possible circumstances? Women have given birth in war, revolutions, famine, concentration camps, on the march. She’s got the essentials, you and a midwife she trusts.”

“She trusts in her God.”

“Perhaps you should try doing the same. It might give you some of her calm. Later, when the baby comes, I shall need your help. I certainly don’t need your anxiety.”

“Do you?” he asked.

She smiled, understanding the question. “Believe in God? No, it’s too late for me. I believe in Julian’s strength and courage and in my own skill. But if He gets us through this maybe I’ll change my mind, see if I can’t get something going with Him.”

“I don’t think He bargains.”

“Oh yes He does. I may not be religious but I know my Bible. My mother saw to that. He bargains all right. But He’s supposed to be just. If He wants belief He’d better provide some evidence.”

“That He exists?”

“That He cares.”

And still they stood, eyes watching that dark figure, hardly discernible against the darker trunk of which he seemed to be part, but quiet now, unmoving, resting against the tree as if in an extremity of exhaustion.

Theo said to Miriam, knowing the futility of the question even as he asked it: “Will he be all right?”

“I don’t know. How can I know?”

She moved from his side and walked towards Rolf, then stopped and stood quietly waiting, knowing that if he needed the comfort of a human touch, there was no one else to whom he could turn.

Julian got up from Luke’s body. Theo felt her cloak brush his arm but he did not turn to look at her. He was aware of a mixture of emotions, anger which he knew he had no right to feel, and relief, so strong that it was close to joy, that Rolf wasn’t the father of the child. But the anger was for the moment the stronger. He wanted to lash out at her, to say:
“Is that what you were, then? Camp-follower to the group? What about Gascoigne? How do you know the child isn’t his?” But those words would be unforgivable and, worse, unforgettable. He knew that he had no right to question her but he couldn’t bite back the stark accusatory words nor hide the pain behind them.

“Did you love them, either of them? Do you love your husband?”

She said quietly: “Did you love your wife?”

It was, he saw, a serious question, not a retaliation, and he gave it a serious and truthful answer. “I convinced myself I did when I married. I willed myself into the appropriate feelings without knowing what the appropriate feelings were. I endowed her with qualities she didn’t have and then despised her for not having them. Afterwards I might have learned to love her if I had thought more of her needs and less of my own.”

He thought: Portrait of a marriage. Perhaps most marriages, good and bad, could be summed up in four sentences.

She looked at him steadily for a moment, then said: “That’s the answer to your question.”

“And Luke?”

“No, I didn’t love him, but I liked having him in love with me. I envied him because he could love so much, could feel so much. No one has wanted me with that intensity of emotion. So I gave him what he wanted. If I had loved him it would have been …” She paused for a moment, then said: “It would have been less sinful.”

“Isn’t that a strong word for a simple act of generosity?”

“But it wasn’t a simple act of generosity. It was an act of self-indulgence.”

It wasn’t, he knew, the time for such a conversation, but when would there be a time? He had to know, had to understand. He said: “But it would have been all right, ‘less sinful’ are the words you used, if you’d loved him. So you agree with Rosie McClure, love justifies everything, excuses everything?”

“No, but it’s natural, it’s human. What I did was to use Luke out of curiosity, boredom, perhaps to get back a little at Rolf for caring more for the group than he did for me, punishing Rolf because I’d stopped loving him. Can you understand that, the need to hurt someone because you can no longer love?”

“Yes, I understand that.”

She added: “It was all very commonplace, predictable, ignoble.”

Theo said: “And tawdry.”

“No. Not that. Nothing to do with Luke was tawdry. But it harmed him more than it gave him joy. But then you didn’t think I was a saint.”

“No, but I thought you were good.”

She said quietly: “Now you know that I’m not.”

Staring into the half-darkness, Theo saw that Rolf had detached himself from the tree and was walking back to join them. Miriam moved forward to meet him. The three pairs of eyes gazed at Rolf’s face, watching, waiting for his first words. When he got close, Theo saw that the left cheek and forehead were an open wound, the skin had been rubbed raw.

Rolf’s voice was perfectly calm but oddly pitched, so that, for one ridiculous moment, Theo thought a stranger had crept up on them in the darkness: “Before we move we must get him buried. That means waiting until it’s light. We’d better get his coat off before he stiffens too much. We need all the warm clothes we have.”

Miriam said: “Burying him won’t be easy without some kind of spade. The ground’s soft but we need to scrape a hole somehow. We can’t just cover him with leaves.”

Rolf said: “It can wait till morning. We’ll get the coat off now. It’s no use to him.”

Having made the suggestion, he took no action to carry it out and it was Miriam and Theo who between them rolled over the body and eased the coat from both arms. The sleeves were heavily bloodstained. Theo could feel them wet under his hands. They composed the body again on its back, the arms straight at the side.

Rolf said: “Tomorrow I’ll get hold of another car. In the meantime we’ll get what rest we can.”

They wedged themselves together in the wide fork of a fallen beech. A jutting branch, still thickly hung with the brittle bronze pennants of autumn, provided an illusion of security, and they huddled beneath it like children conscious of grave delinquencies, hiding ineffectively from the searching adults. Rolf took the outside place, with Miriam next to him, then Julian between Miriam and Theo. Their rigid bodies seemed to infect the air around them with anxiety. The wood itself was distraught; its ceaseless small noises hissed and whispered on the agitated air. Theo couldn’t sleep, and knew from the uneven breathing, suppressed
coughs, and small grunts and sighs that the others shared his vigil. There would be a time for sleep. It would come with the greater warmth of the day, with the burial of that dark, stiffening shape which, out of sight on the other side of the fallen tree, was a living presence in all their minds. He was aware of the warmth of Julian’s body pressed against his and knew that she must feel from him a similar comfort. Miriam had tucked Luke’s coat around Julian and it seemed to Theo that he could smell the drying blood. He felt suspended in a limbo of time, aware of the cold, of thirst, of the innumerable small sounds of the wood, but not of the passing hours. Like his companions, he endured and waited for the dawn.

Daylight, tentative and bleak, stole like a chill breath into the wood, wrapping itself round barks and broken boughs, touching the boles of the trees and the low denuded branches, giving darkness and mystery form and substance. Opening his eyes, Theo couldn’t believe that he had actually dozed, although he must have momentarily lost consciousness since he had no recollection of Rolf getting up and leaving them.

Now he saw him striding back through the trees. Rolf said: “I’ve been exploring. This isn’t a proper wood, more a copse. It’s only about eighty yards wide. We can’t hide here for long. There’s a kind of ditch between the end of the wood and the field. That should do for him.”

Again Rolf made no move to touch Luke’s body. It was Miriam and Theo who managed between them to raise it. Miriam held Luke’s legs, parted, resting against her thighs. Theo took the weight of the head and shoulders, sensing that he could already detect the onset of rigor. The body sagged between them as they followed Rolf through the trees. Julian walked beside them, her cloak clutched tightly round her, her face calm but very pale, Luke’s bloodstained coat and his cream stole folded over her arm. She carried them like trophies of battle.

It was only about fifty yards to the edge of the copse and they found themselves looking out over a gently rolling countryside. The harvest was over and bales of straw lay like pale bolsters haphazard on the distant uplands. The sun, a ball of harsh white light, was already beginning to dispel the thin mist which lay over fields and far hills, absorbing the autumn colours and merging them to a soft olive green in which the individual trees stood out like black cut-outs. It was going to
be another mellow autumn day. With a lifting of the heart, Theo saw that there was a hedge of laden blackberry bushes edging the wood. It took all his self-control not to drop Luke’s body and fall on them.

The ditch was shallow, no more than a narrow gully between the copse and the field. But it would have been difficult to find a more convenient burial place. The field had recently been ploughed and the ridged earth looked relatively soft. Bending, Theo and Miriam let the body roll from their grasp and tumble into the shallow depression. Theo wished that they could have done it more reverently, less as if dumping an unwanted animal. Luke had come to rest face-downwards. Sensing that this wasn’t what Julian wanted, he jumped into the ditch and tried to turn the body over. The task was more difficult than he had expected, better not attempted. In the end Miriam had to help and they struggled together in the earth and leaves before what remained of Luke’s battered and mud-caked face was turned upwards to the sky.

Miriam said: “We can cover him first with leaves, and then with the earth.”

Still Rolf made no move to help, but the other three went back into the wood and came with armfuls of dried and mouldering leaves, the brown lightened by the bright bronze of the newly fallen beech leaves. Before they began the burial Julian rolled up Luke’s stole and dropped it into the grave. For a second Theo was tempted to protest. They had so little: their clothes, a small torch, the gun with the bullet. The stole could have been useful. But for what? Why grudge Luke what was his? The three of them covered the body with leaves, then began with their hands shifting the soil from the edge of the field on top of the grave. It would have been quicker and easier for Theo to kick the sliced clots of earth over the body and stamp them down but in Julian’s presence he felt unable to act with such brutal efficiency.

Throughout the burial Julian had been silent but perfectly calm. Suddenly she said: “He should lie in consecrated ground.” For the first time she sounded distressed, uncertain, plaintive as a worried child.

Theo felt a spurt of irritation. What, he nearly asked, did she expect them to do? Wait until dark then dig up the body, lug it to the nearest cemetery and reopen one of the graves?

It was Miriam who replied. Looking at Julian, she said gently: “Every place where a good man lies is consecrated ground.”

Julian turned to Theo. “Luke would want us to say the Burial Service. His prayer book is in his pocket. Please do it for him.”

She shook out the bloodstained coat and took from an inside breast pocket the small black leather prayer book, then handed it to Theo. It took only a little time to find the place. He knew that the service wasn’t long, but even so decided to truncate it. He couldn’t refuse her, but it wasn’t a task he welcomed. He began speaking the words, Julian standing on his left and Miriam on his right. Rolf stood at the foot of the grave, straddling it with his legs, his arms folded, gazing ahead. His ravaged face was so white, the body so rigid, that, looking up, Theo almost feared that he would crash forward over the soft earth. But he felt an increased respect for him. It was impossible to imagine the enormity of his disappointment or the bitterness of his betrayal. But at least he was still on his feet. He wondered if he would have been capable of such control. He kept his eyes on the prayer book but he was aware of Rolf’s dark eyes staring at him across the grave.