The Wanting Seed (20 page)

Return to work, eh? Tristram thought about that, looking up from his paper. The men and women that stood around, reading with their lips or skimming, openmouthed, puzzled and wondered. There was no throwing of hats in the air or huzzaing to celebrate this news of the reimposition of stability. Return to work. Officially he must still be workless, a committal to jail automatically depriving a government servant of his post. He would push on to State Farm NW
₃₁₃
. Surely one’s wife and children came first? (Children? One of them was dead.) Officially, anyway, he had received no information.

He would try to reach Chester tonight. He bought himself the viaticum of a large sausage for a tanner and sought the Chester road munching. His marching feet teased out from deep memory the rhythm of a gnomic
quatrain written by some forgotten poet:

Seven

C
APTAIN
L
OOSLEY
devoured crackling morsels of the news received on the dashboard microwave radio. ‘There,’ he said with nasty satisfaction, ‘that’ll teach them, do you see. There’ll be a bit more respect for law and order.’ As Tristram Foxe had so rudely told him that day in jail, he had no knowledge of historiography, no sense of the cycle. Young Oxenford, driving, nodded without much conviction. He was fed up; it had been a rotten journey. The police rations had been meagre and his stomach growled. The nuclear motor of the Poppol van had misbehaved several times, and Oxenford was no nuclear mechanic. Coming out of Chester he had mistaken the road and gone blithely west (this being at night and he no astro-navigator either), only at Dolgelley discovering his error (signposts had been uprooted for fuel). At Mallwyd, on the Welshpool road, men and women with lilting speech and magicians’ faces had halted them. These people had been charmed by Beatrice-Joanna’s twins (‘There’s pretty’) but antagonized by the haughty demeanour and trembling gun
of Sergeant Image. ‘Queer the poor bugger is,’ they said, taking his weapon with gentle fingers. ‘Boil up lovely he will,’ they had nodded, fingering his soft joints as they undressed him. They had also taken the uniforms of Captain Loosley and young Oxenford, saying, ‘Come in nice these will for the army. Proper, these are.’ Seeing the two shivering in their underclothes they had said, ‘There’s pity now. Who knows for some brown paper to cwtch their chests?’ Nobody did. ‘Treating you kind we are, see,’ they said finally, ‘because of her in the back. Fair play.’ And they had sped them on to Welshpool with waves, Sergeant Image protesting loudly at treachery, writhing in the grip of strong butchers.

Taking their uniforms, the people of Mallwyd had perhaps saved their lives, but Captain Loosley was too stupid to see it. As for Beatrice-Joanna, her sole anxiety was for her babies. She feared these towns and villages with their fires and hearty meat-eating faces, faces that looked in on her sleeping pair and grinned amiably. The smiles and words of admiration seemed to her to be equivocal: cooing might soon turn to lip-smacking. Whatever official fate waited in the capital, it would, surely, not stoop to teknophagy? Anxious for her babies, Beatrice-Joanna forgot to feel hungry, but malnutrition spoke loud in the quality and quantity of her milk. Involuntarily she occasionally yearned towards the smell of roasting or simmering as they sped through a town; whenever the van was stopped by held-up meaty hands and curious eyes examined the pair in their underwear, herself with the twins at her breasts, she would feel sick at the thought of what was being roasted and boiled.
But why? Sense was primal, and sense was not revolted; it was always the great traitor
thought
that threw its shoe into the works.

‘Things look almost back to normal, do you see,’ said Captain Loosley as, at last, they took the Brighton road. ‘Too many smashed windows, though, and look at that twisted metal in the road, do you see. Overturned vehicles. Barbarous, barbarous. Martial law. Poor Sergeant Image. We should have taken the names, do you see, of those responsible. Then they could be summarily punished.’

‘Don’t talk so bloody wet,’ said young Oxenford. ‘The way you go on makes me proper bloody sick sometimes.’

‘Oxenford,’ cried Captain Loosley, shocked. ‘I don’t think you quite know what you’re saying. Just because we haven’t our uniforms on, do you see, is no excuse for forgetting the deference due to, due to –’

‘Aw, shut it. It’s all over. Haven’t you got the bloody sense to see it’s all over? How the hell you got where you have got bloody well beats me.’ They were now coming into Haywards Heath. ‘First thing I do when I get back and get some clothes on is to join the bloody army. I’m finished with this lot because this lot is finished anyway.’ They were coming out of Haywards Heath.

‘This lot is
not
finished, do you see,’ said Captain Loosley. ‘There must always be an organization for keeping the population down, whether by force, do you see, or by propaganda. I forgive you, Oxenford,’ he added generously. ‘The fate of Sergeant Image must have unnerved you as, I confess, it’s unnerved me, do you see, a little. But don’t let it happen again. Remember, please, the difference in our ranks.’

‘Aw, shut it,’ said Oxenford again. ‘I’m bloody freezing cold and I’m bloody hungry and I’ve a bloody good mind to stop the van and leave you to get on with it while I go and join that lot there.’ He gestured roughly with his head towards a gipsy-like company at the roadside who were placidly eating round a fire.

‘The army will get them,’ said Captain Loosley calmly. ‘They’ll be picked up, never fear.’

‘Aaaaarch,’ suddenly sneezed Oxenford. And again, ‘Aaaaah Chag. Blast it and damn it, I’ve got a cold, a real beauty. Blast your eyes, Loosley. Aaaaaaah Shok.’

‘The Metropolitan Commissioner will have something to say about this, do you see,’ warned Captain Loosley. ‘Sheer unmitigated insubordination.’

‘I thought,’ said Oxenford sarcastically, ‘that the purpose of the exercise was to get the Metropolitan Commissioner given the sack. I thought that was the idea.’

‘That’s where you’re stupid, Oxenford. There will be another Metropolitan Commissioner,’ said Captain Loosley loftily. ‘He’ll know how to deal with insubordination.’

‘Aaaarch,’ went young Oxenford, and then, ‘Chow,’ nearly running into a lamp-standard. ‘It won’t be you, anyway,’ he said rudely. ‘It won’t be you who’ll get the bloody job, and that’s a fact. And, anyhow, I’ll be in the army tomorrow or the next day. A man’s life that’ll be. Howrashyouare. Dog damn and blast it. Not running after poor defenceless women and kids, same as we’ve been doing.’

‘I’ve heard quite enough, do you see,’ said Captain Loosley. ‘That will do very well, Oxenford.’

‘Raaaaaarch. Blast it.’

Soon they were running into Brighton. Sunlight was merry on the sea, on the coloured dresses of the women and children, on the drab suits of the men. There seemed to be fewer people about; you couldn’t have your cake and eat it too. Now they came to the lofty Government offices. ‘Here we are,’ said Captain Loosley. ‘Drive straight in there, Oxenford, where it says
In
. Strange, I can’t remember that
In
being there, do you see, when we left.’

Oxenford laughed raucously. ‘You poor silly bloody clot,’ he said. ‘Can’t you see where that
In
has come from? Can’t you, you daft fool?’

Captain Loosley stared at the façade. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh, dear.’ For the great sprawling sign
– Ministry of Infertility –
had changed; its last word had lost its negative prefix.

‘Ha ha,’ went young Oxenford. ‘Ha ha ha.’ And then, ‘Raaaaaaarch I Damn and blast it.’

Eight

‘A
ND
as far as possible,’ said the television face of the Right Honourable George Ockham, Prime Minister, ‘to pursue the good life with a minimum of State interference.’ It was the face of a business tycoon – fat-jowled with firm but self-indulgent lips, hard-bargain-driving eyes behind hexagonal glasses. It could be seen only intermittendy because of a transmission fault: it alternated with rapid ripples or itself dissolved into geometrical
tropes and fancies; it wobbled, wambled; it split itself into autonomous grimaces; it flew pentecostally up out of the screen and, in frame after rising frame, chased its own flight. But the firm calm steady business voice remained undistorted. It spoke long, though – in the true Augustinian manner – it had little to say. Difficult times might well still lie before them, but, thanks to the spirit of hard-headed British compromise that had weathered so many crises in the past, the nation would undoubtedly win through to happier days. Confidence was the thing; Mr Ockham. asked for confidence. He had confidence in the British people; let them have confidence in him. His image nodded itself to extinction and television darkness.

Tristram himself nodded, picking his teeth in the eleemosynary eating-centre which had been set up by the Chester Ladies’ Fecundity Association on the north bank of the Dee. He had just consumed, listening to Mr Ockham, a fair meat-meal served by rosy bantering Cheshire girls in pleasant though austere surroundings, daffodils in jars spouting to the ceiling. Many men in his position were, and had been, eating there, though mostly, it seemed, provincial men: men let, bewildered, out of prison, now on the road to find families evacuated from the towns during diet-riots and the first diningclub atrocities; jobless men tramping to newly re-opened factories; men (but there ought to be
women
, too; where were the women?) evicted from their low-storey flats by the strong and ruthless – all tannerless.

Tannerless. Money was a problem. Tristram had found a bank open that afternoon, a branch of the State 3 in which his few guineas were deposited, doing brisk
business again after the long moratorium. He had been told politely by a teller that he must draw at his own branch though, and Tristram had a grim smile at this, he was very welcome to pay in money if he wished. Banks. Perhaps those who mistrusted them were not so foolish. A man at Tarporley, so he had heard, had sewn three thousand guinea-notes into his mattress and been able to open up a general store while the banks were still closed. The small capitalists were crawling out of their holes, rats of the Pelphase but Augustine’s lions.

‘– Cordially invited,’ a woman’s voice was calling over a loudspeaker, ‘to attend. Eight o’clock. A light barbecue supper will be served. Partners,’ and this sounded sinister, ‘for everyone.’ The voice clicked out. More of an order than an invitation. A bonfire dance by the river, not in the fields. Did they hope that Dee salmon would soon start leaping again? Two things idly struck Tristram this fine, but chill, spring evening: the toughness of women; the fact that everything, however small, had to be paid for. Sighing, he rose from the table; he would take a stroll through Chester’s streets. At the door an eager woman said, ‘You won’t forget, will you? Eight o’clock sharp. I’ll be watching out for you, you greedy boy.’ She giggled, a plump woman, more easily thought of as an aunt than a mistress. Greedy? In what way had he shown himself greedy? Was the term facetiously proleptic, in no wise a food-referent? Tristram combined a smirk and a grunt and went out.

Had Chester smelled like this in the days of Roman occupation – smelled of soldiery?
Army of the West – GHQ
, cried the sign-board; noble, thrilling the sound of that, Arthurian almost. As, in the days of Caesar’s
legionaries, the town must have smoked with the breath of slithering horses, so now the exhausts of motor-cycles gushed and plumed caerulean – dispatch-riders arriving with top-secret messages in nests of envelopes, leaving – gloved and helmeted – with such letters, kicking their machines afire to burn up one of the tentacle-roads that roared out of the city-camp, camp-city. Cryptic signposts pointed to
Director of Ordnance Supplies, Director of Medical Supplies, Office of Quartermaster-General
. There were lorries clattering out their freights of lumpish soldiers in their improvised uniforms; a working squad – with brooms for rifles – was dismissed in a side-street; a couple of chaplains were learning shyly to salute. Cans were being unloaded into the guarded foodstore.

By what hypocritical gesture of the head were the supplies being metintained? Civilian contracts with no questions asked; the troops called the anonymous tinned meat ‘bully’, and there was no such animal as that; the keeping of law and order was not incompatible with tolerance of the quiet work of the slaughter-house. Martial law was the only way, Tristram supposed. An army being primarily an organization set up for mass murder, morality could never be its concern. Clear the road-arteries for traffic, the country’s blood; watch the water-supply; keep the main streets well-lighted, the alleys and back-lanes can look after themselves. Theirs not to reason why. I’m a simple soldier-man, sir, damn your eyes, not one of your flaming politicians: leave the dirty work to them.

The
Daily Newsdisc
was functioning once more. Tristram heard the metal voice booming from the
Garrison Officers’ Mess (dim lights, a white-coated orderly, cutlery ringing silverily) and stopped to listen. The cult of Quetzlcoatl revived in Mexico: love-feasts and human sacrifice reported from Chihuahua, Moctezuma, Chilpanzingo. Meat-eating and the salting-down of meat all along Chile’s long thin strip. Vigorous canning in Uruguay. Free love in Utah. Riots in the Panama Canal Zone, a loose-loving loose-feeding people unsubmissive to the newly-raised militia. In Suiyuan Province, Northern China, a local magnate with a pronounced limp had been mactated with due ceremony. ‘Rice babies’ had been moulded in the East Indies and drowned in the paddies. Good news of grain crops in Queensland.

Tristram walked on, seeing troops off duty laughing, their arms round local girls. He heard a band tuning up for a dance, fairy lights delicate on the buds of the riverside trees. He began to formicate all over with the languor of one digesting meat. This was the world, acquiesce in it: the mutter of love-making and the mass, the grinding of meat and the wheels of the military. Life. No, damn it, no. He pulled himself together. He was on the last stage of his journey now. With luck and lifts he might even reach Preston by morning. He had been long enough on the road; he must look forward to one known and loved pair of arms, a languor consecrated by love and private darkness, away from the fires and the gay feasts. He tramped briskly to the mouth of the road leading north and stood, jerking his raised thumb, under a signpost pointing to Warrington. He was not perhaps showing due gratitude to the duennas of the Chester Ladies’
Fecundity Association, but never mind. Fecundity ought to be a fruit of the Holy Ghost reserved to the married, anyway. Too much fornication going on.