The Wanting Seed (7 page)

‘Any news?’

She looked up at him, a long-faced woman of forty-odd, her skin dry and smoked like that of a gipsy. ‘Not a word. It’s my belief that they’ve shot him.
Shot him,’
she suddenly cried aloud. Fellow-passengers pretended not to hear.

‘Nonsense.’ Tristram patted her thin arm. ‘He didn’t commit any real crime. He’ll be back soon, you’ll see.’

‘It was his own fault,’ said Mrs Gow. ‘Drinking that there ale. Shooting his mouth off. I always told him he’d go too far one of these days.’

‘There, there,’ said Tristram, continuing to pat. The truth was that Gow hadn’t technically shot his mouth off at all; he’d merely rasped a brief rude noise at a knot of policemen outside one of the rougher drinking-shops, somewhere off Guthrie Road. He’d been carted off amid great hilarity, and no more had been seen of him. It was best to keep off alc these days, best to leave alc to the greyboys.

4 − 3 − 2 − 1 – G. Tristram shuffled out of the lift. Moonshot plummy night waited outside in the packed street. And in the vestibule were members of the Poppol or Population Police – black uniform, cap with shiny
peak, badge and collar-dogs ashine with a bursting bomb which proved, on closer inspection, to be a breaking egg. Unarmed, less given to summary violence than the greyboys, smart, polite, they were mostly a credit to their commissioner. Tristram, joining the I-had-not-thought-death-had-undone-so-many workward crowd, uttered the word ‘brother’ aloud to the night-running Channel and its silver sky. The term had taken on purely pejorative connotations for him, which was not fair on poor inoffensive George, eldest of the three, hard at work on an agricultural station near Springfield, Ohio. George had recently sent one of his rare letters, dully factual about experiments with new fertilizers, puzzled about a strange wheat-blight seeping east through Iowa, lllinois and Indiana. Good solid old George.

Tristram entered the good solid old skyscraper which was the South London (Channel) Unitary School (Boys) Division Four. The Delta Shift was streaming out, and one of Joscelyne’s three deputies, an open-mouthed grey-coxcombed man named Cory, stood in the great vestibule, watching. The Alpha Shift darted and needled into lifts, up stairs, down corridors. Tristram’s first lesson was on the second floor – Elementary Historical Geography for the twentieth stream of the First Form. The artificial voice counted: ‘– Eighteen-seventeen –’ Was it only his imagination, or was that creation of the National Syntheglot Corporation sterner, more iron-like, than it used to be?’ ‘– Three–two–one.’ He was late. He shot up in a staff-lift and panted into the classroom. One had to be careful these days.

Fifty-odd boys of various colour-mixtures greeted him
in a single polite ‘Good morning’. Morning, eh? Night sat firmly on outside; the moon, great and frightening female symbol, sat over the night. Tristram said:

‘Homework. Homework on your desks, please.’ The tinkle of metal fasteners as the boys undid their satchels, then the flap of exercise-books, the rustle as they turned to the page where they had drawn their map of the world. Tristram strolled round, hands clasped behind, cursorily examining. The great crowded globe on Mercator’s Projection, the two great empires – Enspun (English-Speaking Union) and Ruspun (Russian-Speaking Union) – crudely copied by lolling tonguetip-protruding boys. The Annexe Islands for population overflow, still building on the major oceans. A peaceful world that had forgotten the arts of self-destruction, peaceful and worried. ‘Careless,’ said Tristram, his forefinger on Cottam’s drawing. ‘You’ve put Australia too far south. You’ve forgotten to put in Ireland.’ ‘Sir,’ said Cottam. And here was a boy-Hynard-who had not done his homework, a scared-looking boy, dark moons under his eyes. ‘What,’ asked Tristram, ‘is the meaning of this?’

‘I wasn’t able to, sir,’ said Hynard, his lower lip shaking. ‘They moved me to the Hostel, sir. I hadn’t time, sir.’

‘Oh. The Hostel.’ This was something new, an institution for orphans, temporary and permanent. ‘What happened?’

‘They took them away, sir, my dad and mum. They said they’d done wrong.’

‘What had they done?’

The boy hung his head. An awareness of crime, not
taboo, kept him red and silent. Tristram said, kindly:

‘Your mother has just had a baby, is that it?’

‘Going to,’ mumbled the boy. ‘They took them away. They had to pack everything up. And then they took me to the Hostel.’

A great anger suffused Tristram. It was (and he realized this with shame) really a factitious anger, a pedantic anger. He saw himself in the Principal’s office, ranting: ‘The State regards the education of these children as important, which presumably means that they regard homework as important, and here the State comes sticking in its ugly hypocritical snout and stops one of my pupils from doing his homework. For Dogsake let’s know where we stand.’ The weak fretfulness of a man invoking principle. He knew, of course, what the answer would be: first things first, the first thing being survival. He sighed, patted the boy’s head, then went back to the front of the class. ‘This morning,’ he said, ‘we’re going to draw a map of the Sahara Reclamation Area. Take out your pencils.’ Morning indeed. Night, that sea of school ink, flowed strongly away outside.

Two

B
EATRICE
-J
OANNA
sat writing a letter. She wrote in pencil, unhandily through desuetude, using the paper-saving logograms she had learned at school. Two months, and she had seen both nothing and too much of Derek. Too much of the public television image – Derek as black-
uniformed reasonably exhorting Commissioner of the Population Police; nothing of Derek the lover, wearing a more becoming uniform of nakedness and desire. There was no censorship of letters, and she felt she could write freely. She wrote: ‘Darling, I suppose I ought to be proud of the great name you’re making for yourself, and you certainly look lovely in your new clothes. But I can’t help wishing things were as they were before, when we could lie together loving each other, and not a care in the world except making sure that nobody knew what was going on between us. I refuse to believe that those lovely times are over. I miss you so much. I miss your arms around me and your lips on mine and –’ She deleted this ampersand; some things were too precious to give to cold logograms. ‘– and your lips on mine. Oh, darling, sometimes I wake in the night or afternoon or morning or whenever it is we go to bed, according to the shift he’s working, and want to cry out with desire for you.’ She crammed her left fist in her mouth as if to stifle such a cry. ‘Oh, dearest one, I love you, love you, love you. I long for your arms around me and your lips –’ She saw that she had already said that, so she crossed it out; but the crossing-out made it appear that she had thought better of wanting his arms, lips and so on. She shrugged and went on. ‘Couldn’t you get in touch with me somehow? I know it’s too risky for you to write to me, as Tristram would be sure to see the letter in the block letter-rack, but surely you could somehow give me a sign to show you still love me? And you do still love me, don’t you, dearest?’ He could send her a token. In the old days, the days of Shakespeare and steam radio, lovers had sent their mistresses flowers.
Now, of course, what flowers there were were all rendered esculent. He could send a packet of dehydrated cowslip broth, but that would mean cutting into his meagre rations. She longed for something romantic and daring, some big heretical gesture. In inspiration she wrote, ‘When next you are on the telly please, if you love me still, bring in some special word, just for me. Bring in the word “love” or the word “desire”. Then I’ll know that you go on loving me as I go on loving you. There is no news, life goes on as it always does, very dull and dreary.’ That was a lie: there was, she thought, a very definite item of news, but that had to be kept to herself. The straight line within her, the eternal and life-giving lance, wanted to say ‘Rejoice’, but the circle counselled caution; more than that, it span in a selfmade breeze of apprehension. She refused to worry; things would work out all right. She signed the letter, ‘Your eternally adoring Beatrice-Joanna.’

She addressed the letter to Commissioner D. Foxe, Population Police HQ, Infertility Building, Brighton, London, feeling a slight tremor as she wrote ‘Infertility’, that word which contained its opposite. She added in big bold logograms ‘PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL’. Then she went on the long vertical journey to the post-box by Earnshaw Mansions. It was a lovely July night, high moon riding, stars, earth-satellites wheeling, a night for love. Five young greyboys, lit by a streetlamp, were laughingly beating up a bewildered-looking old man who appeared, from his lack of response to the slaps and truncheonings, anaesthetized by ale. He seemed also, a Neronian Nazarene set upon by tittering lions, to be singing a hymn. ‘You ought to be ashamed,’
rebuked Beatrice-Joanna fiercely, ‘downright ashamed. A poor old man like that.’

‘You mind your own business,’ said one of the grey policemen peevishly.
‘Woman.’
he added with scorn. Their victim was allowed to crawl away, still singing. Very much a woman, minding her own business, socially and biologically, she shrugged and posted her letter.

Three

A
LETTER
for Tristram in the staff-room letter-rack, a letter from his sister Emma. It was four-thirty, hour of the half-hour luncheon break, but the bell had still to go. Dawn was coming up deliciously over the sea far beneath the staff-room window. Tristram fingered the letter with its garish Chinese stamp, its superscription
Air Mail
in ideograms and Cyrillic, smiling at yet another example of family telepathy. It was always happening like this – a letter from George in the West followed a day or so after by one from Emma in the East. Neither of them, significantly, ever wrote to Derek. Tristram read, still smiling, standing among his colleagues: ‘. . . The work goes on. I flew last week from Chengkiang to Hingi to Changchai to Tuyun to Shihtsien – exhausting. It’s still almost standing room only here, but really frightening measures are being taken by the Central Government since the recent change in policy began. A mass execution of offenders against the Increase in Family laws took place in Chungking only
ten days ago. This seemed to a lot of us to be going too far –’ Typical of her, that understatement; Tristram caught an image of her prim forty-five-year-old face, the thin prim lips saying it.’–But it does seem to be having a salutary effect on some who, despite everything, still cherish as a life’s ambition becoming an honourable ancestor to be worshipped by a milling mound of progeny. Such people are likely to become ancestors sooner than they expect. Curiously, ironically, there looks like being something of a famine in Fukien Province where the rice-crops – for some reason unknown – have failed . . .’ Tristram frowned and wondered. George’s report about the wheat-blight, the news about herring catches, now this. There awoke in him a faint nagging suspicion about something, he couldn’t tell what.

‘And how,’ said a young mincing niggling voice, ‘is our dear Tristram today?’ It was Geoffrey Wiltshire, the new head of the Social Studies Department, literally a blue-eyed boy, so fair as almost to look white-headed. Tristram, who was trying not to hate him too much, gave a lemony smile and said, ‘Well.’

‘I tuned in to your Sixth Form lesson,’ said Wiltshire. ‘I know you won’t mind my saying this, my dear dear Tristram.’ He brought a whiff of perfume and two sets of twittering lashes close to his colleague. ‘Saying that, in effect, you were teaching something you should
not
have been teaching.’

‘I don’t recollect.’ Tristram tried to master his breathing.

‘I, on the other hand, recollect rather perfectly. You said something like this: art, you said, cannot flourish in a society like ours, because, you seemed to say, art is
the product of – I think this is the term you used –
paternlty lust
. Wait,’ he said, ‘wait,’ to Tristram’s open mouth. ‘You also said that the materials of the arts were, in effect, fertility symbols. Now, apart from the fact, my still dear Tristram, apart from the fact that one is at a complete loss to know how exacdy this fits into the syllabus, you were quite gratuitously – and you can’t deny this–quite gratuitously teaching something which is, however you look at it, to say the least heretical.’ The bell rang for luncheon. Wiltshire put his arm round Tristram as they’ all processed to the staff dininghall.

‘But,’ said Tristram, fighting his anger, ‘damn it all, it’s true. All art is an aspect of sexuality –’.

‘Nobody, my dear Tristram, denies that that, to some extent, is perfectly true.’

‘But it goes deeper. Great art, the art of the past, is a kind of glorification of increase. I mean, take even drama for instance. I mean, tragedy and comedy had their origin in fertility ceremonies. The sacrificial goat–that’s
tragos
in Greek – and the village Priapic festivals which crystallized into comic drama. I mean–and,’ spluttered Tristram, ‘take architecture –’

‘We shall take no more.’ Wiltshire stopped, dropped his arm from around Tristram’s shoulder, and wagged a forefinger at Tristram’s eyes, as though to disperse the smoke in them. ‘We shall have no more of that, shal1 we, dear Tristram? Do, please, please, be careful. Everybody’s really quite fond of you, you know.’

‘I don’t quite see what that has to do with anything –’

‘It has a
lot
to do with
everything
. Now, just be a good boy –’ he was at least seven years younger than
Tristram ‘– and stick to the syllabus. You can’t go very far wrong if you do that.’

Tristram said nothing, pushing the lid down hard on his boiling temper. But, entering the steamy dining-hall, he deliberately stalked away from Wiltshire, seeking a table where sat Visser, Adair, Butcher (a very ancient trade-name), Freathy and Haskell-Sprott. These were harmless men who taught harmless subjects – simple skills into which controversy could never enter. ‘You look,’ said Mongol-eyed Adair, ‘pretty sick.’

‘I feel pretty sick,’ said Tristram. Haskell-Sprott, at the head of the mess, spooned out very thin vegetable stew, saying: