The Wanting Seed (8 page)

‘This’ll make you sicker.’

‘– Little bastards have been better behaved since we’ve had a chance to be tough with them,’ Visser was saying. He mimed violent boxing. ‘Take young Mildred, for example – queer name, Mildred, a girl’s name, though that’s the lad’s surname, of course – take him. Late again today, so what do I do? I let the toughs get at him – you know, Brisker and Couchman and that lot. They roughed him up something beautiful. Just two minutes of that, that’s all. He couldn’t get up from the floor.’

‘You’ve got to have discipline,’ agreed Butcher through a mouthful of stew.

‘I say,’ said Adair to Tristram, ‘you
do
look pretty sick.’

‘As long as he hasn’t got morning sickness,’ leered the joker Freathy.

Tristram put down his spoon. ‘What did you say then?’

‘A joke,’ said Freathy. ‘I meant no harm.’

‘You said something about morning sickness.’

‘Forget it. Just my fun.’

‘But that’s impossible,’ said Tristram. ‘That couldn’t be possible.’

‘If I were you,’ said Adair, ‘I should go and have a lie down. You don’t look at all well.’

‘Absolutely impossible,’ said Tristram.

‘If you don’t want your stew,’ said Freathy, dripping with greed, ‘I’d be very much obliged –’ And he slid Tristram’s plate towards himself.

‘That’s not fair,’ said Butcher. ‘It should be shared out. That’s sheer damned gutsiness.’ They tugged, slopping the stew.

‘I think I’d better go home,’ said Tristram.

‘You do that,’ said Adair. ‘You might be sickening for something. Something catching.’ Tristram got up and tottered over to tell Wiltshire. Butcher had won the stew and was sucking it down in triumph.

‘Gulosity,’ said Haskell-Sprott tolerantly. ‘That’s the word.’

Four

‘B
UT
how could it have happened?’ cried Tristram. ‘How? How? How?’ Two paces to the window, two paces back to the wall, his hands agitatedly clasped behind him.

‘Nothing’s one hundred per cent sure,’ said Beatrice-
Joanna, sitting placidly. ‘There might have been sabotage at the Contraceptive Works.’

‘Nonsense. Absolute and utter bloody nonsense. That’s a frivolous sort of remark,’ cried Tristram, turning on her. ‘That’s typical of your whole attitude.’

‘Are you sure,’ said Beatrice-Joanna, ‘that you actually took your tablets on that memorable occasion?’

‘Of course I’m sure. I wouldn’t dream of taking a risk like that.’

‘No, of course you wouldn’t.’ She swayed her head, reciting in sing-song: ‘Take a tablet instead of a risk.’ She smiled up at him. ‘That would have made a good slogan, wouldn’t it? But, of course, we don’t have slogans to make us good any more. We have the big stick.’

‘It’s completely beyond my understanding,’ said Tristram. ‘Unless –’ He beetled down at her. ‘But you wouldn’t do that, would you? You wouldn’t be so wicked and evil and sinful as to do that.’ Augustinian words. He grasped her by the wrist. ‘Is there anybody else?’ he asked. ‘Tell me the truth. I promise not to be angry,’ he said angrily.

‘Oh, don’t be stupid,’ she said very quietly. ‘Even if I wanted to be unfaithful, who could I be unfaithful with? We don’t go anywhere, we don’t know anyone. And,’ she said with heat, ‘I object strongly to your saying that. To your thinking that. I’ve been faithful to you ever since the day we got married, and a fat lot of thanks or appreciation I’ve ever had for my fidelity.’

‘I must have taken the tablets,’ said Tristram, thinking hard back. ‘I remember when it was. It was the day when poor young Roger –’

‘Yes, yes, yes.’

‘– And I’d just had my dinner and, if I remember rightly, it was you who suggested –’

‘Oh, no, Tristram. It wasn’t me. It certainly wasn’t me.’

‘– And I have a distinct recollection that I pulled the medicine cupboard down from the ceiling and that I –’

‘You’d been drinking, Tristram. You smelt
terribly
of ale.’ Tristram hung his head an instant. ‘Are you sure you took the
right
tablets? I didn’t check that with you. You always know best, don’t you dear?’ Her natural teeth gleamed in sarcasm. ‘Anyhow, there it is. Perhaps it was a sudden accession of
paternity lust.’

‘Where did you get that expression from?’ he blazed at her. ‘Who told you those words?’

‘You did,’ she said sighing. ‘It’s an expression you sometimes use.’ He stared at her. ‘There must,’ she added, ‘be quite a lot of the heretic in you. In your unconscious, anyway. You say things in your sleep, you know. You wake me up with your snoring and then, assured of an audience, you talk. You’re quite as bad as I am, in your way.’

‘Well.’ He looked round vaguely for somewhere to sit down. Beatrice-Joanna made another chair come purring out of the wall. ‘Thanks,’ he said distractedly. ‘However it happened,’ he said, sitting, ‘you’ll have to get rid of it. You’ll have to take something. You won’t want to leave it till you have to go to the Abortion Centre. That’ll be shameful. That’ll be almost as bad as breaking the law. Carelessness,’ he muttered. ‘No self-control.’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’ She was too cool about the whole thing. ‘Things may not be as bad as you think. I mean.
people have been having children in excess of the ration and nothing much has happened to them. I’m entitled to a child,’ she said more warmly. ‘The State killed Roger. The State let him die.’

‘Ah, nonsense. We’ve been over all that before. What you don’t seem to realize in your stupidity is that things have changed.
Things have changed.’
He emphasized this by punching her on the knee, once for each word.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘The days of asking are over. The State doesn’t ask any more. The State orders, the State compels. Do you realize that in China people have actually been put to death for disobeying the birth-control laws? Executed. Hanged or shot – I’m not sure which. It’s in a letter I got from Emma.’

‘This isn’t China,’ she said. ‘We’re more civilized here.’

‘Ah, arrant bloody nonsense. It’s going to be the same everywhere. The parents of one of my pupils were carted off by the Population Police – do you realize that? It happened only last night. And, as far as I can gather, they hadn’t even had the baby yet. She just happened to be pregnant, as far as I can gather. Good Dog, woman, it won’t be long before they’ll be coming round with mice in a cage, testing urine for pregnancy.’

‘How do they do that?’ she asked, interested.

‘You’re incorrigible, that’s what you are.’ He got up again. Beatrice-Joanna let his chair whine back to the wall, giving him room topace. ‘Thanks. Now, look,’ he said, ‘just think of our position. If anybody found out we’d been careless, even without the results of the carelessness going any further, if anybody found out that –’

‘How could anybody find out that?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Somebody might hear you, in the morning, when you get up, that is,’ he said delicately. ‘There’s Mrs Pettitt next door. There are spies around, you know. Where you have police you always have spies. Narks, they call them. Or you might say something to somebody – accidentally, I mean. I might as well tell you that I don’t like the way things are going at the school. That little swine Wiltshire keeps plugging in on my lessons. Look,’ he said, ‘I’m going out now. I’m going to the chemist’s. I’m going to get you some quinine tablets. And some castor oil.’

‘I don’t like them. I hate the taste of both of them. Give it a bit longer, will you? Just give it a bit longer. Everything may be all right.’

‘There you go again. Let me try and get it into your thick skull,’ said Tristram, ‘that we’re living in dangerous times. The Population Police have a lot of power. They can be very very nasty.’

‘I don’t think they’d ever do me any harm,’ she said complacently.

‘Why not? Why wouldn’t they?’

‘I’ve just got a feeling, that’s all.’ Careful, careful. ‘I just have a sort of intuition about it, that’s all.’ Then, ‘Oh,’ she cried powerfully, ‘I’m sick to death of the whole business. If God made us what we are, why should we have to worry about what the State tells us to do? God’s stronger and wiser than the State, isn’t He?’

‘There is no God.’ Tristram looked at her curiously. ‘Where have you been getting these ideas from? Who’s been talking to you?’

‘Nobody’s been talking to me. I see nobody, except when I go out to buy rations. When I talk, I ta1k to
myself. Or to the sea. Sometimes I talk to the sea.’

‘What is all this? What exactly is going on? Do you feel all right?’

‘Except for being hungry all the time,’ said Beatrice-Joanna, ‘I feel very well. Very well indeed.’

Tristram went to the window and gazed up at the patch of sky visible between topless towers. ‘I wonder sometimes,’ he said, ‘if perhaps there is a God after all. Somebody up there,’ he mumbled, musing, ‘controlling everything. I wonder sometimes. But,’ he said, turning in a small show of sudden panic, ‘don’t tell anybody I said that. I didn’t say there
was
a God. I just said I wondered sometimes, that’s all.’

‘You don’t trust me very much, do you?’

‘I don’t trust anyone. Forgive me, but I might as well be honest with you. I just daren’t trust anybody at alL I don’t seem able even to trust myself, do I?’ Then he went out into the pearly morning to buy quinine in one State Druggist’s, castor oil in another. In the first shop he talked loudly about malaria, even mentioning an educational trip he had once taken down the Amazon; in the second he simulated a convincing costive look.

Five

I
F
no God, there must be at least a pattern-making demiurge. So Tristram was later to think, when he had leisure and inclination for thinking. The next day (though only the calendar really accepted such a term,
the shift-system cutting across natural time like a global air-journey) the next day Tristram knew he was being followed. A neat blob of black in the crowds behind him, keeping its distance, seen fully – as Tristram turned into Rostron Place-as a comely small man with a moustache, Poppol egg bursting in the sun on his cap-badge, three glinting stars on each epaulette. Tristram became aware of the gelatinous sensations of nightmare-limbs melting, shallow breath, hopelessness. But, when a lorry and trailer loaded with equipment for the Ministry of Synthetic Food timidly began to poke into Adkins Street from Rostron Place, Tristram had enough strength and will-to-survive to dash round to its off-side, so that many red tons of pipes and cauldrons interposed themselves between himself and his pursuer. Not that it made any difference, he realized, feeling hopeless and foolish; they would get him if they really wanted him. He took the second turning to the left – Hanania Street. There stretched, along the whole bottom storey of Reppel Building, the Metropole, haunt of high officials, no place for a humble schoolmaster unsure of his position. Clacking the few septs, tanners and tosheroons in his left-hand trouser-pocket, he entered.

Ring of glasses, broad backs and girlish shoulders in grey and black uniforms, voices of policy. (‘RB stroke 371 is perfectly clear about it.’) Tristram crawled to an empty table and awaited a waiter. (‘Allocation of raw materials should be worked out in inter-departmental conference.’) A waiter came, black as the ace of spades in a cream jacket. ‘With what, sir?’ he asked. ‘With orange,’ said Tristram, his eyes on the swinging doors. A couple of grey-uniformed exquisites entered, expiring
with laughter; an eye-glassed stern bald gelding with his boy secretary; a mannish woman with a big useless bust. Then Tristram saw his pursuer enter, saw with a kind of relief. The officer took off his cap, disclosing short straight oiled rust-coloured hair, and looked into the throng of drinkers; Tristram nearly waved to show where he was. But the officer noticed him soon enough and, smiling, came over. ‘Mr Foxe? Mr
Tristram
Foxe?’

‘Yes, as you very well know. You’d better sit down. Unless, of course, you want to take me off right away.’ The black waiter brought Tristram’s drink.

‘Take you off?’ The officer laughed. ‘Oh, I see. Look,’ he said to the waiter, ‘I’ll have one of those. Yes,’ he said to Tristram, ‘you are quite like your brother. Your brother Derek, that is. In appearance. For the rest, of course, I just don’t know.’

‘Don’t play with me,’ said Tristram. ‘If you want to prefer a charge, then prefer it.’ He even thrust forward his wrists, as if in a mime of cycling.

The officer laughed louder. ‘Take a tip from me, Mr Foxe,’ he said. ‘If you’ve done something indictable, wait till it’s found out. We’ve enough to cope with without people volunteering, do you see.’ He put both hands supine on the table, as if to show that they were free of blood, and smiled pleasantly at Tristram. He seemed a decent sort of man, about Tristram’s own age.

‘Well,’ said Tristram, ‘if I may ask –’ The officer swivelled his head as though to see whether anybody, whether listening or not, would be able to hear. But Tristram had humbly chosen a remote and isolated table. The officer nodded slightly in satisfaction. He said:

‘I won’t tell you my name. My rank you can seecaptain. I work in the organization of which your brother is Commissioner, do you see. It’s about your brother that I wish to speak. I take it that you’re not too fond of your brother.’

‘I’m not, as a matter of fact,’ said Tristram. ‘But I don’t see what that’s got to do with anything or anybody.’ The waiter brought the captain’s alc, and Tristram ordered another. ‘This is on me,’ said the captain. ‘Bring two more. Doubles, make them.’ Tristram raised his eyebrows. He said:

‘If your intention’s to make me drunk so that I’ll say things I shouldn’t say –’

‘Such balderdash,’ laughed the captain. ‘You’re a very suspicious type of man I’d say, do you see. You know that, I suppose. You know that you’re a very suspicious type of man, I should imagine.’

‘I am,’ said Tristram. ‘Circumstances are making all of us suspicious.’

‘I would say,’ said the captain, ‘that your brother Derek has done very well for himself, wouldn’t you agree? That, of course, is in spite of a lot of things. In spite of his family background, for instance. But being homo, do you see, wipes out all other sins, the sins of the fathers, for instance, do you see.’