The Children of Men Read online

  19

  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.

  BOOK TWO

  ALPHA

  October 2021

  20

  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 d
ay 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.

  After the first week he telephoned Helena, surprised that he should wish not only to hear her voice, but to hope for an invitation. Helena gave none. She made no attempt to hide her disappointment at hearing his voice. Mathilda was listless and off her food. The vet had done some tests and she was expecting him to telephone.

  He said: “I’ve been out of Oxford for the whole summer. Has anything been happening?”

  “What do you mean, has anything been happening? What sort of things? Nothing’s been happening.”

  “I suppose not. One returns after six months expecting to find things changed.”

  “Things don’t change in Oxford. Why should anything change?”

  “I wasn’t thinking of Oxford. The country as a whole. I didn’t get much news when I was away.”

  “Well, there isn’t any. And why ask me? There’s been trouble about some dissidents, that’s all. It’s mostly rumour. Apparently they’ve been blowing up piers, trying to stop the Quietus. And there was something on the television news about a month ago. The announcer said that a group of them are planning to free all the convicts on the Isle of Man, that they might even organize an invasion from the island and try to depose the Warden.”

  Theo said: “That’s ridiculous.”

  “That’s what Rupert says. But they shouldn’t publicize things like that if they aren’t true. It only upsets people. Everything used to be so peaceful.”

  “Do they know who these dissidents are?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t think they know. Theo, I’ve got to get off the line now. I’m expecting the vet to call.”

  Without waiting for his goodbye, she put down the receiver.

  In the early hours of the tenth day after his return the nightmare returned. But this time it wasn’t his father who stood at the foot of his bed pointing his bleeding stump, but Luke, and he wasn’t in bed but sitting up in his car, not outside the Lathbury Road house but actually in the nave of Binsey Church. The windows of the car were closed. He could hear a woman screaming as Helena had screamed. Rolf was there, scarlet-faced, pounding his fists against the car and shouting: “You’ve killed Julian, you’ve killed Julian!” At the front of the car stood Luke, mutely pointing his bleeding stump. He was unable to move, locked in a rigor like the rigor of death. He heard their angry voices, “Get out! Get out!,” but he couldn’t move. He sat there staring with blank eyes through the windscreen at Luke’s accusing figure, waiting for the door to be wrenched open, for hands to drag him out and confront him with the horror of what he, and he alone, had done.

  The nightmare left its legacy of unease, which deepened day by day. He tried to throw it off but nothing in his uneventful, solitary, routine-dominated life was powerful enough to engage more than a part of his mind. He told himself that he must act normally, appear unconcerned, that he was under some kind of surveillance. But there was no sign of it. He heard nothing from Xan, nothing from the Council, received no communications, was not aware that he was being followed. He dreaded hearing from Jasper, with a renewal of his suggestion that they should join forces. But Jasper hadn’t been in touch since the Quietus and no call came. He took his usual exercise and two weeks after his return set off for an early-morning run across Port Meadow to Binsey Church. He knew that it would be unwise to visit and question the old priest and he found it difficult to explain to himself why revisiting Binsey was so important, or what he hoped to gain. Running with his long regular strides across Port Meadow he was for a moment worried in case he should lead the State Security Police to one of the group’s normal meeting places. But when he reached Binsey he saw that the hamlet was completely deserted and told himself that they would hardly continue to meet in any of their old haunts. Wherever they were, he knew them to be in terrible danger. He ran now, as he had every day, in a tumult of conflicting and familiar emotions: irritation that he had become involved, regret that he hadn’t handled the interview with the Council better, terror that Julian might even now be in the hands of the Security Police, frustration that there was no way in which he could get in touch with her, no person to whom he could safely talk.

  The lane to St. Margaret’s Church was even more dishevelled, even more overgrown than when he had last walked it, the interlocking boughs overhead making it dark and sinister as a tunnel. When he reached the churchyard he saw that there was a mortuary van outside the house and that two men were carrying a simple pine coffin down the path.

  He said: “Is the old parson dead?”

  The man who replied barely gazed at him. “He’d better be. He’s in the box.” He slid the coffin expertly into the back of the van, slammed the door and the two of them drove away.

  The door to the church was open and he moved into its dim secular emptiness. Already there were signs of its impending decay. Leaves had blown in through the open door and the floor of the chancel was muddy and stained with what looked like blood. The pews were thick with dust and it was apparent from the smell that animals, probably dogs, had been loose. Before the altar, curious signs had been painted on the floor, some of which were vaguely familiar. He was sorry he had come to this desecrated hovel. He left it, closing the heavy door behind him with a sense of relief. But he had learned nothing
, done no good. His pointless small pilgrimage had only deepened his sense of impotence, of impending disaster.

  21

  It was at half past eight that night that he heard the knock. He was in the kitchen dressing a salad for his dinner, carefully mixing the olive oil and the wine vinegar in the right proportions. He was to eat, as he usually did at night, from a tray in his study and the tray with its clean cloth and table napkin was already set and waiting on the kitchen table. The lamb chop was in the grilling pan. The claret had been uncorked an hour earlier and he had poured the first glass to drink while he was cooking. He went through the familiar motions without enthusiasm, almost without interest. He supposed he needed to eat. It was his habit to take trouble with the salad dressing. Even as his hands were at the familiar business of preparation his mind told him that it was all supremely unimportant.

  He had drawn the curtains across the french doors leading to the patio and the steps up to the garden, less to preserve privacy—that was hardly necessary—than because it was his habit to shut out the night. Apart from the small noises of his own making he was surrounded by total silence, the empty floors of the house piled above him like a physical weight. And it was at the moment when he raised the glass to his lips that he heard a knock. It was low but urgent, a single tap on the glass quickly followed by three others, as definite as a signal. He drew back the curtains and could just make out the outlines of a face almost pressed to the glass. A dark face. He knew instinctively rather than could see that it was Miriam. He drew back the two bolts and unlocked the door and immediately she slipped in.