The Wanting Seed (4 page)

‘But,’ began Tristram, ‘my family –’

Joscelyne held up a traffic-stopping hand. ‘I don’t mean whether your family was up in the world,’ he said. ‘I mean how much of it there is. Or was.’ He twitched. ‘It’s a matter of arithmetic, not of eugenics or social status. Now I know as well as you do, Brother Foxe, that all this is absurd. But there it is.’ His right hand suddenly took flight, hovered, then dropped to the desk like a paper-weight. ‘The records,’ he said, pronouncing the word ‘wreckerds’, ‘the records here say-the records say – yah, here it is: they say you come of a family of four. You have a sister in China (she’s on the Global Demographic Survey, right?) and a brother in, of all places, Springfield, Ohio. I know Springfield well. And then, of course, there’s Derek Foxe here, homo and highly placed. Now you, Brother Foxe, are married. And you have. one kid.’ He looked up at Tristram sadly.

‘Not any more. He died in hospital this morning.’ Tristram’s lower lip jutted, quivering.

‘Dead, eh? Well.’ Condolences nowadays were purely financial. ‘Young, wasn’t he? Very young. Not much P
₂
0
₅
there. Well, his being dead doesn’t alter the position as far as you’re concerned.’ Joscelyne clasped his hands tight as if about to pray away the fact of Tristram’s fatherhood. ‘One birth per family. Alive or dead. Singleton, twins, triplets. It makes no difference. Now,’ he said, ‘you’ve broken no law. You’ve not done a
thing you theoretically shouldn’t have. You’re entitled to marry if you want to, you’re entitled to one birth in the family, though, of course, the best people just don’t. Just don’t.’

‘Damn it,’ said Tristram, ‘damn it all, somebody’s got to keep the race going. There’d be no human race left if some of us didn’t have children.’ He was angry. ‘And what do you mean by “the best people”?’ he asked. ‘People like my brother Derek? That power-struck little nancy, crawling, yes, literally crawling up the –’

‘Calmo,’
said Joscelyne,
‘calmo.’
He had only just returned from an educational conference in Rome, that popeless city. ‘You were just going to say something very opprobrious then. “Nancy” is a very contemptuous term. The homos, remember, virtually run this country and, for that matter, the whole of the English-Speaking Union.’ He lowered his eyebrows, gazing at Tristram with foxy sorrow. ‘My uncle, the High Commissioner, he’s homo. I was nearly homo myself once. Let’s keep emotion out of this,’ he said. ‘It’s unseemly, that’s what it is, yah, unseemly. Just let’s try to
parlare
about this
calmamente
, huh?’ He smiled, trying to make the smile look homespun and cracker-barrel. ‘You know as well as I do that the job of breeding’s best left to the lower orders. Remember that the very term proletariat comes from Latin
proletarius
, meaning those that serve the State with their offspring or
proles
. You and me, we’re supposed to be above that sort of thing, huh?’ He sat back in his chair, smiling, tapping the desk with his inkpencil-0, for some reason, in Morse. ‘One birth per family, that’s the rule or recommendation or whatever you like to call it, but the proletariat breaks that rule an
the time. The race is in no danger of dying. Just the opposite, I’d say. I hear rumours from high places, but never mind, never mind. The fact is that your old man and your old lady broke the rule very nastily, very nastily indeed. Yah. He was what? – something in the Ministry of Agriculture, wasn’t he? According to this dossier he was. Well, it was just a little bit cynical, I’d say, helping to increase the national food supply with one hand and getting four kids with the other.’ He saw that this was rather a grotesque antithesis but he shrugged it off. ‘And that’s not forgotten, you know, Brother Foxe, not forgotten. The sins of the fathers, as they used to say.’

‘We’ll all help the Ministry of Agriculture some day,’ sulked Tristram. ‘Quite a nice lump of phosphorous pentoxide, the four of us.’

‘Your wife, too,’ said Joscelyne, rustling the many sheets of the dossier. ‘She’s got a sister in Northern Province. Married to an agricultural officer. Two children there.’ He tutted. ‘A kind of aura of fertility surrounds you, Brother Foxe. Anyway, as far as this post of departmental head is concerned, it’s pretty evident that, all things being equal, the Board will want to appoint a candidate with a cleaner family wreckerd.’ This pronunciation became a focus of irritation to Tristram. ‘Let’s see. Let’s look at the other candidates.’ Joscelyne leaned forward, elbows on the desk, and began to tick them off on his fingers. ‘Wiltshire’s homo. Cruttenden’s unmarried. Cowell’s married with one kid, so he’s out. Crum-Ewing’s gone the whole hog, he’s a
castrato
, a pretty strong candidate. Fiddian’s just nothing. Ralph’s homo –’

‘All right,’ said Tristram. ‘I accept my sentence. I just stay where I am and see somebody younger – it’s bound to be somebody younger; it always is – promoted over my head. Just because of my
wrreckerd,’
he added bitterly.

‘Yah, that’s it,’ said Joscelyne. ‘I’m glad you’re taking it this way. You see how a lot of these top-brass are going to look at it. Heredity, that’s the word, heredity. A family pattern of deliberate fertility, that’s it. Yah. Like being a hereditary criminal. Things are very tricky these days. In confidence, fella, you watch your step. Watch your wife. Don’t start having any more kids. Don’t start getting irresponsible like the proletariat. One false step like that and you’d be out. Yah, out.’ He made the gesture of cutting his own throat. ‘Lots of promising young men coming up. Men with the right ideas. I’d hate to lose you, Brother Foxe.’

Nine

‘D
EAREST
one.’

‘Darling, darling, darling.’ They embraced hungrily, the door still open. ‘Yumyumyumyumyum.’ Derek disengaged himself and kicked it shut.

‘Must be careful,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t put it past Loosley to follow me here.’

‘Well, what’s the harm?’ said Beatrice-Joanna. ‘You can visit your brother if you wish to, can’t you?’

‘Don’t be silly. Loosley’s thorough, I’ll say that for the
little swine. He’ll have found out what Tristram’s working-hours are.’ Derek went over to the window. He came back from it immediately, smiling at his own foolishness. So many storeys up, so many indistinguishable crawling ants on the deep street. ‘Perhaps I’m getting a bit too nervy,’ he said. ‘It’s only that – well, things are happening. I’ve got to see the Minister this evening. It looks as though I’m in for a big job.’

‘What sort of job?’

‘A job that means, I’m afraid, we shan’t be seeing quite so much of each other. Not for a time, anyway. A job with a uniform. Tailors came in this morning, measuring. Big things are happening.’ Derek had shed his public skin of dandified epicene. He looked male, tough.

‘So,’ said Beatrice-Joanna. ‘You’re getting a job that’s going to be more important than seeing me. Is that it?’ She had thought, on his entering the flat and taking her in his arms, of urging, in a mad instant, that they run away together, to live for ever on coconuts and love among the banyans. But then her woman’s desire for the best of both worlds had supervened. ‘I sometimes wonder,’ she said, ‘whether you really mean what you say. About love and so on.’

‘Oh, darling, darling,’ he said impatiently. ‘But listen.’ He was in no mood for dalliance. ‘Some things are happening which are far more important than love. Matters of life and death.’

Just like a man. ‘Nonsense,’ she said promptly.

‘Purges, if you know what those are. Changes in the Government. The unemployed being drafted into the police force. Oh, big things, big things.’

Beatrice-Joanna started to snivel, to make herself look very weak, defenceless, small. ‘It’s been such an awful day,’ she said. ‘I’ve been so miserable. I’ve been so lonely.’

‘Dearest one. It’s beastly of me.’ He took her in his arms again. ‘I’m so sorry. I think only of myself.’ Content, she went on snivelling. He kissed her cheek, neck, brow, buried his lips in hair the colour of cider. She smelt of soap, he of all the perfumes of Arabia. Embraced, they four-legged their way clumsily into the bedroom, as in some blind dance undisciplined by music. The switch had long been touched which sent the bed swinging – in an arc like Tristram’s chalked Pelphase–to the floor. Derek swiftly undressed, disclosing a spare body knobbed and striated with muscle, and then the dead eye of the television screen on the ceiling was able to watch the writhing of a male body – crust – brown, delicate russet – and a female – nacreous, touched subtly with blue and carmine – in the exordia of an act which was technically both adulterous and incestuous.

‘Did you,’ panted Derek, ‘remember to–?’ There was now no possible ideal observer who could think of Mrs Shandy and, thinking, grin.

‘Yes, yes.’ She had taken tablets; everything was quite safe. It was only when the point of no return had been reached that she remembered that the tablets she had swallowed were analgesic, not contraceptive. Routine let one down sometimes. Then it was too late and she didn’t care.

Ten

‘G
ET
on with it,’ said Tristram, frowning unwontedly. ‘Read it up on your own.’ The seventh stream of the Fourth Form offered him wide eyes and mouths. ‘I’m going home,’ he said. ‘I’ve had enough for one day. Tomorrow there will. be a test on the matter contained between Pages 267 and 274 – inclusive – of your textbook. The Chronic Nuclear Scare and the Coming of Perpetual Peace. Dunlop,’ he said sharply. ‘Dunlop.’ The boy had a rubbery face, but, in this age of total nationalization, his name was neither appropriate nor inappropriate. ‘Nose-picking is an unseemly habit, Dunlop,’ he said. The class tittered. ‘Get on with it,’ repeated Tristram at the door, ‘and a very good day to you. Or early evening,’ he amended, glancing out at the rose marine sky. Curious that the English tongue had never evolved a valedictory form fitting this time of day. A sort of Interphase. Pelagian day, Augustinian night. Tristram walked boldly out of the classroom, down the corridor to the lift, then sped down and out of the mammoth building itself. Nobody hindered his leaving. Teachers just did not desert their classes before the final bell; ergo, Tristram was still, in some mystical way, at work.

He swam strongly through the crowds on Earp Road (tides simultaneously flowing in and out) and then turned left into Dallas Street. And there, just by the turning into McGibbon Avenue, he saw something which, for no immediate reason he could assign to the
sensation, chilled him. On the road, blocking the sparse traffic, watched by crowds that kept their decent distance, was a company of men in the grey uniform of the police – three platoons with platoon commanders–standing at ease. Most of them grinned awkwardly, shuffled; recruits, Tristram divined, new recruits, but each already armed with a squat dull-shining carbine. Their trousers tapered to black elasticated bands which hugged the uppers of deep-soled boots; their waisted tunics were curiously archaic with their collars, brassy collar-dogs glinting on them, and with the collars went black ties. The men were capped in grey cheese-cutters; a police badge shone dead above the frontal lobes.

‘Finding jobs for them,’ said a man next to Tristram–an unshaven man in rusty black, a roll of fat on his chin though his body was meagre. ‘The out-of-work, they are. Were,’ he corrected himself. ‘About time the Government did something about them. That’s my brother-in-law there, see, second from the end of the first row.’ He pointed, vicariously proud. ‘Giving them jobs,’ he repeated. He was evidently a lonely man, glad of the chance to talk to anybody.

‘Why?’ asked Tristram. ‘What’s it all about?’ But he knew; this was the end of the Pelphase: people were going to be made to be good. He felt a certain panic on his own account. Perhaps he ought to be getting back to the school. Perhaps nobody would know anything about it if he went back right away. It was foolish of him, he’d never done anything like that before. Perhaps he ought to ring up Joscelyne and say he’d left before time because he wasn’t feeling well-

‘Keep some of them in order,’ said the fat-chinned
thin man promptly. ‘Too many of these young hooligans round the streets at night. Not strict enough with them, they’re not. Teachers don’t have any control over them any more.’

‘Some of those young recruits,’ said Tristram carefully, ‘look suspiciously like young hooligans.’

‘Are you calling my brother-in-law a hoo\igan? Best lad who ever breathed, he is, and been unemployed near fourteen months. He’s no hooligan, mister.’

An officer now took post before the company. Smart, his pants moulded to his bottom, silver bars on his epaulettes agleam in the sun, a gun holstered in rich leather-substitute on his hip, he called in an unexpectedly manly voice: ‘
Campniiiiigh
–’ The company stiffened, as if for a blow.
‘Shn.’
The snarl was hurled like a pebble; the men came to attention raggedly.
‘To your jewtahhhhz, diiiii –’
(The syllable wavered between two allophones) ‘–
zmiss.’
Some turned left, some right, some waited to see what the others were doing. Laughter and jeering claps from the crowd. And now the street was full of wandering knots of self-conscious policemen.

Tristram, feeling somewhat sick, made for Earnshaw Mansions. In a cellar under that thick dry tower was a drinking-shop called the Montague. The only intoxicant available these days was a pungent distillation from vegetable and fruit-peel. It was called alc, and only the lowest-class stomach could take it neat. Tristram put down a tosheroon on the counter and was served with a glass of this vicious viscous spirit, well diluted in orangeade. There was nothing else to drink: hop-fields, the ancient centres of viticulture – these had gone the way of the grazing-plains and the tobacco-lands of
Virginia and Turkey; all now supported more esculent crops. A near-vegetarian world, non-smoking, teetotal except for ale. Tristram gravely toasted it and, after another tosheroon’s worth of orange fire, felt himself sufficiently reconciled to it. Promotion dead, Roger dead. To hell with Joscelyne. He panned his head almost genially round the close little drinking-hole. Homos, some of them bearded, twittered among themselves in the dark corner; the bar-drinkers were mostly hetero and gloomy. The greasy fat-bottomed barman waddled to a musicator in the wall, put a tanner in the slot, and let loose, like an animal, a grating kind of concrete music – spoons rattling in tin basins, a speech made by the Minister of Pisciculture, a lavatory cistern filling up, a revving engine: all recorded backwards, augmented or diminished, thoroughly mixed. The man next to Tristram said, ‘Bloody awful.’ He said this to the alccasks, not moving his head and hardly moving his lips, as if, though the remark had had to be made, he did not want it to be picked up as a pretext for drawing him into conversation. One of the bearded homos now began to recite: