The Children of Men (16 page)

“It’ll last for ever.”

“You won’t. Nor will the fashion.”

“I don’t care about fashions. I shall like the style better when no one else is wearing it.”

And no one was wearing it now.

They crossed the road into the park. Xan said: “You were unwise to come here today. There’s a limit to how far I can protect you, you or the people you’ve been consorting with.”

“I didn’t think I needed protection. I’m a free citizen consulting the democratically elected Warden of England. Why should I need protection, yours or anyone’s?”

Xan didn’t answer. On impulse Theo said: “Why do you do it? Why on earth do you want the job?” It was, he thought, a question that only he could, or dared to, ask.

Xan paused before replying, narrowing and focusing his eyes on the
lake as if something invisible to other eyes had suddenly interested him. But surely, thought Theo, he didn’t need to hesitate. It must have been a question he’d thought over often enough. Then he turned, walked on, and said: “At first because I thought I’d enjoy it. The power, I suppose. But it wasn’t only that. I could never bear to watch someone doing badly what I knew I could do well. After the first five years I found I was enjoying it less, but by then it was too late. Someone has to do it and the only people who want to are the four round that table. Would you prefer Felicia? Harriet? Martin? Carl? Carl could do it, but he’s dying. The other three couldn’t keep the Council together, let alone the country.”

“So that’s why. Disinterested public duty?”

“Have you ever known anyone to give up power, real power?”

“Some people do.”

“And have you seen them, the walking dead? But it’s not the power, not entirely. I’ll tell you the real reason. I’m not bored. Whatever else I am now, I’m never bored.”

They walked on in silence, skirting the lake. Then Xan said: “The Christians believe that the Last Coming has arrived except that their God is gathering them one by one instead of descending more dramatically in the promised clouds of glory. This way heaven can control the intake. It makes it easier to process the white-robed company of the redeemed. I like to think of God concerning Himself with logistics. But they’d give up their illusion to hear the laughter of one child.”

Theo didn’t reply. Then Xan said quietly: “Who are these people? You’d better tell me.”

“There are no people.”

“All that farrago in the Council room. You didn’t think that out for yourself. I don’t mean that you’re incapable of thinking it out. You’re capable of a great deal more than that. But you haven’t cared for three years, and you didn’t care greatly before then. You’ve been got at.”

“Not by anyone specifically. I live in the real world even in Oxford. I queue at cash registers, I shop, I take buses, I listen. People sometimes talk to me. Not anyone I care about, just people. What I have is communication with strangers.”

“Which strangers? Your students?”

“Not students. No one in particular.”

“Odd that you’ve become so approachable. You used to go round
with an impervious membrane of privacy, your private invisible caul. When you talk to these mysterious strangers, ask them if they can do my job better than I. If so, tell them to come and say so to my face; you’re not a particularly persuasive emissary. It would be a pity if we had to close down the adult education school at Oxford. There’ll be no option if the place becomes a focus for sedition.”

“You can’t mean that.”

“It’s what Felicia would say.”

“Since when have you taken any notice of Felicia?”

Xan smiled his inward reminiscent smile. “You’re right, of course. I don’t take any notice of Felicia.”

Crossing the bridge which spanned the lake, they paused to gaze towards Whitehall. Here, unchanged, was one of the most exciting views which London had to offer, English and yet exotic, the elegant and splendid bastions of Empire seen across shimmering water and framed in trees. Theo recalled lingering at just this spot a week after he had joined the Council, remembered contemplating the same view, Xan wearing the same coat. And he could recall every word they had said as clearly as if it had just been spoken.

“You should give up the compulsory testing of sperm. It’s degrading and it’s been done now for over twenty years without success. Anyway, you only test healthy, selected males. What about the others?”

“If they can breed, good luck to them, but while there are limited facilities for the testing, let’s keep it for the physically and morally fit.”

“So you’re planning for virtue as well as health?”

“You could say, yes. No one with a criminal record or a family record of offending ought to be allowed to breed, if we have a choice.”

“So the criminal law is to be the measure of virtue?”

“How else can it be measured? The State can’t look into men’s hearts. All right, it’s rough and ready and we’ll disregard small delinquencies. But why breed from the stupid, the feckless, the violent?”

“So in your new world there will be no room for the penitent thief?”

“One can applaud his penitence without wanting to breed from him. But look, Theo, it isn’t going to happen. We plan for the sake of planning, pretending that man has a future. How many people really believe that we shall find live seed now?”

“And suppose you discover somehow that an aggressive psychopath has fertile sperm. Will you use that?”

“Of course. If he’s the only hope, we’ll use him. We’ll take what we can get. But the mothers will be carefully chosen for health, intelligence, no criminal record. We’ll try to breed out the psychopathy.”

“Then there are the pornography centres. Are they really necessary?”

“You don’t have to use them. There has always been pornography.”

“State-tolerated but not State-provided.”

“There’s not so great a difference. And what harm do they do to people without hope? There’s nothing like keeping the body occupied and the mind quiescent.”

Theo had said: “But that isn’t really what they’re set up for, is it?”

“Obviously not. Man has no hope of reproducing himself if he doesn’t copulate. Once that goes totally out of fashion we are lost.”

But now, slowly, they moved on. Breaking a silence which was almost companionable, Theo asked: “Do you often go back to Woolcombe?”

“That living mausoleum? The place appals me. I used to make the occasional duty visit to my mother. I haven’t been back for five years. No one ever dies now at Woolcombe. What the place needs is its own Quietus by way of a bomb. Odd, isn’t it? Almost the whole of modern medical research is dedicated to improving health in old age and extending the human life-span and we get more senility, not less. Extending it for what? We give them drugs to improve short-term memory, drugs to raise mood, drugs to increase appetite. They don’t need anything to make them sleep, that’s all they seem to do. What, I wonder, goes on in those senile minds during those long periods of half-consciousness. Memories, I suppose, prayers.”

Theo said: “One prayer. ‘That I may see my children’s children and peace upon Israel.’ Did your mother recognize you before she died?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“You told me once that your father hated her.”

“I can’t think why. I suppose I was trying to shock you, or impress you. You were unshockable even as a boy. And nothing I’ve achieved, University, soldiering, becoming Warden, has really impressed you, has it? My parents got along all right. My father was gay, of course. Didn’t you realize? I used to care desperately when I was a boy, now it seems supremely unimportant. Why shouldn’t he live his life as he wished? I always have. That explains the marriage, of course. He wanted respectability and he needed a son, so he chose a woman who would be so dazzled by getting Woolcombe, a baronet and a title that
she wouldn’t complain when she found that that was all that she was getting.”

“Your father never made any approach to me.”

Xan laughed. “What an egotist you are, Theo. You weren’t his type and he was morbidly conventional. Never shit in your own bed. Besides, he had Scovell. Scovell was in the car with him when he crashed. I managed to hush that up pretty effectively—out of a kind of filial piety, I suppose. I didn’t care who knew it, but he would have cared. I was a bad enough son. I owed him that.”

Suddenly Xan said: “We shan’t be the last two men on earth. That privilege will go to an Omega, God help him. But if we were, what do you think we’d do?”

“Drink. Salute the darkness and remember the light. Shout out a roll-call of names and then shoot ourselves.”

“What names?”

“Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven. Jesus Christ.”

“This would be a roll-call of humanity. Leave out the gods, the prophets, the fanatics. I should like the season to be midsummer, the wine to be claret, and the place the bridge at Woolcombe.”

“And since we are, after all, English, we could end with Prospero’s speech from
The Tempest.”

“If we weren’t too old to remember the words and, when the wine was finished, too weak to hold the guns.”

They were now at the end of the lake. On the Mall, backed by Queen Victoria’s statue, the car was waiting. The chauffeur stood beside it, legs parted, arms folded, staring at them from under the rim of his cap. It was the stance of a gaoler, perhaps of an executioner. Theo pictured the cap replaced by a black skull-cap, the mask, the axe at his side.

Then he heard Xan’s voice, Xan’s parting words: “Tell your friends, whoever they are, to be sensible. If they can’t be sensible, tell them to be prudent. I’m not a tyrant, but I can’t afford to be merciful. Whatever it is necessary to do, I shall do.”

He looked at Theo, who thought for one extraordinary moment that he saw in Xan’s eyes a plea for understanding. Then he repeated: “Tell them, Theo. I shall do what needs to be done.”

Theo still found it difficult to get used to crossing an empty St. Giles. The memory of his first days in Oxford, the rows of tightly parked cars under the elms, of his increasing frustration waiting to cross against the almost ceaseless traffic, must have taken a firmer hold than more auspicious or significant recollections to be so easily triggered. He still found himself instinctively hesitating at the kerb, still could not see this emptiness without surprise. Crossing the wide street with a quick glance to left and right, he cut down the cobbled lane at the side of the Lamb and Flag pub and walked to the museum. The door was closed and for a moment he feared that the museum was also, and was irritated that he hadn’t bothered to telephone. But it opened as he turned the handle and he saw that the inner wooden door was ajar. He moved into the great square room of glass and iron.

The air was very cold, colder, it seemed, than the street outside, and the museum was empty except for an elderly woman, so muffled that only her eyes were visible between the striped woollen scarf and her cap, who was presiding at the counter of the shop. He could see that the same postcards were on display: pictures of dinosaurs, of gems, of butterflies, of the crisply carved capitals of the pillars, photographs of the founding fathers of this secular cathedral to Victorian confidence, John Ruskin and Sir Henry Ackland sitting together in 1874, Benjamin Woodward with his sensitive melancholy face. He stood silently looking up at the massive roof supported by its series of cast-iron pillars, at the embellished spandrels between the arches branching with such elegance into leaves, fruits, flowers, trees and shrubs. But he knew that his unfamiliar
tingle of excitement, more worrying than pleasant, had less to do with the building than with his meeting with Julian, and he tried to control it by concentrating on the ingenuity and quality of the wrought-iron work, the beauty of the carvings. It was, after all, his period. Here was Victorian confidence, Victorian earnestness; the respect for learning, for craftsmanship, for art; the conviction that the whole of man’s life could be lived in harmony with the natural world. He hadn’t been in the museum for over three years, yet nothing had changed. Nothing, indeed, had changed since he had first entered it as an undergraduate except the notice which he remembered seeing propped against a pillar, welcoming children but admonishing them—ineffectually, he recalled—not to run about or make a noise. The dinosaur with its great hooked thumb still had pride of place. Studying it, he was again in his Kingston primary school. Mrs. Ladbrook had pinned a drawing of the dinosaur on the blackboard and had explained that the great unwieldy animal with its minute head had been all body but little brain, and had accordingly failed to adapt and had perished. Even at ten years of age he had found the explanation unconvincing. The dinosaur, with its small brain, had survived for a couple of million years; it had done better than
Homo sapiens
.

He passed through the arch at the far end of the main building into the Pitt Rivers Museum, one of the world’s greatest ethnological collections. The exhibits were so close together that it was difficult to know whether she was already waiting there, standing perhaps beside the forty-foot totem pole. But when he paused he heard no answering footfall. The silence was absolute, and he knew that he was alone but knew, too, that she would come.

The Pitt Rivers seemed even more densely packed than on his last visit. In the cluttered show cabinets, model ships, masks, ivory and beadwork, amulets and votive offerings seemed mutely to offer themselves for his attention. He made his path between the cases and paused at last before an old favourite, still on display but with its label now so brown and faded that the print was hardly decipherable. It was a necklace of twenty-three curved and polished teeth of the sperm whale, given by King Thakombau in 1874 to the Reverend James Calvert and presented to the museum by his great-grandson, a pilot officer who had died of wounds early in the Second World War. Theo felt again the
fascination he had felt as an undergraduate with the strange concatenation of events which linked the hands of a Fijian carver with the young doomed airman. He pictured again the ceremony of presentation, the King on his throne ringed by his grass-skirted warriors, the serious-faced missionary accepting the curious tribute. The 1939–45 war had been his own grandfather’s war; he, too, had been killed serving with the RAF, shot down in a Blenheim bomber on the great raid over Dresden. As an undergraduate, obsessed always with the mystery of time, he had liked to think that this gave him, also, a tenuous link with that long-dead King whose bones lay on the other side of the world.