The Wanting Seed (10 page)

Then noise could be heard coming from Froude Place. It was a procession of rough-looking men in overalls, loud with confused cries of disaffection. ‘You see,’ said
Tristram triumphantly. ‘Everybody knows.’ They all wore the crown and the NSW of the National Synthefabrik Works. Some carried banners of grievancepieces of synthetic cloth tacked on to broom-handles, hastily cut bits of card on slender laths. The only true inscription was the logogram STRK; for the rest, there were crude drawings of human skeletons. ‘It’s all over between us,’ said Tristram. ‘You stupid idiot,’ said Beatrice-Joanna, ‘get inside. We don’t want to be involved in this.’ A wild-eyed workers’ leader stood on the plinth of a street lamp, hugging the pillar with his left arm. ‘Brothers,’ he called, ‘brothers. If they want a fair day’s work they’ve got to bloody well feed us proper.’

‘Hang old Jackson,’ wavered an elderly worker. ‘String him up.’

‘Shove him in a stewpot,’ called a Mongol with comic strabismus.

‘Don’t be a fool,’ said Beatrice-Joanna in disquiet. ‘I’m getting out of this if you’re not.’ She pushed Tristram violently out of her way. Her provisions went flying and Tristram himself staggered and fell. He began to cry. ‘How could you,
how could you
, with my own brother?’ She went grimly into Spurgin Building, leaving him to his sonata of reproach. Tristram got up from the pavement with difficulty, clutching the tin of synthelac. ‘You stop shoving,’ said a woman. ‘Nowt to do with me. I want to get home.’

‘They can threaten,’ said the leader, ‘till they’re bloody well blue in the face. We have our rights and they can’t take them away, and the withholding of labour’s a lawful right in case of just grievance, and they can’t bloody well deny it.’ Roars. Tristram found him-
self wound round, stirred into the crowd of workers. A schoolgirl, also caught in it, began to cry. ‘You do well to do that,’ nodded a youngish man with pimples and a bad shave. ‘Starved, the bloody lot of us, that’s about it.’ The cross-eyed Mongol turned to give Tristram his full face. A fly had settled on his porous nose; his eyes were well set for looking at it. He watched it fly away, wondering, as though it symbolized liberation. ‘My name,’ he said to Tristram, ‘is Joe Blacklock.’ Then, satisfied, he turned back to listening to his leader. The leader called, himself unfortunately plump as a table bird, ‘Let them listen to the crying-out of the empty guts of the workers.’ Roars.
‘Solidarity,’ yelled this solid man. More roars. Tristram was crushed, pushed. Then two greyboys from the State Provisions Store (Rossiter Avenue branch) appeared, armed only with truncheons. Manly-looking, they began vigorously to belabour. There was a great cry of pain and anger as they jerked at the right arm of the lamp-clutching leader. The leader flailed and protested. One of the police went down, crunched under boots. Blood appeared from nowhere on somebody’s face, an earnest of earnest. ‘Aaaaargh,’ gargled the man next to Tristram. ‘Do the bastards in.’ The schoolgirl shrieked. ‘Let her get out,’ cried soberer Tristram. ‘For Dogsake clear a way there.’ The crushing crowd came on. The still upright greyboy was now at bay against the freestone wall of Spurgin Building. He cracked, his panting mouth open, at skulls and faces. An upper set was spewed out by someone, a Cheshire Cat grin in the air for an instant. Then whistles shrilled hollowly. ‘More of the bastards,’ throated a voice in Tristram’s neck-nape. ‘Make a bloody dash for it.’ ‘Solidarity,’ cried the lost leader from somewhere among fists. The sirens of police cars rose and fell in
glissandi
of dismal tritones. The crowd tongued out in all directions like fire or stone-dinged water. The schoolgirl needled across the street with spider-legs, escaped into an alley. Tristram was still clutching, like a baby, the white tin of synthelac. Greyboys now held the street, some tough and stupid, others sweetly prettily smiling, all with carbines at the ready. An officer with two bright bars on each shoulder strutted, whistle in mouth like a baby’s dummy, hand on holster. At each end of the street were crowds, watching. Placards and banners shifted to and fro uncertainly above shoulders, already looking sheepish and forlorn. There were black vans waiting, side-doors open, lorries with tail-boards down. A sergeant yelped something. There was a jostling at one place, the vexillae advanced. The whistled shining inspector unholstered his pistol. He peeped one silver blast, and a carbine spat at the air. ‘Get the sods,’ called a worker in torn overalls. A tentative thrust of a phalanx of crushed men gained momentum speedily, and a greyboy went down shrieking. The whistle now pierced like toothache. Carbines opened out frankly, and shot whined like puppies from the walls. ‘Hands up,’ ordered the inspector, whistle out of his mouth. Some workers were down, gaping and bleeding in the sun. ‘Get ‘em all in,’ yelped the sergeant. ‘Room for everyone, the little beauties.’ Tristram dropped his tin of synthelac. ‘Watch that one there,’ cried the officer. ‘Home-made bomb.’

‘I’m not one of these,’ Tristram tried to explain, hands clasped over his head. ‘I was just going home. I’m a teacher. I object strongly. Take your dirty hands off.’
‘Right,’ said a bulky greyboy obligingly, and carbinebutted him fairly in the gut. Tristram sent out a delicate fountain of the purple juice that had diluted the alc. ‘In.’ He was prodded to a black lorry, his nasopharynx smarting with the taste of the brief vomit. ‘My brother,’ he protested. ‘Commissioner of the Poppoppoppop –’ He couldn’t stop popping. ‘My wife’s in there, let me at least speak to my wife.’ ‘In.’ He fell up the rungs of the swinging tail-board. ‘Speeeeak tub mah wahf,’ mocked a worker’s voice. ‘Haw haw.’ The lorry was full of sweat and desperate breathing, as though all inside had been kindly rescued from some killing crosscountry run. The tail-board clinked up with merry music of chains, a tarpaulin curtain came down. The workers cheered at the total darkness, and one or two squeaked in girly voices, ‘Stop it, I’ll tell my rna’ and ‘Oh, you
are
awful, Arthur.’ An earnest breathing bulk next to Tristram said, ‘They don’t take it seriously, that’s the trouble with a lot of these here. Let the side down, that’s what they do.’ A hollow voice with slack Northern vowels ventured a pleasantry: ‘Would anybody lahk a fried egg samwidge?’ ‘Look,’ almost wept Tristram to the odorous dark, ‘I was just going in to have it out with my wife, that’s all. It was nothing to do with me. It’s unfair.’ The serious voice at his side said, ‘Course it’s unfair. They never have been fair to the working man.’ Another, hostile to Tristram’s accent, growled, ‘Shut it, see. We know your type. Watching you, I am,’ which was manifestly impossible. Meanwhile, they roared along in convoy, as they could tell, and there was a sense of streets full of happy unarrested people. Tristram wanted to blubber. ‘I take it,’ said a
new voice, ‘that you don’t want to associate yourself with our struggle, is that it, friend? The intellectuals have never been on the side of the workers. Sometimes they’ve let on to be, but only for purposes of betrayal.’ Tm the one who’s been betrayed,’ cried Tristram. ‘Betray his arse,’ said someone. ‘Treason of clerks,’ came a bored voice. A harmonica began to play.

At length the lorry stopped, and there was a grinding finality of brakes, an opening and slamming of the doors of the driver’s cabin. A noise of unslotting, a chainy rattle, and then great daylight blew in like a wind. ‘Out,’ said a carbined corporal, pock-marked Micronesian. ‘Look here,’ said Tristram, getting out, ‘I want to register the strongest possible protest about this. I demand that I be allowed to telephone Commissioner Foxe, my brother. There’s been a ghastly mistake.’ ‘In,’ said a constable, and Tristram was shoved with the rest through a doorway. Forty-odd storeys dove into heaven over their heads. ‘You lot in here,’ said a sergeant. ‘Thirty-five to a cell. Plenty of room for all, you horrible great antisocial things, you.’ ‘I protest,’ protested Tristram. ‘I’m not going in there,’ going in. ‘Ah, shut it,’ said a worker. ‘With pleasure,’ said the sergeant. Three bolts slammed in on them and, for good measure, a key ground round in a rusty ward.

Seven

B
EATRICE
-J
OANNA
packed one bag only, there not being
much to pack. This was no age of possessions. She said good-bye to the bedroom, her eyes moistening at her last sight of the tiny wall-cot that had been Roger’s. Then, in the living-room, she told out all her cash: five guineanotes, thirty crowns, odd septs, florins and tanners. Enough. There was no time to let her sister know, but Mavis had often said, often written, ‘Now, come any time. But don’t bring that husband of yours with you. You know Shonny can’t stand him.’ Beatrice-Joanna smiled at the thought of Shonny, then cried, then pulled herself together. She also pulled the main switch and the hum of the refrigerator ceased. It was a dead flat now. Guilty? Why should she feel guilty? Tristram had told her to get out, and she was getting out. She wondered again who had told him, how many knew. Perhaps she would never see Tristram again. The small life within her said, ‘Act, don’t think. Move. I’m all that counts.’ She would, she thought, be safe in Northern Province;
it
would be safe. She could think of no other obligation than to this, the single inch of protest, weighing thirty-odd grains, the cells dividing again and again in protest, blasts of protest – epi, meso, hypo. Tiny life protesting at monolithic death. Away.

It was starting to rain, so she put on her waterproof, a thin skin like a mist. There was dried blood on the pavement, needles of rain pricking it to make it flow, if only down the gutter. The rain came from the sea and stood for life. She walked briskly into Froude Square. The red-lit underground station entrance milled with people, red-lit like devils of the old mythical hell, silent, chunnering, giggling, sped singly or in pairs down the grumbling escalator. Beatrice-Joanna bought her ticket
from a machine, dove down to the aseptic white catacombs where winds rushed out of tunnels, and boarded a tube-train to Central London. It was a swift service and would get her there in less than half an hour. Next to her an old woman champed and champed, talking to herself, her eyes closed, saying aloud at intervals, ‘Doris was a good girl, a good girl to her mother, but the other one –’ Preston, Patcham, Pangdean. Passengers left, passengers boarded. Pyecombe. The old woman alighted, mumbling, ‘Doris.’ ‘A pie was what they used to eat,’ said a pale fat mother in powder-blue. Her child cried.

‘Hungry, that’s his trouble,’ she said. And now the legs of the journey grew longer. Albourne. Hickstead. Bolney. Warninglid. At Warninglid a scholarly-looking man with a stringy neck boarded, sitting next to Beatrice-Joanna to read, puffing like a tortoise,
Dh Wks v Wlym Shkspr
. He unwrapped a synthechoc bar and began to chew, puffing. The child renewed his crying. Handcross. Pease Pottage. ‘Pease pottage was something else they used to eat,’ said the mother. Crawley, Horley, Salfords. Nothing edible there, Redhill. At Redhill the scholar alighted and three members of the Population Police came aboard. They were young men, subalterns, well set-up, their metal ashine and their black unmaculated by hairs, scurf or food-droppings. They examined the women passengers insolently, as with eyes expert at burrowing to illegal pregnancies. Beatrice-Joanna blushed, wishing the journey were over. Merstham, Caterham, Coulsdon. It soon would be. She pressed her hands over her belly as though its cellulating inmate were already leaping with audible joy. Purley, Croydon, Thornton Heath, Norwood. The police officers alighted.
And now the train went purring into the deep black heart of the immemorial city. Dulwich, Camberwell, Central London. And soon Beatrice-Joanna was on the local line to the North-West Terminus.

She was shocked at the number of grey and black police that infested the noisy station. She joined a queue in the booking-hall. Officers of both forces sat at long tables barring the way to the bank of booking-guichets. They were smart, pert, clipped.

‘Identity-card, please.’ She handed it over. ‘Destination?’

‘State Farm NW
₃₁₃
, outside Preston.’

‘Purpose of trip?’

She fell easily into the rhythm. ‘Social visit.’

‘Friends?’

‘Sister.’

‘I see.
Sister.’
A dirty word, that. ‘Duration of visit?’

‘I can’t say. Look here, why do you want to know all this?’

‘Duration of visit?’

‘Oh, perhaps six months. Perhaps longer.’ How much should she tell them? ‘I’m leaving my husband, you see.’

‘Hm. Hm. Check on this passenger, will you?’ A constable-clerk copied from her identity-card on to a buff form, official. Meanwhile another young woman was in trouble. ‘I tell you I’m
not
pregnant,’ she kept saying. A gold-haired thin-lipped policewoman in black began to pull her to a door blazoned MEDICAL OFFICER. ‘We’ll soon see,’ she said. ‘We’ll soon know all about that, shan’t we, dear?’

‘But I’m
not,’
cried the young woman. ‘I tell you I’m not.’

‘There,’ said Beatrice-Joanna’s interrogator, handing back her stamped carnet. He had a pleasant prefect’s face on which grimness sat like a bogey-mask. ‘Too many illeg pregs trying to escape to the provinces.
You
wouldn’t be trying anything like that, would you? Your card says you’ve got one child, a son. Where is he now?’

‘Dead.’

‘I see. I see. Well, that’s that then, isn’t it? Off you go.’ And Beatrice-Joanna went to book her single ticket to the north.

Police at the barriers, police patrolling the platform. A crowded train (nuclear-propelled). Beatrice-Joanna sat down, already exhausted, between a thin man so stiff that his skin seemed to be armour and a very small woman whose legs dangled like a very big doll’s. Opposite was a check-suited man with a coarse comedian’s face, sucking desperately at a false molar. A small girl, open-mouthed as with adenoid growths, surveyed Beatrice-Joanna from head to foot, foot to head, in a strict slow rhythm. A very fat young woman glowed like a deliberate lamp, her legs so tree-like that they seemed to be growing out of the floor of the compartment. Beatrice-Joanna closed her eyes. Almost at once a dream leaped on to her: a grey field under a thundery sky, cactus-like plants groaning and swaying, skeletal people collapsing with their black tongues hanging out, then herself involved – with some bulky male form that shut out the scene – in the act of copulation. Loud laughter broke out and she awoke fighting. The train was still in the station; her fellow-travellers stared at her with (except for the adenoidal girl) only a little curiosity. Then-as if that dream had been an obligatory rite before
departure – they began to ease out, leaving the grey and black police behind.