The Wanting Seed (11 page)

Eight

‘W
HAT
will they do to us?’ asked Tristram. His eyes had grown used to the dark and could see that the roan next to him was the cross-eyed Mongol who, ages ago in the rebellious street, had announced his name as Joe Blacklock. Of the other prisoners, some squatted like miners – there were no seats – and others propped up the walls. One old man, formerly phlegmatic, had become possessed of a fit of excitement and had gripped the bars, crying to the corridor, ‘I left the stove on. Let me get home and turn it off. I’ll come straight back, honest I will,’ and now lay exhausted on the cold flags.

‘Do to us?’ said Joe Blacklock. ‘There’s nothing laid down, far as I know. Far as I know, they let some out and keep others in. That’s right, isn’t it, Frank?’

‘Ringleaders gets what for,’ said Frank, gaunt, tall, gormless. ‘We all said to ‘Arry it was waste of time. Shouldn’t never have done it. Look where it’s got us. Look where it’ll get him.’

‘Who?’ asked Tristram. ‘Where?’

‘Strike-leader he calls himself. He’ll do hard labour for a bit. Might be worse than that, what with things getting tougher all round.’ He made a gun of his hand and levelled it at Tristram. ‘As it might be yourself,’ he said. ‘Bang bang.’

‘It was nothing to do with me,’ said Tristram for the thirtieth time. ‘I just got caught up in the crowd. It’s all a mistake, I keep telling you.’

‘That’s right. You tell them that when they come for you.’ Frank then went into the corner to micturate. The whole cell stank cosily of urine. A middle-aged man with grey chick-down on his dome, wild-looking like a lay-preacher, came over to Tristram and said:

‘You’ll convict yourself soon as you open your mouth, mister. Bless your heart and soul, they’ll know you for an intellectual soon as you walk in there. I reckon you’ve been real brave in one way or another, sticking up for the workers. You’ll get your reward when better times come, you mark my words.’

‘But I wasn’t,’ almost wept Tristram. ‘I didn’t.’

‘Ah,’ said a voice in a corner, ‘I heareth footsteps, verily I dost, methinks.’ The corridor light was switched on, raw as an egg, and boots clamped towards the cell. From the floor the old man pleaded, ‘I only want to turn it off. I won’t be gone long.’ The cell-bars, dead black against the new light, grinned frankly at them all. Two greyboys, young and thuggish, armed, grinned in between the grinning bars. The bolts shot out, the key ground round, the cell-door clanged open. ‘Right,’ said one of the greyboys, a lance-jack, shuffiing a deck of identity cards. ‘I’m giving these out, back, see? Them I give them to can skedaddle and are not to be naughty boys no more. Right. Aaron, Aldiss, Barber, Collins, Chung –’ ‘Now what the hell have
I
done wrong?’ said Joe Blacklock. ‘– Davenport, Dilke, Mohamed Daud, Dodds, Endore, Evans –’ The men came eagerly grabbing and were pushed out roughly to freedom. ‘– Fair-
brother, Franklin, Gill, Hackney, Hamidin –’ ‘There must be some mistake,’ cried Tristram. ‘I’m an F.’ ‘– Jones, Lindsay, Lowrie –’ The cell was emptying fast. ‘– Mackintosh, Mayfield, Morgan, Norwood, O’Connor –’ ‘I’ll be back,’ said the old man, trembling, taking his card, ‘as soon as I’ve turned it off. Thanks, lads.’ ‘– Paget, Radzinowicz, Smith, Snyder, Taylor, Tucker, Ucuck, Vivian, Wilson, Wilson, Wilson. That’s the lot. Who are you, chum?’ asked the greyboy of Tristram. Tristram told him. ‘Right, you’re to stay here, you are.’ ‘I demand to see the man in charge,’ demanded Tristram. ‘I demand that I be allowed to contact my brother. Let me phone my wife. I shall write to the Home Secretary.’ ‘No harm in writing,’ said the greyboy. ‘Perhaps writing will keep you quiet. You do that, chum. You write.’

Nine

‘W
ELL
,’ boomed Shonny, ‘glory be to God in the highest, look who it is. My own litde sister-in-law, God bless us and keep us, not looking a day older than when I saw her last, and that must be all of three years ago. Come in, come in, and highly welcome.’ He peered suspiciously out, saying, ‘I mean no harm to him, mind, but I hope you haven’t brought that horrible man with you, seeing as there’s something in the very look of the man that makes my hackles rise and sets my teeth on edge.’ Beatrice-Joanna shook her head, smiling. Shonny was
something out of the fabulous past – open, direct, honest, virile, with a burnt coarse humorous moon-face, surprised ice-blue eyes, a simian upper lip, a lower lip that drooped fleshily, big-bodied in sack-like farmer’s garb. ‘Mavis,’ he called, ‘Mavis,’ and Mavis appeared in the tiny hallway – six years older than Beatrice-Joanna, with the same cider hair, speck-brown eyes and lavish limbs, bathycolpous.

‘I didn’t have time to let you know,’ said Beatrice-Joanna, kissing her sister. ‘I left in rather a hurry.’

‘A good place to leave in a hurry,’ said Shonny, picking up her bag, ‘that great horrible metropolis, God send it bad dreams.’

‘Poor little Roger,’ said Mavis, her arm round her sister, leading her to the living-room. ‘Such a shame.’ The room was not much bigger than the one in the Foxe fiat, but it seemed to breathe space and oxygen. Shonny said:

‘Before we go any further, we’ll have a drink of something.’ He opened a trap-door to disclose a platoon of bottles. ‘Something you’d never buy at twenty crowns the noggin in that benighted carcinoma you’ve left behind, God blast it.’ He held up a bottle to the electric light. ‘Plum wine of my own making,’ he said. ‘Wine-making’s supposed to be forbiden like a lot of other wholesome and God-fearing things, but the hell. with the lot of the little-souled law-making dung-beetles, Christ have mercy on them.’ He poured. ‘Take that in your right hand and say after me,’ he ordered. They drank. ‘Wait,’ said Shonny. ‘What is it we drink to?’

‘A lot of things,’ said Beatrice-Joanna. ‘Life. Freedom. The sea. Us. Something I’ll tell you about later.’

‘We’ll have a glass for each of those,’ said Shonny. He beamed. ‘Nice to have you with us,’ he said.

Shonny was a Pancelt, one of the rare survivors of the Celtic Union that, in voluntary exodus, had left the British Isles and, wave after wave, settled in Armorica nearly a century before. In Shonny was a heartening stew of Manx, Glamorgan, Shetland, Ayrshire and County Cork, but this, as Shonny was hot in pointing out, could not be called miscegenation. Fergus, the Moses of the Union, had taught that the Celts were one people, their language one language, their religion fundamentally one. He had wrung the doctrine of the Messiah’s second coming out of Catholicism, Calvinistic Methodism, Presbyterianism: church, kirk and chapel were one temple of the imminent Lord. Their mission was, in a world whose Pelagianism was really Indifferentism, to cherish the Christian flame, as once before in face of the Saxon hordes.

‘We’ve been praying, you know,’ said Shonny, pouring out more wine for the ladies, ‘though, of course, that’s illegal, too. They used to leave us alone in the old days, but now they’ve got these infernal police on the job, spying and arresting, just like in the ancient penal days of sacred memory. We’ve had mass here a couple of times. Father Shackel, God bless and help the poor man, was picked up in his own shop the other day by some of these simperers with guns and lipstick – Father Shackel’s a seedsman by trade-and taken off we don’t know where. And yet, and this the poor benighted imbeciles can’t or won’t realize, we’ve been offering the sacrifice for the State’s own good. We’re all going to starve, God bless us, if we don’t pray for forgiveness for
our blasphemous ways. Sinning against the light, denying life. The way things are going is being sent as a divine judgment on the lot of us.’ He tossed off a beaker of plum wine and smacked his great meaty lips.

‘They’ve kept on cutting the rations,’ said Beatrice-Joanna. ‘They don’t say why. There’ve been demonstrations in the streets. Tristram got mixed up in one of those. He was drunk at the time. I think the police must have taken him off. I hope he’s going to be all right.’

‘Well,’ said Shonny, ‘I don’t wish him any real harm. Drunk, was he? There may be some good in him after all.’

‘And how long do you propose to stay with us?’ asked Mavis.

‘I suppose I might as well tell you now as later,’ said Beatrice-Joanna. ‘I hope you’re not going to be shocked or anything. I’m pregnant.’

‘Oh,’ said Mavis.

‘And,’ said Beatrice-Joanna, ‘I’m glad I’m pregnant. I
want
to have the baby.’

‘We’ll certainly drink to that,’ roared Shonny. ‘Damn the consequences, say I. A gesture, that’s what it is, keeping the flame going, saying mass in the cellar. Good girl.’ He poured more wine.

‘You want to have the baby here?’ said Mavis. ‘It’s dangerous. It’s not something you can keep hidden for long. It’s something you ought to think about very carefully, things being as they are these days.’

‘It’s the will of God,’ cried Shonny. ‘Go forth and multiply. So that little man of yours has still got some life in him, eh?’

‘Tristram doesn’t want it,’ said Beatrice-Joanna. ‘He told me to get out.’

‘Does anybody know you’ve come here?’ asked Mavis.

‘I had to tell the police at Euston. I said I was just coming on a visit. I don’t think they’ll do anything about it. There’s nothing wrong with coming on a visit.’

‘A pretty long visit,’ said Mavis. ‘And there’s the question of room. The children are away at the moment, staying with Shonny’s Aunt Gertie in Cumnock. But when they come back –’

‘Now, Mavis,’ said Beatrice-Joanna, ‘if you don’t want me to stay, tell me straight. I don’t want to be a burden and a nuisance.’

‘You won’t be either,’ said Shonny. ‘We can fix you up, if need be, in one of the outhouses. A greater mother than you gave birth in a –’

‘Oh, stop that sentimentality,’ scolded Mavis. ‘That’s the sort of thing that turns me against religion sometimes. If you’re determined,’ she said to her sister, ‘really determined, well, we must just go ahead and hope for better times soon. I know how you feel, don’t think I don’t. Our family’s always been very strong on motherhood. We must just hope for more sensible times to come again, that’s all.’

‘Thank you, Mavis,’ said Beatrice-Joanna. ‘I know there’ll be a lot of problems – registration and rations and so on. There’s time enough to think of those things.’

‘You’ve come to the right place,’ said Shonny. ‘My veterinary training will come in very handy, God bless you. Many’s the litter I’ve helped to bring into the world.’

‘Animals?’ said Beatrice-Joanna. ‘You don’t mean to say you have animals?’

‘Battery hens,’ said Shonny gloomily, ‘and our old sow Bessie. Jack Beare over at Blackburn has a boar which he hires out. It’s all supposed to be illegal, may the Holy Trinity curse them, but we have managed to eke out our shameful diet with a bit of pig-meat. Everything’s in a shocking state,’ he said, ‘and nobody seems able to understand it at all. This blight that seems to be sweeping the world, and the hens won’t lay, and Bessie’s last farrow so sickly with some queer internal growth, vomiting worms and all, I had to put them out of their misery. There’s a curse settling on us, God forgive us all, with our blaspheming against life and love.’

‘Talking about love,’ said Mavis, ‘is it all over between you and Tristram?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Beatrice-Joanna. ‘I’ve tried to worry about him, but somehow I can’t. It seems I’ve got to concentrate all my love now on something that hasn’t even been born. I feel as though I’m being taken over and
used
. But I don’t feel unhappy about it. Rather the opposite.’

‘I always felt you married the wrong man,’ said Mavis.

Ten

D
EREK FOXE
read for a second time the scrawled two sheets of toilet paper signed by his brother; read smiling. ‘I am illegally incarcerated here and I am not allowed
to see anybody. I call upon you as my brother to bring your influence to bear and have me released. The whole thing is shameful and unjust. If this simple brotherly appeal fails to move you, perhaps the following intimation will: to wit, I know now that you and my wife have been conducting a protracted liaison and that she is now carrying your child. How could you – you, my brother? Get me out of here at once, it is the least you can do and you owe it to me. You have my solemn assurance that I will not let this go any further if you give me the help I ask. If you do not, however, I shall be compelled to divulge
all
to the appropriate authorities.
Get me out of here
. Tristram.’

The letter was rubber-stamped all over like a passport: ‘
Seen
, Commandant Franklyn Road Temporary Detention Centre’; ‘
Seen
, Officer Commanding Brighton Police District’; ‘
Seen
, Officer Commanding 121 Police Circle’; ‘
Opened
, Poppol Central Registry’. Derek Foxe smiled, leaning back in his leather-substitute chair, smiled at the huge idiot moon of a clock on the wall opposite, at the bank of telephones, at the back of his flavicomous male secretary. Poor Tristram. Poor not-very-bright Tristram. Poor moronic Tristram who had, by the mere act of writing, already divulged all to all available authorities, appropriate and inappropriate. And it didn’t, of course, matter. Unsupported libels and slanders whizzed all day long through the offices of the great, a sort of gnat-fritinancy, disregarded. Still, Tristram at large might be a nuisance. Tristram, horn – mad, with a gang of schoolboy thugs. Tristram with a sly knife waiting in the shadows. Tristram alc-demented with a pistol. It was better that Tristram remain caged
for a while; it was a bore to have to contemplate being on guard against one’s brother.

How about her? That was altogether different. Wait, wait – the next phase might not be too long coming. And poor stupid Captain Loosley? Leave him alone for the time being, idiot. Derek Foxe rang through to Police Headquarters and requested that Tristram Foxe be, on grounds of suspicion, kept indefinitely out of circulation. Then he went on with the draft of the television talk (five minutes after the 23.00 news on Sunday), warning and appealing to the women of Greater London. ‘Love of country,’ he wrote, ‘is one of the purest kinds of love. Desire for one’s country’s welfare is a holy desire.’ This sort of thing came easily to him.