The Wanting Seed (18 page)

‘The cat’s way is only exceeded by its perpenderosity.’

‘I love potatoes. I love pork. I love man.’

‘Eucharistic ingestion is our answer.’

That dark term – eucharistic ingestion – became a sort of key to sleep. As though it were indeed an answer, Tristram passed, content and comforted, into oblivion.
Sinking out of time, he rose into it again to see Sinclair, humming and dressing, blinking down at him amiably. It seemed to be a fine spring morning. ‘Well,’ said Sinclair, ‘we must set you on your way, mustn’t we? First, however, a good breakfast is essential.’ Sinclair washed quickly (the public water supply still seemed in order) and shaved with an antique cut-throat. ‘Well-named,’ he smiled, naming it, lending it to Tristram. ‘It has cut throats enow.’ Tristram found no cause to disbelieve him.

The barbecue fires were, it seemed, never allowed to go out. Templar, thought Tristram, Olympic, flashing a modest smile at the members of the dining club, four of whom had guarded and tended the flames through the night. ‘Bacon?’ said Sinclair, and he heaped a singing tin plate high for Tristram. All ate heartily, with many a merry quip, and drank water by the quart. Then these kind people filled a postman’s sack with cold joints and, with several expressions of good will, loaded their guest and sped him on his way.

‘Never,’ declared Tristram, ‘have I met such generosity.’

‘Go with God,’ said Sinclair, replete and ripe for solemnity. ‘May you find her well. May you find her happy.’ He frowned and amended that. ‘Happy to see you, that is, of course.’

Two

T
RISTRAM
walked all the way to Finchley. There would
not be, he knew, any sense in taking the road until well past, say, Nuneaton. It was a long long plodding of a town street, between skyscraper dwelling-blocks and factories with smashed windows. He passed jolly or somnolent dining clubs, corpses, bones, but was not himself molested. The endless city had a smell of roasting flesh and stopped-up drains. Once or twice, to his embarrassment, he saw open and unashamed copulation. I love potatoes. I love pork. I love woman. No, that was wrong. Something like that, though. He saw no police; they all seemed absorbed or digested into the generality. At a street-corner near Tufnell Park mass was being said before a small but fairly devout congregation. Tristram knew all about mass from the Blessed Ambrose Bayley and so was surprised to see the priest – a grey-coxcombed boyish man with a roughly painted surplice (the cross, IHS) – doling out what looked like rounds of meat.
‘Hoc est enim Corpus. Hie est enim calix sanguinis.’
Some new Council of somewhere or other must be, in this shortage of the orthodox accidents, countenancing that sort of improvisation.

It was a fine spring day.

Just beyond Finchley Tristram sat down to rest in a shop doorway in a safe back-street and drew food from his scrip. He was footsore. He ate carefully and slowly, his stomach – as was evident from a bout of dyspepsia after breakfast – still having much to learn, and, having eaten, sought water. Queen Mab whispered to him about thirst being the necessary concomitant of a flesh diet, great thirst. In the rear living-quarters of the rifled shop Tristram found a tap in working order and, laying his mouth beneath it, drank as if he would drink for ever.
The water tasted faintly foul, faintly corrupt, and he thought: ‘Here is where future trouble lies.’ He rested a while longer, sitting in the doorway, clutching his truncheon, watching the passers-by. They all kept to the middle of the road, an interesting characteristic of the later part of the Interphase. He sat idly reviewing the thoughts and feelings it seemed to him he ought to have. It surprised him that he now felt so little desire to smash in the face of his brother. Perhaps it had all been a malicious lie of that ambitious and aggrieved captain; one needed proof, one needed definite and incontrovertible evidence. The meat growled in his stomach; he belched an utterance that sounded like ‘paternity lust’.

Would the child, if there was to be a child, be born yet? He had lost track of time somehow. He felt that Beatrice-Joanna would, in all this chaos, be safer than before. She must still be up north (if that man had told the truth); she had nowhere else, anyway, to go. He himself, he was sure, was doing the only possible thing. He too had nowhere else to go. How he detested his brother-in-law, however: the bluff bluster, pious shouts apt for tug-of-war teams always on his lips. This time he would bluster back and out-God him; he was not going to be bullied by anyone any more.

Keeping to the pavement, he made Barnet by midafternoon. Hesitating between the roads to, respectively, Hatfield and St Albans, he was surprised to see a motor-. van come coughing slowly up, north-bound like himself. It was painted a sort of earth-colour and the ghost of its provenance –
Ministry of Infertility
– showed faintly under the single coat. Tristram, hesitating between
roads, hesitated before gesturing for a lift. A nerve in his sore left foot decided for him and, by-passing his brain, shot up its reflex message to his thumb.

‘I’m only going as far as Aylesbury,’ said the driver. ‘You might pick up something else there. If we get to Aylesbury, that is.’ The car shuddered agreement. ‘You’re making a long trip,’ he said, glancing curiously at Tristram. ‘There’s not much travelling done these days.’ Tristram explained. The driver was a lean man in a strange uniform: greyboy’s tunic and civilian trousers dyed the earth-colour of the van itself, an earth-coloured cheese-cutter on his knees, white bands looped through his shoulder-straps. When Tristram spoke of his escape from prison he laughed in a brief snort. ‘If you’d waited till this morning,’ he said, ‘you would have been bowed off the premises. They opened up their gates, apparently, because of the failure of the food supply. At least, that’s what they told me at Ealing.’

Tristram also barked a short laugh. All Charlie Link-later’s work for nothing. He said, ‘You can understand that I’m very much out of touch. I just don’t know what’s going on.’

‘Oh,’ said the man. ‘Well, there’s not a lot I can tell you. There doesn’t seem to be a central government at the moment, but we’re trying to improvise some kind of regional law and order. A sort of martial law you could call it. You behold in me one of the resuscitated military. I’m a soldier.’ He snorted another laugh.

‘Armies,’ said Tristram. ‘Regiments. Battalions. Platoons.’ He had read of such things.

‘We can’t have all this,’ said the man. ‘Indiscriminate cannibalism and the drains out of order. ‘We’ve got our wives
and children to think of. We’ve got something started in Aylesbury, anyway. We’ve even got people doing a bit of work again.’

‘What do you eat?’ asked Tristram.

The soldier laughed very loud. ‘It’s officially called tinned pork,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to eat something. Waste not want not. We’ve had to do a fair amount of shooting, you see, in the name of law and order,’ he said seriously. ‘Meat and water. It’s a bit too much of a tiger’s diet, perhaps, but the canning makes it seem civilized. And we have hopes, you know, we have hopes that things will start growing again. And, believe it or not, I actually did some fishing last week-end.’

‘Much of a catch?’

‘Chub,’ said the soldier. He laughed again. ‘Measly little chub.’

‘And,’ said Tristram, ‘if I may ask, what’s been the purpose of your journey?’

‘This journey? Oh, we’d had a report of a police ammunition dump along the road from Ealing to Finchley. Some swine had got there first, though. One of these gangs. They knocked off my corporal. He wasn’t a very good corporal, but they shouldn’t have knocked him off. Probably eating him now, blasted cannibals.’ He spoke quite calmly.

‘It would seem,’ said Tristram, ‘that we’re all cannibals.’

‘Yes, but, damn it all, we in Aylesbury are at least civilized cannibals. It makes all the difference if you get it out of a tin.’

Three

W
EST
of Hinckley Tristram saw his first ploughed fields. He had done well on the whole: a night in barracks in civilized Aylesbury; a walk in weather continuing fair along the Bicester road with a lift in an army truck five miles out of Aylesbury as far as Blackthorn; lunch in armed but kindly Bicester and even a shave and haircut there; a walk up the railway line to Ardley and there a surprise – an ancient steam train run on wood as far as Banbury. Tristram had only the few septs and tanners and tosheroons he had found in the pockets of the man he had truncheoned, but the amateurs who manned the three-coach train were archaeologists vague about fares. Tristram spent the night in a cobwebbed cellar on the Warwick Road and reached Warwick, with the aid of a lift on a truck musical with small arms, well before lunch-time the next day. At Warwick, which was sullen under martial law, he was told to beware of Kenilworth, this town apparently being ruled by a sort of Fifth Monarchy fanatics who preached a doctrine of rigid exophagy; Coventry, he was assured, was safe enough to the stranger. So Tristram plodded the secondary road through Leamington, the journey eased by a pillion lift on a cheerful dispatch-rider’s motor-cycle. Coventry seemed almost a normal city except for its flavour of the garrison: communal messes, roll-calls outside factories, a curfew at nightfall. Tristram was asked eagerly for news at the city-frontier, but of course he had none to give. Still, he was made welcome and given
the freedom of the Engineers’ Sergeants’ Mess. A couple of tins of meat were crammed into his pockets when he left at dawn and, for the first time in many years, he actually felt like singing as he marched, in this miraculous weather, towards Nuneaton. He was near the northern limit of Greater London now; he fancied he could snuff country air. At Bedworth he was picked up in a staff car (a Falstaffian colonel and his adjutant, redfaced on ale) and was taken through Nuneaton on to the Shrewsbury road. Here at last was country indeed: the flatness of ploughed fields, hardly a building in sight, the sky no longer challenged by proud monoliths. He lay down behind a gate and took a nap in the smell of earth. Thanked be Almighty God.

When he awoke he thought he was dreaming. He thought he heard a flute playing breathily and voices singing more breathily still. The words of the song seemed to resolve themselves into a statement so direct and final that it was as though he was hearing ‘Eucharistic Ingestion’ all over again. The words were something like ‘Apples be ripe and nuts be brown, petticoats up and trousers down’, and the simple tune went round and round, an endless
da capo
. And he saw, he saw, he saw men and women in the furrows – a pair here and a pair there – making, with ritual seriousness, beast after beast after beast with two backs. Petticoats up and trousers down in the spring sun, in the sown furrows, ripe apples and brown nuts, country copulatives. Six men, five men, four men, three men, two men, one man and his, and their – Why did the song say ‘dog’? Sowing, not mowing, a meadow. But they would mow in due time, they would quite certainly mow. All life was one.
That blight had been man’s refusal to breed.

Four

‘C
OME
on, now,’ called the leader crossly. He had the look of a morris-dance organizer, stringy and sniffly, red-nosed and blue-cheeked. ‘Listen, please, everybody,’ he said plaintively. ‘The following partners have been drawn.’ He read from the list in his hand. ‘Mr Lipset with Miss Kemeny. Mr Minrath with Mrs Graham. Mr Evans with Mrs Evans. Mr Hilliard with Miss Ethel Duffus.’ He read on. Tristram, blinking in the warm sun, sat outside the inn at Atherstone, watching benevolently as the men and women paired. ‘Mr Finlay with Miss Rachel Duffus. Mr Mayo with Miss Lowrie.’ As for country dancing, those called did a stand-and-faceyour-lover line-up, giggling, blushing, bold-faced, bashful, game, ready. ‘Very well,’ said the leader, tiredly. ‘Into the fields.’ And off, hand in hand, they went. The leader saw Tristram and, shaking his head resignedly, came over and sat next to him on the bench. ‘These are strange times we’re living in,’ he said. ‘Are you just passing through?’

‘On my way to Preston,’ said Tristram. ‘Why, if I may ask, do you have all this organizing?’

‘Oh, the usual. thing,’ said the leader. ‘Greed, selfishness. Some people getting all the plums. That man Hilliard, for instance. And poor Belinda Lowrie left out in the cold all the time. I wonder if it really does any
good,’ he wondered gloomily. ‘I wonder if it’s really anything more than sheer self-indulgence.’

‘It’s an affirmation,’ said Tristram. ‘It’s a way of showing that reason is only one instrument for running our lives. A return to magic, that’s what it is. It seems very healthy to me.’

‘I foresee danger,’ said the leader. ‘Jealousy, fights, possessiveness, the breaking-up of marriages.’ He was determined to look on the black side.

‘Things will sort themselves out,’ soothed Tristram. ‘You’ll see. A recapitulation of whole aeons of free love, and then the Christian values will be reasserted. Nothing to worry about at all.’

The leader gloomed at the sun, at the clouds gently and seriously propelled across the blue acres. ‘I suppose you’re normal,’ he said at length. ‘I suppose you’re one of those like that man Hilliard. A real told-you-so, born and bred, that man. He was always saying that things couldn’t go on as they were for ever. They laughed at me when I did what I did. Hilliard laughed louder than anybody. I could kill Hilliard,’ he said, clenching his fists with the thumbs inside.

‘Kill?’ said Tristram. ‘Kill in these days of,’ he said, ‘love?’

‘It was when I was working at the Lichfield Housing Office,’ bubbled the leader, ‘that this thing happened. There was the question of a vacancy and me getting up-graded. I was senior, you see.’ If not days of love, these were certainly days of open and frank confiding. ‘Mr Consett, who was in charge, told me it was a toss-up between me and a man called Maugham, very much my junior Maugham was, but Maugham was homo.
Well, I thought about that a good deal. I was never that way inclined myself but, of course, there was something I could do. I thought about it a good deal before taking action, because it was, after all, a pretty momentous step to take. Anyway, after a good deal of thought and lying in bed, tossing and turning, worrying about it, I made up my mind and went to see Dr Manchip. Dr Manchip said it was quite an easy job, no danger at all, and he did it. He said a general anaesthetic wasn’t necessary. I watched him do it.’