The Wanting Seed (19 page)

‘I see,’ said Tristram. ‘I wondered about your voice –’

‘That’s right. And look at me now.’ He extended his arms. ‘What’s done can’t be undone. How do I fit into this new world? I should have been warned, somebody should have told me. How was I to know that that sort of world wasn’t going to go on for ever?’ He lowered his voice. ‘You know what that man Hilliard’s been calling me lately? He’s been calling me a
capon
. And he smacks his lips, joking of course, but it’s not in very good taste.’

‘I see,’ said Tristram.

‘I don’t like it at all. I don’t like it one little bit.’

‘Sit tight and wait,’ counselled Tristram. ‘History is a wheel. This sort of world can’t go on for ever, either. One of these days we’re bound to go back to liberalism and Pelagianism and sexual inversion and, and – well, your sort of thing. We’re obviously bound to, because of all this.’ He waved his hand in the direction of the ploughed fields, whence came muffled noises of intense concentration. ‘Because,’ he clarified, ‘of the biological purpose of all this.’

‘But in the meantime,’ said the leader sadly, ‘I’ve
people like Hilliard to contend with.’ He shuddered. ‘Calling me a capon, indeed.’

Five

T
RISTRAM
, being still young and not ill-looking, was kindly received by the ladies of Shenstone. He excused himself courteously, pleading that he must reach Lichfield by nightfall. He was sped on his way with kisses.

Lichfield burst on him like a bomb. Here some kind of carnival was in progress (though it was no farewell to flesh, far from it) and Tristram’s eyes were confused by a torch-procession and by banners and streamers dancing aloft:
Lichfield Fecundity Guild
and
South Staffs Love Group
. Tristram mingled with the crowd on the pavement to watch the parade go by. First marched a band of pre-electronic instruments booming and shrilling what sounded like that thin flute-tune of the fields outside Hinckley, but the tune was now, in an its brass, beefy, blood-red, confident. The crowd cheered. Next came two clowns buffeting and falling at the head of a comic squad in boots, long tunics, but no trousers. A woman behind Tristram screamed, ‘Eeeee, there’s our Arthur, Ethel.’ The tunics and caps of this leering, waving, shouting, staggering bare-legged phalanx had evidently been stolen from the Poppol (where were they now, where were they?) and a card on a stick was held high, lettered neatly COPULATION POLICE. They belaboured each other with truncheons of stuffed sacking
or thrust at the air with them in ithyphallic rhythms. ‘What’s that word mean, Ethel?’ cried the woman behind Tristram. ‘Real jaw-breaker, that is.’ A small man with a hat on told her in one brief Lawrentian term. ‘Eeeeeee,’ she screamed.

Next toddled little boys and girls in green, sweet and pretty, soaring multicoloured sausage balloons moored to their fingers. ‘Awwww,’ went a droop-mouthed lankhaired girl next to Tristram. ‘Em’s nice, ennem?’ The balloons jostled high in the torchlit air, an airy languid pillow-fight. After the children leaped and staggered more buffoons, men in antique billowing female skirts, enormously and unevenly breasted, others in skintight motley with Panurgian codpieces. Dancing clumsily, they engaged in brief spasmodic parodies of the clawbuttock act. ‘Eeeeeee,’ yelled the woman behind Tristram, ‘I shall fair pass out of laughing, that I shall.’ Then, to a hush of admiration followed by sincere cheers, there trundled up a white-decked float of paper flowers with, high on a throne, a buxom lass in blue, paper-flower-crowned, a staff in her grip, clustered about by all her starry fays, smiling and waving nubility, Lichfield’s, so it would appear, festal queen. ‘Real lovely she is,’ said another woman. ‘Joe Treadwell’s daughter.’ The float was pulled – crackling flower-twined ropes – by young men in white shirts and red leggings, handsome and muscular. After this float there walked sedate members of the clergy, bearing, in embroidered silk-surrogate, the motto
God Is Love
. The local army marched behind, terrible with banners:
General Hapgood’s Boys
and
We Saved Lichfield
. The crowd cheered full-throatedly. And then, at the end, young
girls trod daintily (not one of them more than fifteen), each with a streamer and each streamer attached to the top of a high thick pole, the Priapic emblem which evoked redoubled cheers, borne in the arms of a long robed comely matron, a blown rose in this garden of callow cowslips. The procession moved on to the town’s outskirts and the crowd jostled, thumped, pushed on to the road to follow it. From the unseen head of the parade the jaunty six-eight tune – mulberry bush, nuts and may, apples be ripe – blasted and thumped brassily on, clearing the way through the spring night. Tristram was caught in the crowd, borne irresistibly, apples be ripe, through the town, home of a swan, and nuts be brown, and a lexicographer, petticoats up,
Lich
meaning a corpse in Middle English, and trousers down, how inappropriately named – Lichfield – tonight. Men and women, youths and girls, thrust, elbowed, laughed, in the procession’s wake, the high white wooden phallus gleaming ahead, swaying, the focus of pretty ribbons, old men bent but game, middle-aged women solidly eager, young lusty boys, girls shy but ready, faces like moons, hatchets, flat-irons, flowers, eggs, mulberries, all the noses of the world (haughty Italian, crushed Oriental, snub, splayed, spur.red, bulbous, crested, tilted, flared), corn-hair, rust-hair, Eskimo-straight, crinkled, undulant, receding, gone, tonsures and bald spots, cheeks warmed to ripe-apple and nut-brown in the flares and fires and enthusiasm, the swish of petticoats, on to the sown furrows of the fields, and trousers.

Down, somewhere, had gone Tristram’s near-empty food-sack; his truncheon had disappeared. His arms were free for dancing and embracing. On the green at
the town’s end the band had settled, squat on benches, blasting, cracking, clashing, skirling away. The Priapic pole was being plunged into a hole already dug in the centre of the green, the streamers flapping and entwining the men who pushed it down and tamped the soil at its base. The local army was smartly fallen out and started to pile arms. There were flares and a bonfire, there were glowing and spitting barbecues.
Lichfield Sausages
, said a notice. Tristram joined hungry wolfers of these, doled out free on skewers, and chewed the salty meat, ho’, ‘ery ho’, his mouth smoking.

Dancing began round the Priapic pole, youths and putative maidens. On the periphery of the green (a euphemistic term for the brown near-bald half-acre) their elders twirled and clodhopped lustily. A warm dark woman in her thirties came up to Tristram and said, ‘How about you and me, duck?’ ‘Gladly,’ said Tristram. ‘You look proper sad,’ she said, ‘as if you was pining away after somebody. Am I right?’ ‘Another couple of days, with a bit of luck,’ said Tristram, ‘and I’ll be with her. In the meantime –’ They rolled into the dance. The band played their rollicking six-eight tune over and over. Soon Tristram and his partner rolled into the furrows. Many were rolling into the furrows. It was a warm night for the time of year.

At midnight, the revellers breathing hard, unbuttoned about the fires, the contest for the male festal crown was fanfared. The queen sat aloof on her float, her dishevelled and rosy retinue settling their skirts, with many a giggle, at her feet. Below the float, at a rough table, passing from hand to wrinkled hand a flask
of alc, sat the judges, elders of the town. There was a short list of five competitors in a trial of physical strength and agility. Desmond Seward bent a poker – teeth gritted, thews bursting – and walked forty yards on his hands. Jollyboy Adams turned innumerable somersaults and then leapt over a fire. Gerald Toynbee held his breath for five minutes and performed a frogdance. Jimmy Quair walked on all fours, supinated, a little boy (his brother, as it turned out) striking an Erospose upon his, Jimmy Quair’s, stomach. This, for its novelty and aesthetic appeal, drew much applause. But the crown went to Melvin Johnson (illustrious surname) who, balanced on his head, feet high in the air, recited loudly a triolet of his own composition. It was strange to see the upside-down mouth, hear the right-way-up words:

In vain for the captious to grumble that the rules of the contest said nothing about facility in versifying and how, anyway, had this competitor shown strength and agility? He would show it soon enough, laughed some. There were roars of approval at the judges’ unanimous decision. Melvin Johnson was crowned with castellar tinfoil
and borne, amid cheers, on strong shoulders to meet his queen. Then the royal pair, hand in hand, youths and maidens singing behind them an old nuptial song whose words Tristram could not catch, proceeded majestically to the field for the consummation of their love. At a decent distance the common sort followed after.

There they all were under the moon, seed busy above seed busy below: Charlie Aaron with Gladys Woodward, Dan Abel with Monica Wilson, Howard Wilson with Clara Hoskyns-Abrahall, Freddie Adler with Diana-Gertrude Williams, Bill Agar with Mary Westcott, Harold Auld with Louisa Wertheimer, Jim Weeks with Pam Asimov, Ford Wolverton Avery with Lucy Vivian, Denis Brodrick with Dorothy Hodge, John Halberstram with Jessie Greenidge, Tristram Foxe with Ann Onymous, Ron Heinlein with Agnes Gelber, Sherman Feyler with Margaret Evans, George Fisher with Lily Ross, Alf Meldrum with Joanie Crump, Elvis Fenwick with Brenda Fenwick, John-James De Ropp with Asmara Jones, Tommy Eliot with Kitty Elphick – and scores more. With the sinking of the moon and the rising of the wind they sought the fires, sleeping till dawn in a red crackling haze of fulfilment.

Tristram woke at dawn to hear bird-twitterings; he rubbed his eyes at the cool distant bass flute of a cuckoo. A priest appeared with his field-altar and a yawning cross boy-servitor.
‘lntroibo ad altare Dei.’
‘To God Who giveth joy to my youth.’ The consecration of the roasted meat (bread and wine would doubtless be back soon), the donation of a eucharistic breakfast. Washed but unshaven, Tristram kissed his new friends good-bye and
took the north-west road to Rugeley. The fine morning weather might well hold all day.

Six

T
HERE
were Dionysian revels at Sandon, Meaford and the cross-roads near Whitmore, but at Nantwich there was the sophistication of a fair. Tristram was interested to see a brisk flow of small money at the stalls (riflerange, aunt sally, try-your-strength, roll-a-coin-on-to-alucky-square): people must be working and earning again. Food (he noticed small spitted birds among the kebabs and sausages) was being sold, not given away. Barkers urged lubricious males to pay a tosheroon to see Lola and Carmenita in their sensational seven-veils speciality. It seemed that, in one town at least, the novelty of free flesh had begun to pall.

But, in its lowliest form, an art had been revived. How long was it since anybody in England had seen a live play? For generations people had lain on their backs in the darkness of their bedrooms, their eyes on the blue watery square on the ceiling: mechanical stories about good people not having children and bad people having them, homos in love with each other, Origen-like heroes castrating themselves for the sake of global stability. Here in Nantwich customers queued outside a big tent to see
The Unfortunate Father: A Comedy
. Tristram shrugged over his small handful of coin and counted out the price of admission: one and a half septs. His feet
were weary; it would be somewhere to rest.

This, he thought, crammed on a bench, was what the first Greek comedy must have been like. On a creaking platform, lighted by two uncertain floods, a narrator wearing a large false phallus introduced, and commented coarsely on, a simple story of bawdry. A bald impotent husband (impotence symbolized by a flaccid codpiece) had a flighty wife, regularly impregnated by lusty lovers, and, in consequence, a house full of children. The poor man, reviled and ridiculed and taunted, eventually in a blazing temper tackled a pair of these cuckolders in the street and was cracked soundly on the pate for his pains. But, lo, a miracle. The bash on the head did strange things to his nervous system: the codpiece swelled and rose: he was no longer impotent. Cunningly feigning, however, to be as he had been, he found his way easily into the homes of those of his wife’s lovers who had womenfolk, swiving them while the man of the house was at work. Uproarious. Finally, he sent his own wife packing and turned his house into a seraglio, the comedy ending with a phallic song and dance. Well, thought Tristram, leaving the tent at twilight, soon men would be dressing up as goats and presenting the first neo-tragedy. Perhaps in a year or two there would be mystery plays.

By one of the smoking food-stalls a little man was selling single sheets of paper, quarto, and doing a brisk trade.
‘Nantwich Echo,’
he called. ‘One tanner only.’ Many were standing, reading, open mouthed. Tristram, trembling a little, spent one of his last coins and took off his paper to a corner, as furtive as when, a few days before, he had carried off his first meat-meal. This – a
newspaper – was almost as archaic as a comedy. There were two sides of blurred print, under the name NNTWTSH EKO the legend ‘Put out by Min of Inf microwave transmitter picked up 1.25 p.m. G. Hawtrey Publisher.’ Private enterprise: beginning of the Gusphase. Tristram gobbled the news without chewing. Mr Ockham invited by His Majesty to form a government, names of cabinet members to be announced tomorrow. Emergency national martial law, immediate establishment of central control of regional (irregular) armed forces, regional commanders to report forthwith for instructions to provincial headquarters as listed below. Regular communications and information services expected to be resumed within forty-eight hours. Return to work in twenty-four hours ordered, dire penalties (unspecified) for refusal.