The Wanting Seed (2 page)

‘Morgan,’ said a boy called Morgan, a spotty boy.

‘Correct. Both names mean “man of the sea”.’ The boy behind Morgan whistled a kind of hornpipe through his teeth, digging Morgan in the back. ‘Stop that,’ said Morgan.

‘Yes,’ continued Tristram. ‘Pelagius was of the race
that at one time inhabited Western Province. He was what, in the old religious days, used to be called a monk. A monk.’ Tristram rose vigorously from his desk and yellowed this word, as if he were fearful that his pupils would not be able to spell it, on the blueboard. Then he sat down again. ‘He denied the doctrine of Original Sin and said that man was capable of working out his own salvation.’ The boys looked very blank. ‘Never mind about that for the moment,’ said Tristram kindly. ‘What you have to remember is that all this suggests human perfectibility. Pelagianism was thus seen to be at the heart of liberalism and its derived doctrines, especially Socialism and Communism. Am I going too fast?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Barks and squeals from sixty breaking voices.

‘Right.’ Tristram had a mild face, blank as the boys’, and his eyes gleamed feverishly from behind their contact-lenses. His hair had a negroid kink; his cuticles half-hid blue half-moons. He was thirty-five and had been a schoolmaster for nearly fourteen years. He earned just over two hundred guineas a month but was hoping, since Newick’s death, to be promoted to the headship of the Social Studies Department. That would mean a substantial increase in salary, which would mean a bigger fiat, a better start in the world for young Roger. Roger, he then remembered, was dead. ‘Right,’ he repeated, like a sergeant-instructor of the days before Perpetual Peace had set in. ‘Augustine, on the other hand, had insisted on man’s inherent sinfulness and the need for his redemption through divine grace. This was seen to be at the bottom of Conservatism and other
laissez-faire
and non-progressive political beliefs.’ He
beamed at his class. ‘The opposed thesis, you see,’ he said, encouragingly. ‘The whole thing is quite simple, really.’

‘I don’t get it, sir,’ boomed a big bold boy named Abney-Hastings.

‘Well, you see,’ said Tristram amiably, ‘the old Conservatives expected no good out of man. Man was regarded as naturally acquisitive, wanting more and more possessions for himself, an unco-operative and selfish creature, not much concerned about the progress of the community. Sin is really only another word for selfishness, gentlemen. Remember that.’ He leaned forward, his hands joined, sliding his forearms into the yellow chalk-powder that covered the desk like windblown sand. ‘What would you do with a selfish person?’ he asked. ‘Tell me that.’

‘Knock him about a bit,’ said a very fair boy called Ibrahim ibn Abdullah.

‘No.’ Tristram shook his head. ‘No Augustinian would do that sort of thing. If you expect the worst from a person, you can’t ever be disappointed. Only the disappointed resort to violence. The pessimist, which is another way of saying the Augustinian, takes a sort of gloomy pleasure in observing the depths to which human behaviour can sink. The more sin he sees, the more his belief in Original Sin is confirmed. Everyone likes to have his deepest convictions confirmed: that is one of the most abiding of human satisfactions.’ Tristram suddenly seemed to grow bored with this trite exposition. He surveyed his sixty, row by row, as if seeking the diversion of bad behaviour; but all sat still and attentive, good as gold, as if bent on confirming
the Pelagian thesis. The microradio on Tristram’s wrist buzzed thrice. He lifted it to his ear. A gnat-song like the voice of conscience said, ‘
Please see the Principal at the end of the present period
’ – a tiny plopping of plosives. Good. This would be it, then, this would be it. Soon he would be standing in poor dead Newick’s place, the salary perhaps back-dated. He now literally stood, his hands clutching in advocate-style his jacket where, in the days of lapels, the lapels would have been. He resumed with renewed vigour.

‘Nowadays,’ he said, ‘we have no political parties. The old dichotomy, we recognize, subsists in ourselves and requires no naïve projection into sects or factions. We are both God and the Devil, though not at the same time. Only Mr Livedog can be that, and Mr Livedog, of course, is a mere fictional symbol.’ All the boys smiled. They all loved
The Adventures of Mr Livedog
in the
Cosmicomic
. Mr Livedog was a big funny fubsy demiurge who,
sufflaminandus
like Shakespeare, spawned unwanted life all over the earth. Overpopulation was his doing. In none of his adventures, however, did he ever win: Mr Homo, his human boss, always brought him to heel. ‘The theology subsisting in our opposed doctrines of Pelagianism and Augustinianism has no longer any validity. We use these mythical symbols because they are peculiarly suited to our age, an age relying more and more on the perceptual, the pictorial, the pictographic. Pettman!’ Tristram shouted, with sudden joy. ‘You’re eating something. Eating in class. That won’t do, will it?’

‘I’m not, sir,’ said Pettman, ‘please, sir.’ He was a boy of purplish Dravidian colouring with strong Red Indian
features. ‘It’s this tooth, sir. I have to keep sucking it, sir, to stop it aching, sir.’

‘A boy of your age should not have teeth,’ said Tristram. ‘Teeth are atavistic.’ He paused. He had said that often to Beatrice-Joanna, who had a particularly fine natural set, top and bottom. In the early days of their marriage she had taken pleasure in biting his ear-lobes. ‘Do stop that, darling. Ow, dear, that hurts.’ And then little Roger. Poor little Roger. He sighed, then pushed on with his lesson.

Three

B
EATRICE
-J
OANNA
decided that, despite her tangle of nerves and the hammering at her occiput, she didn’t want a pacifier from the Dispensary. She didn’t want anything further from the State Health Service, thank you very much. She filled her lungs with air as if about to dive, then thrust her way into the jam of people packing the vast hospital vestibule. With its mixture of pigments, cephalic indices, noses and lips, it looked like some monstrous international airport lounge. She pushed to the steps and stood there awhile, drinking the clean street air. The age of private transport was all but over; only official vans, limousines and microbuses crawled the street crammed with pedestrians. She gazed up. Buildings of uncountable storeys lunged at the May sky, duck-egg blue with a nacreous film. Pied and peeled. Blue-beating and hoary-glow height. The procession of
seasons was one abiding fact, an eternal recurrence, the circle. But in this modern world the circle had become an emblem of the static, the limited globe, the prison. Up there, at least twenty storeys high, on the facrade of the Demographic Institute, stood a bas-relief circle with a straight line tangential to it. It symbolized the wished-for conquest of the population problem: that tangent, instead of stretching from everlasting to everlasting, equalled in length the circumference of the circle. Stasis. A balance of global population and global food supply. Her brain approved, but her body, the body of a bereaved mother, shouted no, no. It all meant a denial of so many things; life, in the name of reason, was being blasphemed against. The breath of the sea struck her left cheek.

She walked due south down the great London street, the nobility of its sheer giddy loftiness of masonry and metal redeeming the vulgarity of the signs and slogans.
Glowgold Sunsyrup. National Stereotelly. Syntheglot
. She was pushing against the crowds, crowds all moving northward. There were, she observed, more uniforms than usual: policemen and policewomen in grey – awkward, many of them, as if they were new recruits. She walked on. At the end of the street, like a vision of sanity, glinted the sea. This was Brighton, London’s administrative centre, if a coastline could be called a centre. Beatrice-Joanna strode as briskly as the tide of the north-moving crowd would let her towards the cool green water. Its vista, taken from this narrow giddy ravine, always promised normality, a width of freedom, but the actual arrival at the sea’s edge always brought disappointment. Every hundred yards or so stood a stout
sea-pier loaded with office-blocks or hives of flats, pushing out towards France. Still, the clean salt breath was there, and greedily she drank it in. She held an intuitive conviction that, if there were a God, He inhabited the sea. The sea spelled life, whispered or shouted fertility; that voice could never be completely stilled. If only, she felt crazily, poor Roger’s body could have been thrown into those tigrine waters, swept out to be gnawed by fish, rather than changed coldly to chemicals and silently fed to the earth. She had a mad intuitive notion that the earth was dying, that the sea would soon be the final repository of life. ‘Vast sea gifted with delirium, panther skin and mantle pierced with thousands and thousands of idols of the sun –’ She had read that somewhere, a translation from one of the auxiliary languages of Europe. The sea drunk with its own blue flesh, a hydra, biting its tail. ‘Sea,’ she said quietly, for this promenade was as crowded as the street she had just left, ‘sea, help us. We’re sick, 0 sea. Restore us to health, restore us to life.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ It was an oldish man, Anglo-Saxon, upright, ruddy, mottled, grey-moustached; in a military age he would have been taken at once for a retired soldier. ‘Did you address-?’

‘Sorry.’ Blushing beneath her bone-white powder, Beatrice-Joanna walked rapidly away, turning instinctively towards the east. Her eyes were drawn upwards to the tremendous bronze statue that stood defiant, a mile in the air, at the summit of Government Building, the figure of a bearded man, classically robed, glaring at the sun. At night he was floodlit. A cynosure to ships, man of the sea, Pelagius. But Beatrice-Joanna could
remember a time when he had been Augustine. And, so it was said, he had been at other times the King, the Prime Minister, a popular bearded guitarist, Eliot (a long-dead singer of infertility), the Minister of Pisciculture, captain of the Hertfordshire Men’s Sacred Game eleven, and – most often and satisfactorily – the great unknown, the magical Anonymous.

Next to Government Building, fronting the fecund sea without shame, stood the squatter, humbler building of twenty-five storeys only which housed the Ministry of Infertility. Above its portico was the inevitable circle with its chastely kissing tangent, also a large bas-relief of a naked sexless figure breaking eggs. Beatrice-Joanna thought she might as well draw her (so cynically named) condolence. It would give her a reason for entering the building, an excuse for hanging about in the vestibule. It was quite possible that she might see
him
, leaving work. He was, she knew, this week on the A Shift. Before crossing the promenade she looked on the busy crowds with almost new eyes, perhaps the sea’s eyes. This was the British people; rather, to be more accurate, this was the people that inhabited the British Islands – Eurasian, Euro-African, Euro-Polynesian predominated, the frank light shining on damson, gold, even puce; her own English peach, masked with white flour, was growing rarer. Ethnic divisions were no longer important; the world was split into language-groups. Was it, she thought in an instant almost of prophetic power, to be left to her and the few indisputable Anglo-Saxons like her to restore sanity and dignity to the mongrel world? Her race, she seemed to remember, had done it before.

Four

‘O
NE
achievement of the Anglo-Saxon race,’ said Tristram, ‘was parliamentary government, which eventually meant government by party. Later, when it was found that the work of government could be carried on more expeditiously without debate and without the opposition that party government entailed, the nature of the
cycle
began to be recognized.’ He went to the blueboard and yellow-chalked a large clumsy ring. ‘Now,’ he said, swivelling his head to look at his pupils, ‘here is how the cycle works.’ He marked off three arcs. ‘We have a Pelagian phase. Then we have an intermediate phase.’ His chalk thickened one arc, then another. ‘This leads into an Augustinian phase.’ More thickening, and the chalk was back where it had started. ‘Pelphase, Interphase, Gusphase, Pelphase, Interphase, Gusphase, and so on, for ever and ever. A sort of perpetual waltz. We must now consider what motive power makes the wheel turn.’ He faced his class seriously, beating one palm against the other to clean the chalk off. ‘In the first place, let us remind ourselves what Pelagianism stands for. A government functioning in its Pelagian phase commits itself to the belief that man is perfectible, that perfection can be achieved by his own efforts, and that the journey towards perfection is along a straight road. Man wants to be perfect. He wants to be good. The citizens of a community want to co-operate with their rulers, and so there is no real need to have devices of coercion, sanctions, which will force them to co-operate.
Laws are necessary, of course, for no single individual, however good and co-operative, can have precise knowledge of the total needs of the community. Laws point the way to an emergent pattern of social perfection-they are guides. But, because of the fundamental thesis that the citizen’s desire is to behave like a good social animal, not like a selfish beast of the waste wood, it is assumed that the laws will be obeyed. Thus, the Pelagian state does not think it necessary to erect an elaborate punitive apparatus. Disobey the law and you will be told not to do it again or fined a couple of crowns. Your failure to obey does not spring from Original Sin, it’s not an essential part of the human fabric. It’s a mere flaw, something that will be shed somewhere along the road to final human perfection. Is that clear?’ Many of the pupils nodded; they were past caring whether they understood or not. ‘Well, then, in the Pelagian phase or Pelphase, the great liberal dream seems capable of fulfilment. The sinful acquisitive urge is lacking, brute desires are kept under rational control. The private capitalist, for instance, a figure of top-hatted greed, has no place in a Pelagian society. Hence the State controls the means of production, the State is the only boss. But the will of the State is the will of the citizen, hence the citizen is working for himself. No happier form of existence can be envisaged. Remember, however,’ said Tristram, in a thrilling near-whisper, ‘remember that the aspiration is always some way ahead of the reality. What destroys the dream? What destroys it, eh?’ He suddenly big-drummed the desk, shouting in crescendo, ‘Disappointment.
Disappointment
.
DISAPPOINTMENT
.’ He beamed. ‘The governors,’ he said, in a reasonable tone,
‘become disappointed when they find that men are not as good as they thought they were. Lapped in their dream of perfection, they are horrified when the seal is broken and they see people as they really are. It becomes necessary to try and force the citizens into goodness. The laws are reasserted, a system of enforcement of those laws is crudely and hastily knocked together. Disappointment opens up a vista of chaos. There is irrationality, there is panic. When the reason goes, the brute steps in. Brutality !’ cried Tristram. The class was at last interested. ‘Beatings-up. Secret police. Torture in brightly lighted cellars. Condemnation without trial. Finger-nails pulled out with pincers. The rack. The cold-water treatment. The gouging-out of eyes. The firing-squad in the cold dawn. And all this because of disappointment. The Interphase.’ He smiled very kindly at his class. His class was agog for more mention of brutality. Their eyes glinted, they goggled with open mouths.