The Wanting Seed (23 page)

Part Five

One

‘l
TSY
bitsy booful,’ went Derek Foxe, first to one dribbling chuckling twin, then to the other. ‘Boo boo boo boop a doop,’ he booed to his little namesake and then, scrupulously fair, that identical phatic utterance to tiny Tristram. He was never anything but scrupulously fair, as his subordinates at the Ministry of Fertility could testify; even Loosley, demoted to rather junior executive rank could – though he was now trying to prove Derek a homosexual – hardly prate of injustice. ‘Worple worple worple,’ chortled Derek in serial duplicate, typing the twins with two fingers. These meanwhile, bubbling like fish, secure in their play-pen, podgily clutched the rails and performed a treadmill action. Tiny Tristram alone said, like Upanishadian thunder, ‘Da da da.’ ‘Ah,’ said Derek seriously, ‘we ought to have more, lots, lots more.’

‘So they can be put in the army and shot at?’ said Beatrice-Joanna. ‘Not likely.’

‘Oh, that –’ Derek, hands clasped behind, did a brief quarterdeck-pacing act round the drawing-room. He then drank off his coffee. It was a spacious drawing-room; all the rooms of the seaward-looking flat were spacious. There was space nowadays for men of Derek’s rank, for their wives or pseudo-wives, their children. ‘Everybody’s
got to take his chance,’ he said. ‘Her chance, too. That’s why we ought to have lots more.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Beatrice-Joanna. She was stretched on a deep-piled chunky couch that was eight feet long and claret-coloured. She was leafing through the latest issue of
Sheek
, a fashion magazine which was all pictures. Bustles, her eye noted, were decreed by Paris for daywear; daring decolktages were
de rigueur
for evening; Hongkong cheongsams were lascivious with fourfold slits. Sex. War and sex. Babies and bullets. ‘In the old days,’ she mused, ‘I’d have been told that I’ve already exceeded my ration. And now your Ministry tells me that I’ve not fulfilled my quota. Mad.’

‘When we’re married,’ said Derek, ‘properly married, that is, you may feel differently about it.’ He padded round to the rear of the couch and kissed her nape, its broth of goldish flue delicate in the weak sun. One of the twins, perhaps tiny Tristram, made, as on a satirical sound-track, a synchronic farting lip-noise. ‘Then,’ said Derek jocularly, ‘I can
really
start talking about wifely duties.’

‘How long now?’

‘About six months. That will make it a full two years since you last saw him.’ He kissed her delicious nape once more. ‘The statutory period for desertion.’

‘I keep thinking about him,’ said Beatrice-Joanna. ‘I can’t help it. I had a dream a couple of nights ago. I saw Tristram quite clearly, wandering through the streets, crying out for me.’

‘Dreams don’t mean anything.’

‘And I’ve been thinking about that business of Shonny saying he’d seen him. In Preston.’

‘Just before they put the poor man away.’

‘Poor, poor Shonny.’ Beatrice-Joanna gave the twins a glance of desperate fondness. Shonny’s brain turned by the loss of his children, the defection of his God, he now recited long liturgies of his own composition – in a cell in Winwick Hospital, near Warrington, Lancs. – trying to munch consecrated bedclothes. ‘I can’t help feeling that. That he’s been wandering everywhere, all over the country, looking for me.’

‘There were ways and means,’ said Derek. ‘Were you honestly expected to live off air, you and the two children? I’ve said often, and I say again now, that the most charitable thing is to think of Tristram long dead and long eaten. Tristram is ended, over. Now it’s you and me. The future.’ He looked, bending over her, masterfully smiling, groomed and smooth, very much like the future. ‘Heavens,’ he said, without anxiety. ‘The time.’ A clock on the far wall meekly showed it him – a stylized golden sun of a clock, fiery rays like hair-locks set all round it. ‘I must fly,’ he said, without hurry. And then, with even less hurry, into her ear, ‘You wouldn’t really like things to be any different, would you? You’re happy with me, aren’t you? Say you’re happy.’

‘Oh, I’m happy.’ But her smile was wan. ‘It’s just that I – that I like things to be right, that’s all.’

‘Things are right. Very much right.’ He kissed her fully on the mouth with a relish that smacked nothing of valediction. But he said, ‘Now I really must fly. I’ve a busy afternoon ahead of me. I’ll be home about six.’ He did not forget the twins, kissing each on its flossy pate and blowing final phatic vocables at them. Waving,
smiling, brief-case under arm, he left: the Ministry car would be waiting below.

After about three minutes Beatrice-Joanna glanced round the room somewhat furtively, then tiptoed over to the switch which operated the
Daily Newsdisc
, shinyblack as a liquorice pancake on its wall-spindle. She could not altogether explain to herself this sensation of small guilt at wanting to hear the day’s news again: after all, the
Daily N ewsdisc
– now one of a number of free-enterprise organs, auditory, audio-visual, even (the
Weekly Feel
) tactile – was there for anybody’s re-listening. What itched in Beatrice-Joanna’s brain-stem was a hint that there was something disingenuous about the news these days, something crafty and implausible which Derek and people like him knew all about (laughing up their sleeves at it) but didn’t want people like her to know all about. She wanted to see if she could find a crack in the too-smooth plaster which now –

‘– Secession of China from Ruspun and the declaration of China’s intention – made by Premier Poh Soo Jin in Peking – to establish an independent association of states to be known in Kuo-Yü as Ta Chung-kuo, anglicized as Chinspun. Indications are already reported of aggressive intentions towards both Ruspun and Enspun, as witness raids on Kultuk and Boryza and massing of infantry in Southern Canton. There is every sign, says our Midway Island observer, of an intended annexation of Japan. With the laying bare of the western flank of Enspun –’ Beatrice-Joanna clicked off the manic synthetic voice. Sheer damned nonsense. If the world were really considering starting a real war, surely there should be talk of soaring planes and plunging
warships as well as trudging armies with simple portable weapons; there should, surely, be threats of the resurrection of one of those ancient but efficacious province-blasting nuclear devices. But there wasn’t. That British Army improvised last year and now superseded – for the maintenance of civil order – by reasonable blueclad bobbies, was pure infantry with minimal support of specialist corps; in the magazines and on the newsreels one saw the soldiers climbing the ramps of troopers – off for training, it was said, on the Annexe Islands or for police work in dissident corridors – up-thumbing at the cameras with a partially dentate leer, the best of British luck and pluck.

Beatrice-Joanna had almost convinced herself that she had been convinced, one evening before the stereotelly in this very flat, that she had seen in penumbral background to the close-up of an up-thumbing cheerful Tommy a face she knew. ‘Nonsense,’ of course, from Derek, stretched in his purple dressing-gown. ‘If Tristram were in the army Army Records would have his name. You sometimes forget I’m his brother and I have a certain duty. I consulted Army Records and they know nothing. I’ve said before, and I say again now, the most charitable thing is to think of Tristram long dead and long eaten.’ Still –

She pressed an electric buzzer on a wall-panel of switches and buzzers; almost at once a cheerful (cheerful as a Tommy) brown girl glided in, bowing in spasms, dressed in servant’s black silk-substitute. She was a pretty little orchestra of races and her name was Jane. ‘Jane,’ said Beatrice-Joanna, ‘please get the twins ready for their afternoon outing.’ ‘Yes, yes, madam,’ said Jane,
and she wheeled the castered play-pen across the seagreen fitted carpet, clucking and creasing her face at the two treadmilling infants.

Beatrice-Joanna went to her bedroom to make herself ready for the afternoon’s walk. Her dressing-table carried, in neat order, a whole pharmacy of creams and unguents; her wall-fitted wardrobes were full of gowns and costumes. She had servants, children, a handsome and successful pseudo-husband (co-ordinating subminister at the Ministry of Fertility, soon, it was said, to be Minister), all that love could give and money could buy. But she did not think she was really happy. A dim film in some basement projection-room of her mind occasionally flickered a sequence of things as they had been. Often called a flower by Derek (and, previously, by Tristram), had she really been a flower she would have belonged to the class Diandria. She needed two men in her life, her day to be salted by infidelity.

She now unlocked a carved camphorwood box and took from it a letter she had written the day before; it smelled deliciously of mingled camphor and sandalwood. She read through it for the seventh or eighth time before definitely making up her mind to send it. It said:

‘Dearest dearest Tristram, there have been such changes in this mad world, so many strange things have been happening since we parted so unhappily, that there is nothing I can say here that will make much sense to either of us except that I miss you and love you and long for you. I’m living with Derek now, but don’t think badly of me for that: I have to keep a home going for your two sons (yes, I do honestly believe they are really
yours). Perhaps you have already tried to write to me, perhaps – and I firmly believe this – you have tried to get in touch with me, but I know how difficult life has been. Your brother has been most kind to me and I think he genuinely loves me, but I don’t think any letter you write c / o him would ever reach me. He has his precious career to think of, a man with children standing a better chance of promotion to Minister of Fertility than a man with none, or so he says. You will remember how every day when we were together I used to take my walk by the sea, not far from Government Building. Every afternoon I still do that, wheeling my two sons in their pram, from three to four. Looking out to sea I now pray daily that the sea will send you back to me. This is my hope. I love you and if I ever hurt you I am sorry. Come back to your always loving Beattie.’

She refolded this and placed it in a fine-quality subtle-smelling envelope. Then she took her dainty inkpencil and addressed the envelope in her bold mannish hand to Tristram Foxe, Esq., B.A., British Army. There was just a chance; it was the only way, anyway. As for Army Records – Derek must either be most influential or a great liar; she herself, one furtive afternoon after seeing that television newsreel, had telephoned the War Office (the house telephone was an extension of the Ministry switchboard) and, after endless shuttling from department to department, had finally contacted a little Scots voice which admitted to being Army Records but said coldly that private individuals could not be informed of troop locations. Something to do with security. But she was not, said Beatrice-Joanna, concerned primarily
with anything so sophisticated as location; her enquiry was more fundamental, more ontological. The voice had clicked itself sternly off.

Derek had come home smiling at six and wanted to know, smiling, why she had been telephoning Army Records. Didn’t she believe him, her pseudo-husband, didn’t she trust him? That was the whole point: she didn’t. One could forgive mendacity and untrustworthiness in a lover but hardly in a husband, even pseudo. She didn’t tell him this, however. Still, his love seemed to be an unscrupulous sort of love, and that was flattering, but she preferred that sort of love in a lover.

So she went out with the twins in a pram in the winter marine sunshine, the little black-clad nurse clucking and moon-smiling at the two bubbling little men in their warm woollies, and she posted the letter in a pillarbox whose top had been whitened by seagull-droppings. It was like launching a letter in a bottle on the sea, that great unpunctual deliverer.

Two

‘S
AH
,’ snarled R.S.M. Backhouse, with a terrifying jaw-twist. ‘7388026 Sergeant Foxe T. Sah.’ Tristram marched in in a sort of lope and saluted without grace. Lieutenant-Colonel Williams looked up sadly from his desk; his swarthy adjutant, standing behind, gave a grin of pain.

‘Sergeant Foxe, eh?’ said Lieutenant-Colonel Williams.
He was a handsome tired greying man wearing, at the moment, clumsy reading-spectacles. The aura of long service which beat from him was, of course, illusory: all the soldiers of all the new armies were rookies. But Lieutenant-Colonel Williams, like all the senior officers, came out of that old liberal police force almost entirely superseded by the greyboys; he had been a scholarly superintendent of the Special Branch. ‘Foxe with an “e”, I see,’ he said now, ‘like the
Book of Martyrs
man.’

‘Sir,’ said Tristram.

‘Well,’ said Lieutenant-Colonel Williams, ‘there’s this question of your terms of reference as a sergeant-instructor.’

‘Sir.’

‘Your duties are, I think, straightforward enough. You have, according to Q.M.S.I. Bartlett, fulfilled them adequately. You have done good work in the class for illiterates, for example. You have, in addition, taught elementary arithmetic, report-writing, use of the telephone, military geography and current affairs.’

‘Sir.’

‘And it’s these current affairs that have been causing the trouble. That right, Willoughby?’ He peered up at his adjutant who, picking his nose, stopped picking his nose and nodded eagerly. ‘Now, let me see. You seem to have been holding certain discussions with the men. Something about Who Is The Enemy? and What’s All The Fighting About? You admit that, I take it.’

‘Yes, sir. In my opinion, the men have a perfect right to discuss why they’re in the army and what –’

‘A soldier,’ said Lieutenant-Colonel Williams wearily, ‘has no right to opinions. That is laid down, rightly or
wrongly. Rightly, I suppose, as it’s laid down.’

‘But, sir,’ said Tristram, ‘surely we have to know what we’re involved in. We’re told that there’s a war on. Some of the men, sir, refuse to believe it. I’m inclined to agree with them, sir.’

‘Indeed?’ said Lieutenant-Colonel Williams coldly. ‘Well, be enlightened, Foxe. There is fighting, so there must be war. There is not perhaps a war in the ancient sense, but war and fighting are, I should have supposed, in the organized sense, in the sense of armies being involved, as good as synonymous.’