The Wanting Seed (3 page)

‘What, sir,’ asked Bellingham, ‘is the cold-water treatment?’

Five

B
EATRICE
-J
OANNA
, the waste of life-giving cold water behind her, entered the open mouth of the Ministry, a mouth that smelled as though it had been thoroughly rinsed with disinfectant. She jostled her way to an office flaunting the word
CONDOLENCES
. A great number of
bereaved mothers were waiting at the counter, somethose who spoke with the accents of irresponsibility – in festal dress as for a day out, clutching death certificates like passports to a good time. There was the smell of cheap spirit – alc, as it was called – and Beatrice-Joanna saw the coarse skins and blear eyes of inveterate aledrinkers. The day of the pawning of the flat-iron was over; the State condoned infanticide.

‘Got sort of sufflicated in the bedclothes. Only three weeks old to the day he was, too.’

‘Scalded, mine was. Pulled the kettle right on top of him.’ The speaker smiled with a sort of pride, as though the child had done something clever.

‘Fell out of the window, he did. Playing, he was.’

‘Money comes in handy.’

‘Oh, yes, it does that.’

A handsome Nigerian girl took the death certificate from Beatrice-Joanna and went off to a central cash-desk. ‘God bless you, miss,’ said a harridan who, from the look of her, seemed well past child-bearing age. She folded the notes the Euro-African clerk gave her. ‘God bless you, miss.’ Clumsily counting her coins, she waddled off happily. The clerk smiled at the old-fashioned locution; God was not much mentioned these days.

‘Here you are, Mrs Foxe.’ The handsome Nigerian had returned. ‘Six guineas, three septs.’ How this amount had been arrived at Beatrice-Joanna did not trouble to ask. With a flush of guilt she couldn’t explain, she swept the money hurriedly into her bag. The three-shilling piece called a sept shone at her in triplicate, sliding into her coin-purse – King Charles VI as triplets, smiling quizzically to the left. The King and Queen
were not subject to the same generative laws as ordinary people: three princesses had been killed last year, all in the same air crash; the succession had to be secured.

Don’t have any More
, said the poster. Beatrice-Joanna pushed her angry way out. She stood in the vestibule, feeling desperately lonely. White-coated workers rushed, busy and brisk as spermatozoa, into the department of Contraceptive Research. The lifts rose and fell, to and from the many floors of the Propaganda Department. Beatrice-Joanna waited. Men and half-men all about her, twittering and sibilating. Then she saw, as she had thought she might at this precise hour, her brother-in-law Derek, her furtive lover Derek, brief-case under his arm, talking animatedly with a flash of rings to a foppish colleague, making point after point on unfolding flashing fingers. Seeing the superb mime of orthodox homosexual behaviour (secondary or social aspects) she could not quell entirely the spark of contempt that arose in her loins. She could hear the snorting emphasis of his speech; his movements had a dancer’s grace. Nobody knew, nobody except her, what a satyr lay couched behind the epicene exterior. He was, it was said by many, likely to rise very high in the hierarchy of the Ministry. If, she reflected with an instant’s malice, if only his colleagues knew, if only his superiors knew. She could ruin him if she wanted to. Could she? Of course she couldn’t. Derek was not the sort of man who would let himself be ruined.

She stood there, waiting, her hands folded in front of her. Derek Foxe said good-bye to his colleague (‘Such a
very
good suggestion, my dear. I promise you, tomorrow we must really
hammer it out.’
) and patted him in
valedictory archness thrice on the left buttock. Then he saw Beatrice-Joanna, looked warily about him, and came over. His eyes gave nothing away. ‘Hallo,’ he said, writhing with grace. ‘What news?’

‘He died this morning. He’s now –’ She took a hold on herself ‘– now in the hands of the Ministry of Agriculture.’

‘My dear.’ That was spoken in a lover’s tone, a man to a woman. He glanced furtively about him again, then whispered, ‘We’d best not be seen together. Can I come round?’ She hesitated, then nodded. ‘What time does my dear brother get home today?’ he asked.

‘Not till seven.’

‘I’ll be along. I have to be careful.’ He smiled queenlily at a passing colleague, a man with Disraeli-like ringlets. ‘Some queer things are going on,’ he said. ‘I think I’m being watched.’

‘You’re always careful, aren’t you?’ she said, somewhat loudly. ‘Always too damned careful.’

‘Oh, do be quiet,’ he whispered. ‘Look,’ he said, slightly agitated. ‘Do you see that man there?’

‘Which man?’ The vestibule was thick with them.

‘That little one with the moustache. Do you see him? That’s Loosely. I’m sure he’s watching me.’ She saw who he meant: a small friendless-looking man with his wrist to his ear as though checking that his watch was going, actually listening to his microradio, standing aloof on the periphery of the crowd. ‘You go off home, my dear,’ said Derek Foxe. ‘I’ll be along in about an hour.’

‘Say it,’ commanded Beatrice-Joanna. ‘Say it before I go.’

‘I love you,’ he mouthed, as through a window. Dirty words from a man to a woman in that place of anti-love. His face contorted as though he were chewing alum.

Six

‘B
UT
,’ went on Tristram, ‘the Interphase cannot, of course, last for ever.’ He contorted his face to a mask of shock. ‘Shock,’ he said. ‘The governors become shocked at their own excesses. They find that they have been thinking in heretical terms – the sinfulness of man rather than his inherent goodness. They relax their sanctions and the result is complete chaos. But, by this time, disappointment cannot sink any deeper. Disappointment can no longer shock the state into repressive action, and a kind of philosophical pessimism supervenes. In other words, we drift into the Augustinian phase, the Gusphase. The orthodox view presents man as a sinful creature from whom no good at all may be expected. A different dream, gentlemen, a dream which, again, outstrips the reality. It eventually appears that human social behaviour is rather better than any Augustinian pessimist has a right to expect, and so a sort of optimism begins to emerge. And so Pelagianism is reinstated. We are back in the Pelphase again. The wheel has come full circle. Any questions?’

‘What do they gouge eyes out with, sir?’ asked Billy Chan.

Bells shrilled, gongs clanged, an artificial voice yelled
over the speakers, ‘Change, change, all, all change. Fifty seconds to change. Count-down now begins. Fifty – forty-nine – forty-eight –’ Tristram mouthed a good afternoon inaudible under the racket and walked out into the corridor. Boys dashed to lessons in concrete music, astrophysics, language control. The count-down went rhythmically on: ‘Thirty-nine–thirty-eight –’Tristram walked to a staff lift and pressed the button. Lights showed that the cabin was already shooting down from the top floor (big-windowed art-rooms there; art-master Jordan quick, as always, off the mark). 43 − 42 − 41 − 40, flashed the indicator. ‘Nineteen–eighteen–seventeen –’ The cretic rhythm of the count-down had changed to trochaic. The lift stopped and Tristram entered. Jordan was telling Mowbray, a colleague, about new movements in painting; names like Zvegintzoy, Abrahams, F. A. Cheel were dealt like dull cards. ‘Plasmatical assonance,’ intoned Jordan. In some things the world had not changed at all. ‘Three–two–one–zero.’ The voice had stopped, but each floor (18 − 17 − 16 − 15) that rose before the eyes of Tristram showed boys not yet in their new classrooms, some not even scurrying. The Pelphase. Nobody tried to enforce the rules. The work got done. More or less. 4 − 3 − 2 − 1. Ground floor. Tristram left the lift.

Seven

B
EATRICE
-J
OANNA
entered the lift in Spurgin Building on
Rossiter Avenue. 1 − 2 − 3 − 4. She rose to the fortieth floor, where their tiny flat waited, empty of a son. In half an hour or so Derek would arrive, the comfort of whose arms she desperately needed. Was not Tristram then equipped to give of the same commodity? It was not the same, no. The flesh has its own peculiar logic. There had been a time when it had been pleasant, thrilling, ecstatically exciting, to be touched by Tristram. That had long gone – gone, to be precise, shortly after Roger’s birth, as though Tristram’s sole function had been to beget him. Love? She still, she thought, loved Tristram. He was kind, honest, gentle, generous, considerate, calm, witty sometimes. But it was Tristram in the living-room she loved, not Tristram in bed. Did she love Derek? She did not answer the question for a moment. 26 – 27 – 28. She thought it was strange that their flesh should be the same. But Tristram’s had become carrion; that of his elder brother was fire and ice, paradisaical fruit, inexpressibly delicious and exciting. She was in love with Derek, she decided, but she did not think she loved him. 30 – 31 – 32. She loved, she decided, Tristram, but was not in love with him. So, so far hence in time, a woman contrived to think with (as it was in the beginning) her instincts, (is now) her complicated nerves, and (ever shall be) her inner organs (world without end) 39 – 40. (Amen.)

Courageously Beatrice-Joanna turned the key of the flatlet and walked in to the familiar smell of
Anaphro
(an air-freshener devised by chemists of the Ministry where her lover worked, piped throughout the block from an engine in the basement) and the hum of the refrigerator. Even though she had no real standards of
comparison, she was always, on each entrance, struck afresh and aghast by the exiguity of the living-space (standard for people of their income-group) – the box of a bedroom, kitchen-coffin, bathroom almost to be worked into like a dress. Two fair strides would see her across the living-room, and the strides were only possible because all the furnishings hid in ceiling and walls, to be released, when wanted, at the touch of a switch. Beatrice-Joanna bade a chair come out, and an angular unlovely sit-unit grudgingly appeared. She was weary, she sat, sighing. The
Daily Newsdisc
still shone, like a black fiat sun, on its wall-spindle. She conjured its artificial voice, sexless, expressionless. ‘The strike at the National Synthelac Works continues. Appeals to the workers to return have proved of no avail. The strike-leaders are unwilling to compromise on their demand for a basic increase of one crown three tanners a day. Dock-workers at Southampton are, as a gesture of sympathy with the strikers, refusing to handle imported synthelac.’ Beatrice-Joanna moved the needle on to the Woman’s Band. A genuinely female voice – strident with a vinegar enthusiasm – spoke of the further reduction of the bust-line. She switched off. Her nerves still danced, her occiput still rocked from repeated hammercracks. She took off her clothes and bathed in the basin that was called a bath. She dusted her body with plain white scentless powder and donned a dressing-gown woven of some new long-chain synthetic polymeric amide. Then she went to the wall-panel of buttons and switches and made a pair of metal arms gently lower a plastic cupboard from a recess in the ceiling. She opened the cupboard and, from a brown bottle, shook
out two tablets. She washed these down with water in a paper cup, thrust the empty cup into a hole in the wall. This launched it on a journey whose destination was the basement furnace. Then she waited.

Derek was late. She grew impatient. Her nerves zithered still, her head thumped. She began to have premonitions of death, doom; then, dragging in reason like some alien constrictive metal, she told herself that these premonitions were a hangover from events already past and irrevocable. She took two more tablets and sent another cup to fiery atomization. Then, at last, there came a knock at the door.

Eight

T
RISTRAM
knocked at the Principal’s secretary’s door, said that his name was Foxe and that the Principal wished to see him. Buttons were pressed; lights flashed over lintels; Tristram was bade enter. ‘Come in, Brother Foxe,’ cried Joscelyne. He looked rather like a fox himself, certainly not Franciscan. He was bald, twitched and had a good degree from the University of Pasadena. He himself, however, came from Sutton, West Virginia, and, though he was too foxily modest to talk much about it, was closely related to the High Commissioner for North American Territories. Nevertheless, he had obtained this post of Principal on sheer merit. That, and a life of blameless sexlessness. ‘Sit down, Brother Foxe,’ said Joscelyne. ‘Sit right down. Have a caff.’ He hospitably
motioned towards the dish of caffeine tablets on his blotter. Tristram shook his head, smiling. ‘Give you a lift when it’s needed most,’ said Joscelyne, taking two. Then he sat down at his desk. The afternoon sea-light shone on a long nose, a blue muzzle, the mouth large and mobile, the face prematurely lined. ‘I tapped your lesson,’ he said, nodding first towards the switchboard on the white wall, then to the ceiling-speaker. ‘Do you think the kids take in much of that stuff?’

‘They’re not supposed to understand it too well,’ said Tristram. ‘Just a general impression, you know. It’s in the syllabus but never comes up in the exam.’

‘Yah, yah, I guess so.’ Joscelyne was not really interested. He was fingering a grey-backed dossier, Tristram’s: Tristram saw FOXE upside down on its cover. ‘Poor old Newick,’ said Joscelyne. ‘He was pretty good. Now he’s phosphorus pentoxide some place in Western Province. But I guess his soul goes marching on,’ he said vaguely. And then, with speed, he added, ‘Here in the school, I mean.’

‘Yes, yes, of course. In the school.’

‘Yah. Now,’ said Joscelyne, ‘you were all lined up to take his place. I’ve been reading through your dossier today –’
Were
. Tristram swallowed a bolus of surprise.
Were
, he said,
were
. ‘– Quite a book. You’ve done pretty good work here, I can see that. And you’re senior in the department. You should have just walked into the job.’ He leaned back, put thumb-tip to thumb-tip, then-little, ring, middle, index-let finger-tip meet finger-tip. He twitched meanwhile. ‘You realize,’ he said, ‘that it’s not up to me who fills these vacancies. It’s up to the Board. All I can do is recommend. Yah, recommend.
Now, I know this sounds crazy, but what gets a man a job these days is not pry-merrily qualifications. No. It isn’t how many degrees he’s got or how good he is at whatever it is he does. It’s-and I’m using the term in its most general sense – his family background. Yah.’