The Children of Men (22 page)

“And why did Rolf recruit him? Hardly to provide spiritual consolation to the group?”

“Julian wanted him.”

“And you?”

“You know about me. I was a midwife. That’s all I’ve ever wanted to be. After Omega I took a job at a supermarket check-out in Headington. Now I manage the store.”

“And what do you do for the Five Fishes? Slip the pamphlets into packets of breakfast cereal?”

She said: “Look, I said we weren’t sensible. I didn’t say we were daft. If we hadn’t been careful, if we were as incompetent as you make out, we wouldn’t have lasted this long.”

He said: “You’ve lasted this long because the Warden wanted you to last. He could have had you picked up months ago. He didn’t because you’re more useful to him at large than imprisoned. He doesn’t want martyrs. What he does want is the pretence of an internal threat to good public order. It helps buttress his authority. All tyrants have needed that from time to time. All he has to do is tell the people that there’s a secret society operating whose published manifesto may be beguilingly liberal but whose real aim is to close down the Isle of Man Colony, let loose ten thousand criminal psychopaths on an ageing society, send home all the Sojourners so that the rubbish isn’t collected and the streets are unswept, and ultimately overthrow the Council and the Warden himself.”

“Why should people believe that?”

“Why not? Between the five of you you’d probably like to do all those things. Rolf certainly would like to do the last. Under an undemocratic
government there can be no acceptable dissent any more than there can be moderate sedition. I know you call yourselves the Five Fishes. You may as well tell me your code names.”

“Rolf is Rudd, Luke is Loach, Gascoigne is Gurdon, I’m Minnow.”

“And Julian?”

“We had difficulty there. There’s only one fish we could find which begins with J, a John Dory.”

He had to stop himself from laughing aloud. He said: “What on earth was the point of it? You’ve advertised to the whole country that you call yourselves the Five Fishes? I suppose that when Rolf telephones you he says this is Rudd calling Minnow, in the hope that if the SSP are listening they’ll tear their hair and bite the carpet with frustration.”

She said: “All right, you’ve made your point. We didn’t actually use the names, not often anyway. It was just an idea of Rolf’s.”

“I thought it might be.”

“Look, cut out all this supercilious chat, will you? We know you’re clever and sarcasm is your way of showing us just how clever, but I can’t cope with it for the moment. And don’t antagonize Rolf. If you care at all about Julian, calm it, OK?”

For the next few minutes they drove in silence. Glancing at her he saw that she was gazing at the road ahead with an almost passionate intensity as if expecting to find that it was mined. Her hands clutching the bag were taut, the knuckles white, and it seemed to him that there flowed from her a surge of excitement which was almost palpable. She had answered his questions, but as if her mind were elsewhere.

Then she spoke, and when she used his name he felt a small shock at the unexpected intimacy. “Theo, there’s something I have to tell you. Julian said not to tell you until we were on our way. It wasn’t a test of your good faith. She knew you’d come if she sent for you. But if you didn’t, if there was something important to prevent you, if you couldn’t come, then I wasn’t to tell. There’d be no point in it anyway.”

“Tell me what?” He gave her a long glance. She was still staring ahead, lips moving silently as if she were searching for words. “Tell me what, Miriam?”

Still she didn’t look at him. She said: “You won’t believe me. I don’t expect you to believe me. Your disbelief isn’t important, because in little more than thirty minutes you’ll see the truth for yourself. Only don’t argue about it. I don’t want to cope right now with protestations,
arguments. I’m not going to try to convince you, Julian will do that.”

“Just tell me. I’ll decide whether to believe you.”

And now she turned her head and looked at him. She said, her voice clear above the noise of the engine: “Julian is pregnant. That’s why she needs you. She’s going to have a child.”

In the silence that followed he was aware firstly of a plunging disappointment followed by irritation and then disgust. It was repugnant to believe that Julian was capable of such self-deceiving nonsense or that Miriam should be fool enough to connive in it. At their first and only meeting at Binsey, brief though it had been, he had liked her, had thought her sensible and intelligent. He didn’t like having his judgement of a person so confounded.

After a moment he said: “I won’t argue, but I don’t believe you. I’m not saying you’re deliberately lying, I believe you think it’s true. But it isn’t.”

It used, after all, to be a common delusion. In the first years after Omega women all over the world believed themselves to be pregnant, displayed the symptoms of pregnancy, walked proud-bellied—he had seen them walking down the High Street in Oxford. They had made plans for the birth, had even gone into spurious labour, groaning and straining and bringing forth nothing but wind and anguish.

After five minutes he said: “How long have you believed this story?”

“I said I didn’t want to talk about it. I said you were to wait.”

“You said I wasn’t to argue. I’m not arguing. I’m only asking one question.”

“Since the baby quickened. Julian didn’t know until then. How could she? Then she spoke to me and I confirmed the pregnancy. I’m a midwife, remember? We’d thought it wise not to be together more than necessary during the last four months. If I’d seen her more often I should have known earlier. Even after twenty-five years, I should have known.”

He said: “If you believe it—the unbelievable—then you’re taking it very calmly.”

“I’ve had time to get used to the glory of it. Now I’m more concerned with the practicalities.”

There was a silence. Then she said, as if reminiscing with all the time in the world: “I was twenty-seven at Omega and working in the maternity department of the John Radcliffe. I was doing a stint in the antenatal clinic at the time. I remember booking a patient for her next
appointment and suddenly noticing that the page seven months ahead was blank. Not a single name. Women usually booked in by the time they’d missed their second period, some as soon as they’d missed one. Not a single name. I thought, what’s happening to the men in this city? Then I rang a friend who was working at Queen Charlotte’s. She said the same. She said she’d telephone someone she knew at the Rosie Maternity Hospital in Cambridge. She rang me back twenty minutes later. It was the same there. It was then I knew, I must have been one of the first to know. I was there at the end. Now I shall be there at the beginning.”

They were coming into Swinbrook now and he drove more slowly, dimming the headlights, as if these precautions could somehow make them invisible. But the village was deserted. The waxy moon, half full, swayed against a sky of blue-grey trembling silk, pierced by a few high stars. The night was less dark than he had expected, the air still and sweet, with a grassy smell. In the pale moonlight the mellow stones gave out a faint glow which seemed to suffuse the air and he could clearly make out the shape of the houses, the high sloping roofs and the flower-hung garden walls. There were no lights in any of the windows and the village lay silent and empty as a deserted film-set, outwardly solid and permanent but ephemeral, the painted walls backed only by wooden supports and concealing the rotting debris of the departed crew. He had a momentary delusion that he would only have to lean against one of the walls and it would collapse in a crumble of plaster and snapping batons. And it was familiar. Even in this unreal light he could recognize the landmarks: the small green beside the pond with its huge overhanging tree and surrounding seat, the entrance to the narrow lane leading up to the church.

He had been here before, with Xan, in their first year. It had been a hot day in late June when Oxford had become a place to escape from, her hot pavements blocked with tourists, her air stinking with car fumes and loud with the clatter of alien tongues, her peaceful quads invaded. They had been driving down the Woodstock Road with no clear idea of their destination when Theo had remembered his wish to see St. Oswald’s Chapel at Widford. It was as good a destination as any. Glad that the expedition had a purpose, they had taken the road to Swinbrook. The day, in memory, was an icon which he could conjure up to represent the perfect English summer: an azure almost cloudless sky, the haze of
cow parsley, the smell of mown grass, the rushing air tearing at their hair. It could conjure up other things too, more transitory, which, unlike the summer, had been lost for ever: youth, confidence, joy, the hope of love. They had been in no hurry. Outside Swinbrook there had been a village cricket match and they had parked the car and sat on the grass bank behind the dry-stone wall to watch, criticize, applaud. They had parked again where he parked now, beside the pond, had taken the same walk which he and Miriam would take, past the old post office, up the narrow cobbled lane bordered by the high, ivy-clad wall, to the village church. There had been a christening. A small procession of villagers was straggling up the path towards the porch, the parents at the head, the mother carrying the baby in its white flounced christening robe, the women in flowered hats, the men, a little self-conscious, perspiring in close-fitting blue and grey suits. He remembered thinking that the scene was timeless and had amused himself for a moment imagining earlier christenings, the clothes different but the country faces, with their mixture of serious purpose and anticipated pleasure, unchanged. He thought then, as he thought now, of time passing, inexorable, unforgiving, unstoppable time. But the thought then had been an intellectual exercise devoid of pain or nostalgia, since time still stretched ahead and for a nineteen-year-old seemed an eternity.

Now, turning to lock the car, he said: “If the meeting place is St. Oswald’s Chapel the Warden knows it.”

Her reply was calm: “But he doesn’t know that we do.”

“He will when Gascoigne talks.”

“Gascoigne doesn’t know either. This is a fall-back meeting place which Rolf kept to himself in case one of us was taken.”

“Where has he left his car?”

“Concealed somewhere off the road. They planned to do the last mile or so on foot.”

Theo said: “Across rough fields, and in the dark. Not exactly an easy place for a quick getaway.”

“No, but it’s remote, unused, and the chapel is always open. We don’t have to worry about a quick getaway if no one knows where to find us.”

But there must be a more suitable place, thought Theo, and felt again a doubt of Rolf’s competence to plan and lead. Comforted by disdain, he told himself: He’s got looks and a certain crude force but not much
intelligence, an ambitious barbarian. How on earth did she come to marry him?

The lane came to an end and they turned left down a narrow path of earth and stone between the ivy-covered walls, across a cattle-grid and into the field. Down the hill to the left was a low farmhouse which he hadn’t remembered seeing before.

Miriam said: “It’s empty. All the village is deserted now. I don’t know why that’s happened with one place more than another. I suppose one or two key families leave and the rest panic and follow.”

The field was rough and tussocky and they walked with care, their eyes on the ground. From time to time one of them would stumble and the other put out a quick supporting hand, while Miriam shone her torch, searching in the pool of light for a non-existent path. It seemed to Theo that they must look like a very old couple, the last inhabitants of a deserted village making their way through the final darkness to St. Oswald’s Chapel out of some perverse or atavistic need to die on consecrated ground. To his left the fields stretched down to a high hedge behind which, he knew, ran the Windrush. Here, after visiting the chapel, he and Xan had lain on the grass watching the slow-flowing stream for the dart and rise of the fish, then, turning on their backs, had stared upwards through the silvered leaves to the blue of the sky. They had brought wine with them and strawberries purchased on the road. He found that he could recall every word of their talk.

Xan, dropping a strawberry into his mouth, then twisting over to reach for wine: “How too Brideshead, dear boy. I feel the need of a teddy bear.” And then, with no change of tone: “I’m thinking of joining the army.”

“Xan, whatever for?”

“No particular reason. At least it won’t be boring.”

“It will be unutterably boring, except for people who like travel and sport, and you’ve never particularly cared for either, except cricket, and that’s hardly an army game. They play rough, those boys. Anyway, they probably won’t have you. Now they’ve got so small I’m told they’ve become very choosy.”

“Oh, they’ll have me. And then later I might try politics.”

“Even more boring. You’ve never shown the slightest interest in politics. You’ve no political convictions.”

“I can acquire them. And it won’t be as boring as what you’ve got planned for yourself. You’ll get your First, of course; then Jasper will find a research job for his favourite pupil. Then there’ll be the usual provincial appointment, serving your time with red-brick nonentities, publishing your papers, writing the occasional well-researched book which will be respectfully received. Then back to Oxford with a fellowship. All Souls, if you’re lucky and haven’t already got it, and a job for life teaching undergraduates who see history as a soft option. Oh, I forgot. A suitable wife, intelligent enough to make acceptable dinner-table talk but not so intelligent that she’ll compete with you, a mortgaged house in North Oxford and two intelligent, boring children who will repeat the pattern.”

Well, he got most of it right, all of it right except the intelligent wife and the two children. And what he had spoken in that seemingly casual conversation, had it even then been part of a plan? He was right, the army did take him. He became the youngest colonel for 150 years. He still had no political allegiance, no convictions beyond his conviction that what he wanted he should have and that when he set his hand to something he would succeed. After Omega, with the country sunk in apathy, no one wanting to work, services almost at a stop, crime uncontrollable, all hope and ambition lost for ever, England had been a ripe plum for his picking. The metaphor was trite but none was more accurate. It had hung there, overripe, rotten; and Xan had only to put out his hand. Theo tried to thrust the past out of memory, but the voices of that last summer echoed in his mind, and even on this chill autumnal night he could feel its sun on his back.