The Children of Men (6 page)

It had been years since he had last seen a doll thus paraded, but they had been common twenty years ago, had indeed become something of a craze. Doll-making was the only section of the toy industry which, with the production of prams, had for a decade flourished; it had produced dolls for the whole range of frustrated maternal desire, some cheap and tawdry but some of remarkable craftsmanship and beauty which, but for the Omega which originated them, could have become cherished heirlooms. The more expensive ones—some he remembered costing well over £2,000—could be bought in different sizes: the new-born, the six-month-old baby, the year-old, the eighteen-month-old child able to stand and walk, intricately powered. He remembered now that they were called Six-Monthlies. At one time it wasn’t possible to walk down the High Street without being encumbered by their prams, by groups of admiring quasi-mothers. He seemed to remember that there had even been pseudo-births and that broken dolls were buried with ceremony in consecrated ground. Wasn’t it one of the minor ecclesiastical disputes of the early 2000s whether churches could legitimately
be used for these charades and even whether ordained priests could take part?

Aware of his gaze, the woman smiled, an idiot smile, inviting connivance, congratulations. As their eyes met and he dropped his, so that she shouldn’t see his small pity and his greater contempt, she jerked the pram back, then put out a shielding arm as if to ward off his masculine importunities. A more responsive passer-by stopped and spoke to her. A middle-aged woman in well-fitting tweeds, hair carefully groomed, came up to the pram, smiled at the doll’s owner and began a congratulatory patter. The first woman, simpering with pleasure, leaned forward, smoothed the satin quilted pram cover, adjusted the bonnet, tucked in a stray lock of hair. The second tickled the doll beneath its chin as she might a cat, still murmuring her baby talk.

Theo, more depressed and disgusted by the charade than surely such harmless play-acting justified, was turning away when it happened. The second woman suddenly seized the doll, tore it from the coverings and, without a word, swung it twice round her head by the legs and dashed it against the stone wall with tremendous force. The face shattered and shards of porcelain fell tinkling to the pavement. The owner was for two seconds absolutely silent. And then she screamed. The sound was horrible, the scream of the tortured, the bereaved, a terrified, high-pitched squealing, inhuman yet all too human, unstoppable. She stood there, hat askew, head thrown back to the heavens, her mouth stretched into a gape from which poured her agony, her grief, her anger. She seemed at first unaware that the attacker still stood there, watching her with silent contempt. Then the woman turned and walked briskly through the open gates, across the courtyard and into the Ashmolean. Suddenly aware that the attacker had escaped, the doll-owner galumphed after her, still screaming, then, apparently realizing the hopelessness of it, returned to the pram. She had grown quieter now and, sinking to her knees, began gathering up the broken pieces, sobbing and moaning gently, trying to match them as she might a jigsaw puzzle. Two gleaming eyes, horribly real, joined by a spring, rolled towards Theo. He had a second’s impulse to pick them up, to help, to speak at least a few words of comfort. He could have pointed out that she could buy another child. It was a consolation he hadn’t been able to offer his wife. But his hesitation was only momentary. He walked briskly on. No one else went near her.
Middle-aged women, those who had reached adulthood in the year of Omega, were notoriously unstable.

He reached the chapel just as the service was about to begin. The choir of eight men and eight women filed in, bringing with them a memory of earlier choirs, boy choristers entering grave-faced with that almost imperceptible childish swagger, crossed arms holding the service sheets to their narrow chests, their smooth faces lit as if with an internal candle, their hair brushed to gleaming caps, their faces preternaturally solemn above the starched collars. Theo banished the image, wondering why it was so persistent when he had never even cared for children. Now he fixed his eyes on the chaplain, remembering the incident some months previously when he had arrived early for Evensong. Somehow a young deer from the Magdalen meadow had made its way into the chapel and was standing peaceably beside the altar as if this were its natural habitat. The chaplain, harshly shouting, had rushed at it, seizing and hurling prayer books, thumping its silken sides. The animal, puzzled, docile, had for a moment endured the assault and then, delicate-footed, had pranced its way out of the chapel.

The chaplain had turned to Theo, tears streaming down his face. “Christ, why can’t they wait? Bloody animals. They’ll have it all soon enough. Why can’t they wait?”

As Theo looked now at his serious, self-important face it seemed, in this candle-lit peace, no more than a bizarre scene from a half-remembered nightmare.

The congregation, as usual, numbered fewer than thirty and many of those present, regulars like himself, were known to Theo. But there was one newcomer, a young woman, seated in the stall immediately opposite his own, whose gaze, from time to time, it was difficult to avoid although she gave no sign of recognition. The chapel was dimly lit and through the flicker of candles her face gleamed with a gentle, almost transparent light, at one moment seen clearly, then as elusive and insubstantial as a wraith. But it was not unknown to him; somehow he’d seen her before, not just with a momentary glance, but face to face and for a stretch of time. He tried to force and then trick his memory into recall, fixing his eyes on her bent head during the confession, appearing to stare past her with pious concentration during the reading of the first lesson, but constantly aware of her, casting over her image memory’s barbed net. By the end of the second lesson he was becoming irritated by his
failure and then, as the choir, mostly middle-aged, arranged their music sheets and gazed at the conductor, waiting for the organ to begin and his small surpliced figure to raise his paw-like hands and begin their delicate paddling of the air, Theo remembered. She had been briefly a member of Colin Seabrook’s class on Victorian Life and Times, with its subtitle Women in the Victorian Novel, which he had taken for Colin eighteen months previously. Seabrook’s wife had had a cancer operation; there was a chance of a holiday together if Colin could find a substitute for this one four-session class. He could recall their conversation, his half-hearted protest.

“Shouldn’t you get a member of the English Faculty to do it for you?”

“No, old boy, I’ve tried. They’ve all got excuses. Don’t like evening work. Too busy. Not their period—don’t think it’s only historians who go in for that crap. Can do one session but not four. It’s only one hour, Thursdays, six to seven. And you won’t have to bother with preparation, I’ve only set four books and you probably know them by heart:
Middlemarch, Portrait of a Lady, Vanity Fair, Cranford
. Only fourteen in the class, fifty-year-old women mainly. They should be fussing round their grandchildren, so they’ve time on their hands, you know how it is. Charming ladies, if a little conventional in their taste. You’ll love them. And they’ll be tickled pink to have you. The comfort of culture, that’s what they’re after. Your cousin, our esteemed Warden, is very keen on the comfort of culture. All they want is to escape temporarily into a more agreeable and permanent world. We all do it, dear boy, only you and I call it scholarship.”

But there had been fifteen students, not fourteen. She had come in two minutes late and had quietly taken her seat at the back of the group. Then as now he had seen her head outlined against carved wood and lit by candles. When the last intake of undergraduates had gone down, hallowed college rooms had been opened to mature, part-time students, and the class had been held in an agreeable, panelled lecture room at Queen’s College. She had listened, apparently attentively, to his preliminary discourse on Henry James and had at first taken no part in the ensuing general discussion until a large woman in the front row began extravagantly praising Isabel Archer’s moral qualities and sentimentally lamenting her undeserved fate.

The girl had suddenly said: “I don’t see why you should particularly pity someone who was given so much and made such poor use of it.
She could have married Lord Warburton and done a great deal of good to his tenants, to the poor. All right, she didn’t love him, so there was an excuse and she had higher ambitions for herself than marriage to Lord Warburton. But what? She had no creative talent, no job, no training. When her cousin made her rich, what did she do? Gad round the world with Madame Merle, of all people. And then she marries that conceited hypocrite and goes in for Thursday salons gorgeously dressed. What happened to all the idealism? I’ve got more time for Henrietta Stackpole.”

The woman had protested: “Oh, but she’s so vulgar!”

“That’s what Mrs. Touchett thinks, so does the author. But at least she has talent, which Isabel hasn’t, and she uses it to earn her living, and support her widowed sister.” She added: “Isabel Archer and Dorothea both discard eligible suitors to marry self-important fools, but one sympathizes more with Dorothea. Perhaps this is because George Eliot respects her heroine and, at heart, Henry James despises his.”

She might, Theo had suspected, have been relieving boredom by deliberate provocation. But, whatever her motive, the ensuing argument had been noisy and lively and for once the remaining thirty minutes had passed quickly and agreeably. He had been sorry and a little aggrieved when, the following Thursday, watched for, she had failed to appear.

The connection made and curiosity appeased, he could sit back in peace and listen to the second anthem. It had been the custom at Magdalen for the last ten years to play a recorded anthem during Evensong. Theo saw from the printed service sheet that this afternoon there was to be the first of a series of fifteenth-century English anthems, beginning with two by William Byrd, “Teach Me, O Lord” and “Exult Thyself, O God.” There was a brief anticipatory silence as the
Informator choristarum
bent down to switch on the tape. The voices of boys, sweet, clear, asexual, unheard since the last boy chorister’s voice had broken, soared and filled the chapel. He glanced across at the girl, but she was sitting motionless, her head thrown back, her eyes fixed on the rib vaulting of the roof, so that all he could see was the candle-lit curve of her neck. But at the end of the row was a figure he suddenly recognized: old Martindale, who had been an English fellow on the eve of retirement when he himself was in his first year. Now he sat perfectly still, his old face uplifted, the candlelight glinting on the tears which ran down his cheeks in a stream so that the deep furrows looked as if they
were hung with pearls. Old Marty, unmarried, celibate, who all his life had loved the beauty of boys. Why, Theo wondered, did he and his like come week after week to seek this masochistic pleasure? They could listen to the recorded voices of children perfectly well at home, so why did it have to be here, where past and present fused in beauty and candlelight to reinforce regret? Why did he himself come? But he knew the answer to that question. Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.

The woman left the chapel before him, moving swiftly, almost surreptitiously. But when he stepped out into the cool air, he was surprised to find her obviously waiting.

She came up beside him and said: “Could I please speak to you? It’s important.”

From the ante-chapel the bright light streamed out into the late-afternoon dusk and for the first time he saw her clearly. Her hair, dark and luscious, a rich brown with flecks of gold, was brushed back and disciplined into a short, thick pleat. A fringe fell over a high, freckled forehead. She was light-skinned for someone so dark-haired, a honey-coloured woman, long-necked with high cheekbones, wide-set eyes whose colour he couldn’t determine under strong straight brows, a long narrow nose, slightly humped, and a wide, beautifully shaped mouth. It was a pre-Raphaelite face. Rossetti would have liked to have painted her. She was dressed in the current fashion for all but Omegas—a short, fitted jacket and, beneath it, a woollen skirt reaching to mid-calf below which he could see the highly coloured socks which had become this year’s craze. Hers were bright yellow. She carried a leather sling bag over her left shoulder. She was gloveless and he could see that her left hand was deformed. The middle and forefinger were fused into a nail-less stump and the back of the hand was grossly swollen. She held it cradled in her right as if comforting or supporting it. There was no effort to hide it. She might even have been proclaiming her deformity to a world which had become increasingly intolerant of physical defects. But at least, he thought, she had one compensation. No one who was in any way physically deformed, or mentally or physically unhealthy, was on the list of women from whom the new race would be bred if ever a fertile male was discovered. She was, at least, saved from the six-monthly, time-consuming, humiliating re-examinations to which all healthy females under forty-five were subjected.

She spoke again, more quietly: “It won’t take long. But please, I have to talk to you, Dr. Faron.”

“If you need to.” He was intrigued, but he couldn’t make his voice welcoming.

“Perhaps we could walk round the new cloisters.”

They turned together in silence. She said: “You don’t know me.”

“No, but I remember you. You were at the second of the classes I took for Dr. Seabrook. You certainly enlivened the discussion.”

“I’m afraid I was rather vehement.” She added, as if it were important to explain: “I do very much admire
The Portrait of a Lady.”

“But presumably you haven’t arranged this interview to reassure me about your literary taste.”

As soon as the words were spoken he regretted them. She flushed, and he sensed an instinctive recoil, a loss of confidence in herself, and perhaps in him. The naïvety of her remark had disconcerted him, but he need not have responded with such hurtful irony. Her unease was infectious. He hoped that she wasn’t proposing to embarrass him with personal revelations or emotional demands. It was difficult to reconcile that articulate confident debater with her present almost adolescent gaucherie. It was pointless to try to make amends and for half a minute they walked in silence.