The Children of Men

by P. D. James

  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.

  Then he said: “I was sorry when you didn’t reappear. The class seemed very dull the following week.”

  “I would have come again, but my hours were changed to the evening shift. I had to work.” She didn’t explain at what or where, but added: “My name is Julian. I know yours, of course.”

  “Julian. That’s unusual for a woman. Were you named after Julian of Norwich?”

  “No, I don’t think my parents had ever heard of her. My father went to register the birth and he gave the name as Julie Ann. That’s what my parents had chosen. The registrar must have misheard, or perhaps Father didn’t speak very clearly. It was three weeks before my mother noticed the mistake and she thought it was too late to change it. Anyway, I think she rather liked the name, so I was christened Julian.”

  “But I suppose people call you Julie.”

  “What people?”

  “Your friends, your family.”

  “I haven’t any family. My parents were killed in the race riots in 2002. But why should they call me Julie? Julie isn’t my name.”

  She was perfectly polite, unaggressive. He might have supposed that she was puzzled by his comment but puzzlement was surely unjustified. His remark had been inept, unthinking, condescending perhaps, but it hadn’t been ridiculous. And if this encounter was the preliminary to a request that he should give a talk about the social history of the nineteenth century it was an unusual one.

  He asked: “Why do you want to speak to me?”

  Now that the moment had come he sensed her reluctance to begin, not, he thought, out of embarrassment or regret that she had initiated the encounter, but because what she had to say was important and she needed to find the right words.

  She paused and looked at him. “Things are happening in England—in Britain—that are wrong. I belong to a small group of friends who think we ought to try to stop them. You used to be a member of the Council of England. You’re the Warden’s cousin. We thought that before we acted you might talk to him. We’re not really sure that you can help, but two of us, Luke—he’s a priest—and I, thought you might be able to. The leader of the group is my husband, Rolf. He agreed that I should talk to you.”

  “Why you? Why hasn’t he come himself?”

  “I suppose he thought—they thought—that I’m the one who might be able to persuade you.”

  “Persuade me to what?”

  “Just to meet us, so that we can explain what we have to do.”

  “Why can’t you explain now? Then I can decide whether I’m prepared to meet you. What group are you talking about?”

  “Just a group of five. We haven’t really got started yet. We may not need to if there is a hope of persuading the Warden to act.”

  He said carefully: “I was never a full member of the Council, only personal adviser to the Warden of England. I haven’t attended for over three years, I don’t see the Warden any longer. The relationship means nothing to either of us. My influence is probably no greater than yours.”

  “But you could see him. We can’t.”

  “You could try. He’s not totally inaccessible. People are able to telephone him, sometimes to speak to him. Naturally he has to protect himself.”

  “Against the people? But seeing him, even speaking to him, would be to let him and the State Security Police know we exist, perhaps even who we are. It wouldn’t be safe for us to try.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “Oh yes,” she said sadly. “Don’t you?”

  “No, I don’t think I do. But if you’re right, then you’re taking an extraordinary risk. What makes you think you can trust me? You’re surely not proposing to place your safety in my hands on the evidence of one seminar on Victorian literature? Have any of the rest of the group even met me?”

  “No. But two of us, Luke and I, have read some of your books.”

  He said drily: “It’s unwise to judge an academic’s personal probity from his written work.”

  “It was the only way we had. We know it’s a risk but it’s one we have to take. Please meet us. Please at least hear what we have to say.”

  The appeal in her voice was unmistakable, simple and direct, and, suddenly, he thought he understood why. It had been her idea to approach him. She had come with only the reluctant acquiescence of the rest of the group, perhaps even against the wish of its leader. The risk she was taking was her own. If he refused her, she would return empty-handed and humiliated. He found that he couldn’t do it.

  He said, knowing even as he spoke that it was a mistake: “All right. I’ll talk to you. Where and when do you next meet?”

  “On Sunday at ten o’clock in St. Margaret’s Church at Binsey. Do you know it?”

  “Yes, I know Binsey.”

  “At ten o’clock. In the church.”

  She had got what she had come for and she didn’t linger. He could scarcely catch her murmured, “Thank you. Thank you.” Then she slipped from his side so quickly and quietly that she might have been a shadow among the many moving shadows of the cloister.

  He loitered for a minute so that there would be no chance of overtaking her and then in silence and solitude made his way home.

  7

  Saturday 30 January 2021

  At seven o’clock this morning Jasper Palmer-Smith telephoned and asked me to visit him. The matter was urgent. He gave no explanation, but, then, he seldom does. I said I could be with him immediately after lunch. These
summonses, increasingly peremptory, are also becoming more common. He used to demand my presence about once every quarter; now it is about once a month. He taught me history and he was a marvellous teacher, at least of clever students. As an undergraduate I had never admitted to liking him, but had said with casual tolerance, “Jasper’s not so bad. I get on all right with him.” And I did, for an understandable if not particularly creditable reason: I was his favourite pupil of my year. He always had a favourite. The relationship was almost entirely academic. He is neither gay nor particularly fond of the young; indeed, his dislike of children has been legendary and they were always kept well out of sight and sound on the rare occasions when he condescended to accept a private dinner invitation. But each year he would select an undergraduate, invariably male, for his approval and patronage. We assumed that the criteria he demanded were intelligence first, looks second and wit third. He took time over the choice but, once made, it was irrevocable. It was a relationship without anxiety for the favourite, since, once approved, he could do no wrong. It was free, too, of peer resentment or envy, since JPS was too unpopular to be courted, and it was in fairness admitted that the favourite had no part in his selection. Admittedly one was expected to gain a First; all the favourites did. At the time I was chosen I was conceited and confident enough to see this as a probability but one which need not worry me for at least another two years. But I did work hard for him, wanted to please him, to justify his choice. To be selected from the crowd is always gratifying to self-esteem; one feels the need to make some return, a fact which accounts for a number of otherwise surprising marriages. Perhaps that was the basis of his own marriage to a mathematics fellow from New College five years older than he. They seemed, in company at least, to get on well enough together, but in general women disliked him intensely. During the early 1990s, when there was an upsurge of allegations about sexual harassment, he instituted an unsuccessful campaign to ensure that a chaperone was provided at all tutorials of female students on the grounds that otherwise he and his male colleagues were at risk from unjustified allegations. No one was more adept at demolishing a woman’s self-confidence while treating her with meticulous, indeed almost insulting, consideration and courtesy.