The Children of Men

by P. D. James

  When he awoke he thought at first that it was totally dark. Turning on his back he looked up into a sky faintly speckled with stars and saw before him the pale luminosity of the sea. He remembered where he was and what had happened. His head still ached, but now only with a dull, persistent pain. Passing his hand over his skull, he felt a lump as large as a hen’s egg, but it seemed to him there was no great damage done. He had no idea of the time and it was impossible to see the hands of his watch. He rubbed his cramped limbs into life, shook the sand from his coat and, putting it on, stumbled down to the edge of the sea, where he knelt and bathed his face. The water was icy cold. The sea was calmer now and there was a shimmering path of light under a fugitive moon. The gently heaving water stretched before him completely empty and he thought of the drowned, still shackled in rows, ribbed by the ship’s timbers, of white hair gracefully rising and falling in the tide. After returning to the beach huts, he rested for a few minutes on one of the steps, gathering his strength. He checked his jacket pockets. His leather notecase was soaking wet, but at least it was there and the contents were intact.

  He made his way up the steps to the promenade. There were only a few street lights but they were sufficient for him to see the dial of his watch. It was seven o’clock. He had been unconscious, and presumably then asleep, for less than four hours. As he came up to Trinity Street he saw with relief that the car was still there, but there was no other sign of life. He stood irresolute. He was beginning to shiver and he felt a longing for hot food and drink. The thought of driving back to Oxford in his present state appalled him, but his need to get out of Southwold was almost as imperative as his hunger and thirst. It was while he was standing irresolute that he heard the closing of a door and looked round. A woman with a small dog on a lead was emerging from one of the Victorian terraced houses fronting the little green. It was the only house in which he could see a light, and he noticed that the ground-floor window displayed a large notice, BED AND BREAKFAST.

  On impulse he walked over to her and said: “I’m afraid I’ve had an accident. I’m very wet. I don’t think I’m fit to drive home tonight. Have you a vacancy? My name is Faron, Theo Faron.”

  She was older than he expected, with a round, windburned face, gently creased like a balloon from which the air has been expelled, bright beady eyes and a small mouth, delicately shaped and once pretty but now, as he looked down on her, restlessly munching as if still relishing the after-taste of her last meal.

  She seemed unsurprised and, better still, unfrightened at his request and when she spoke her voice was pleasant. “I have a room vacant if you would just wait until I have taken Chloe for her evening duties. There’s a special little place reserved for the dogs. We take care not to soil the beach. Mothers used to complain if the beach wasn’t clean for the children and—old habits remain. I’m EMO—Evening Meal Optional. Would you be wanting that?”

  She looked up at him and for the first time he saw a trace of anxiety in the bright eyes. He said he very much wanted it.

  She returned within three minutes and he followed her down the narrow hall, then into a back sitting-room. It was small, almost claustrophobic, crammed with old-fashioned furniture. He had an impression of fading chintz, of a mantelshelf crowded with small china animals, of patchwork cushions on the low fireside chairs, of photographs in silver frames and the smell of lavender. It seemed to him that the room was a sanctum, its flower-papered walls enclosing the comfort and security which in his anxiety-fraught childhood he had never known.

  She said: “I’m afraid I haven’t very much in the refrigerator tonight, but I could give you soup and an omelette.”

  “That would be wonderful.”

  “The soup isn’t home-made, I’m afraid, but I mix two tins to make it more interesting and add a little something, chopped parsley or an onion. I think you will find it palatable. Did you want it in the dining-room, or here in the sitting-room, in front of the fire? That might be cosier for you.”

  “I’d like to have it here.”

  He settled himself in a low button-backed chair, stretching his legs out in front of the electric fire, watching the steam rise from his drying trousers. The food came quickly, the soup first—a mixture, he detected, of mushroom and chicken sprinkled with parsley. It was hot, and surprisingly good, and the roll and butter accompanying it were fresh. Then she brought in a herb omelette. She asked if he would like tea, coffee or cocoa. What he wanted was alcohol, but that seemed not to be on offer. He settled for tea and she left him to drink it alone, as she had left him for the whole of the meal.

  When he had finished, she reappeared, as if she had been waiting at the door, and said: “I’ve put you in the back room. Sometimes it’s nice to get away from the sound of the sea. And don’t worry about the bed being aired. I’m most particular about airing the beds. I’ve put in two bottles. You can kick them out if you’re too hot. I’ve turned on the immersion heater so there’s plenty of hot water if you want a bath.”

  His limbs ached from the hours lying on the damp sand and the prospect of stretching them out in hot water was appealing. But, hunger and thirst appeased, tiredness took over. It was too much trouble even to run the bath.

  He said: “I’ll bath in the morning, if I may.”

  The room was on the second floor and at the back as she had promised. Standing aside as he entered, she said: “I’m afraid I haven’t any pyjamas large enough for you but there’s a very old dressing-gown which you could use. It used to belong to my husband.”

  She seemed unsurprised and unworried that he had brought none of his own. An electric fire had been plugged in close to the Victorian grate. She bent to switch it off before leaving and he realized that what she was charging wouldn’t cover all-night heating. But he didn’t need it. Hardly had she closed the door after her than he tore off his clothes, drew back the bed-coverings and slid into warmth and comfort and oblivion.

  Breakfast next morning was served to him in the ground-floor dining-room, at the front of the house. It was set with five tables, each with a pristine white table-cloth and a small vase of artificial flowers, but there were no other guests.

  The room, with its cluttered emptiness, its air of promising more than could be provided, sparked a memory of the last holiday he had taken with his parents. He had been eleven and they had spent a week at Brighton staying in a bed-and-breakfast boarding house on the cliff top towards Kemp Town. It had rained nearly every day and his memory of the holiday was of the smell of wet raincoats, of the three of them huddled in shelters looking out at the grey heaving sea, of walking the streets in search of affordable entertainment until it was half past six and they could return for the evening meal. They had eaten in just such a room as this, the family groups, unused to being waited on, sitting in mute embarrassed patience until the proprietress, determinedly cheerful, came in with the laden trays of meat and two vegetables. Throughout the holiday he had been resentful and bored. It occurred to him now, for the first time, how little joy his parents had had in their lives and how little he, their only child, had contributed to that meagre store.

  She waited on him eagerly, providing a full breakfast of bacon, eggs and fried potatoes, obviously torn between her desire to watch him enjoy it and the realization that he would prefer to eat alone. He ate quickly, anxious to get away.

  As he paid her he said: “It was good of you to take me in, a solitary man and without an overnight bag. Some people might have been reluctant.”

  “Oh no, I wasn’t at all surprised to see you. I wasn’t worried. You were an answer to prayer.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever been called that before.”

  “Oh, but you were. I haven’t had a B and B for four months now and one feels so useless. There’s nothing worse than feeling useless when you’re old. So I prayed that God would show me what I ought to do, whether there was any point in carrying on. And He sent you. I always find, don’t you, that when you’re in real trouble, faced with
problems which seem too much for you, and just ask, He does answer.”

  “No,” he said, counting out the coins, “no, I can’t say that’s been my experience.”

  She went on as if she hadn’t heard him: “I realize, of course, that I shall have to give up eventually. The little town is dying. We aren’t scheduled as a population centre. So the newly retired don’t come here any more and the young leave. But we shall be all right. The Warden has promised that everyone at the end will be cared for. I expect I’ll be moved to a little flat in Norwich.”

  He thought: Her God provides the occasional overnight customer, but it is the Warden she relies on for the essentials. On impulse he asked: “Did you see the Quietus here yesterday?”

  “Quietus?”

  “The one held here. The boats at the pier.”

  She said, her voice firm: “I think you must be mistaken, Mr. Faron. There was no Quietus. We have none of that kind of thing in Southwold.”

  After that he sensed that she was as anxious to see him go as he was to leave. He thanked her again. She hadn’t told him her name and he didn’t ask. He was tempted to say: “I’ve been very comfortable. I must come back and spend a short holiday with you.” But he knew that he would never return and her kindness deserved better of him than a casual lie.

  10

  Next morning he wrote the single word YES on a postcard and folded it carefully and precisely, running his thumb along the crease. The act of writing those three letters seemed portentous in ways he couldn’t as yet foresee, a commitment to more than his promised visit to Xan.

  Shortly after ten o’clock he made his way over the narrow cobbles of Pusey Lane to the museum. A single custodian was on duty, seated as usual at a wooden table opposite the door. He was very old and he was sound asleep. His right arm, curved on the table-top, cradled a high-domed, speckled head spiked with bristles of grey hairs. His left hand looked mummified, a collection of bones loosely held together by a stained glove of mottled skin. Close to it lay an open paperback, Plato’s Theaetetus. He was probably a scholar, one of the unpaid band who volunteered to take turns and to keep the museum open. His presence, asleep or awake, was unnecessary; no one was going to risk deportation to the Isle of Man for the few medallions in the display case, and who could or would want to carry out the great Victory of Samafaya or the Wings of the Nike of Samothrace?

  Theo had been reading history, yet it was Xan who had introduced him to the Cast Museum, entering it light-footed, as joyously expectant as a child with a new nursery of toys showing off its treasures. Theo, too, had fallen under its spell. Even in the museum their tastes differed. Xan liked best the rigour and the stern unemotional faces of the early-classical male statues on the ground floor. Theo preferred the lower room, with its examples of the softer, flowing Hellenistic lines. Nothing, he saw, was changed. Casts and statues stood ranked under the light of the high windows, like the closely packed lumber of a discarded civilization, the armless torsos with their grave faces and arrogant lips, the elegantly dressed curls above bound foreheads, eyeless gods secretly smiling, as if they were privy to a truth more profound than the spurious message of these ice-cold limbs: that civilizations rise and fall but man endures.

  As far as he knew, once he had gone down Xan had never revisited the museum, but to Theo it had become a place of refuge over the years. In those dreadful months following Natalie’s death and his move to St. John Street, it had provided a convenient escape from his wife’s grief and resentment. He could sit on one of the hard utilitarian chairs, reading or thinking in this silent air, seldom disturbed by a human voice. From time to time small groups of school children or individual students would come into the museum and then he would close his book and leave. The special atmosphere which the place held for him depended on his being alone.

  Before doing what he had come to do, he walked round the museum, partly from a half-superstitious feeling that, even in this silence and emptiness, he should act like a casual visitor, partly from the need to revisit old delights and see if they could still touch him: the Attic gravestone of the young mother from the fourth century B.C., the servant holding the swaddled baby, the tombstone of a little girl with doves, grief speaking across nearly three thousand years. He looked and thought and remembered.

  When he came up again to the ground floor he saw that the attendant was still asleep. The head of the Diadoumenos was still in its place in the ground floor gallery but he looked at it with less emotion than when he had first seen it thirty-two years ago. Now the pleasure was detached, intellectual; then he had run his finger over the forehead, had traced the line from nose to throat, shaken with that mixture of awe, reverence and excitement which, in those heady days, great art could always produce in him.

  Taking the folded postcard from his pocket, he inserted it between the base of the marble and the shelf, its edge just visible to a keen and searching eye. Whoever Rolf sent to retrieve it should be able to dislodge it with the tip of a fingernail, a coin, a pencil. He had no fear of anyone else finding it and, even if they did, the message could tell them nothing. Checking that the edge of the card could be seen, he felt again the mixture of irritation and embarrassment which he had first felt in the church at Binsey. But now the conviction that he was becoming unwillingly involved in an enterprise as ridiculous as it was futile was less powerful. The image of Hilda’s half-naked body rolling in the surf, of that thin, wailing procession, the crack of a gun on bone; these imposed dignity and seriousness on even the most childish games. He had only to shut his eyes to hear again the crash of the falling wave, its long withdrawing sigh.

  There was some dignity and much safety in the self-selected role of spectator, but, faced with some abominations, a man had no option but to step onto the stage. He would see Xan. But was he motivated less by outrage at the horror of the Quietus than by the memory of his own humiliation, the carefully judged blow, his body hauled up the beach and dumped as if it were an unwanted carcase?

  As he was passing the table on his way to the door the aged custodian stirred and sat up. Perhaps the footfall had penetrated his half-sleeping mind with a warning of duty neglected. His first gaze at Theo was one of fear almost amounting to terror. And then Theo recognized him. He was Digby Yule, a retired classics don from Merton.

  Theo introduced himself. “It’s good to see you, sir. How are you?”

  The question seemed to increase Yule’s nervousness. His right hand began an apparently uncontrolled drumming of the table-top. He said: “Oh, very well, yes, very well, thank you, Faron. I’m managing all right. I do for myself, you know. I live in lodgings off the Iffley Road but I manage very well. I do everything for myself. The landlady isn’t an easy woman—well, she has her own problems—but I’m no trouble to her. I’m no trouble to anyone.”

  What was he afraid of, Theo wondered. The whispered call to the SSP that here was another citizen who had become a burden on others? His senses seemed to have become preternaturally sharp. He could smell the faint tang of disinfectant, see the flakes of soapy foam on stubble and chin, note that the half-inch of shirt-cuff protruding from the shabby jacket sleeves was clean but unironed. Then it occurred to him that it was in his power to say: “If you’re not comfortable where you are there’s plenty of room with me in St. John Street. I’m on my own now. It would be pleasant for me to have some company.”

  But he told himself firmly that it wouldn’t be pleasant, that the offer would be seen as both presumptuous and condescending, that the old man wouldn’t be able to cope with the stairs, those convenient stairs which excused him from the obligations of benevolence. Hilda wouldn’t have been able to cope with the stairs either. But Hilda was dead.

  Yule was saying: “I just come here twice a week. Monday and Friday, you know. I’m standing in for a colleague. It’s good to have something useful to do and I like the quality of the silence. It’s different from the silence in any other Oxford building.”

  Theo thought: Perhaps h
e will die here quietly, sitting at this table. What better place to go? And then he had an image of the old man left there, still at the table, of the last custodian locking and bolting the door, of the endless, unbroken silent years, of the frail body mummified or rotting at last under the marble gaze of those blank unseeing eyes.

  11

  Tuesday 9 February 2021

  Today I saw Xan for the first time in three years. There was no difficulty in getting an appointment, although it wasn’t his face that appeared on the televiewer, but one of his aides, a Grenadier with sergeant’s stripes. Xan is guarded, cooked for, driven, serviced by a small company of his private army; even from the beginning no women secretaries or personal assistants, no women housekeepers or cooks were employed at the court of the Warden. I used to wonder whether this was to avoid even the hint of sexual scandal or whether the loyalty Xan demanded was essentially masculine: hierarchical, unquestioning, unemotional.

  He sent a car for me. I told the Grenadier that I would prefer to drive to London myself, but he merely said with unemphatic finality: “The Warden will send a car and driver, sir. He will be at the door at nine-thirty.”

  Somehow I had expected that it would still be George, who was my regular driver when I was Xan’s adviser. I liked George. He had a cheerful, engaging face with protruding ears, a wide mouth and a rather broad, retroussé nose. He seldom spoke, and never unless I began the conversation. I suspected that all drivers worked under that prohibition. But there emanated from him—or so I liked to believe—a spirit of general goodwill, perhaps even of approval, which made our drives together a restful and anxiety-free interlude between the frustrations of Council meetings and the unhappiness of home. This driver was leaner, aggressively smart in his apparently new uniform, and the eyes which met mine gave nothing away, not even dislike.