The Children of Men

by P. D. James

  “You don’t have to use them. There has always been pornography.”

  “State-tolerated but not State-provided.”

  “There’s not so great a difference. And what harm do they do to people without hope? There’s nothing like keeping the body occupied and the mind quiescent.”

  Theo had said: “But that isn’t really what they’re set up for, is it?”

  “Obviously not. Man has no hope of reproducing himself if he doesn’t copulate. Once that goes totally out of fashion we are lost.”

  But now, slowly, they moved on. Breaking a silence which was almost companionable, Theo asked: “Do you often go back to Woolcombe?”

  “That living mausoleum? The place appals me. I used to make the occasional duty visit to my mother. I haven’t been back for five years. No one ever dies now at Woolcombe. What the place needs is its own Quietus by way of a bomb. Odd, isn’t it? Almost the whole of modern medical research is dedicated to improving health in old age and extending the human life-span and we get more senility, not less. Extending it for what? We give them drugs to improve short-term memory, drugs to raise mood, drugs to increase appetite. They don’t need anything to make them sleep, that’s all they seem to do. What, I wonder, goes on in those senile minds during those long periods of half-consciousness. Memories, I suppose, prayers.”

  Theo said: “One prayer. ‘That I may see my children’s children and peace upon Israel.’ Did your mother recognize you before she died?”

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  “You told me once that your father hated her.”

  “I can’t think why. I suppose I was trying to shock you, or impress you. You were unshockable even as a boy. And nothing I’ve achieved, University, soldiering, becoming Warden, has really impressed you, has it? My parents got along all right. My father was gay, of course. Didn’t you realize? I used to care desperately when I was a boy, now it seems supremely unimportant. Why shouldn’t he live his life as he wished? I always have. That explains the marriage, of course. He wanted respectability and he needed a son, so he chose a woman who would be so dazzled by getting Woolcombe, a baronet and a title that she wouldn’t complain when she found that that was all that she was getting.”

  “Your father never made any approach to me.”

  Xan laughed. “What an egotist you are, Theo. You weren’t his type and he was morbidly conventional. Never shit in your own bed. Besides, he had Scovell. Scovell was in the car with him when he crashed. I managed to hush that up pretty effectively—out of a kind of filial piety, I suppose. I didn’t care who knew it, but he would have cared. I was a bad enough son. I owed him that.”

  Suddenly Xan said: “We shan’t be the last two men on earth. That privilege will go to an Omega, God help him. But if we were, what do you think we’d do?”

  “Drink. Salute the darkness and remember the light. Shout out a roll-call of names and then shoot ourselves.”

  “What names?”

  “Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven. Jesus Christ.”

  “This would be a roll-call of humanity. Leave out the gods, the prophets, the fanatics. I should like the season to be midsummer, the wine to be claret, and the place the bridge at Woolcombe.”

  “And since we are, after all, English, we could end with Prospero’s speech from The Tempest.”

  “If we weren’t too old to remember the words and, when the wine was finished, too weak to hold the guns.”

  They were now at the end of the lake. On the Mall, backed by Queen Victoria’s statue, the car was waiting. The chauffeur stood beside it, legs parted, arms folded, staring at them from under the rim of his cap. It was the stance of a gaoler, perhaps of an executioner. Theo pictured the cap replaced by a black skull-cap, the mask, the axe at his side.

  Then he heard Xan’s voice, Xan’s parting words: “Tell your friends, whoever they are, to be sensible. If they can’t be sensible, tell them to be prudent. I’m not a tyrant, but I can’t afford to be merciful. Whatever it is necessary to do, I shall do.”

  He looked at Theo, who thought for one extraordinary moment that he saw in Xan’s eyes a plea for understanding. Then he repeated: “Tell them, Theo. I shall do what needs to be done.”

  14

  Theo still found it difficult to get used to crossing an empty St. Giles. The memory of his first days in Oxford, the rows of tightly parked cars under the elms, of his increasing frustration waiting to cross against the almost ceaseless traffic, must have taken a firmer hold than more auspicious or significant recollections to be so easily triggered. He still found himself instinctively hesitating at the kerb, still could not see this emptiness without surprise. Crossing the wide street with a quick glance to left and right, he cut down the cobbled lane at the side of the Lamb and Flag pub and walked to the museum. The door was closed and for a moment he feared that the museum was also, and was irritated that he hadn’t bothered to telephone. But it opened as he turned the handle and he saw that the inner wooden door was ajar. He moved into the great square room of glass and iron.

  The air was very cold, colder, it seemed, than the street outside, and the museum was empty except for an elderly woman, so muffled that only her eyes were visible between the striped woollen scarf and her cap, who was presiding at the counter of the shop. He could see that the same postcards were on display: pictures of dinosaurs, of gems, of butterflies, of the crisply carved capitals of the pillars, photographs of the founding fathers of this secular cathedral to Victorian confidence, John Ruskin and Sir Henry Ackland sitting together in 1874, Benjamin Woodward with his sensitive melancholy face. He stood silently looking up at the massive roof supported by its series of cast-iron pillars, at the embellished spandrels between the arches branching with such elegance into leaves, fruits, flowers, trees and shrubs. But he knew that his unfamiliar tingle of excitement, more worrying than pleasant, had less to do with the building than with his meeting with Julian, and he tried to control it by concentrating on the ingenuity and quality of the wrought-iron work, the beauty of the carvings. It was, after all, his period. Here was Victorian confidence, Victorian earnestness; the respect for learning, for craftsmanship, for art; the conviction that the whole of man’s life could be lived in harmony with the natural world. He hadn’t been in the museum for over three years, yet nothing had changed. Nothing, indeed, had changed since he had first entered it as an undergraduate except the notice which he remembered seeing propped against a pillar, welcoming children but admonishing them—ineffectually, he recalled—not to run about or make a noise. The dinosaur with its great hooked thumb still had pride of place. Studying it, he was again in his Kingston primary school. Mrs. Ladbrook had pinned a drawing of the dinosaur on the blackboard and had explained that the great unwieldy animal with its minute head had been all body but little brain, and had accordingly failed to adapt and had perished. Even at ten years of age he had found the explanation unconvincing. The dinosaur, with its small brain, had survived for a couple of million years; it had done better than Homo sapiens.

  He passed through the arch at the far end of the main building into the Pitt Rivers Museum, one of the world’s greatest ethnological collections. The exhibits were so close together that it was difficult to know whether she was already waiting there, standing perhaps beside the forty-foot totem pole. But when he paused he heard no answering footfall. The silence was absolute, and he knew that he was alone but knew, too, that she would come.

  The Pitt Rivers seemed even more densely packed than on his last visit. In the cluttered show cabinets, model ships, masks, ivory and beadwork, amulets and votive offerings seemed mutely to offer themselves for his attention. He made his path between the cases and paused at last before an old favourite, still on display but with its label now so brown and faded that the print was hardly decipherable. It was a necklace of twenty-three curved and polished teeth of the sperm whale, given by King Thakombau in 1874 to the Reverend James Calvert and presented to the m
useum by his great-grandson, a pilot officer who had died of wounds early in the Second World War. Theo felt again the fascination he had felt as an undergraduate with the strange concatenation of events which linked the hands of a Fijian carver with the young doomed airman. He pictured again the ceremony of presentation, the King on his throne ringed by his grass-skirted warriors, the serious-faced missionary accepting the curious tribute. The 1939–45 war had been his own grandfather’s war; he, too, had been killed serving with the RAF, shot down in a Blenheim bomber on the great raid over Dresden. As an undergraduate, obsessed always with the mystery of time, he had liked to think that this gave him, also, a tenuous link with that long-dead King whose bones lay on the other side of the world.

  And then he heard the footsteps. He looked round but waited until Julian moved beside him. Her hair was uncovered but she was wearing a padded jacket and trousers. When she spoke, her breath rose in small bursts of mist.

  “I’m sorry I’m late. I cycled and got a puncture. Did you see him?”

  There was no greeting between them and he knew that, for her, he was just a messenger. He moved away from the showcase and she followed, looking from side to side, hoping, he supposed, to give the impression, even in this obvious emptiness, of two visitors who had casually met. It wasn’t convincing and he wondered why she bothered.

  He said: “I saw him. I saw the whole Council. Later I saw the Warden alone. I did no good; I may have done some harm. He knew that someone had prompted my visit. Now if you do go ahead with your plans, he’s been warned.”

  “You explained to him about the Quietus, the treatment of the Sojourners, what’s happening on the Isle of Man?”

  “That’s what you asked me to do and that’s what I did. I didn’t expect to be successful and I wasn’t. I know him. Oh, he may make some changes, although he gave no promises. He’ll probably shut down the remaining porn shops, but gradually, and liberalize the regulations for compulsory semen testing. It’s a waste of time, anyway, and I doubt whether he’s got the lab technicians to keep it going on a national scale much longer. Half of them have stopped caring. I missed two appointments last year and no one bothered to check up. I don’t think he’ll do anything about the Quietus except, perhaps, to ensure that in future it’s better organized.”

  “And the Man Penal Colony?”

  “Nothing. He won’t waste men and resources on pacifying the island. Why should he? Setting up the Penal Colony is probably the most popular thing he’s ever done.”

  “And the treatment of the Sojourners? Giving them full civil rights, a decent life here, the chance to stay?”

  “That seems very unimportant to him compared to what is important: the good order of Britain, ensuring that the race dies with some dignity.”

  She said: “Dignity? How can there be dignity if we care so little for the dignity of others?”

  They were close now to the great totem pole. Theo ran his hands over the wood. Not bothering to look at it, she said: “So we shall have to do what we can.”

  “There’s nothing you can do except in the end get yourselves killed or sent to the island—that is, if the Warden and the Council are as ruthless as you apparently believe. As Miriam can tell you, death would be preferable to the island.”

  She said, as if considering a serious plan: “Perhaps if a few people, a group of friends, got themselves exiled to the island deliberately, they could do something to change things. Or if we offered to go there voluntarily, why should the Warden forbid us, why should he care? Even a small group could help if they arrived in love.”

  Theo could hear the contempt in his voice. “Holding up the Cross of Christ before the savages, as the missionaries did in South America. Like them, get yourselves butchered on the beaches? Don’t you read any history? There are only two reasons for that kind of folly. One is that you have a yearning for martyrdom. There’s nothing new in that, if it’s the way your religion takes you. I’ve always seen it as an unhealthy mixture of masochism and sensuality but I can see its appeal to a certain cast of mind. What is new is that your martyrdom won’t even be commemorated, won’t even be noticed. In seventy-odd years it will have no possible value because there will be no one left on earth to give it value, no one even to put up a small wayside shrine to the new Oxford martyrs. The second reason is more ignoble and Xan would understand it very well. If you did succeed, what an intoxication of power! The Isle of Man pacified, the violent living in peace, crops sown and harvested, the sick cared for, Sunday services in the churches, the redeemed kissing the hands of the living saint who made it all possible. Then you’ll know what the Warden of England feels every waking moment, what he enjoys, what he can’t do without. Absolute power in your little kingdom. I can see the attraction of that; but it won’t happen.”

  They stood together for a moment in silence, then he said quietly: “Let it go. Don’t waste the rest of your life on a cause that is as futile as it’s impossible. Things will get better. In fifteen years’ time—and that’s such a little space—90 per cent of the people living in Britain will be over eighty. There won’t be the energy for evil any more than there will be the energy for good. Think what that England will be like. The great buildings empty and silent, the roads unrepaired, stretching between the overgrown hedges, the remnants of humanity huddling together for comfort and protection, the running-down of services of civilization and then, at the end, the failure of power and light. The hoarded candles will be lit and soon even the last candle will flicker and die. Doesn’t that make what’s happening on the Isle of Man seem unimportant?”

  She said: “If we are dying we can die as human beings, not as devils. Goodbye, and thank you for seeing the Warden.”

  But he had to make one more effort. He said: “I can’t think of any group less equipped to confront the apparatus of state. You’ve no money, no resources, no influence, no popular backing. You haven’t even a coherent philosophy of revolt. Miriam is doing it to avenge her brother. Gascoigne, apparently, because the Warden has appropriated the word Grenadiers. Luke out of some vague Christian idealism and a yearning for such abstracts as compassion, justice and love. Rolf hasn’t even the justification of moral indignation. His motive is ambition; he resents the Warden’s absolute power and would like it for himself. You’re doing it because you’re married to Rolf. He’s dragging you into dreadful danger to satisfy his own ambitions. He can’t compel you. Leave him. Break free.”

  She said gently: “I can’t not be married to him. I can’t leave him. And you’re wrong, that isn’t the reason. I’m with them because this is something I have to do.”

  “Yes, because Rolf wants you to.”

  “No, because God wants me to.”

  He wanted to bang his head against the totem pole in his frustration. “If you believe He exists, then presumably you believe that He gave you your mind, your intelligence. Use it. I thought you would have been too proud to make such a fool of yourself.”

  But she was impervious to such facile blandishments. She said: “The world is changed not by the self-regarding, but by men and women prepared to make fools of themselves. Goodbye, Dr. Faron. And thank you for trying.” She turned without touching him and he watched her leave.

  She hadn’t asked him not to betray them. She didn’t need to, but he was glad all the same that the words hadn’t been spoken. And he could have given no promise. He didn’t believe that Xan would condone torture, but for him the threat of torture would have been enough, and it struck him for the first time that he had, perhaps, misjudged Xan for the most naïve of reasons; he couldn’t believe that a man who was highly intelligent, who had humour and charm, a man he had called his friend, could be evil. Perhaps it was he, not Julian, who needed a lesson in history.

  15

  The group didn’t wait long. Two weeks after his meeting with Julian he came down to breakfast and found among the scatter of post on the mat a sheet of folded paper. The printed words were headed by the precisely drawn pi
cture of a small herring-like fish. It was like a child’s drawing; trouble had been taken. Theo read the message underneath with exasperated pity.

  TO THE PEOPLE OF BRITAIN

  We cannot shut our eyes any longer to the evils in our society. If our race is to die, let us at least die as free men and women, as human beings, not as devils. We make the following demands to the Warden of England.

  Call a general election and put your policies before the people.

  Give the Sojourners full civil rights including the right to live in their own homes, to send for their families and to remain in Britain at the end of their contract of service.

  Abolish the Quietus.

  Stop deporting convicted offenders to the Isle of Man Penal Colony and ensure that people already there can live in peace and decency.

  Stop the compulsory testing of semen and the examination of healthy young women and shut down the public porn shops.

  THE FIVE FISHES

  The words confronted him in their simplicity, their reasonableness, their essential humanity. Why was he so certain, he wondered, that they had been written by Julian? And yet they could do no good. What were the Five Fishes proposing? That people should march in force on their Local Council or should storm the old Foreign Office building? The group had no organization, no basis of power, no money, no apparent plan of campaign. The most they could hope for would be to make people think, to provoke discontent, to encourage men not to attend their next semen testing and women to refuse their next medical examination. And what difference would that make? The examinations were becoming increasingly perfunctory as hope died.

  The paper was of cheap quality, the message amateurishly printed. Presumably they had a press hidden in some church crypt or remote but accessible forest shed. But how long would it remain secret if the SSP troubled to hunt them down?