The Children of Men

Friday 1 January

Early this morning, 1 January 2021, three minutes after midnight, the last human being to be born on earth was killed in a pub brawl in a suburb of Buenos Aires, aged twenty-five years, two months and twelve days. If the first reports are to believed, Joseph Ricardo died as he had lived. The distinction, if one can call it that, of being the last human whose birth was officially recorded, unrelated as it was to any personal virtue or talent, had always been difficult for him to handle. And now he is dead. The news was given to us here in Britain on the nine o’clock programme of the State Radio Service and I heard it fortuitously. I had settled down to begin this diary of the last half of my life when I noticed the time and thought I might as well catch the headlines to the nine o’clock bulletin. Ricardo’s death was the last item mentioned, and then only briefly, a couple of sentences delivered without emphasis in the newscaster’s carefully non-committal voice. But it seemed to me, hearing it, that it was a small additional justification for beginning the diary today: the first day of a new year and my fiftieth birthday. As a child I had always liked that distinction, despite the inconvenience of having it follow Christmas too quickly so that one present—it never seemed notably superior to the one I would in any case have received—had to do for both celebrations.

As I begin writing, the three events, the New Year, my fiftieth birthday, Ricardo’s death, hardly justify sullying the first pages of this new loose-leaf notebook. But I shall continue, one small additional defence against personal accidie. If there is nothing to record, I shall record the nothingness and then if, and when, I reach old age—as most of us can expect to, we have become experts at prolonging life—I shall open one of my tins of hoarded matches and light my small personal bonfire of vanities. I have no intention of leaving the diary as a record of one man’s last years. Even in my most egotistical moods I am not as self-deceiving as that. What possible interest can there be in the journal of Theodore Faron, Doctor of Philosophy, Fellow of Merton College in the University of Oxford, historian of the Victorian age, divorced, childless, solitary, whose only claim to notice is that he is cousin to Xan Lyppiatt, the dictator and Warden of England. No additional personal record is, in any case, necessary. All over the world nation states are preparing to store their testimony for the posterity which we can still occasionally convince ourselves may follow us, those creatures from another planet who may land on this green wilderness and ask what kind of sentient life once inhabited it. We are storing our books and manuscripts, the great paintings, the musical scores and instruments, the artefacts. The world’s greatest libraries will in forty years’ time at most be darkened and sealed. The buildings, those that are still standing, will speak for themselves. The soft stone of Oxford is unlikely to survive more than a couple of centuries. Already the University is arguing about whether it is worth refacing the crumbling Sheldonian. But I like to think of those mythical creatures landing in St. Peter’s Square and entering the great Basilica, silent and echoing under the centuries of dust. Will they realize that this was once the greatest of man’s temples to one of his many gods? Will they be curious about his nature, this deity who was worshipped with such pomp and splendour, intrigued by the mystery of his symbol, at once so simple, the two crossed sticks, ubiquitous in nature, yet laden with gold, gloriously jewelled and adorned? Or will their values and their thought processes be so alien to ours that nothing of awe or wonder will be able to touch them? But despite the discovery—in 1997, was it?—of a planet which the astronomers told us could support life, few of us really believe that they will come. They must be there. It is surely unreasonable to credit that only one small star in the immensity of the universe is capable of developing and supporting intelligent life. But we shall not get to them and they will not come to us.

Twenty years ago, when the world was already half-convinced that our species had lost forever the power to reproduce, the search to find the last known human birth became a universal obsession, elevated to a matter of national pride, an international contest as ultimately pointless as it was fierce and acrimonious. To qualify, the birth had to be officially notified, the date and precise time recorded. This effectively excluded a high proportion of the human race where the day but not the hour was known, and it was accepted, but not emphasized, that the result could never be conclusive. Almost certainly, in some remote jungle, in some primitive hut, the last human being had slipped largely unnoticed into an unregarding world. But after months of checking and rechecking, Joseph Ricardo, of mixed race, born illegitimately in a Buenos Aires hospital at two minutes past three Western time on 19 October 1995, had been officially recognized. Once the result was proclaimed, he was left to exploit his celebrity as best he could while the world, as if suddenly aware of the futility of the exercise, turned its attention elsewhere. And now he is dead and I doubt whether any country will be eager to drag the other candidates from oblivion.

We are outraged and demoralized less by the impending end of our species, less even by our inability to prevent it, than by our failure to discover the cause. Western science and Western medicine haven’t prepared us for the magnitude and humiliation of this ultimate failure. There have been many diseases which have been difficult to diagnose or cure and one which almost depopulated two continents before it spent itself. But we have always in the end been able to explain why. We have given names to the viruses and germs which, even today, take possession of us, much to our chagrin since it seems a personal affront that they should still assail us, like old enemies who keep up the skirmish and bring down the occasional victim when their victory is assured, Western science has been our god. In the variety of its power it has preserved, comforted, healed, warmed, fed and entertained us and we have felt free to criticize and occasionally reject it as men have always rejected their gods, but in the knowledge that, despite our apostasy, this deity, our creature and our slave, would still provide for us; the anaesthetic for the pain, the spare heart, the new lung, the antibiotic, the moving wheels and the moving pictures. The light will always come on when we press the switch and if it doesn’t we can find out why. Science was never a subject I was at home with. I understood little of it at school and I understand little more now that I’m fifty. Yet it has been my god too, even if its achievements are incomprehensible to me, and I share the universal disillusionment of those whose god has died. I can clearly remember the confident words of one biologist spoken when it had finally become apparent that nowhere in the whole world was there a pregnant woman: “It may take us some time to discover the cause of this apparent universal infertility.” We have had twenty-five years and we no longer even expect to succeed. Like a lecherous stud suddenly stricken with impotence, we are humiliated at the very heart of our faith in ourselves. For all our knowledge, our intelligence, our power, we can no longer do what the animals do without thought. No wonder we both worship and resent them.

The year 1995 became known as Year Omega and the term is now universal. The great public debate in the late 1990s was whether the country which discovered a cure for the universal infertility would share this with the world and on what terms. It was accepted that this was a global disaster and that it must be met by the response of a united world. We still, in the late 1990s, spoke of Omega in terms of a disease, a malfunction which would in time be diagnosed and then corrected, as man had found a cure for tuberculosis, diphtheria, polio and even in the end, although too late, for AIDS. As the years passed and the united efforts under the aegis of the United Nations came to nothing, this resolve of complete openness fell apart. Research became secret, nations’ efforts a cause of fascinated, suspicious attention. The European Community acted in concert, pouring in research facilities and manpower. The European Centre for Human Fertility, outside Paris, was among the most prestigious in the world. This in turn co-operated, at least overtly, with the United States, whose efforts were if anything greater. But there was no inter-race co-operation; the prize was too great. The terms on which the secret might be shared were a cause of passionate speculation and debate. It was accepted that the cure, once found, would have to be shared; this was scientific knowledge which no race ought to, or could, keep to itself indefinitely. But across continents, national and racial boundaries, we watched each other suspiciously, obsessively, feeding on rumour and speculation. The old craft of spying returned. Old agents crawled out of comfortable retirement in Weybridge and Cheltenham and passed on their trade craft. Spying had, of course, never stopped, even after the official end of the Cold War in 1991. Man is too addicted to this intoxicating mixture of adolescent buccaneering and adult perfidy to relinquish it entirely. In the late 1990s the bureaucracy of espionage flourished as it hadn’t since the end of the Cold War, producing new heroes, new villains, new mythologies. In particular we watched Japan, half-fearing that this technically brilliant people might already be on the way to finding the answer. Ten years on we still watch, but we watch with less anxiety and without hope. The spying still goes on but it is twenty-five years now since a human being was born and in our hearts few of us believe that the cry of a newborn child will ever be heard again on our planet. Our interest in sex is waning. Romantic and idealized love has taken over from crude carnal satisfaction despite the efforts of the Warden of England, through the national porn shops, to stimulate our flagging appetites. But we have our sensual substitutes; they are available to all on the National Health Service. Our ageing bodies are pummelled, stretched, stroked, caressed, anointed, scented. We are manicured and pedicured, measured and weighed. Lady Margaret Hall has become the massage centre for Oxford and here every Tuesday afternoon I lie on the couch and look out over the still-tended gardens, enjoying my State-provided, carefully measured hour of sensual pampering. And how assiduously, with what obsessive concern, do we intend to retain the illusion, if not of youth, of vigorous middle age. Golf is now the national game. If there had been no Omega, the conservationists would protest at the acres of countryside, some of it our most beautiful, which have been distorted and rearranged to provide ever more challenging courses. All are free; this is part of the Warden’s promised pleasure. Some have become exclusive, keeping unwelcome members out, not by prohibition, which is illegal, but by those subtle, discriminating signals which in Britain even the least sensitive are trained from childhood to interpret. We need our snobberies; equality is a political theory not a practical policy, even in Xan’s egalitarian Britain. I tried once to play golf but found the game immediately and totally unattractive, perhaps because of my ability to shift divots of earth, but never the ball. Now I run. Almost daily I pound the soft earth of Port Meadow or the deserted footpaths of Wytham Wood, counting the miles, subsequently measuring heartbeat, weight loss, stamina. I am just as anxious to stay alive as anyone else, just as obsessed with the functioning of my body.

Much of this I can trace to the early 1990s: the search for alternative medicine, the perfumed oils, the massage, the stroking and anointing, the crystal-holding, the non-penetrative sex. Pornography and sexual violence on film, on television, in books, in life, had increased and became more explicit but less and less in the West we made love and bred children. It seemed at the time a welcome development in a world grossly polluted by over-population. As a historian I see it as the beginning of the end.

We should have been warned in the early 1990s. As early as 1991 a European Community Report showed a slump in the number of children born in Europe—8.2 million in 1990, with particular drops in the Roman Catholic countries. We thought that we knew the reasons, that the fall was deliberate, a result of more liberal attitudes to birth control and abortion, the postponement of pregnancy by professional women pursuing their careers, the wish of families for a higher standard of living. And the fall in population was complicated by the spread of AIDS, particularly in Africa. Some European countries began to pursue a vigorous campaign to encourage the birth of children, but most of us thought the fall was desirable, even necessary. We were polluting the planet with our numbers; if we were breeding less it was to be welcomed. Most of the concern was less about a falling population than about the wish of nations to maintain their own people, their own culture, their own race, to breed sufficient young to maintain their economic structures. But as I remember it, no one suggested that the fertility of the human race was dramatically changing. When Omega came it came with dramatic suddenness and was received with incredulity. Overnight, it seemed, the human race had lost its power to breed. The discovery in July 1994 that even the frozen sperm stored for experiment and artificial insemination had lost its potency was a peculiar horror casting over Omega the pall of superstitious awe, of witchcraft, of divine intervention. The old gods reappeared, terrible in their power. The world didn’t give up hope until the generation born in 1995 reached sexual maturity. But when the testing was complete and not one of them could produce fertile sperm, we knew that this was indeed the end of Homo sapiens. It was in that year, 2008, that the suicides increased. Not mainly among the old, but among my generation, the middle-aged, the generation who would have to bear the brunt of an ageing and decaying society’s humiliating but insistent needs. Xan, who had by then taken over as the Warden of England, tried to stop what was becoming an epidemic by imposing fines on the surviving nearest relations, just as the Council now pays handsome pensions to the relations of the incapacitated and dependent old who kill themselves. It had its effect; the suicide rate fell compared with the enormous figures in other parts of the world, particularly countries whose religion was based on ancestor worship, on the continuance of a family. But those who lived gave way to the almost universal negativism, what the French named ennui universal. It came upon us like an insidious disease; indeed, it was a disease, with its soon-familiar symptoms of lassitude, depression, ill-defined malaise, a readiness to give way to minor infections, a perpetual disabling headache. I fought against it, as did many others. Some, Xan among them, have never been afflicted with it, protected perhaps by a lack of imagination or, in his case, by an egotism so powerful that no external catastrophe can prevail against it. I still occasionally need to struggle but I now fear it less. The weapons I fight it with are also my consolations: books, music, food, wine, nature.

These assuaging satisfactions are also bittersweet reminders of the transitoriness of human joy; but when was it ever lasting? I can still find pleasure, more intellectual than sensual, in the effulgence of an Oxford spring, the blossoms in Belbroughton Road which seem lovelier every year, sunlight moving on stone walls, horse-chestnut trees in full bloom, tossing in the wind, the smell of a bean field in flower, the first snowdrops, the fragile compactness of a tulip. Pleasure need not be less keen because there will be centuries of springs to come, their blossom unseen by human eyes, the walls will crumble, the trees die and rot, the gardens revert to weeds and grass, because all beauty will outlive the human intelligence which records, enjoys and celebrates it. I tell myself this, but do I believe it when the pleasure now comes so rarely and, when it does, is so indistinguishable from pain? I can understand how the aristocrats and great landowners with no hope of posterity leave their estates untended. We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life. But our minds reach back through centuries for the reassurance of our ancestry and, without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruins.

In our universal bereavement, like grieving parents, we have put away all painful reminders of our loss. The children’s playgrounds in our parks have been dismantled. For the first twelve years after Omega the swings were looped up and secured, the slides and climbing frames left unpainted. Now they have finally gone and the asphalt playgrounds have been grassed over or sown with flowers like small mass graves. The toys have been burnt, except for the dolls, which have become for some half-demented women a substitute for children. The schools, long closed, have been boarded up or used as centres for adult education. The children’s books have been systematically removed from our libraries. Only on tape and records do we now hear the voices of children, only on film or on television programmes do we see the bright, moving images of the young. Some find them unbearable to watch but most feed on them as they might a drug.

The children born in the year 1995 are called Omegas. No generation has been more studied, more examined, more agonized over, more valued or more indulged. They were our hope, our promise of salvation, and they were—they still are—exceptionally beautiful. It sometimes seems that nature in her ultimate unkindness wished to emphasize what we have lost. The boys, men of twenty-five now, are strong, individualistic, intelligent and handsome as young gods. Many are also cruel, arrogant and violent, and this has been found to be true of Omegas all over the world. The dreaded gangs of the Painted Faces who drive round the countryside at night to ambush and terrorize unwary travellers are rumoured to be Omegas. It is said that when an Omega is caught he is offered immunity if he is prepared to join the State Security Police, whereas the rest of the gang, no more guilty, are sent on conviction to the Penal Colony on the Isle of Man, to which all those convicted of crimes of violence, burglary or repeated theft are now banished. But if we are unwise to drive unprotected on our crumbling secondary roads, our towns and cities are safe, crime effectively dealt with at last by a return to the deportation policy of the nineteenth century.

The female Omegas have a different beauty, classical, remote, listless, without animation or energy. They have their distinctive style which other women never copy, perhaps fear to copy. They wear their hair long and loose, their foreheads bound with braid or ribbon, plain or plaited. It is a style which suits only the classically beautiful face, with its high forehead and large, widely spaced eyes. Like their male counterparts, they seem incapable of human sympathy. Men and women, the Omegas are a race apart, indulged, propitiated, feared, regarded with a half-superstitious awe. In some countries, so we are told, they are ritually sacrificed in fertility rites resurrected after centuries of superficial civilization. I occasionally wonder what we in Europe will do if news reaches us that these burnt offerings have been accepted by the ancient gods and a live child has been born.

Perhaps we have made our Omegas what they are by our own folly; a regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development. If from infancy you treat children as gods they are liable in adulthood to act as devils. I have one vivid memory of them which remains the living icon of how I see them, how they see themselves. It was last June, a hot but unsultry day of clear light with slow-moving clouds, like wisps of muslin, moving across a high, azure sky, the air sweet and cool to the cheek, a day with none of the humid languor I associate with an Oxford summer. I was visiting a fellow academic in Christ Church and had entered under Wolsey’s wide, four-centred arch to cross Tom Quad when I saw them, a group of four female and four male Omegas elegantly displaying themselves on the stone plinth. The women, with their crimped aureoles of bright hair, their high bound brows, the contrived folds and loops of their diaphanous dresses, looked as though they had stepped down from the Pre-Raphaelite windows in the cathedral. The four males stood behind them, legs firmly apart, arms folded, gazing not at them but over their heads, seeming to assert an arrogant suzerainty over the whole quad. As I passed, the females turned on me their blank, incurious gaze, which nevertheless signalled an unmistakable flicker of contempt. The males briefly scowled, then averted their eyes as if from an object unworthy of further notice and gazed again over the quad. I thought then, as I do now, how glad I was that I no longer had to teach them.

Most of the Omegas took a first degree, but that was all; they aren’t interested in further education. The undergraduate Omegas I taught were intelligent but disruptive, ill-disciplined and bored. Their unspoken question, “What is the point of all this?,” was one I was glad I wasn’t required to answer. History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future, is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species.

The university colleague who takes Omega with total calmness is Daniel Hurstfield, but then, as professor of statistical palaeontology, his mind ranges over a different dimension of time. As with the God of the old hymn, a thousand ages in his sight are like an evening gone. Sitting beside me at a college feast in the year when I was wine secretary, he said: “What are you giving us with the grouse, Faron? That should do very nicely. Sometimes I fear you are a little inclined to be too adventurous. And I hope you have established a rational drinking-up programme. It would distress me, on my deathbed, to contemplate the barbarian Omegas making free with the college cellar.”

I said: “We’re thinking about it. We’re still laying down, of course, but on a reduced scale. Some of my colleagues feel we are being too pessimistic.”

“Oh, I don’t think you can possibly be too pessimistic. I can’t think why you all seem so surprised at Omega. After all, of the four billion life forms which have existed on this planet, three billion, nine hundred and sixty million are now extinct. We don’t know why. Some by wanton extinction, some through natural catastrophe, some destroyed by meteorites and asteroids. In the light of these mass extinctions it really does seem unreasonable to suppose that Homo sapiens should be exempt. Our species will have been one of the shortest-lived of all, a mere blink, you may say, in the eye of time. Omega apart, there may well be an asteroid of sufficient size to destroy this planet on its way to us now.”

He began loudly to masticate his grouse as if the prospect afforded him the liveliest satisfaction.

Tuesday 5 January

During those two years when, at Xan’s invitation, I was a kind of observer-adviser at the Council meetings, it was usual for journalists to write that we had been brought up together, that we were as close as brothers. It wasn’t true. From the age of twelve we spent the summer holidays together, but that was all. The error wasn’t surprising. I half believed it myself. Even now the summer term seems in retrospect a boring concatenation of predictable days dominated by timetables, neither painful nor feared but to be endured and occasionally, briefly, enjoyed, since I was both clever and reasonably popular, until the blessed moment of release. After a couple of days at home I would be sent to Woolcombe.

Even as I write I am trying to understand what I felt for Xan then, why the bond remained so strong and for so long. It wasn’t sexual, except that in nearly all close friendships there is a subcutaneous pricking of sexual attraction. We never touched, not even, I remember, in boisterous play. There was no boisterous play—Xan hated to be touched and I early recognized and respected his invisible no-man’s-land, as he respected mine. It wasn’t, either, the usual story of the dominant partner, the elder, if only by four months, leading the younger, his admiring disciple. He never made me feel inferior; that wasn’t his way. He welcomed me without particular warmth but as if he were receiving back his twin, a part of himself. He had charm, of course; he still has. Charm is often despised but I can never see why. No one has it who isn’t capable of genuinely liking others, at least at the actual moment of meeting and speaking. Charm is always genuine; it may be superficial but it isn’t false. When Xan is with another person he gives the impression of intimacy, interest, of not wanting any other company. He could hear of that person’s death the next day with equanimity, could probably even kill him without scruple. Now I can watch him on television as he gives his quarterly report to the nation and see the same charm.

Both our mothers are now dead. They were nursed to the end at Woolcombe, which is now a nursing home for the nominees of the Council. Xan’s father was killed in a car crash in France the year after Xan became Warden of England. There was some mystery about it; no details were ever released. I wondered about the crash at the time, still do wonder, which tells me a lot about my relationship with Xan. With part of my mind I still believe him capable of anything, half needing to believe him ruthless, invincible, beyond the bounds of ordinary behaviour, as he had seemed to be when we were boys.

The sisters’ lives had taken very different paths. My aunt, by a fortunate combination of beauty, ambition and good luck, had married a middle-aged baronet, my mother a middle-grade civil servant. Xan was born at Woolcombe, one of the most beautiful manor houses in Dorset. I was born in Kingston, Surrey, in the maternity wing of the local hospital, and taken home to a semi-detached Victorian house in a long, dull road of identical houses leading up to Richmond Park. I was brought up in an atmosphere redolent of resentment. I remember my mother packing for my summer visit to Woolcombe, anxiously sorting out clean shirts, holding up my best jacket, shaking it and scrutinizing it with what seemed a personal animosity, as if simultaneously resenting what it had cost and the fact that, since it had been bought too large, to allow for growth, and was now too small for comfort, there had been no intervening period in which it had actually fitted. Her attitude to her sister’s good fortune was expressed in a series of often-repeated phrases: “Just as well they don’t dress for dinner. I’m not handing out for a dinner jacket, not at your age. Ridiculous!” And the inevitable question—asked with averted eyes, for she was not without shame: “They get on all right, I suppose? Of course that class of person always sleeps in separate rooms.” And at the end: “Of course, it’s all right for Serena.” I knew even at twelve years of age that it wasn’t all right for Serena.

I suspect that my mother thought a great deal more often of her sister and brother-in-law than they ever thought of her. And even my unfashionable Christian name I owe to Xan. He was called after a grandfather and great-grandfather; “Xan” had been a family name with the Lyppiatts for generations. I, too, had been named after my paternal grandfather. My mother had seen no reason why she should be outdone when it came to the eccentric naming of a child. But Sir George puzzled her. I can still hear her peevish complaint: “He doesn’t look like a baronet to me.” He was the only baronet either of us had met and I wondered what private image she was conjuring up—a pale, romantic Van Dyck portrait stepping down from its frame; sulky Byronic arrogance, a red-faced swashbuckling squire, loud of voice, hard rider to hounds. But I knew what she meant; he didn’t look like a baronet to me either. Certainly he didn’t look like the owner of Woolcombe. He had a spade-shaped face, mottled red, with a small, moist mouth under the moustache which looked both ridiculous and artificial, the ruddy hair which Xan had inherited, faded to the drab colour of dried straw, and eyes which gazed over his acres with an expression of puzzled sadness. But he was a good shot—my mother would have approved of that. So too was Xan. He was not permitted to handle his father’s Purdeys but had his own couple of guns with which we would pot rabbits, and there were two pistols which we were allowed to use with blanks. We would set up target cards on trees and spend hours improving our scores. After a few days’ practice I was better than Xan both with gun and pistol. My skill surprised us both, me particularly. I hadn’t expected to like or be good at shooting; I was almost disconcerted to discover how much I enjoyed, with a half-guilty, almost sensual pleasure, the feel of the metal in my palm, the satisfying balance of the weapons.

Xan had no other companions during the holidays and seemed not to need them. No friends from Sherborne came to Woolcombe. When I asked him about school he was elusive.

“It’s all right. Better than Harrow would have been.”

“Better than Eton?”

“We don’t go there any more. Great-grandfather had a tremendous row, public allegations, angry letters, dust shaken off feet. I’ve forgotten what it was all about.”

“You never mind going back to school?”

“Why should I? Do you?”

“No, I rather like it. If I can’t be here, I’d rather have school than holidays.”

He was silent for a moment, then said: “The thing is this, school-masters want to understand you, that’s what they think they’re paid for. I keep them puzzled. Hard worker, top marks, housemaster’s pet, safe for an Oxford scholarship one term; next term big, big trouble.”

“What sort of trouble?”

“Not enough to get kicked out, and of course next term I’m a good boy again. It confuses them, gets them worried.”

I didn’t understand him either, but it didn’t worry me. I didn’t understand myself.

I know now, of course, why he liked having me at Woolcombe. I think I guessed almost from the beginning. He had absolutely no commitment to me, no responsibility for me, not even the commitment of friendship or the responsibility of personal choice. He hadn’t chosen me. I was his cousin, I was wished on him, I was there. With me at Woolcombe he need never face the inevitable question: “Why don’t you invite your friends here for the holidays?” Why should he? He had his fatherless cousin to entertain. I lifted from him, an only child, the burden of excessive parental concern. I was never particularly aware of that concern but, without me, his parents might have felt constrained to show it. From boyhood he couldn’t tolerate questions, curiosity, interference in his life. I sympathized with that; I was very much the same. If there was time enough or purpose in it, it would be interesting to trace back our common ancestry to discover the roots of this obsessive self-sufficiency. I realize now that it was one of the reasons for my failed marriage. It is probably the reason why Xan has never married. It would take a force more powerful than sexual love to prise open the portcullis which defends that crenellated heart and mind.

We seldom saw his parents during those long weeks of summer. Like most adolescents, we slept late, and they had breakfasted when we got down. Our midday meal was a picnic set out for us in the kitchen, a thermos of homemade soup, bread, cheese and pate, slabs of rich homemade fruit cake prepared by a lugubrious cook who managed illogically to grumble simultaneously at the small extra trouble we caused and at the lack of prestigious dinner parties at which she could display her skill. We got back in time to change into our suits for dinner. My uncle and aunt never entertained, at least not when I was there, and the conversation was carried on almost entirely between them while Xan and I ate, casting each other occasionally the secretive, colluding glances of the judgemental young. Their spasmodic talk was invariably about plans for us and carried on as if we weren’t there.

My aunt, delicately stripping the skin from a peach, not raising her eyes: “The boys might like to see Maiden Castle.”

“Not a lot to see at Maiden Castle. Jack Manning could take them out in his boat when he collects the lobsters.”

“I don’t think I trust Manning. There’s a concert tomorrow at Poole which they might enjoy.”

“What kind of concert?”

“I don’t remember, I gave you the programme.”

“They might like a day in London.”

“Not in this lovely weather. They’re much better in the open air.”

When Xan was seventeen and first had the use of his father’s car we would drive into Poole to pick up girls. I found these excursions terrifying and went with him only twice. It was like entering an alien world; the giggles, the girls hunting in pairs, the bold, challenging stares, the apparently inconsequential but obligatory chat. After the second time I said: “We’re not pretending to feel affection. We don’t even like them; they certainly don’t like us. So if both parties only want sex why don’t we just say so and cut out all these embarrassing preliminaries?”

“Oh, they seem to need them. Anyway, the only women you can approach like that want cash payment in advance. We can strike lucky in Poole with one film and a couple of hours’ drinking.”

“I don’t think I’ll come.”

“You’re probably right. I usually feel next morning that it hasn’t been worth the trouble.”

It was typical of him to make it sound as if my reluctance was not, as he must have known, a mixture of embarrassment, fear of failure and shame. I could hardly blame Xan for the fact that I lost my virginity in conditions of acute discomfort in a Poole car park with a redhead who made it plain, both during my fumbling preliminaries and afterwards, that she had known better ways of spending a Saturday evening. And I can hardly claim that the experience adversely affected my sex life. After all, if our sex life were determined by our first youthful experiments, most of the world would be doomed to celibacy. In no area of human experience are human beings more convinced that something better can be had if only they persevere.

Apart from the cook, I can remember few of the servants. There was a gardener, Hobhouse, with a pathological dislike of roses, particularly when planted with other flowers. They get in everywhere, he would grumble, as if the climbers and standard bushes which he resentfully and skilfully pruned had somehow mysteriously seeded themselves. And there was Scovell, with his pretty, pert face, whose precise function I never understood: chauffeur, gardener’s boy, handyman? Xan either ignored him or was calculatingly offensive. I had never known him to be rude to any other servant and would have asked him why if I hadn’t sensed, alert as always to every nuance of emotion in my cousin, that the question would be unwise.

I didn’t resent it that Xan was our grandparents’ favourite. The preference seemed to me perfectly natural. I can remember one snatch of conversation overheard at the one Christmas when, disastrously, we were all together at Woolcombe.

“I sometimes wonder if Theo won’t go further than Xan in the end.”

“Oh no. Theo is a good-looking, intelligent boy, but Xan is brilliant.”

Xan and I colluded in that judgement. When I got my Oxford entrance they were gratified but surprised. When Xan was accepted at Balliol they took it as his due. When I got my First they said I was lucky. When Xan achieved no more than an upper second they complained, but indulgently, that he hadn’t bothered to work.

He didn’t make demands, never treated me like a poor cousin, annually provided me with food, drink and a free holiday in return for companionship or subservience. If I wanted to be alone, I could be, without complaint or comment. Usually this was in the library, a room which delighted me with its shelves filled with leather-bound books, its pilasters and carved capitals, the great stone fireplace with its carved coat of arms, the marble busts in their niches, the huge map table where I could spread my books and holiday tasks, the deep leather armchairs, the view from the tall windows across the lawn down to the river and the bridge. It was here, browsing in the county histories, that I discovered that a skirmish had been fought on that bridge in the Civil War when five young Cavaliers had held the bridge against the Roundheads until all of them had fallen. Even their names were set out, a roll-call of romantic courage: Ormerod, Freemantle, Cole, Bydder, Fairfax. I went to Xan in great excitement and dragged him into the library.

“Look, the actual date of the fight is next Wednesday, August 16. We ought to celebrate.”

“How? Throw flowers in the water?”

But he was not being either dismissive or contemptuous and he was only slightly amused at my enthusiasm.

“Why not drink to them anyway? Make a ceremony of it.”

We did both. We went to the bridge at sunset with a bottle of his father’s claret, the two pistols, my arms filled with flowers from the walled garden. We drank the bottle between us; then Xan balanced on the parapet, firing both pistols into the air as I shouted out the names. It is one of the moments from my boyhood which have remained with me, an evening of pure joy, unshadowed, untainted by guilt or satiety or regret, immortalized for me in that image of Xan balanced against the sunset, of his flaming hair, of the pale petals of roses floating downstream under the bridge until they were lost to sight.

Monday 18 January

I can remember my first holiday at Woolcombe. I followed Xan up a second flight of stairs at the end of the corridor to a room at the top of the house looking out over the terrace and the lawn towards the river and the bridge. At first, sensitive and contaminated by my mother’s resentment, I wondered if I was being put in the servants’ quarters.

Then Xan said: “I’m next door. We have our own bathroom, it’s at the end of the corridor.”

I can remember every detail of that room. It was the one I was to have every summer holiday throughout my schooldays and until I left Oxford. I changed, but the room never changed, and I see in imagination a succession of schoolboys and undergraduates, each one bearing an uncanny resemblance to myself, opening that door summer after summer and entering by right into that inheritance. I haven’t been back to Woolcombe since my mother died eight years ago and I shall never go back now. Sometimes I have a fantasy that I shall return to Woolcombe as an old man and die in that room, pushing open the door for the last time and seeing again the single four-poster bed with its carved bed-posts, the cover of faded silk patchwork; the bentwood rocking-chair with its cushion embroidered by some long-dead female Lyppiatt; the patina of the Georgian desk, a little battered but firm, steady, usable; the bookcase with the editions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century boys’ books: Henty, Fenimore Cooper, Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle, Sapper, John Buchan; the bow-fronted chest of drawers with the flyblown mirror above it; and the old prints of battle scenes, terrified horses rearing before the cannons, wild-eyed cavalry officers, the dying Nelson. And I can remember best of all that day when I first entered it and, walking over to the window, looked out over the terrace, the sloping lawn, the oak trees, the sheen of the river and the small hump-backed bridge.

Xan stood at the door. He said: “We can go off somewhere tomorrow, if you like, cycling. The Bart has bought you a bicycle.”

I was to learn that he seldom spoke of his father in any other way. I said: “That’s kind of him.”

“Not really. He had to—hadn’t he?—if he wanted us to be together.”

“I’ve got a bicycle. I always cycle to school, I could have brought it.”

“The Bart thought it would be less trouble to keep one here. You don’t have to use it. I like to go off for the day but you don’t have to come if you don’t want to. Cycling isn’t compulsory. Nothing is compulsory at Woolcombe, except unhappiness.”

I was to discover later that this was the kind of sardonic quasi-adult remark he liked to make. It was intended to impress me and it did. But I didn’t believe him. On that first visit, innocently enchanted, it was impossible to imagine anyone suffering unhappiness in such a house. And he couldn’t surely have meant himself.

I said: “I’d like to see round the house sometime.” Then I blushed, afraid that I sounded like a prospective purchaser or a tourist.

“We can do that, of course. If you can wait until Saturday, Miss Maskell from the vicarage will do the honours. It’ll cost you a pound but that includes the garden. It’s open every other Saturday in aid of church funds. What Molly Maskell lacks in historical and artistic knowledge she makes up in imagination.”

“I’d rather you showed it.”

He didn’t reply to that, but watched while I humped my case on to the bed and began to unpack. My mother had bought me a new case for this first visit. Miserably aware that it was too large, too smart, too heavy, I wished that I had brought my old canvas grip. I had, of course, packed too many clothes, and the wrong clothes, but he didn’t comment, I don’t know whether out of delicacy or tact or because he simply didn’t notice. Stuffing them quickly into one of the drawers, I asked: “Isn’t it strange living here?”

“It’s inconvenient and it’s sometimes boring, but it isn’t strange. My ancestors have lived here for three hundred years.” He added: “It’s quite a small house.”

He sounded as if he was trying to put me at ease by belittling his inheritance but when I looked at him I saw, for the first time, the look that was to become familiar to me, of a secret inner amusement which reached eyes and mouth but never broke into an open smile. I didn’t know then and still don’t know how much he cared for Woolcombe. It’s still used as a nursing-and-retirement home for the privileged few—relations and friends of the Council, members of the Regional, District and Local Councils, people who are considered to have given some service to the State. Until my mother died Helena and I made our regular duty visits. I can still picture the two sisters sitting together on the terrace, well wrapped up against the chill, one with her terminal cancer, the other with her cardiac asthma and arthritis, envy and resentment forgotten as they faced the great equalizer of death. When I imagine the world without a living human being, I can picture—who doesn’t?—the great cathedrals and temples, the palaces and the castles, existing through the uninhabited centuries, the British Library, opened just before Omega, with its carefully preserved manuscripts and books which no one will ever again open or read. But at heart I am touched only by the thought of Woolcombe; the imagined smell of its musty deserted rooms, the rotting panels in the library, the ivy creeping over its crumbling walls, a wilderness of grass and weeds obscuring the gravel, the tennis court, the formal garden; by the memory of that small back bedroom, unvisited and unchanged until the coverlet rots at last, the books turn to dust and the final picture drops from the wall.

Thursday 21 January

My mother had artistic pretensions. No, that is arrogant and not even true. She had no pretensions to anything except a desperate respectability. But she did have some artistic talent, although I never saw her produce an original drawing. Her hobby was painting old prints, usually Victorian scenes taken from damaged bound volumes of the Girls’ Own Paper or the Illustrated London News. I don’t suppose it was difficult, but she did it with some skill, taking care, as she told me, to get the colours historically correct, although I don’t see how she could have been sure of that. I think the nearest she got to happiness was when she was sitting at the kitchen table with her paint box and two jam jars, the angled lamp precisely focused on the print spread out on a newspaper in front of her. I used to watch her working away, the delicacy with which she dipped the finer brush into the water, the swirl of coalescing blues, yellows and whites as she mixed them on the palette. The kitchen table was large enough, if not for me to spread out all my homework, at least for me to read or write my weekly essay. I liked to look up, my brief scrutiny unresented, and watch the bright colours edging across the print, the transformation of the drab grey of the microdots into a living scene; a crowded railway terminus with bonneted women seeing off their men to the Crimean War; a Victorian family, the women in furs and bustles, decorating the church for Christmas; Queen Victoria escorted by her consort, surrounded by crinolined children, opening the Great Exhibition; boating scenes on the Isis with long-defunct college barges in the background, the moustached men in their blazers, the full-bosomed, small-waisted girls in jackets and straw hats; village churches with a straggling procession of worshippers, the squire and his lady in the foreground entering for the Easter service against a background of graves made festive with spring flowers. Perhaps it was my early fascination with these scenes which came to direct my interest as a historian to the nineteenth century, that age which now, as when I first studied it, seems like a world seen through a telescope at once so close and yet infinitely remote, fascinating in its energy, its moral seriousness, its brilliance and squalor.

My mother’s hobby was not unlucrative. She would frame the finished pictures with the help of Mr. Greenstreet, the vicar’s warden from the local church they both regularly, and I reluctantly, attended, and would sell them to antique shops. I shall never now know what part Mr. Greenstreet played in her life, apart from his neat-fingered facility with wood and glue, or might have played except for my ubiquitous presence, any more than 1 can know how much my mother was paid for the pictures and whether, as I now suspect, it was this extra income which provided me with the school trips, the cricket bats, the extra books which I was never grudged. I did my bit to contribute; it was I who found the prints. I would rummage through boxes in junk shops in Kingston and further afield on my way home from school or on Saturdays, sometimes cycling fifteen or twenty miles to a shop which yielded the best spoils. Most were cheap and I bought them from my pocket money. The best I stole, becoming adept at removing centrepieces from bound books without damage, extracting prints from their mounts and slipping them into my school atlas. I needed these acts of vandalism, as I suspect most young boys needed their minor delinquencies. I was never suspected, I the uniformed, respectful, grammar-school boy who took his lesser findings to the till and paid without hurry or apparent anxiety and who occasionally bought the cheaper second-hand books from the boxes of miscellanea outside the shop door. I enjoyed these solitary excursions, the risk, the thrill of discovering a treasure, the triumph of returning with my spoils. My mother said little except to ask what I had spent and to reimburse me. If she suspected that some of the prints were worth more than I told her I had paid, she never questioned, but I knew that she was pleased. I didn’t love her but I did steal for her. I learned early and at that kitchen table that there are ways of avoiding, without guilt, the commitments of love.

I know, or think I know, when my terror of taking responsibility for other people’s lives or happiness began, although I may be deceiving myself; I have always been clever at devising excuses for my personal shortcomings. I like to trace its roots to 1983, the year my father lost his fight against cancer of the stomach. That was how, listening to the grown-ups, I heard it described. “He’s lost his fight,” they said. And I can see now that it was a fight, carried on with some courage even if he hadn’t much option. My parents tried to spare me the worst of knowledge. “We try to keep things from the boy” was another frequently overheard phrase. But keeping things from the boy meant telling me nothing except that my father was ill, would have to see a specialist, would go into hospital for an operation, would soon be home again, would have to go back into hospital. Sometimes I wasn’t even told that; I would return from school to find him no longer there and my mother feverishly cleaning the house, with a face set like stone. Keeping things from the boy meant that I lived without siblings in an atmosphere of uncomprehended menace in which the three of us were moving inexorably forward to some unimagined disaster which, when it came, would be my fault. Children are always ready to believe that adult catastrophes are their fault. My mother never spoke the word “cancer” to me, never referred to his illness except incidentally. “Your father’s a little tired this morning.”

“Your father has to go back into hospital today.”

“Get those schoolbooks out of the sitting-room and go upstairs before the doctor comes. He’ll be wanting to talk to me.”

She would speak with eyes averted, as if there was something embarrassing, even indecent, about the disease, which made it an unsuitable subject for a child. Or was this a deeper secrecy, a shared suffering, which had become an essential part of their marriage and from which I was as rightly excluded as I was from their marriage bed? I wonder now whether my father’s silence, which seemed at the time a rejection, was deliberate. Were we alienated less by pain and weariness, the slow draining away of hope, than by his wish not to increase the anguish of separation? But he can’t have been so very fond of me. I wasn’t an easy child to love. And how could we have communicated? The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead. I have watched others since I watched my father, and always with a sense of their strangeness. They sit and speak, and are spoken to, and listen, and even smile, but in spirit they have already moved away from us and there is no way we can enter their shadowy no-man’s-land.

I can’t now remember the day he died except for one incident: my mother sitting at the kitchen table, weeping at last tears of anger and frustration. When, clumsy and embarrassed, I tried to put my arms round her, she wailed: “Why do I always have such rotten luck?” It seemed then to that twelve-year-old, as it seems now, an inadequate response to personal tragedy, and its banality influenced my attitude to my mother for the rest of my childhood. That was unjust and judgemental, but children are unjust and judgemental to their parents.

Although I have forgotten, or perhaps deliberately put out of mind, all but one memory of the day my father died, I can recall every hour of the day he was cremated: the thin drizzle that made the crematorium gardens look like a pointilliste painting; the waiting in the mock cloister until an earlier cremation was over and we could file in and take our places in those stark pine pews; the smell of my new suit; the wreaths stacked up against the chapel wall; the smallness of the coffin—it seemed impossible to believe that it actually held my father’s body. My mother’s anxiety that all should go well was increased by the fear that her baronet brother-in-law would attend. He didn’t, and neither did Xan, who was at his prep school. But my aunt came, too smartly dressed, and the only woman not predominantly in black, giving my mother a not-unwelcome cause for complaint. It was after the baked meats of the funeral feast that the two sisters agreed I should spend the next summer holiday at Woolcombe and the pattern for all subsequent summer holidays was established.

But my main memory of the day is its atmosphere of suppressed excitement and a strong disapproval which I felt was focused on me. It was then that I first heard the phrase reiterated by friends and neighbours who, in their unaccustomed black, I hardly knew: “You’ll have to be the man of the family now, Theo. Your mother will look to you.” I couldn’t then say what for nearly forty years I have known to be true. I don’t want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.

I wish that my remembrance of my father was happier, that I had a clear view, or at least some view, of the essential man which I could take hold of, make part of me; I wish that I could name even three qualities which characterized him. Thinking about him now for the first time in years, there are no adjectives which I can honestly conjure up, not even that he was gentle, kind, intelligent, loving. He may have been all of these things, I just don’t know. All I know about him is that he was dying. His cancer wasn’t quick or merciful—when is it merciful?—and he took nearly three years to die. It seems that most of my childhood was subsumed in those years by the look and the sound and the smell of his death. He was his cancer. I could see nothing else then and I can see nothing else now. And for years my memory of him, less memory than reincarnation, was one of horror. A few weeks before his death he cut his left index finger opening a tin and the wound became infected. Through the bulky lint-and-gauze bandage applied by my mother seeped blood and pus. It seemed not to worry him; he would eat with his right hand, leaving his left resting on the table, gently regarding it, with an air of slight surprise, as if it were separate from his body, nothing to do with him. But I couldn’t take my eyes from it, hunger fighting with nausea. To me it was an obscene object of horror. Perhaps I projected on to his bandaged finger all my unacknowledged fear of his mortal illness. For months after his death I was visited by a recurrent nightmare in which I would see him at the foot of my bed pointing at me a bleeding yellow stump, not of a finger but of a whole hand. He never spoke; he stood mute in his striped pyjamas. His look was sometimes an appeal for something I couldn’t give, but more often gravely accusatory, as was that pointing. It seems now unjust that he should for so long have been remembered only with horror, with dripping pus and blood. The form of the nightmare, too, puzzles me now that, with my amateur adult knowledge of psychology, I attempt to analyse it. It would be more explicable had I been a girl. The attempt to analyse was, of course, an attempt at exorcism. In part it must have succeeded. After I killed Natalie he visited me weekly; now he never comes. I am glad that he has finally gone, taking with him his pain, his blood, his pus. But I wish that he had left me a different memory.

Friday 22 January

Today is my daughter’s birthday, would have been my daughter’s birthday if I hadn’t run her over and killed her. That was in 1994, when she was fifteen months old. Helena and I were living then in an Edwardian semi-detached house in Lathbury Road, too large and too expensive for us, but Helena, as soon as she knew she was pregnant, had insisted on a house with a garden and a south-facing nursery. I can’t remember now the exact circumstances of the accident, whether I was supposed to be keeping an eye on Natalie or thought that she was with her mother. All that must have come out at the inquest; but the inquest, that official allocation of responsibility, has been erased from memory. I do remember that I was leaving the house to go into College and backing the car, which Helena had clumsily parked the previous day, so that I could more easily manoeuvre it through the narrow garden gate. There was no garage at Lathbury Road but we had standing for two cars in front of the house. I must have left the front door open and Natalie, who had walked since she was thirteen months, toddled out after me. That minor culpability must have been established at the inquest, too. But some things I do remember: the gentle bump under my rear left wheel like a ramp but softer, more yielding, more tender than any ramp. The immediate knowledge, certain, absolute, terrifying, of what it was. And the five seconds of total silence before the screaming began. I knew that it was Helena screaming and yet part of my mind couldn’t believe that what I was hearing was a human sound. And I remember the humiliation. I couldn’t move, couldn’t get out of the car, couldn’t even stretch out my hand to the door. And then George Hawkins, our neighbour, was banging on the glass and shouting, “Get out you bastard, get out!” And I can remember the irrelevance of my thought, seeing that gross, anger-distorted face pressing against the glass: He never liked me. And I can’t pretend that it didn’t happen. I can’t pretend it was someone else. I can’t pretend I wasn’t responsible.

Horror and guilt subsumed grief. Perhaps if Helena had been able to say, “It’s worse for you, darling,” or “It’s as bad for you, darling,” we might have salvaged something from the wreckage of a marriage which from the start hadn’t been particularly seaworthy. But of course she couldn’t; that wasn’t what she believed. She thought that I cared less, and she was right. She thought that I cared less because I loved less, and she was right about that too. I was glad to be a father. When Helena told me she was pregnant I felt what I presume are the usual emotions of irrational pride, tenderness and amazement. I did feel affection for my child, although I would have felt more had she been prettier—she was a miniature caricature of Helena’s father—more affectionate, more responsive, less inclined to whine. I’m glad that no other eyes will read these words. She has been dead for almost twenty-seven years and I still think of her with complaint. But Helena was obsessed by her, totally enchanted, enslaved, and I know that what spoiled Natalie for me was jealousy. I would have got over it in time, or at least come to terms with it. But I wasn’t given time. I don’t think Helena ever believed that I’d run Natalie over on purpose, at least not when she was rational; even at her most bitter she managed to prevent herself from saying the unforgivable words, as a woman burdened with a sick and cantankerous husband, out of superstition or a remnant of kindness, will bite back the words, “I wish you were dead.” But, given the chance, she would rather have had Natalie alive than me. I’m not blaming her for that. It seemed perfectly reasonable at the time and it seems so now.

I would lie distanced in the king-sized bed waiting for her to fall asleep, knowing that it might be hours before she did, worrying about next day’s over-filled diary, about how, with the prospect of endless broken nights, I would be able to cope, reiterating into the darkness my litany of justification—“For Christ’s sake, it was an accident. I didn’t mean to do it. I’m not the only father to have run down his child. She was supposed to be looking after Natalie, the child was her responsibility, she made it plain enough it wasn’t mine. The least she could have done was to look after her properly. “ But angry self-justification was as banal and irrelevant as a child’s excuse for breaking a vase.

We both knew that we had to leave Lathbury Road. Helena said: “We can’t stay here. We should look for a house near the centre of the city. After all, that’s always what you’ve wanted. You’ve never really liked this place.”

The allegation was there but unspoken: you’re glad that we’re moving, glad that her death has made it possible.

Six months after the funeral we moved to St. John Street, to a tall Georgian house with a front door on the street, where parking is difficult. Lathbury Road was a family house; this is a house for the unencumbered, if agile, and the solitary. The move suited me because I liked being close to the city centre, and Georgian architecture, even speculative Georgian requiring constant maintenance, has a greater cachet than Edwardian. We hadn’t made love since Natalie’s death but now Helena moved into her own room. It was never discussed between us but I knew that she was saying that there would be no second chance, that I had killed not only her beloved daughter but all hope of another child, of the son she suspected I had really wanted. But that was in October 1994 and the choice was no longer there. We didn’t stay permanently apart, of course. Sex and marriage are more complicated than that. From time to time I would cross the few feet of carpeted floor between her room and mine. She neither welcomed me nor rejected me. But there was a wider, more permanent gulf between us and that I made no effort to cross.

This narrow, five-storeyed house is too large for me, but with our falling population I’m hardly likely to be criticized for not sharing my over-provision. There are no undergraduates clamouring for a bed-sitting-room, no young homeless families to prick the social conscience of the more privileged. I use it all, mounting from floor to floor through the routine of my day, as if methodically stamping my ownership on vinyl, on carpet and rugs and polished wood. The dining-room and kitchen are in the basement, the latter with a wide arc of stone steps leading to the garden. Above them, two small sitting-rooms have been converted into one which also serves as a library, a television-and-music room and a convenient place in which to see my students. On the first floor is a large L-shaped drawing-room. This too has been converted from two smaller rooms, the two discordant fireplaces proclaiming its former use. From the back window I can look out over the small walled garden with its single silver birch tree. At the front, two elegant windows, ceiling—high, with a balcony beyond, face St. John Street.

Anyone pacing between the two windows would have little difficulty describing the room’s owner. Obviously an academic; three walls are lined with bookshelves from ceiling to floor. A historian; the books themselves make that plain. A man concerned primarily with the nineteenth century; not only the books but the pictures and ornaments proclaim this obsession: the Staffordshire commemorative figures, the Victorian genre oil paintings, the William Morris wallpaper. The room, too, of a man who likes his comfort and who lives alone. There are no family photographs, no board games, no disarray, no dust, no feminine clutter, little evidence, indeed, that the room is ever used.

And a visitor might guess, too, that nothing here is inherited, everything acquired. There are none of those unique or eccentric artefacts, valued or tolerated because they are heirlooms, no family portraits, undistinguished oils given their place to proclaim ancestry. It is the room of a man who has risen in the world, surrounding himself with the symbols both of his achievements and his minor obsessions. Mrs. Kavanagh, the wife of one of the college scouts, comes in three times a week to clean for me and does it well enough. I have no wish to employ the Sojourners to whom, as ex-adviser to the Warden of England, I am entitled.

The room I like best is at the top of the house, a small attic room with a charming fireplace in wrought iron and decorated tiles, furnished only with a desk and chair and containing the necessities for making coffee. An uncurtained window looks out over the campanile of St. Barnabas Church to the far green slope of Wytham Wood. It is here I write my diary, prepare my lectures and seminars, write my historical papers. The front door is four storeys down, inconvenient for answering the doorbell; but I have ensured that there are no unexpected visitors in my self-sufficient life.

Last year, in March, Helena left me for Rupert Clavering, thirteen years younger than she, who combines the appearance of an over-enthusiastic rugby player with, one is forced to believe, the sensitivity of an artist. He designs posters and dust jackets and does them very well. I recall something she said during our pre-divorce discussions, which I was at pains to keep unacrimonious and unemotional: that I had slept with her only at carefully regulated intervals because I wanted my affairs with my students to be driven by more discriminating needs than the relief of crude sexual deprivation. Those weren’t, of course, her words, but that was her meaning. I think she surprised both of us by her perception.

The task of writing his journal—and Theo thought of it as a task, not a pleasure—had become part of his over-organized life, a nightly addition to a weekly routine half imposed by circumstance, half deliberately devised in an attempt to impose order and purpose on the shapelessness of existence. The Council of England had decreed that all citizens should, in addition to their ordinary jobs, undertake two weekly training sessions in skills which would help them to survive if and when they became part of the remnant of civilization. The choice was voluntary. Xan had always known the wisdom of giving people a choice in matters where choice was unimportant. Theo had elected to do one stint in the John Radcliffe Hospital, not because he felt at home in its antiseptic hierarchy or imagined that his ministrations to the sick and aged flesh which both terrified and repelled him was any more gratifying to the recipients than it was to him, but because he thought the knowledge gained might be the most personally useful, and it was no bad idea to know where, should the need arise, he could with some cunning lay his hands on drugs. The second two-hour session he spent more agreeably on house maintenance, finding the good humour and crude critical comments of the artisans who taught there a welcome relief from the more refined disparagements of academe. His paid job was teaching the full- and part-time mature students who, with the few former undergraduates doing research or taking higher degrees, were the University’s justification for its existence. On two nights a week, Tuesday and Friday, he dined in Hall. On Wednesday he invariably attended the three o’clock service of Evensong in Magdalen Chapel. A small number of colleges with more than usually eccentric collegers or an obstinate determination to ignore reality still used their chapels for worship, some even reverting to the old Book of Common Prayer. But the choir at Magdalen was among the best regarded and Theo went to listen to the singing, not to take part in an archaic act of worship.

It happened on the fourth Wednesday in January. Walking to Magdalen as was his custom, he had turned from St. John Street into Beaumont Street and was nearing the entrance to the Ashmolean Museum when a woman approached him wheeling a pram. The thin drizzle had stopped and as she drew alongside him she paused to fold back the mackintosh cover and push down the pram hood. The doll was revealed, propped upright against the cushions, the two arms, hands mittened, resting on the quilted coverlet, a parody of childhood, at once pathetic and sinister. Shocked and repelled, Theo found that he couldn’t keep his eyes off it. The glossy irises, unnaturally large, bluer than those of any human eye, a gleaming azure, seemed to fix on him their unseeing stare which yet horribly suggested a dormant intelligence, alien and monstrous. The eyelashes, dark brown, lay like spiders on the delicately tinted porcelain cheeks and an adult abundance of yellow crimped hair sprung from beneath the close-fitting lace-trimmed bonnet.

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 newborn, 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 nailless 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 naivety 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.

Saturday 30 January

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 IPS 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.

He was a caricature of the popular idea of an Oxford don: high forehead, receding hairline, thin, slightly hooked nose, tight-lipped. He walked with his chin jutting forward as if confronting a strong gale, shoulders hunched, his faded gown billowing. One expected to see him pictured, high-collared as a Vanity Fair creation, holding one of his own books with slender-tipped, fastidious fingers.

He occasionally confided in me and treated me as if grooming me as his successor. That, of course, was nonsense; he gave me much but some things were not within his gift. But the impression his current favourite had of being in some sense a crown prince has made me wonder subsequently whether this wasn’t his way of confronting age, time, the inevitable blunting of the mind’s keen edge, his personal illusion of immortality.

He had often proclaimed his view of Omega, a reassuring litany of comfort shared by a number of his colleagues, particularly those who had laid down a good supply of wine or had access to their college cellar.

“It doesn’t worry me particularly. I’m not saying I hadn’t a moment of regret when I first knew Hilda was barren; the genes asserting their atavistic imperatives, I suppose. On the whole I’m glad; you can’t mourn for unborn grandchildren when there never was a hope of them. This planet is doomed anyway. Eventually the sun will explode or cool and one small insignificant particle of the universe will disappear with only a tremble. If man is doomed to perish, then universal infertility is as painless a way as any. And there are, after all, personal compensations. For the last sixty years we have sycophantically pandered to the most ignorant, the most criminal and the most selfish section of society. Now, for the rest of our lives, we’re going to be spared the intrusive barbarism of the young, their noise, their pounding, repetitive, computer-produced so-called music, their violence, their egotism disguised as idealism. My God, we might even succeed in getting rid of Christmas, that annual celebration of parental guilt and juvenile greed. I intend that my life shall be comfortable, and, when it no longer is, then I shall wash down my final pill with a bottle of claret.”

His personal plan for survival in comfort until the last natural moment was one thousands of people had adopted in those early years before Xan took power, when the great fear was of a total breakdown of order. Removal from the city—in his case from Clarendon Square—to a small country house or cottage in wooded country with a garden for food production, a nearby stream with water fresh enough to be drunk after boiling, an open fireplace and store of wood, tins of food carefully selected, enough matches to last for years, a medicine chest with drugs and syringes, above all strong doors and locks against the possibility that the less prudent might one day turn envious eyes on their husbandry. But in recent years Jasper has become obsessive. The wood store in the garden has been replaced by a brick-built structure with a metal door activated by remote control. There is a high wall round the garden and the door to the cellar is padlocked.

Usually when I visit, the wrought-iron gates are unlocked in anticipation of my arrival and I can open them and leave the car in the short driveway. This afternoon they were locked and I had to ring. When Jasper came to let me in I was shocked by the difference a month had made in his appearance. He was still upright, his step still firm, but as he came closer I saw that the skin stretched tightly over the strong bones of the face was greyer and there was a fiercer anxiety in the sunken eyes, almost a gleam of paranoia, which I hadn’t noticed before. Ageing is inevitable but it is not consistent. There are plateaux of time stretching over years when the faces of friends and acquaintances look virtually unchanged. Then time accelerates and within a week the metamorphosis takes place. It seemed to me that Jasper had aged ten years in a little over six weeks.

I followed him into the large sitting-room at the back of the house, with its French windows looking out over the terrace and the garden. Here, as in his study, the walls were completely covered with bookshelves. It was, as always, obsessively tidy, furniture, books, ornaments precisely in place. But I detected, for the first time, the small tell-tale signs of incipient neglect, the smeared windows, a few crumbs on the carpet, a thin layer of dust on the mantelshelf. There was an electric fire in the grate but the room was chilly. Jasper offered me a drink and, although mid-afternoon is not my favourite time for drinking wine, I accepted. I saw that the side-table was more liberally supplied with bottles than on my last visit. Jasper is one of the few people I know who use their best claret as an all-day, all-purpose tipple.

Hilda was sitting by the fire, a cardigan round her shoulders. She stared ahead, without a welcome or even a look, and made no sign when I greeted her other than a brief nod of the head. The change in her was even more marked than in Jasper. For years, so it seemed to me, she had looked always the same: the angular but upright figure, the well-cut tweed skirt with the three centre box pleats, the high-necked silk shirt and cashmere cardigan, the thick grey hair intricately and smoothly twisted into a high bun. Now the front of the cardigan, half-slipped from her shoulders, was stiff with congealed food, her tights, hanging in loose folds above uncleaned shoes, were grubby and her hair hung in strands about a face set rigidly in lines of rebarbative disapproval. I wondered, as I had on previous visits, what exactly was wrong with her. It could hardly be Alzheimer’s disease, which has been largely controlled since the late 1990s. But there are other kinds of senility which even our obsessive scientific concern with the problems of ageing has still been unable to alleviate. Perhaps she is just old, just tired, just sick to death of me. I suppose, in old age, there is advantage in retreating into a world of one’s own, but not if the place one finds is hell.

I wondered why I had been asked to call but didn’t like to ask directly. Finally Jasper said: “There’s something I wanted to discuss with you. I’m thinking of moving back into Oxford. It was that last television broadcast by the Warden that decided me. Apparently the eventual plan is for everyone to move into towns so that facilities and services can be concentrated. He said that the people who wished to remain in remote districts were free to do so but that he wouldn’t be able to guarantee supplies of power or petrol for transport. We’re rather isolated here.” I said: “What does Hilda think about it?” Jasper didn’t even bother to glance at her. “Hilda is hardly in a position to object. I’m the one who does the caring. If it’s easier for me, it’s what we ought to do. I was thinking that it might suit us both—I mean you and me—if I joined you in St. John Street. You don’t really need that large house. There’s plenty of room at the top for a separate flat. I’d pay for the conversion, of course.”

The idea appalled me. I hope I concealed my repugnance. I paused as if considering the idea, then said: “I don’t think it would really suit you. You’d very much miss the garden. And the stairs would be difficult for Hilda.”

There was a silence; then Jasper said: “You’ve heard of the Quietus, I suppose, the mass suicide of the old?”

“Only what I read briefly in the newspapers, or see on television.”

I remembered one picture, I think the only one ever shown on television: white-clad elderly being wheeled or helped on to the low barge-like ship, the high, reedy singing voices, the boat slowly pulling away into the twilight, a seductively peaceful scene, cunningly shot and lit.

I said: “I’m not attracted to gregarious death. Suicide should be like sex, a private activity. If we want to kill ourselves, the means are always at hand, so why not do it comfortably in one’s own bed? I would prefer to make my quietus with a bare bodkin.”

Jasper said: “Oh, I don’t know, there are people who like to make an occasion of these rites of passage. It’s happening in one form or another all over the world. I suppose there’s comfort in numbers, in ceremony. And their survivors get this pension from the State. Not exactly a pittance either, is it? No, I think I can see the attraction. Hilda was talking about it the other day.”

I thought that unlikely. I could imagine what the Hilda I had known would have thought of such a public exhibition of sacrifice and emotion. She had been a formidable academic in her day, cleverer, people said, than her husband, her sharp tongue venomous in his defence. After her marriage she taught and published less, talent and personality diminished by the appalling subservience of love.

Before leaving, I said: “It looks as if you could do with extra help. Why not apply for a couple of Sojourners? Surely you’d qualify.”

He dismissed the idea. “I don’t think I want strangers here, particularly not Sojourners. I don’t trust those people. It’s asking to get murdered under my own roof. And most of them don’t know what a day’s work means. They’re better used mending the roads, cleaning the sewers and collecting the rubbish, jobs where they can be kept under supervision.”

I said: “The domestic workers are very carefully selected.”

“Perhaps, but I don’t want them.”

I managed to get away without making any promises. On the drive back to Oxford I pondered how to frustrate Jasper’s determination. He was, after all, used to getting his own way. It looks as if the thirty-year-old bill for benefits received, the special coaching, the expensive dinners, the theatre and opera tickets, is belatedly being presented. But the thought of sharing St. John Street, of the violation of privacy, of my increasing responsibility for a difficult old man, repels me. I owe Jasper a great deal, but I don’t owe him that.

Driving into the city, I saw a queue about a hundred yards long outside the Examination Schools. It was an orderly, well-dressed crowd, old and middle-aged, but with more women than men. They stood waiting quietly and patiently with that air of complicity, controlled anticipation and lack of anxiety which characterizes a queue where everyone has a ticket, entry is assured and there is a sanguine expectation that the entertainment will be worth the wait. For a moment I was puzzled, then remembered: Rosie McClure, the evangelist, is in town. I should have realized at once; the advertisements have been prominent enough. Rosie is the latest and most successful of the television performers who sell salvation and do very well out of a commodity which is always in demand and which costs them nothing to supply. For the first two years after Omega we had Roaring Roger and his sidekick, Soapy Sam, and Roger still has a following for his weekly TV slot. He was—still is—a natural and powerful orator, a huge man, white-bearded, consciously moulding himself on the popular idea of an Old Testament prophet, pouring out his comminations in a powerful voice curiously given increased authority by its trace of a Northern Ireland accent. His message is simple if unoriginal: Man’s infertility is God’s punishment for his disobedience, his sinfulness. Only repentance can appease the Almighty’s rightful displeasure, and repentance is best demonstrated by a generous contribution towards Roaring Roger’s campaign expenses. He himself never touts for cash; that remains the job of Soapy Sam. They were initially an extraordinarily effective pair and their large house on Kingston Hill is the solid manifestation of their success. In the first five years after Omega the message had some validity, as Roger fulminated against inner-city violence, old women attacked and raped, children sexually abused, marriage reduced to no more than a monetary contract, divorce the norm, dishonesty rife and the sexual instinct perverted. Text after damning Old Testament text fell from his lips as he held aloft his well-thumbed Bible. But the product had a short shelf-life. It is difficult to fulminate successfully against sexual licence in a world overcome by ennui, to condemn the sexual abuse of children when there are no more children, to denounce inner-city violence when the cities are increasingly becoming the peaceful repositories of the docile aged. Roger has never fulminated against the violence and selfishness of the Omegas; he has a well-developed sense of self-preservation.

Now, with his decline, we have Rosie McClure. Sweet Rosie has come into her own. She is originally from Alabama but left the United States in 2019, probably because her brand of religious hedonism is oversupplied there. The gospel according to Rosie is simple: God is love and everything is justified by love. She has resurrected an old pop song of the Beatles, a group of young Liverpool boys in the 1960s, “All You Need Is Love,” and it is this repetitive jingle, not a hymn, which precedes her rallies. The Last Coming is not in the future but now, as the faithful are gathered in, one by one, at the end of their natural lives and translated to glory. Rosie is remarkably specific about the joys to come. Like all religious evangelists, she realizes that there is little satisfaction in the contemplation of heaven for oneself if one cannot simultaneously contemplate the horrors of hell for others. But hell as described by Rosie is less a place of torment than the equivalent of an ill-conducted and uncomfortable fourth-rate hotel where incompatible guests are forced to endure each other’s company for eternity and do their own washing-up with inadequate facilities although, presumably, with no lack of boiling water. She is equally specific about the joys of heaven. “In my Father’s house are many mansions,” and Rosie assures her adherents that there will be mansions to suit all tastes and all degrees of virtue, the highest pinnacle of bliss being reserved for the chosen few. But everyone who heeds Rosie’s call to love will find an agreeable place, an eternal Costa del Sol liberally supplied with food, drink, sun and sexual pleasure. Evil has no place in Rosie’s philosophy. The worst accusation is that people have fallen into error because they have not understood the law of love. The answer to pain is an anaesthetic or an aspirin, to loneliness the assurance of God’s personal concern, to bereavement the certainty of reunion. No man is called to practise inordinate self-denial, since God, being Love, desires only that His children shall be happy.

Emphasis is placed on the pampering and gratification of this temporal body, and Rosie is not above giving a few beauty hints during her sermons. These are spectacularly arranged, the white-clad choir of a hundred ranked under the strobe lights, the brass band and the Gospel singers. The congregation join in the cheerful choruses, laugh, cry and fling their arms like demented marionettes. Rosie herself changes her spectacular dresses at least three times during each rally. Love, proclaims Rosie, all you need is love. And no one need feel deprived of a love object. It needn’t be a human being; it can be an animal—a cat, a dog; it can be a garden; it can be a flower; it can be a tree. The whole natural world is one, linked by love, upheld by love, redeemed by love. One would suppose that Rosie had never seen a cat with a mouse. By the end of the rally the happy converts are generally throwing themselves into each other’s arms and casting notes into the collection buckets with reckless enthusiasm.

During the mid-1990s the recognized churches, particularly the Church of England, moved from the theology of sin and redemption to a less uncompromising doctrine: corporate social responsibility coupled with a sentimental humanism. Rosie has gone further and has virtually abolished the Second Person of the Trinity together with His cross, substituting a golden orb of the sun in glory, like a garish Victorian pub sign. The change was immediately popular. Even to unbelievers like myself, the cross, stigma of the barbarism of officialdom and of man’s ineluctable cruelty, has never been a comfortable symbol.

Just before nine-thirty on Sunday morning Theo set off to walk across Port Meadow to Binsey. He had given his word to Julian and it was a matter of pride not to renege. But he admitted to himself that there was a less estimable reason for fulfilling his promise. They knew who he was and where to find him. Better be bothered once, meet the group and get it over, than spend the next few months in the embarrassing expectation of meeting Julian every time he went to chapel or shopped in the covered market. The day was bright, the air cold but dry under a clear sky of deepening blue; the grass, still crisp from an early morning frost, crackled under his feet. The river was a crinkled ribbon reflecting the sky, and as he crossed the bridge and paused to look down, a noisy gaggle of ducks and two geese came clamouring, wide-beaked, as if there could still be children to fling them crusts and then run screaming in half-simulated fear from their noisy importunities. The hamlet was deserted. The few farmhouses to the right of the wide green were still standing but most of their windows were boarded up. In places the boarding had been smashed and through the splinters and spears of jagged glass edging the window frames he could glimpse the remnants of peeling wallpaper, flowered patterns once chosen with anxious care but now in tattered fragments, frail transitory banners of departed life. On one of the roofs slates were beginning to slide, revealing the rotting timbers, and the gardens were wildernesses of shoulder-high grass and weeds.

The Perch Inn, as he knew, had long been closed, as custom had dwindled. Across Port Meadow to Binsey had been one of his favourite Sunday-morning walks, with the inn as its destination. It seemed to him now that he passed through the hamlet like the ghost of that former self, seeing with unfamiliar eyes the narrow half-mile avenue of chestnuts which led north-west from Binsey to St. Margaret’s Church. He tried to remember when he had last taken this walk. Was it seven years ago, or ten? He could recall neither the occasion nor his companion if there had been one. But the avenue had changed. The chestnuts were still standing but the lane, dark under the intertwined boughs of the trees, had narrowed to a footpath musty with fallen leaves and tangled with an untamed profusion of elderberry and ash. The Local Council had, he knew, designated certain footpaths for clearage but gradually the number of those preserved had fallen. The old were too weak for the work, the middle-aged, on whom the burden of maintaining the life of the State largely depended, were too busy, the young cared little for the preservation of the countryside. Why preserve what would be theirs in abundance? They would all too soon inherit a world of unpopulated uplands, unpolluted streams, encroaching woods and forests and deserted estuaries. They were seldom seen in the country and, indeed, seemed frightened by it. Woods, in particular, had become places of menace which many feared to enter, as if terrified that, once lost among those dark unyielding trunks and forgotten paths, they would never again emerge into the light. And it wasn’t only the young. More and more people were seeking the company of their own kind, deserting the lonelier villages even before prudence or official decree made it necessary, and moving to those designated urban districts where the Warden had promised that light and power would be provided, if possible, until the end.

The solitary house which he remembered still stood in its garden to the right of the church and Theo saw to his surprise that it was at least partly occupied. The windows were curtained, there was a thin trail of smoke from the chimney and to the left of the path some attempt had been made to clear the earth of the knee-high grasses and to cultivate a vegetable garden. A few shrivelled runner beans still hung from the supporting sticks and there were uneven rows of cabbages and yellowing, half-picked Brussels sprouts. During his visits as an undergraduate he remembered regretting that the peace of the church and the house, which it was difficult to believe were so close to the city, had been spoiled by the loud, ceaseless roar from the M40 motorway. Now that nuisance was hardly noticeable and the house seemed wrapped in an ageless calm.

It was broken when the door burst open and an elderly man in a faded cassock precipitated himself out and came squawking and stumbling down the path, waving his arms as if to repel recalcitrant beasts. He called out in a quavering voice: “No service! No service today. I’ve got a christening at eleven o’clock.”

Theo said: “I’m not attending a service, I’m just visiting.”

“That’s all they ever do. Or so they say. But I shall want the font at eleven. All out then. Everyone out except the christening party.”

“I don’t expect to be here as late as that. Are you the parish priest?”

He came close and glared at Theo with fierce paranoid eyes. Theo thought that he had never seen anyone so old, the skull stretching the paper-thin, mottled skin of his face as if death couldn’t wait to claim him.

The old man said: “They had a black Mass here last Wednesday, singing and shouting all night. That’s not right. I can’t stop it, but I don’t approve. And they don’t clear up after themselves—blood, feathers, wine all over the floor. And black candle-grease. You can’t get it out. It won’t come out, you know. And it’s all left for me to do. They don’t think. It isn’t fair. It isn’t right.”

Theo said: “Why don’t you keep the church locked?”

The old man became conspiratorial. “Because they’ve taken the key, that’s why. And I know who’s got it. Oh yes, I know.” He turned and stumbled, muttering, towards the house, wheeling round at the door to shout a final warning. “Out at eleven o’clock. Unless you’re coming to the christening. All out by eleven.”

Theo made his way to the church. It was a small stone building and with its short twin-belled turret it looked very like an unpretentious stone house with a single chimney stack. The churchyard was as overgrown as a long-neglected field. The grass was tall and pale, as hay and ivy had leached over the gravestones, obliterating the names. Somewhere in this tangled wilderness was the well of St. Frideswide, once a place of pilgrimage. A modem pilgrim would have difficulty in finding it. But the church was obviously visited. On either side of the porch was a terracotta pot containing a single rose bush, the stems now denuded but still bearing a few starved winter-blighted buds.

Julian was waiting for him in the porch. She didn’t hold out her hand or smile, but said, “Thank you for coming, we’re all here,” and pushed open the door. He followed her into the dim interior and was met by a strong wave of incense overlaying a more feral smell. When he had first come here, thirty years ago, he had been transported by the silence of its ageless peace, seeming to hear upon the air the echo of long-forgotten plainsong, of old imperatives and desperate prayers. All that had gone. Once it had been a place where silence was more than the absence of noise. Now it was a stone building; nothing more.

He had expected the group to be waiting for him, standing or sitting together in the dim rustic emptiness. But he saw that they had separated themselves and had been walking in different parts of the church as if some argument or a restless need for solitude had forced them apart. There were four of them, three men and a tall woman standing beside the altar. As he and Julian entered they came quietly together and grouped themselves in the aisle facing him.

He had no doubt which one was Julian’s husband and their leader even before he came forward and, it seemed, deliberately confronted him. They stood facing each other like two adversaries weighing each other up. Neither smiled or put out a hand.

He was very dark, with a handsome, rather sulky face, the restless, suspicious eyes bright and deep-set, the brows strong and straight as brush strokes accentuating the jutting cheekbones. The heavy eyelids were spiked with a few black hairs so that the lashes and eyebrows looked joined. The ears were large and prominent, the lobes pointed, pixie ears at odds with the uncompromising set of the mouth and the strong clenched jaw. It was not the face of a man at peace with himself or his world, but why should he be, missing by only a few years the distinction and privileges of being an Omega? His generation, like theirs, had been observed, studied, cosseted, indulged, preserved for that moment when they would be male adults and produce the hoped—for fertile sperm. It was a generation programmed for failure, the ultimate disappointment to the parents who had bred them and the race which had invested in them so much careful nurturing and so much hope.

When he spoke his voice was higher than Theo had expected, harsh-toned and with a trace of an accent which he couldn’t identify. Without waiting for Julian to make any introductions he said: “There’s no need for you to know our surnames. We’ll use forenames only. I’m Rolf and I’m the leader of the group. Julian is my wife. Meet Miriam, Luke and Gascoigne. Gascoigne is his forename. His gran chose it for him in 1990, God knows why. Miriam used to be a midwife and Luke is a priest. You don’t need to know what any of us do now.”

The woman was the only one to come forward and grasp Theo’s hand. She was black, probably Jamaican, and the oldest of the group, older than himself, Theo guessed, perhaps in her mid- or late fifties. Her high bush of short, tightly curled hair was dusted with white. The contrast between the black and white was so stark that the head looked powdered, giving her a look both hieratic and decorative. She was tall and gracefully built with a long, fine-featured face, the coffee-coloured skin hardly lined, denying the whiteness of the hair. She was wearing slim black trousers tucked into boots, a high-necked brown jersey and sheepskin jerkin, an elegant, almost exotic contrast to the rough serviceable country clothes of the three men. She greeted Theo with a firm handshake and a speculative, half-humorous colluding glance, as if they were already conspirators.

At first sight there was nothing remarkable about the boy—he looked like a boy although he couldn’t be younger than thirty-one—whom they called Gascoigne. He was short, almost tubby, crop-haired and with a round, amiable face, wide-eyed, snub-nosed—a child’s face which had grown with age but not essentially altered since he had first looked out of his pram at a world which his air of puzzled innocence suggested he still found odd but not unfriendly.

The man called Luke, whom he remembered Julian too had described as a priest, was older than Gascoigne, probably over forty. He was tall, with a pale, sensitive face and an etiolated body, the large knobbled hands drooping from delicate wrists, as if in childhood he had outgrown his strength and had never managed to achieve robust adulthood. His fair hair lay like a silk fringe on the high forehead; his grey eyes were widely spaced and gentle. He looked an unlikely conspirator, his obvious frailty in stark contrast to Rolf’s dark masculinity. He gave Theo a brief smile which transformed his slightly melancholy face, but did not speak.

Rolf said: “Julian explained to you why we agreed to see you.” He made it sound as if Theo were the supplicant.

“You want me to use my influence with the Warden of England. I have to tell you that I have no influence. I gave up any such right when I relinquished my appointment as his adviser. I’ll listen to what you have to say but I don’t think there’s anything I can do to influence either the Council or the Warden of England. There never was. That’s partly why I resigned.”

Rolf said: “You’re his cousin, his only living relative. You were more or less brought up together. The rumour is that you’re the only one in England he’s ever listened to.”

“Then the rumour is wrong.” Theo added: “What sort of group are you? Do you always meet here in this church? Are you some kind of religious organization?”

It was Miriam who answered. “No. As Rolf explained, Luke is a priest, although he hasn’t a full-time job or a parish. Julian and he are Christians, the rest of us aren’t. We meet in churches because they’re available, they’re open, they’re free and they’re usually empty, at least the ones we choose are. We may have to give this one up. Other people are beginning to use it.”

Rolf broke in, his voice impatient, over-emphatic. “Religion and Christianity have nothing to do with it. Nothing!”

As if she hadn’t heard him, Miriam went on: “All sorts of eccentrics meet in churches. We’re just one set of oddballs among many. No one asks any questions. If they do, we’re the Cranmer Club. We meet to read and study the old Book of Common Prayer.”

Gascoigne said: “That’s our cover.” He spoke with the satisfaction of a child who has learned some of the grown-ups’ secrets.

Theo turned to him. “Is it? So what do you reply when the State Security Police ask you to recite the Collect for the first Sunday in Advent?” Seeing Gascoigne’s embarrassed incomprehension, he added: “Hardly a convincing cover.”

Julian said quietly: “You may not sympathize with us but you don’t have to despise us. The cover isn’t meant to convince the SSP. If they started taking an interest in us no cover would protect us. They’d break us in ten minutes. We know that. The cover gives us a reason, an excuse for meeting regularly and in churches. We don’t publicize it. It’s there if anyone asks, if we need it.”

Gascoigne said: “I know the prayers are called Collects. Do you know the one you asked me?” He wasn’t being accusatory, merely interested.

Theo said: “I was brought up with the old Book. The church my mother took me to as a boy must have been one of the last to use it. I’m a historian. I have an interest in the Victorian church, in old liturgies, defunct forms of worship.”

Rolf said impatiently: “All this is irrelevant. As Julian says, if the SSP take us they’re not going to waste turn examining us on the old catechism. We’re not in any danger yet; not unless you betray us. What have we done so far? Nothing but talk. Before we do act two of us thought it might be sensible to make an appeal to the Warden of England, your cousin.”

Miriam said: “Three of us. It was a majority. I went along with Luke and Julian. I thought it was worth a try.”

Rolf again ignored her. “It wasn’t my idea to get you here. I’m being honest with you. I’ve no reason to trust you and I don’t particularly want you.”

Theo replied: “And I didn’t particularly want to come, so we meet on equal footing. You want me to speak to the Warden. Why don’t you do that yourselves?”

“Because he wouldn’t listen. He may listen to you.”

“And if I agree to see him, and if he does listen, what do you want me to say?”

Now that the question was so baldly put it seemed that they were temporarily nonplussed. They looked at each other as if wondering which one would begin.

It was Rolf who answered: “The Warden was elected when he first took power, but that was fifteen years ago He hasn’t called an election since. He claims to rule by the people’s will, but what he is is a despot and a tyrant.”

Theo said drily: “It would be a brave messenger who was prepared to tell him that.”

Gascoigne said: “And the Grenadiers are his private army. It’s him they take an oath to. They don’t serve the State any more, they serve him. He’s got no right to use that name. My granddad was a private in the Grenadiers. He said they were the best regiment in the British Army.”

Rolf ignored him. “And there are things he could do even without waiting for a general election. He could end the semen-testing programme. It’s time-wasting and degrading, and it’s hopeless anyway. And he could let the Local and Regional Councils choose their own Chairmen. That would at least be the beginning of democracy.”

Luke said: “It isn’t only the semen testing. He should stop the compulsory gynaecological examinations. They degrade women. And we want him to put an end to the Quietus. I know that all the old people are supposed to be volunteers. Maybe it started out like that. Maybe some of them still are. But would they want to die if we gave them hope?”

Theo was tempted to ask “Hope of what?”

Julian broke in. “And we want something done about the Sojourners. Do you think it’s right that there’s an edict prohibiting our Omegas from emigrating? We import Omegas and others from less affluent countries to do our dirty work, clean the sewers, clear away the rubbish, look after the incontinent, the aged.”

Theo said: “They’re anxious enough to come, presumably because they get a better quality of life.”

Julian said: “They come to eat. Then, when they get old—sixty is the age limit, isn’t it?—they’re sent back whether they want to go or not.”

“That’s an evil their own countries could redress. They could begin by managing their affairs better. Anyway, their numbers aren’t great. There’s a quota, the intake is carefully controlled.”

“Not only a quota, stringent requirements. They have to be strong, healthy, without criminal convictions. We take the best and then chuck them back when they’re no longer wanted. And who gets them? Not the people who need them most. The Council and their friends. And who looks after the foreigners when they’re here? They work for a pittance, they live in camps, the women separate from the men. We don’t even give them citizenship; it’s a form of legalized slavery.”

Theo said: “I don’t think you’ll start a revolution on the issue of the Sojourners, or on the Quietus for that matter. People don’t care enough.”

Julian said: “We want to help them to care.”

“Why should they? They live without hope on a dying planet. What they want is security, comfort, pleasure. The Warden of England can promise the first two, which is more than most foreign governments are managing to do.”

Rolf had been listening to their exchange without speaking. Then he said suddenly: “What’s he like, the Warden of England? What sort of man is he? You should know, you were brought up with him.”

“That doesn’t give me an open entry to his mind.”

“All that power, more than anyone has ever had before—in this country anyway—all in his hands. Does he enjoy it?”

“Presumably. He doesn’t seem anxious to let it go.” He added: “If you want democracy, you have somehow to revitalize the Local Council. It begins there.”

Rolf said: “It ends there too. It’s how the Warden exercises control at that level. And have you seen our local chairman, Reggie Dimsdale? He’s seventy, querulous, shit-scared, only doing the job because it gets him a double petrol allowance and a couple of foreign Omegas to look after his bloody great bam of a house and wipe his bum for him when he gets incontinent. No Quietus for him.”

“He was elected to the Council. They were all elected.”

“By whom? Did you vote? Who cares? People are just relieved that someone will do the job. And you know how it works. The Chairman of the Local Council can’t be appointed without the approval of the District Council. That needs the approval of the Regional Council. He or she has to be approved by the Council of England. The Warden controls the system from top to bottom, you must know that. He controls it, too, in Scotland and Wales. Each has its own Warden, but who appoints them? Xan Lyppiatt would call himself the Warden of Great Britain except that, for him, it hasn’t got quite the same romantic appeal.”

The remark, thought Theo, showed perception. He recalled an old conversation with Xan. “Hardly ‘Prime Minister,’ I think. I don’t want to appropriate someone else’s title, particularly when it carries such a weight of tradition and obligation. I might be expected to call an election every five years. And not ‘Lord Protector.’ The last one was hardly an unqualified success. ‘Warden’ will do very well. But Warden of Great Britain and Northern Ireland? That hardly has the romantic ring I’m aiming for.”

Julian said: “We’ll get nowhere with the Local Council. You live in Oxford, you’re a citizen like everyone else. You must read the kind of stuff they paste up after the meetings, the things they discuss. The maintenance of the golf courses and bowling greens. Are the clubhouse facilities adequate? Decisions about job allocations, petrol-allowance complaints, applications to employ a Sojourner.

Auditions for the local amateur choir. Are there enough people wanting violin lessons to make it worthwhile for the Council to employ a full-time professional? Sometimes they even discuss street policing, not that it’s really necessary now that the threat of deportation to the Man Penal Colony is hanging over prospective burglars.”

Luke said gently: “Protection, comfort, pleasure. There has to be something more.”

“It’s what people care about, what they want. What more should the Council be offering?”

“Compassion, justice, love.”

“No state has ever concerned itself with love, and no state ever can.”

Julian said: “But it can concern itself with justice.”

Rolf was impatient: “Justice, compassion, love. They’re all words. What we’re talking about is power. The Warden is a dictator masquerading as a democratic leader. He ought to be made to be responsible to the will of the people.”

Theo said: “Ah, the will of the people. That’s a fine sounding phrase. At present, the will of the people seems to be for protection, comfort, pleasure.” He thought: I know what offends you—the fact that Xan enjoys such power, not the way he exercises it. The little group had no real cohesion and, he suspected, no common purpose. Gascoigne was fuelled by indignation about the appropriation of the name Grenadier, Miriam by some motive which was, as yet, unclear, Julian and Luke by religious idealism, Rolf by jealousy and ambition. As a historian he could have pointed out a dozen parallels.

Julian said: “Tell him about your brother, Miriam. Tell him about Henry. But let’s sit down before you begin.”

They settled themselves in a pew, crouching forward to listen to Miriam’s low voice, looking, thought Theo, like a huddled ill-assorted bunch of half-reluctant worshippers.

“Henry got sent to the island eighteen months ago. Robbery with violence. It wasn’t much violence, not real violence. He robbed an Omega and pushed her over. It was no more than a shove but she fell to the ground and she told the court that Henry had kicked her in the ribs while she was lying there. That isn’t true. I’m not saying Henry didn’t push her. He’s been grief and trouble since childhood. But he didn’t kick that Omega, not when she was down. He snatched her handbag and pushed her over and then he ran. It happened in London, just before midnight. He ran round the comer of Ladbroke Grove straight into the arms of the State Security Police. He’s had bad luck all his life.”

“Were you in court?”

“My mother and I, both of us. My father died two years ago. We got Henry a lawyer—paid him too—but he wasn’t really interested. Took our money and did nothing. We could see mat he agreed with the prosecution that Henry ought to be sent to the island. After all, it was an Omega he robbed. That counted against him. And, then, he’s black.”

Rolf said impatiently: “Don’t start all that crap about racial discrimination. It was the push that did it for him, not his colour. You can’t be sent to the Penal Colony except for a crime of violence against the person or for a second conviction for burglary. Henry had no convictions for burglary but two for theft.”

Miriam said: “Shoplifting. Nothing really bad. He stole a scarf for Mum’s birthday and a bar of chocolate. But that was when he was a kid. For God’s sake Rolf, he was twelve! It was over twenty years ago.”

Theo said: “If he knocked the victim down, he was guilty of a crime of violence whether or not he kicked her.”

“But he didn’t. He pushed her aside and she fell. It wasn’t deliberate.”

“The jury must have thought otherwise.”

“There wasn’t a jury. You know how difficult it is to get people to serve. They’re not interested. Won’t bother. He was tried under the new arrangements, a judge and two magistrates. They’ve got power to send people to the island. And it’s for life. There’s no remission, you never get out. A life sentence in that hell for one push which he didn’t mean. It killed my mother. Henry was her only son and she knew she’d never see him again. She just turned her face to the wall after that. But I’m glad she did die. At least she never knew the worst that happened to him.”

She looked at Theo and said simply: “You see, I did know. He came home.”

“You mean he escaped from the island? I thought that was impossible.”

“Henry did it. He found a broken dinghy, one that the security force had overlooked when they got the island ready for the convicts. Every boat which wasn’t worth taking away they burnt, but one was hidden or got overlooked, or perhaps they thought it was too damaged to be useful. Henry was always good with his hands. He repaired it in secret and he made two oars. Then, four weeks ago, January the third it was, he waited until it was dark and pushed off.”

“It was incredibly foolhardy.”

“No, it was sensible. He knew that he’d either make it or drown, and drowning was better than staying on that island. And he got home, he got back. I live—well, never mind where I live. It’s in a cottage on the edge of a village. He arrived after midnight. I’d had a heavy day at work and I meant to go to bed early. I was tired but restless, so I made myself a cup of tea when I got in and then I fell asleep in my chair. I only slept for about twenty minutes but when I awoke I found I wasn’t ready for bed. You know how it is. You get beyond tiredness. It’s almost too much of an effort to undress.

“It was a dark night, starless, and the wind was rising. Usually I like the sound of the wind when I’m snug at home, but that night it was different, not comforting, wailing and hissing in the chimney, menacing. I got the blues, the black dog on my shoulder, thinking of Mother dead and Henry lost forever. I thought I’d better shake myself out of it and get up to bed. And then I heard the knocking on the door. There is a bell but he didn’t use that. He just used the knocker twice, and feebly, but I heard. I went to the peep-hole but I could see nothing, only blackness. It was after midnight now and I couldn’t think who could be calling and so late. But I put on the chain and opened the door. There was a dark shape, collapsed against the wall. He had only the strength to knock twice before he fell unconscious. I managed to drag him in and to revive him.

I gave him some soup and brandy and after an hour he could talk. He wanted to talk so I let him, cradling him in my arms.”

Theo asked: “What sort of state was he in?”

It was Rolf who replied: “Filthy, stinking, bloody and desperately thin. He’d walked from the Cumbrian coast.”

Miriam went on: “I washed him and bandaged his feet and managed to get him to bed. He was terrified to sleep alone, so I lay down beside him fully dressed. I couldn’t sleep. It was then he began talking. He talked for over an hour. I didn’t speak. I just held him and listened. Then, at last, he was silent and I knew he was asleep. I lay there, holding him, listening to his breathing, his muttering. Sometimes he gave a groan and then he would suddenly shriek and sit up, but I managed to soothe him as if he were a baby and he would sleep again. I lay beside him and wept silently for the things he’d told me. Oh, but I was angry too. I burned with anger like a hot coal in my breast.

“The island is a living hell. Those who went there human are nearly all dead and the rest are devils. There’s starvation. I know they have seeds, grain, machinery, but these are mostly town offenders not used to growing things, not used to working with their hands. All the stored food has been eaten now, gardens and fields stripped. Now, when people die, some get eaten too. I swear it. It has happened. The island is run by a gang of the strongest convicts. They enjoy cruelty and on Man they can beat and torture and torment and there’s no one to stop them and no one to see. Those who are gentle, who care, who ought not to be mere, don’t last long. Some of the women are the worst. Henry told me things I can’t repeat and I shall never forget.

“And then next morning they came for him. They didn’t burst in, they didn’t make very much noise. They just surrounded the cottage quietly and knocked at the door.”

Theo asked: “Who were they?”

“Six Grenadiers and six men from the State Security Police. One beaten exhausted man and they sent twelve to take him. The SSP were the worst. I think they were Omegas. They didn’t say anything to me at first, they just went upstairs and dragged him down. When he saw them he gave a shriek. I’ll never forget that shriek. Never, never… Then they turned on me, but an officer, he was one of the Grenadiers, told them to leave me alone. He said, ‘She’s his sister, naturally he came here. She had no choice but to help him.’ ”

Julian said: “We thought afterwards that he must have had a sister himself, someone he knew would never let him down, would always be there.”

Rolf said impatiently: “Or else he thought he could show a little humanity and get paid for it by Miriam one way or the other.”

Miriam shook her head. “No, it wasn’t like that. He was trying to be kind. I asked him what would happen to Henry. He didn’t reply, but one of the SSP said, ‘What do you expect? But you’ll get his ashes.’ It was the captain of the SSP who told me that they could have picked him up when he landed but that they followed him all the way from Cumbria to Oxford. Partly to see where he’d go, I suppose, partly because they wanted to wait until he felt safe before they arrested him.”

Rolf said with bitter anger: “It was that refinement of cruelty which gave them an extra kick.”

“A week later the package arrived. It was heavy, like two pounds of sugar, and the same shape, done up in brown paper with a typed label. Inside was this plastic bag filled with white grit. It looked like garden fertilizer, nothing to do with Henry. There was just a typed note, no signature. ‘Killed while attempting to escape.’ Nothing else. I dug a hole in the garden. I remember that it was raining and when I poured the white grit into the hole it was as if the whole garden was crying. But I didn’t cry. Henry’s sufferings were over. Anything was better than being sent back to that island.”

Rolf said: “There’d be no question of sending him back, of course. They wouldn’t want anyone to know that it’s possible to get away. And it won’t be, not now. They’ll start patrolling the coast.”

Julian touched Theo’s arm and looked him full in the face. “They shouldn’t treat human beings like that. No matter what they’ve done, what they are, they shouldn’t treat people like that. We have to stop it.”

Theo said: “Obviously there are social evils, but they are nothing to what is happening in other parts of the world. It’s a question of what the country is prepared to tolerate as the price of sound government.”

Julian asked: “What do you mean by sound government?”

“Good public order, no corruption in high places, freedom from fear of war and crime, a reasonably equitable distribution of wealth and resources, concern for the individual life.”

Luke said: “Then we haven’t got sound government.”

“We may have the best that is possible in the circumstances. There was wide public support for setting up the Man Penal Colony. No government can act in advance of the moral will of the people.”

Julian said: “Then we have to change the moral will. We have to change people.”

Theo laughed. “Oh, that’s the kind of rebellion you have in mind? Not the system but human hearts and minds. You’re the most dangerous revolutionaries of all, or would be if you had the slightest idea how to begin, the slightest chance of succeeding.”

Julian asked, as if seriously interested in his answer: “How would you begin?”

“I wouldn’t. History tells me what happens to people who do. You have one reminder on that chain round your neck.”

She put up her distorted left hand and briefly touched the cross. Beside that swollen flesh it seemed a very small and fragile talisman.

Rolf said: “You can always find excuses for doing nothing. The fact is that the Warden runs Britain as his private fiefdom. The Grenadiers are his private army and the State Security Police are his spies and executioners.”

“You’ve no proof of that.”

“Who killed Miriam’s brother? Was that execution after a proper trial or secret murder? What we want is real democracy.”

“With you at the head of it?”

“I’d make a better job of it than he does.”

“I imagine that’s exactly what he thought when he took over from the last Prime Minister.”

Julian said: “So you won’t speak to the Warden?”

Rolf broke in. “Of course he won’t. He never intended to. It was a waste of time getting him here. Pointless, stupid and dangerous.”

Theo said quietly: “I haven’t said I won’t see him. But I’ve got to take him more than hearsay, particularly as I can’t even tell him where and how I’ve got my information. Before I give you a decision I want to see a Quietus. When is the next one due to be held? Does anyone know?”

It was Julian who replied. “They’ve stopped advertising them, but of course the news does get round in advance. There’s a female Quietus in Southwold this Wednesday, in three days’ time. It’s off the pier, north of the town. D’you know the town? It’s about eight miles south of Lowestoft.”

“That’s not very convenient.”

Rolf said: “Not for you, maybe. But it is for them. No railway so they won’t get crowds, a long drive so people wonder if it’s worth the petrol just to see Granny despatched in a white nightie to the sound of ‘Abide With Me.’ Oh, and there’s just the one access by road. They can control how many people attend, keep an eye on them. If there’s trouble they can pick up the people responsible.”

Julian asked: “How long must we wait before you report back?

“I’ll decide whether to see the Warden immediately after the Quietus. Then we’d better wait for a week and arrange a meeting.”

Rolf said: “Leave it for a fortnight. If you do see the Warden, they may put a watch on you.”

Julian asked: “How will you let us know whether you’ve agreed to see him?”

“I’ll leave a message after I’ve seen the Quietus. Do you know the Cast Museum in Pusey Lane?”

Rolf said: “No.”

Luke said eagerly: “I do. It’s part of the Ashmolean, an exhibition of plaster casts and marble copies of Greek and Roman statues. We used to be taken there during art class at school. I haven’t been there for years. I didn’t even know that the Ashmolean was keeping it open.”

Theo said: “There’s no particular reason to close it. It doesn’t require much supervision. A few elderly scholars occasionally drift in. The opening hours are on the board outside.”

Rolf was suspicious. “Why there?”

“Because I like to visit it occasionally and the attendant is used to seeing me. Because it provides a number of accessible hiding places. Mainly because it’s convenient for me. Nothing else about this enterprise is.”

Luke said: “Where exactly will you leave the message?”

“On the ground floor, the right-hand wall, under the head of the Diadoumenos. The catalogue number is C38 and you’ll find that on the bust. If you can’t remember the name, you can remember the number, presumably. If you can’t, then write it down.”

Julian said: “It’s Luke’s age, that makes it easy. Will we have to lift the statue?”

“It’s not a statue, merely a head, and you needn’t touch it. There’s a very narrow gap between the base and the shelf. I’ll leave my answer on a card. It won’t be incriminating, a simple yes or no. You could telephone me for it, but no doubt you believe that might be unwise.”

Rolf said: “We try never to telephone. Even though we haven’t got started yet, we take normal precautions. Everyone knows that the lines are tapped.”

Julian asked: “And if your answer is yes, and the Warden agrees to see you, when will you let us know what he says, what he promises to do?”

Rolf broke in: “Better leave it for at least two weeks. Report on Wednesday, fourteen days after the Quietus. I’ll meet you on foot anywhere in Oxford, an open space might be best.”

Theo said: “Open spaces can be watched through binoculars. Two people, obviously meeting, in the middle of a park, meadow or university park draw attention to themselves. A public building is safe. I’ll meet Julian in the Pitt Rivers Museum.”

Rolf said: “You appear to like museums.”

“They have the advantage of being places where people can legitimately loiter.”

Rolf said: “Then I’ll meet you at twelve o’clock in the Pitt Rivers.”

“Not you; Julian. You used Julian to make the first approach to me. It was Julian who brought me here today. I’ll be in the Pitt Rivers at midday on the Wednesday two weeks after the Quietus and I shall expect her to come alone.”

It was just before eleven when Theo left them in the church. He stood for a moment in the porch, glanced at his watch and looked out over the unkept graveyard. He wished that he hadn’t come, hadn’t got involved in this futile and embarrassing enterprise. He was more affected by Miriam’s story than he cared to admit. He wished he had never heard it. But what was he expected to do, what could anyone do? It was too late now. He didn’t believe that the group was in any danger. Some of their concern had seemed close to paranoia. And he had hoped for a temporary reprieve from responsibility, that there would be no Quietus for months. Wednesday was a bad day for him. It would mean rearranging his diary at short notice. He hadn’t seen Xan for three years. If they were to meet again, it was humiliating and disagreeable to see himself in the role of supplicant. He was as irritated with himself as with the group. He might despise them as a gang of amateur malcontents, but they had outwitted him, had sent the one member whom they knew he would find it difficult to refuse. Why he should have found it difficult was a question he was not at present willing to explore. He would go to the Quietus as he had promised and leave them a message in the Cast Museum. He hoped that the message could justifiably be the single word NO.

The christening party was coming up the path, the old man, now wearing a stole, shepherding them with small cries of encouragement. There were two middle-aged women and two older men, the men soberly dressed in blue suits, the women wearing flowered hats, incongruous above their winter coats. Each of the women was carrying a white bundle wrapped in a shawl beneath which fell the lace-trimmed pleated folds of christening robes. Theo made to pass them, eyes tactfully averted, but the two women almost barred his way and, smiling the meaningless smile of the half-demented, thrust forward the bundles, inviting his admiration. The two kittens, ears flattened beneath the ribboned bonnets, looked both ridiculous and endearing. Their eyes were wide-open, uncomprehending opal pools, and they seemed worried at their confinement. He wondered if they had been drugged, then decided that they had probably been handled, caressed and carried like babies since birth and were accustomed to it. He wondered, too, about the priest. Whether validly ordained or an impostor—and there were plenty about—he was hardly engaged in an orthodox rite. The Church of England, no longer with a common doctrine or a common liturgy, was so fragmented that there was no knowing what some sects might not have come to believe, but he doubted whether the christening of animals was encouraged. The new Archbishop, who described herself as a Christian Rationalist, would, he suspected, have prohibited infant baptism on the grounds of superstition, had infant baptism still been possible. But she could hardly control what was happening in every redundant church. The kittens presumably would not welcome a douche of cold water over their heads, but no one else was likely to object. The charade was a fitting conclusion to a morning of folly. He set off walking vigorously towards sanity and that empty inviolate house he called home.

On the morning of the Quietus, Theo awoke to a weight of vague unease, not heavy enough to be called anxiety, but a mild unfocused depression, like the last tatters of an unremembered but disagreeable dream. And then, even before he put out his hand to the light switch, he knew what the day held. It had been his habit all his life to devise small pleasures as palliatives to unpleasant duties. Normally he would now begin planning his route with care: a good pub for an early lunch, an interesting church to visit, a detour to take in an attractive village. But there could be no compensation on this journey whose end and purpose was death. He had better get there as quickly as possible, see what he had promised to see, return home, tell Julian there was nothing that he or the group could do, and attempt to put the whole unsought and unwelcome experience out of his mind. That meant rejecting the more interesting route, via Bedford, Cambridge and Stowmarket, in favour of the M40 to the M25, then northeast to the Suffolk coast by the A 12. It would be a faster if less direct and certainly duller route, but, then, he wasn’t expecting to enjoy the drive.

But he made good progress. The A 12 was in much better condition than he had expected, considering that the east-coast ports were now almost derelict. He made excellent time, arriving at Blythburgh, on the estuary, just before two. The tide was receding but beyond the reeds and mud flats the water stretched like a silken scarf and a fitful early-afternoon sun struck gold in the windows of Blythburgh Church.

It had been more than twenty-seven years since he was last here. Then he and Helena had taken a weekend break at the Swan in Southwold when Natalie was only six months old. They had only been able to afford a secondhand Ford in those days. Natalie’s carry-cot had been firmly strapped to the back seat and the boot filled with the paraphernalia of babyhood: large packets of disposable nappies, sterilizing equipment for the bottles, tins of baby food. When they reached Blythburgh, Natalie had begun to cry and Helena had said that she was hungry and should be fed now without waiting to get to the hotel. Why couldn’t they stop at the White Hart at Blythburgh? The innkeeper would be sure to have facilities for heating milk. They could both have a pub lunch and she could feed Natalie. But the car park, he saw, was crowded and he disliked the trouble and disruption which the child and Helena’s demands would cause. His insistence on pressing on for the few extra miles to Southwold had been ill-received. Helena, attempting ineffectually to pacify the child, had scarcely glanced at the gleaming water, at the great church, moored like a majestic ship among the reed beds. The weekend break had begun with the usual resentment and had continued with half-repressed ill-humour. It was, of course, his fault. He had been more ready to hurt his wife’s feelings and deprive his daughter than to inconvenience a pub bar full of strangers. He wished there could be one memory of his dead child which wasn’t tainted with guilt and regret.

He decided almost on impulse to lunch at the pub. Today his was the only car parked there. And inside the low-raftered room the black hearth of blazing logs which he remembered had been replaced with a two-bar electric fire. He was the only customer. The publican, very old, served him with a local beer. It was excellent, but the only food on offer was pre-cooked pies which the man heated in the microwave oven. It was an inadequate preparation for the ordeal ahead.

He took the remembered turn on to the Southwold road. The Suffolk countryside, crimped and barren under the winter sky, looked unchanged, but the road itself had deteriorated, making the drive as bumpy and hazardous as a cross-country rally. But when he reached the outskirts of Reydon he saw small gangs of Sojourners with their overseers, obviously preparing to make a start on repairing the surface. The dark faces glanced at him as he slowed and drove carefully past. Their presence surprised him. Southwold had surely not been designated as a future approved population centre. Why, then, was it important to ensure reasonable access?

And now he was driving past the wind shield of trees and the grounds and buildings of St. Felix School. A large board at the gate proclaimed that it was now die East Suffolk Craft Centre. Presumably it was open only during the summer, or at weekends, for he saw no one on the broad, unkempt lawns. He drove over Bight Bridge and entered the little town, its painted houses seeming to sleep in a post-prandial stupor. Thirty years ago its inhabitants had been mainly elderly: old soldiers walking their dogs, retired couples, bright-eyed and weather-beaten, walking arm in arm along the front. An atmosphere of ordered calm, all passion spent. Now it was almost deserted. On the bench outside the Crown Hotel two old men sat side by side staring into the distance, brown gnarled hands crossed over the handles of their walking sticks.

He decided to park in the yard of the Swan and have coffee before making his way to the north beach, but the inn was closed. As he was getting back into his car a middle-aged woman wearing a flowered apron came out of the side door and locked it behind her.

He said: “I was hoping to have coffee. Is the hotel closed permanently?”

She was pleasant-faced but nervous, and looked around before replying. “Just today, sir. A mark of respect. It’s the Quietus, you see, or perhaps you didn’t know.”

“Yes,” he said, “I did know.”

Wishing to break the profound sense of isolation which lay heavily on buildings and streets, he said: “I was last here thirty years ago. It hasn’t changed very much.”

She laid one hand on the car window and said: “Oh, but it has, sir, it has changed. But the Swan is still a hotel. Not so many customers, of course, now people are moving out of the town. You see, it’s scheduled for evacuation. The government won’t be able to guarantee us power and services at the end. People are moving to Ipswich or Norwich.“ Why all the hurry, he wondered irritably. Surely Xan could keep this place going for another twenty years.

In the end he parked the car on the small green at the end of Trinity Street and began walking along the cliff-top path towards the pier.

The mud-grey sea heaved sluggishly under a sky the colour of thin milk, faintly luminous at the horizon as if the fickle sun were about once more to break through. Above this pale transparency there hung great bunches of darker-grey and black clouds, like a half-raised curtain. Thirty feet below him he could see the stippled underbelly of the waves as they rose and spent themselves with weary inevitability, as if weighted with sand and pebbles. The rail of the promenade, once so pristine and white, was rusted and in parts broken, and the grassy slope between the promenade and the beach huts looked as if it hadn’t been cropped for years. Once he would have seen below him the long shining row of wooden chalets with their endearingly ridiculous names, ranged like brightly painted dolls’ houses facing the sea. Now there were gaps like missing teeth in a decaying jaw and those remaining were ramshackle, their paint peeling, precariously roped by staves driven into the bank, waiting for the next storm to sweep them away. At his feet the dry grasses, waist-high, beaded with dry seed pods, stirred fitfully in the breeze which was never entirely absent from this easterly coast.

Apparently the embarkation was to take place not from the pier itself but from a specially erected wooden jetty alongside it. He could see in the distance the two low boats, their decks festooned with garlands of flowers, and, on the end of the pier overlooking the jetty, a small group of figures some of whom he thought were in uniform. About eighty yards in front of him three coaches were drawn up on the promenade. As he approached, the passengers began to get down. First came a small group of bandsmen dressed in red jackets and black trousers. They stood chatting in a disorderly little group, the sun glinting on the brass of their instruments. One of them gave his neighbour a playful cuff. For a few seconds they pretended to spar, then, bored with the horseplay, lit cigarettes and stared out to sea. And now came the elderly people, some able to descend unaided, others leaning on nurses. The luggage hold of one of the coaches was unlocked and a number of wheelchairs dragged out. Last of all the most frail were helped from the coach and into the wheelchairs.

Theo kept his distance and watched as the thin line of bent figures straggled down the sloping path which bisected the cliff, towards the beach huts on the lower promenade. Suddenly he realized what was happening. They were using the huts for the old women to change into their white robes, huts which for so many decades had echoed with the laughter of children, and whose names, not thought of for nearly thirty years, now came unbidden to his mind, the silly, happy celebrations of family holidays: Pete’s Place, Ocean View, Spray Cottage, Happy Hut. He stood grasping the rusty rail at the top of the cliff, watching as, two by two, the old women were helped up the steps and into the huts. The members of the band had watched but made no movement. Now they conferred a little together, stubbed out their cigarettes, picked up their instruments and made their own way down the cliff. They formed themselves into a line and stood waiting. The silence was almost eerie. Behind him the row of Victorian houses, shuttered, empty, stood like shabby memorials of happier days. Below him the beach was deserted; only the squawk of gulls disturbed die calm.

And now the old women were being helped down from me huts and arranged in line. They were all wearing long white robes, perhaps nightdresses, with what looked like woollen shawls and white capes over them, a necessary comfort in the keen wind. He was glad of the warmth of his own tweed coat. Each woman was carrying a small posy of flowers so that they looked like a bevy of dishevelled bridesmaids. He found himself wondering who had placed the flowers ready, who had unlocked the huts, left the nightdresses folded for that purpose. The whole event, which seemed so haphazard, so spontaneous, must have been carefully organized. And he noticed for the first time that the huts on this part of the lower promenade had been repaired and newly painted.

The band began playing as the procession shuffled slowly along the lower promenade towards the pier. As the first blare of brass broke the silence he felt a sense of outrage, a dreadful pity. They were playing cheerful songs, melodies from the time of his grandparents, the songs of the Second World War, which he recognized but whose names he could not at first recall. Then some of the titles fell into his mind: “Bye Bye, Blackbird.”

“Somebody Stole My Girl.”

“Somewhere over the Rainbow.” As they approached the pier the music changed and he recognized the strains of a hymn, “Abide with Me.” After the first verse had been played and the tune began again, there rose from beneath him a querulous mewing like the sound of sea birds and he realized that the old people were singing. As he watched some of the women began swaying to the music, holding out their white skirts and clumsily pirouetting. It occurred to Theo that they could have been drugged.

Keeping pace with the last couple in the line, he followed them towards the pier. And now the scene was plain beneath him. There was a crowd of only about twenty, some perhaps relatives and friends, but most members of the State Security Police. The two low boats might once, he thought, have been small barges. Only the hulls remained and these had been fitted with rows of benches. There were two soldiers in each of the boats and, as the old women entered, they bent down, presumably either to shackle their ankles or to attach weights. The motorboat, moored at the pier itself, made the plan clear. Once out of sight of land the soldiers would knock away the plugs and then board the motorboat and return to shore. The band on shore was still playing, this time Elgar’s “Nimrod.” The singing had ceased and no sound reached him except the ceaseless crash of the waves on the shingle and an occasional quiet word of command blown to him on the thin breeze.

He told himself that he had seen enough. He would be justified now in returning to the car. He wanted nothing more than to drive furiously away from this little town which spoke to him only of helplessness, of decay, of emptiness and death. But he had promised Julian that he would see a Quietus and that must mean watching until the boats were out of sight. As if to reinforce his intention, he walked down the concrete steps from the upper promenade to the beach. No one came forward to order him away. The little group of officials, the nurses, the soldiers, even the bandsmen, concerned with their part in the macabre ceremony, seemed not even to notice that he was there.

Suddenly there was a commotion. One of the women being helped on to the nearer boat gave a cry and began a violent thrashing of her arms. The nurse with her was taken by surprise and, before she could move, the woman had leapt from the jetty into the water and was struggling ashore. Instinctively Theo cast off his heavy coat and ran towards her, scrunching over the pebbles and shingle, feeling the icy bite of the sea freezing his ankles. She was only about twenty yards from him now and he could see her plainly, the wild white hair, the nightdress sticking to her body, the swinging, pendulous breasts, the arms with their weals of crêpy skin. A crashing wave tore the nightdress from her shoulder and he saw the breast swaying obscenely like a giant jellyfish. She was still screaming, a high, piercing whistle like a tortured animal. And almost at once he recognized her. It was Hilda Palmer-Smith. Buffeted, he struggled towards her, holding out both hands.

And then it happened. His outstretched hands were about to grasp her wrists when one of the soldiers leapt into the water from the jetty and, with the butt of his pistol, struck her viciously on the side of the head. She fell forward into the sea, arms whirling. There was a brief stain of red before the next wave came, engulfed her, lifted her, receded and left her spreadeagled in the foam. She tried to rise but again he struck. Theo had reached her by now and clutched one of her hands. Almost immediately he felt his shoulders seized and he was flung aside. He heard a voice, quiet, authoritative, almost gentle: “Let it be, sir. Let it be.”

Another wave, larger than the last, engulfed her and knocked him off his feet. It receded and, struggling up, he saw her again, stretched out, the nightdress rucked up over the thin legs, all of the lower body exposed. He gave a groan and again staggered towards her, but this time he, too, felt a blow on the side of his head and fell. He was aware of the harshness of pebbles grinding into his face, of the overwhelming smell of salt sea water, of a pounding in his ears. His hands scrabbled at the shingle, trying to get a hold. But sand and shingle were sucked away beneath him. And then another wave struck and he felt himself dragged back into deeper water. Only half-conscious, he tried to raise his head, tried to breathe, knowing that he was close to drowning. And then came the third wave, which lifted him bodily and flung him among the stones of the beach.

But they hadn’t intended him to drown. Shivering with cold, spluttering and retching, he was aware of strong hands under his shoulders, of being lifted out of the water as lightly as if he were a child. Someone was dragging him face-downwards up the beach. He could feel his toe-caps rasping the patches of wet sand and the drag of the shingle on his soaking trouser-legs. His arms dangled powerlessly, the knuckles bruised and grazed by the larger stones on the upper ridges of the shore. And all the time he could smell the strong sea-smell of the beach and hear the rhythmic thudding of the surf. Then the dragging stopped, and he was dumped ungently on soft, dry sand. He felt the weight of his coat as it was thrown over his body. He was dimly aware of a dark shape passing over him, and then he was alone.

He tried to raise his head, aware for the first time of a throbbing pain, expanding and contracting like a living thing pulsating in his skull. Each time he managed to lift his head it swayed weakly from side to side, then thudded again into the sand. But at the third try he managed to raise it a few inches and opened his eyes. The lids were weighted with caked sand, sand that covered his face and blocked his mouth, while strands of slimy weeds webbed his fingers and hung in his hair. He felt like a man dug from some watery grave with all the trappings of his death still on him. But in the moment before he lapsed into unconsciousness he was able to see that someone had dragged him into the narrow space between two beach huts. They were raised on low stilts and he could see beneath the floors the detritus of long-forgotten holidays half-buried in the duty sand: the gleam of silver paper, an old plastic bottle, the rotting canvas and splintered struts of a deck chair, and a child’s broken spade. He shuffled painfully to get closer and reached out his hand, as if to lay hold on it would be to lay hold on safety and peace. But the effort was too great and, closing his smarting eyes, he sank with a sigh into the darkness.

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, wind-burned 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 patch-work 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 botties. 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.

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 he 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.

Tuesday 9 February

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.

I said: “Is George no longer driving?”

“George is dead, sir. An accident on the A4. My name is Hedges. I shall be your driver on both journeys.”

It was difficult to think of George, that skilled and meticulously careful driver, being involved in a fatal accident, but I asked no more questions. Something told me that curiosity would be unsatisfied and further inquiry unwise.

There was no point in attempting to rehearse the interview to come or in speculating how Xan would receive me after three years’ silence. We hadn’t parted in anger or bitterness but I knew that what I had done had in his eyes been inexcusable. I wondered whether it was also unforgivable. He was used to getting what he wanted. He had wanted me at his side, and I had defected. But now he had agreed to see me. In less than an hour I should know whether he wanted the breach to be permanent. I wondered whether he had told any other members of the Council that I’d asked for an interview. I neither expected nor wished to see them, that part of my life is over, but I thought of them as the car sped smoothly, almost silently, towards London.

There are four of them. Martin Woolvington, in charge of Industry and Production; Harriet Marwood, responsible for Health, Science and Recreation; Felicia Rankin, whose Home Affairs portfolio, something of a ragbag, includes Housing and Transport; and Carl Inglebach, Minister for Justice and State Security. The allocation of responsibility is more a convenient way of dividing the workload than the conferring of absolute authority. No one, at least while I attended the Council meetings, was inhibited from encroaching on another’s field of interest, and decisions were taken by the whole Council by a majority vote in which, as Xan’s adviser, I had no part. Was it, I wondered now, this humiliating exclusion rather than any awareness of my ineffectiveness which had made my position intolerable? Influence was no substitute for power.

Martin Woolvington’s use to Xan and the justification for his place on the Council is no longer in doubt and must have strengthened since my defection. He is the member with whom Xan is most intimate, the one he probably comes closest to calling a friend. They were in the same regiment, serving as subalterns together, and Woolvington was one of the first men Xan appointed to serve on the Council. Industry and Production is one of the heaviest portfolios, including, as it does, agriculture, food and power, and the direction of labour. In a Council notable for high intelligence, Woolvington’s appointment at first surprised me. But he isn’t stupid; the British Army had ceased to value stupidity among its commanders long before the 1990s, and Martin more than justifies his place by a practical, non-intellectual intelligence and an extraordinary capacity for hard work. He says little in Council but his contributions are invariably apposite and sensible. His loyalty to Xan is absolute. During Council meetings he was the only one who doodled. Doodling, I had always thought, was a sign of minor stress, a need to keep the hands busy, a useful expedient for avoiding meeting the eyes of others. Martin’s doodling was unique. The impression he gave was of a reluctance to waste time. He could listen with half his mind and draw up on paper his battle lines, plan his manoeuvres; could still draw his meticulous toy soldiers, usually in the uniform of the Napoleonic Wars. He would leave his papers on the table when he left and I was astounded at the detail and the skill of the drawings. I rather liked him, because he was invariably courteous and displayed none of the covert resentment at my presence which, morbidly sensitive to atmosphere, I thought I detected in all the others. But I never felt that I understood him and I doubt whether it ever occurred to him to try to understand me. If the Warden wanted me there, that was good enough for him. He is little more than medium height, with fair wavy hair and a sensitive, aesthetic face which reminded me strongly of a photograph I had seen of a 1930s film star, Leslie Howard. The resemblance, once detected, reinforced itself, imbuing him in my eyes with a sensibility and dramatic intensity which were foreign to his essentially pragmatic nature. I never felt at ease with Felicia Rankin. If Xan had wanted a colleague who was both a young woman and a distinguished lawyer, he had less acerbic choices available to him. I have never been able to understand why he chose Felicia. Her appearance is extraordinary. She is invariably televised and photographed in profile or half-face and, seen thus, gives the impression of calm, conventional loveliness: the classic bone structure, the high arched eyebrows, the blond hair swept back into a chignon. When seen full-faced, the symmetry vanishes. It is as if her head has been fashioned from distinct halves, both attractive but put together in a discordance which, in certain lights, is close to deformity. The right eye is larger than the left, the forehead above it bulges slightly, the right ear is larger than its fellow. But the eyes are remarkable, huge with clear grey irises. Looking at them when her face was in repose, I used to wonder what it felt like to be cheated so spectacularly of beauty by so minute a margin. Sometimes in Council I found it difficult to keep my eyes from her and she would suddenly turn her head and catch my quickly averted eyes with her own bold contemptuous glance. I wondered now how much my morbid obsession with her looks had fuelled our mutual antipathy.

Harriet Marwood, at sixty-eight the oldest member, is responsible for Health, Science and Recreation, but her main function on the Council was obvious to me after the first meeting I attended and is indeed obvious to the whole country. Harriet is the wise old woman of the tribe, the universal grandmother, reassuring, comforting, always there, upholding her own outdated standard of manners and taking it for granted that the grandchildren will conform. When she appears on television screens to explain the latest instruction it’s impossible not to believe that all is for the best. She could make a law requiring universal suicide seem eminently reasonable; half the country, I suspect, would immediately comply. Here is the wisdom of age, certain, uncompromising, caring. Before Omega she was head of a girls’ public school and teaching was her passion. Even as headmistress she had continued to teach the sixth form. But it was the young she wanted to teach. She despised my compromise of taking a job in adult education, spooning out the pabulum of popular history and even more popular literature to the bored middle-aged. The energy, the enthusiasm she had given as a young woman to teaching is now given to the Council. They are her pupils, her children, and, by a process of extension, so is the whole country. I suspect that Xan finds her useful in ways I can’t guess. I also think her extremely dangerous. People who bother to cogitate about the personalities of the Council say that Carl Inglebach is the brain, that the brilliant planning and administration of the tightly knit organization which holds the country together has been formulated within that high domed head, that without his administrative genius the Warden of England would be ineffectual. It’s the kind of thing that gets said about the powerful and he may have encouraged it, although I doubt that. He is impervious to public opinion. His creed is simple. There are things about which nothing can be done and to try to change them is a waste of time. There are things that ought to be changed and, the decision once made, the change should be put in hand without procrastination or clemency. He is the most sinister member of the Council and, after the Warden, the most powerful.

I didn’t speak to my driver until we reached the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout, when I leaned forward, tapped the window between us and said: “I’d like you to drive through Hyde Park then down Constitution Hill and Birdcage Walk if you will.”

He said, without a motion of his shoulders or any expression in his voice: “That, sir, is the route the Warden has instructed me to take.”

We drove in front of the palace, its windows shuttered, the flagpole without its standard, the sentry boxes empty, the great gates closed and padlocked. St. James’s Park looked more unkempt than when I had last seen it. This was one of the parks which the Council had decreed should be properly maintained and there was, in fact, a distant group of toiling figures wearing the yellow-and-brown overalls of Sojourners, picking up rubbish and apparently clipping the edges of the still-bare flowerbeds. A wintry sun lit the surface of the lake on which the bright plumage of two mandarin ducks stood out like painted toys. Under the trees lay a thin powder of last week’s snow and I saw, with interest but with no lifting of the heart, that the nearer patch of white was a drift of the first snowdrops.

There was very little traffic in Parliament Square and the iron gates to the entrance of the Palace of Westminster were closed. Here once a year Parliament meets, the Members elected by the District and Regional Councils. No bills are debated, no legislation is enacted, Britain is governed by decree of the Council of England. The official function of Parliament is to discuss, advise, receive information and make recommendations. Each of the five members of the Council reports personally in what the media describe as the annual message to the nation. The session lasts only for a month and the agenda is set by the Council. The subjects discussed are innocuous. Resolutions by a two-thirds majority go to the Council of England, who can reject or accept as they will. The system has the merit of simplicity and gives the illusion of democracy to people who no longer have the energy to care how or by whom they are governed as long as they get what the Warden has promised: freedom from fear, freedom from want, freedom from boredom.

For the first few years after Omega, the King, still uncrowned, opened Parliament with the old splendour, but driving through almost empty streets. From being the potent symbol of continuity and tradition, he has become an unemployable archaic reminder of what we have lost. Now he still opens Parliament, but quietly, wearing a lounge suit, stealing in and out of London almost unnoticed.

I could remember a conversation I’d had with Xan the week before I resigned my post. “Why don’t you get the King crowned? I thought you were anxious to maintain normality.”

“What would be the point of it? People aren’t interested. They would resent the huge expense of a ceremony which has become meaningless.”

“We hardly ever hear of him. Where is he, under house arrest?”

Xan had given his inward laugh. “Hardly house. Palace or castle arrest, if you like. He’s comfortable enough. Anyway I don’t think that the Archbishop of Canterbury would agree to crown him.”

And I remembered my reply. “That’s hardly surprising. You knew when you appointed Margaret Shivenham to Canterbury that she was a fervent republican.”

Just inside the railings of the park, walking in line along the grass, came a company of flagellants. They were naked to the waist, wearing, even in the cold of February, nothing but yellow loincloths and sandals on their bare feet. As they walked they swung back the heavy knotted cords to lacerate already bleeding backs. Even through the car window I could hear the whistle of the leather, the thud of the whips on naked flesh. I looked at the back of the driver’s head, the half moon of meticulously cropped dark hair under the cap, the single mole above the collar which had irritatingly held my gaze for most of the silent journey.

Now, determined to get some response from him, I said: “I thought this kind of public display had been made illegal.”

“Only on the public highway or pavement, sir. I imagine they feel they’re entitled to walk through a park.”

I asked: “Do you find the spectacle offensive? I gather that was why the flagellants were banned. People dislike the sight of blood.”

“I find it ridiculous, sir. If God exists and He’s decided He’s had enough of us, He isn’t going to change His mind because a rabble of no-hopers dress up in yellow and go wailing through the park.”

“Do you believe in Him? Do you believe He exists?”

We had drawn up now at the door of the old Foreign Office. Before getting out to open the door for me he looked round and gazed into my face. “Perhaps His experiment went spectacularly wrong, sir. Perhaps He’s just baffled. Seeing the mess, not knowing how to put it right. Perhaps not wanting to put it right. Perhaps He only had enough power left for one final intervention. So He made it. Whoever He is, whatever He is, I hope He burns in His own hell.”

He spoke with extraordinary bitterness, and then his face assumed its cold, immobile mask. He stood to attention and opened the door of the car.

The Grenadier on duty inside the door was one Theo recognized. He said, “Good morning, sir,” and smiled almost as if there had been no lapse of three years and Theo was entering as of right to take his appointed place. Another Grenadier, this time unknown to him, came forward and saluted. Together they mounted the ornate staircase.

Xan had rejected Number Ten Downing Street as both his office and residence, and had chosen instead the old Foreign and Commonwealth building overlooking St. James’s Park. Here he had his private flat on the top floor, where, as Theo knew, he lived in an ordered and comfortable simplicity which is only achievable when buttressed by money and staff. The room at the front of the building, used twenty-five years ago by the Foreign Secretary, had from the first been both Xan’s office and the Council chamber.

Without knocking, the Grenadier opened the door and loudly announced his name.

He found himself facing, not Xan, but the full Council. They were sitting at the same small oval table he remembered, but along one side only and closer than was usual. Xan was in the middle, flanked by Felicia and Harriet, with Martin on the far left, Carl on his right. A single vacant chair had been placed immediately opposite Xan. It was a calculated ploy obviously intended to disconcert him, and momentarily it succeeded. He knew that the five pairs of watching eyes hadn’t missed his involuntary hesitation at the door, the flush of annoyance and embarrassment. But surprise gave way to a spurt of anger and the anger was helpful. They had taken the initiative, but there was no reason why they should retain it.

Xan’s hands were lying lightly on the table, the fingers curved. Theo saw the ring with a shock of recognition and knew that he was meant to recognize it. It could hardly have been concealed. Xan was wearing on the third finger of his left hand the Coronation Ring, the wedding ring of England, the great sapphire surrounded with diamonds and surmounted with a cross of rubies. He looked down at it, smiled, and said: “An idea of Harriet’s. It would look appallingly vulgar if one didn’t know that it was real. The people need their baubles. Don’t worry, I’m not proposing to have myself anointed by Margaret Shivenham in Westminster Abbey. I doubt whether I could get through the ceremony with the appropriate gravity. She looks so ridiculous in her mitre. You’re thinking that there was a time when I wouldn’t have worn it.”

Theo said: “A time when you wouldn’t have felt the need to wear it.” He could have added: “Nor the need to tell me that it was Harriet’s idea.”

Xan motioned towards the empty chair. Theo took it and said: “I asked for a personal interview with the Warden of England and I understood that was what I was getting. I’m not applying for a job, nor am I a candidate for a viva voce.”

Xan said: “It’s three years since we met or spoke. We thought you might like to meet old—what would you say, Felicia?—friends, comrades, colleagues?”

Felicia said: “I would say acquaintances. I never understood Dr. Faron’s precise function when he was Warden’s Adviser and it hasn’t become clearer with his absence and the passing of three years.”

Woolvington looked up from his doodling. The Council must have been sitting for some time. He had already massed a company of foot soldiers. He said: “It never was clear. The Warden asked for him and that was good enough for me. He didn’t contribute very much, as I remember, but neither did he hinder.”

Xan smiled, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes. “That’s in the past. Welcome back. Say what you’ve come to say. We’re all friends here.” He made the banal words sound like a threat.

There was no point in circumlocution. Theo said: “I was at the Quietus at Southwold last Wednesday. What I saw was murder. Half of the suicides looked drugged and those who did know what was happening didn’t all go willingly. I saw women dragged on to the boat and shackled. One was clubbed to death on the beach. Are we culling our old people now like unwanted animals? Is this murderous parade what the Council means by security, comfort, pleasure? Is this death with dignity? I’m here because I thought you ought to know what’s being done in the Council’s name.”

He told himself: I’m being too vehement. I’m antagonizing them before I’ve really started. Keep it calm.

Felicia said: “That particular Quietus was mismanaged. Things got out of control. I’ve asked for a report. It’s possible that some of the guards exceeded their duties.”

Theo said: “Someone exceeded his duties. Hasn’t that always been the excuse? And why do we need armed guards and shackles if these people are going willingly to their death?”

Felicia explained again with barely controlled impatience: “That particular Quietus was mismanaged. Appropriate action will be taken against those responsible. The Council notes your concern, your rational, indeed laudable, concern. Is that all?”

Xan appeared not to have heard her question. He said: “When my turn comes I propose to take my lethal capsule comfortably in bed at home and preferably on my own. I’ve never quite seen the point of the Quietus, although you seemed keen on them, Felicia.”

Felicia said: “They began spontaneously. About twenty eighty-year-olds in a home in Sussex decided to organize a coach party to Eastbourne, then, hand in hand, jumped over Beachy Head. It became something of a fashion. Then one or two Local Councils thought they ought to meet an obvious need and organize the thing properly. Jumping off cliffs may be an easy way out for the old people but someone has the unpleasant job of clearing away the bodies. One or two of them actually survived for a short time, I believe. The whole thing was messy and unsatisfactory. Towing them out to sea was obviously more sensible.”

Harriet leaned forward, her voice persuasive, reasonable: “People need their rites of passage and they want company at the end. You have the strength to die alone, Warden, but most people find it comforting to feel the touch of a human hand.”

Theo said: “The woman I saw die didn’t get the touch of a human hand except, briefly, mine. What she got was a pistol crack on her skull.”

Woolvington did not bother to look up from his doodling. He muttered: “We all die alone. We shall endure death as once we endured birth. You can’t share either experience.”

Harriet Marwood turned to Theo. “The Quietus is, of course, absolutely voluntary. There are all the proper safeguards. They have to sign a form—in duplicate, is it, Felicia?”

Felicia said curtly: “In triplicate. One copy for the Local Council, one to the nearest relation so that they can claim the blood money, and one is retained by the old person and collected when they board the boat. That goes to the Office of Census and Population.”

Xan said: “As you see, Felicia has it all under control. Is that all, Theo?”

“No. The Man Penal Colony. Do you know what’s happening there? The murders, the starvation, the complete breakdown of law and order.”

Xan said: “We do. The question is, how do you know?”

Theo didn’t reply, but in his heightened awareness the question sounded a clear warning bell.

Felicia said: “I seem to remember that you were present at our meeting in your somewhat ambiguous capacity when the setting up of the Man Penal Colony was under discussion. You made no objection except on behalf of the then resident population, whom we proposed to resettle on the mainland. They have been resettled, comfortably and advantageously, in their chosen parts of the country. We get no complaints.”

“I assumed that the Colony would be properly run, that the basic necessities for a reasonable life would be provided.”

“They are. Shelter, water and seeds to grow food.”

“I assumed, also, that the Colony would be policed, governed. Even in the nineteenth century, when convicts were deported to Australia, the settlements had a governor, some liberal, some draconian, but all responsible for the maintenance of peace and order. The settlements weren’t left to the mercy of the strongest and most criminal of the convicts.”

Felicia said: “Weren’t they? That’s a matter of opinion. But we’re not dealing with the same situation. You know the logic of the penal system. If people choose to assault, rob, terrify, abuse and exploit others, let them live with people of the same mind. If that’s the kind of society they want, then give it to them. If there is any virtue in them, then they’ll organize themselves sensibly and live at peace with each other. If not, their society will degenerate into the chaos they’re so ready to impose on others. The choice is entirely theirs.”

Harriet broke in: “As for employing a governor or prison officers to enforce order, where will you find these people? Have you come here to volunteer? And if you won’t, who will? People have had enough of criminals and criminality. They aren’t prepared today to live their lives in fear. You were born in 1971, weren’t you? You must remember the 1990s, women afraid to walk the streets of their own cities, the rise in sexual and violent crime, old people self-imprisoned in their flats—some burned to death behind their bars—drunken hooligans ruining the peace of country towns, children as dangerous as their elders, no property safe if it wasn’t protected with expensive burglar alarms and grilles. Everything has been tried to cure man’s criminality, every type of so-called treatment, every regime in our prisons. Cruelty and severity didn’t work, but neither did kindness and leniency. Now, since Omega, the people have said to us: ‘Enough is enough.’ The priests, the psychiatrists, the psychologists, the criminologists—none has found the answer. What we guarantee is freedom from fear, freedom from want, freedom from boredom. The other freedoms are pointless without freedom from fear.”

Xan said: “The old system wasn’t entirely without profit, though, was it? The police got well paid. And the middle classes did very well out of it, probation officers, social workers, magistrates, judges, court officials, quite a profitable little industry all depending on the offender. Your profession, Felicia, did particularly well, exercising their expensive legal skills in getting people convicted so that their colleagues could have the satisfaction of getting the verdicts overturned on appeal. Today the encouragement of criminals is an indulgence we cannot afford, even to provide comfortable living for middle-class liberals. But I suspect the Man Penal Colony isn’t the last of your concerns.”

Theo said: “There’s disquiet about the treatment of Sojourners. We import them as helots and treat them as slaves. And why the quota? If they want to come, let them in. If they want to leave, let them go.”

Woolvington’s first two lines of cavalry were complete, prancing elegantly across the top of the paper. He looked up and said: “You’re not suggesting we should have unrestricted immigration? Remember what happened in Europe in the 1990s? People became tired of invading hordes, from countries with just as many natural advantages as this, who had allowed themselves to be misgoverned for decades through their own cowardice, indolence and stupidity and who expected to take over and exploit the benefits which had been won over centuries by intelligence, industry and courage, while incidentally perverting and destroying the civilization of which they were so anxious to become part.”

Theo thought: They even speak alike now. But, whoever speaks, the voice is the voice of Xan. He said: “We’re not talking about history. We’ve no shortage of resources, no shortage of jobs, no shortage of houses. Restricting immigration in a dying and underpopulated world isn’t a particularly generous policy.”

Xan said: “It never was. Generosity is a virtue for individuals, not governments. When governments are generous it is with other people’s money, other people’s safety, other people’s future.”

It was then Carl Inglebach spoke for the first time. He was sitting as Theo had seen him sit dozens of times, a little forward in his seat, his two fists clenched, lying precisely side by side downwards on the table, as if concealing some treasure which it was nevertheless important to let the Council know that he possessed, or perhaps as if about to play a childish game, opening one palm and then the other to display its transferred penny. He looked—was probably tired of being told so—like a benign edition of Lenin, with his domed polished head and black bright eyes. He disliked the constriction of ties and collars and the resemblance was accentuated by the fawn linen suit he always wore, beautifully tailored, high-necked and buttoned on the left shoulder. But now he was dreadfully different. Theo had seen at first glance that he was mortally ill, perhaps even close to death. The head was a skull with a membrane of skin stretched taut over the jutting bones, the scrawny neck stuck out tortoise-like from his shirt and his mottled skin was jaundiced. Theo had seen that look before. Only the eyes were unchanged, blazing from the sockets with small pinpoints of light. But when he spoke his voice was as strong as ever. It was as if all the strength left to him was concentrated in his mind and in the voice, beautiful and resonant, which gave that mind its utterance.

“You are a historian. You know what evils have been perpetrated through the ages to ensure the survival of nations, sects, religions, even of individual families. Whatever man has done for good or ill has been done in the knowledge that he has been formed by history, that his life-span is brief, uncertain, insubstantial, but that there will be a future, for the nation, for the race, for the tribe.

That hope has finally gone except in the minds of fools and fanatics. Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past; without hope of a future he becomes a beast. We see in every country in the world the loss of that hope, the end of science and invention, except for discoveries which may extend life or add to its comfort and pleasure, the end of our care for the physical world and our planet. What does it matter what turds we leave behind as legacies of our brief disruptive tenancy? The mass emigrations, the great internal tumults, the religious and tribal wars of the 1990s have given way to a universal anomie which leaves crops unsown and unharvested, animals neglected, starvation, civil war, the grabbing from the weak by the strong. We see reversions to old myths, old superstitions, even to human sacrifice, sometimes on a massive scale. That this country has been largely spared this universal catastrophe is due to the five people round this table. In particular it is due to the Warden of England. We have a system extending from this Council, down to the Local Councils, which retains a vestige of democracy for those few who still care. We have a humane direction of labour which pays some regard to individual wishes and talents, and which ensures that people continue to work even though they have no posterity to inherit the rewards of their labour. Despite the inevitable desire to spend, to acquire, to satisfy immediate wants, we have sound money and low inflation. We have plans that will ensure that the last generation fortunate enough to live in the multiracial boarding house we call Britain will have stored food, necessary medicines, light, water and power. Beside these achievements, does the country greatly care that some Sojourners are discontented, that some of the aged choose to die in company, that the Man Penal Colony isn’t pacified?”

Harriet said: “You distanced yourself from those decisions, didn’t you? It’s hardly dignified to opt out from responsibility and then complain when you don’t like the result of other people’s efforts. You were the one who decided to resign, remember? You historians are happier living in the past anyway, so why not stay there?”

Felicia said: “It’s certainly where he’s most at home. Even when he killed his child he was going backwards.”

In the silence, short but intense, which greeted this comment, Theo was able to say: “I don’t deny what you’ve achieved, but would it really prejudice good order, comfort, protection, the things you offer people, if you made some reforms? Do away with the Quietus. If people want to kill themselves—and I’ll agree it’s a rational way to end—then issue them with the necessary suicide pills, but do it without mass persuasion or coercion. Send a force to the Isle of Man and restore some order there. Do away with the compulsory testing of sperm and the routine examination of healthy women; they’re degrading and anyway they haven’t worked. Close down the State porn shops. Treat the Sojourners like human beings not slaves. You can do any of those things easily. The Warden can do them with one signature. That’s all I’m asking.”

Xan said: “It seems to this Council that you’re asking rather a lot. Your concern would have more weight with us if you were sitting, as you could be sitting, on this side of the table. Your position is no different from the rest of Britain. You desire the end but close your eyes to the means. You want the garden to be beautiful provided the smell of manure is kept well away from your fastidious nose.”

Xan got to his feet and, one by one, the rest of the Council followed. But he didn’t hold out his hand. Theo was aware that the Grenadier who had shown him in had moved quietly to his side as if in obedience to some secret signal. He almost expected a hand to clamp down on his shoulder. He turned without speaking and followed him out of the Council chamber.

The car was waiting. On seeing him the driver got out and opened the door. But suddenly Xan was at his side. He said to Hedges, “Drive to the Mall and wait for us at the Queen Victoria statue,” and, turning to Theo, he said: “We’ll walk in the park. Wait while I get my coat.”

He was back in less than a minute wearing the familiar tweed which he invariably wore for outdoor television shots, slightly waisted, with two capes, Regency style, which in the early 2000s had for a brief time become fashionable and expensive. The coat was old but he had kept it.

Theo could remember when he had first ordered it, their conversation: “You’re mad. All that for one coat.”

“It’ll last forever.”

“You won’t. Nor will the fashion.”

“I don’t care about fashions. 1 shall like the style better when no one else is wearing it.”

And no one was wearing it now.

They crossed the road into the park. Xan said: “You were unwise to come here today. There’s a limit to how far I can protect you, you or the people you’ve been consorting with.”

“I didn’t think I needed protection. I’m a free citizen consulting the democratically elected Warden of England. Why should I need protection, yours or anyone’s?”

Xan didn’t answer. On impulse Theo said: “Why do you do it? Why on earth do you want the job?” It was, he thought, a question that only he could, or dared to, ask.

Xan paused before replying, narrowing and focusing his eyes on the lake as if something invisible to other eyes had suddenly interested him. But surely, thought Theo, he didn’t need to hesitate. It must have been a question he’d thought over often enough. Then he turned, walked on, and said: “At first because I thought I’d enjoy it. The power, I suppose. But it wasn’t only that. I could never bear to watch someone doing badly what I knew I could do well. After the first five years I found I was enjoying it less, but by then it was too late. Someone has to do it and the only people who want to are the four round that table. Would you prefer Felicia? Harriet? Martin? Carl? Carl could do it, but he’s dying. The other three couldn’t keep the Council together, let alone the country.”

“So that’s why. Disinterested public duty?”

“Have you ever known anyone to give up power, real power?”

“Some people do.”

“And have you seen them, the walking dead? But it’s not the power, not entirely. I’ll tell you the real reason. I’m not bored. Whatever else I am now, I’m never bored.”

They walked on in silence, skirting the lake. Then Xan said: “The Christians believe that the Last Coming has arrived except that their God is gathering them one by one instead of descending more dramatically in the promised clouds of glory. This way heaven can control the intake. It makes it easier to process the white-robed company of the redeemed. I like to think of God concerning Himself with logistics. But they’d give up their illusion to hear the laughter of one child.”

Theo didn’t reply. Then Xan said quietly: “Who are these people? You’d better tell me.”

“There are no people.”

“All that farrago in the Council room. You didn’t think that out for yourself. I don’t mean that you’re incapable of thinking it out. You’re capable of a great deal more than that. But you haven’t cared for three years, and you didn’t care greatly before then. You’ve been got at.”

“Not by anyone specifically. I live in the real world even in Oxford. I queue at cash registers, I shop, I take buses, I listen. People sometimes talk to me. Not anyone I care about, just people. What I have is communication with strangers.”

“Which strangers? Your students?”

“Not students. No one in particular.”

“Odd that you’ve become so approachable. You used to go round with an impervious membrane of privacy, your private invisible caul. When you talk to these mysterious strangers, ask them if they can do my job better than I. If so, tell them to come and say so to my face; you’re not a particularly persuasive emissary. It would be a pity if we had to close down the adult education school at Oxford. There’ll be no option if the place becomes a focus for sedition.”

“You can’t mean that.”

“It’s what Felicia would say.”

“Since when have you taken any notice of Felicia?”

Xan smiled his inward reminiscent smile. “You’re right, of course. I don’t take any notice of Felicia.”

Crossing the bridge which spanned the lake, they paused to gaze towards Whitehall. Here, unchanged, was one of the most exciting views which London had to offer, English and yet exotic, the elegant and splendid bastions of Empire seen across shimmering water and framed in trees. Theo recalled lingering at just this spot a week after he had joined the Council, remembered contemplating the same view, Xan wearing the same coat. And he could recall every word they had said as clearly as if it had just been spoken.

“You should give up the compulsory testing of sperm. It’s degrading and it’s been done now for over twenty years without success. Anyway, you only test healthy, selected males. What about the others?”

“If they can breed, good luck to them, but while there are limited facilities for the testing, let’s keep it for the physically and morally fit.”

“So you’re planning for virtue as well as health?”

“You could say, yes. No one with a criminal record or a family record of offending ought to be allowed to breed, if we have a choice.”

“So the criminal law is to be the measure of virtue?”

“How else can it be measured? The State can’t look into men’s hearts. All right, it’s rough and ready and we’ll disregard small delinquencies. But why breed from the stupid, the feckless, the violent?”

“So in your new world there will be no room for the penitent thief?”

“One can applaud his penitence without wanting to breed from him. But look, Theo, it isn’t going to happen. We plan for the sake of planning, pretending that man has a future. How many people really believe that we shall find live seed now?”

“And suppose you discover somehow that an aggressive psychopath has fertile sperm. Will you use that?”

“Of course. If he’s the only hope, we’ll use him. We’ll take what we can get. But the mothers will be carefully chosen for health, intelligence, no criminal record. We’ll try to breed out the psychopathy.”

“Then there are the pornography centres. Are they really necessary?”

“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 appalls 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.”

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 museum 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 naive 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.

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 picture 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.

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

2. 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.

3. Abolish the Quietus.

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

5. 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?

Once more he read the five demands. The first was unlikely to worry Xan. The country would hardly welcome the expense and disruption of a general election but, if he called one, his power would be confirmed by an overwhelming majority whether or not anyone had the temerity to stand against him. Theo asked himself how many of the other reforms he might have achieved had he stayed as Xan’s adviser. But he knew the answer. He had been powerless then and the Five Fishes were powerless now. If there had been no Omega, these were aims which a man might be prepared to fight for, even to suffer for. But if there had been no Omega, the evils would not exist. It was reasonable to struggle, to suffer, perhaps even to die, for a more just, a more compassionate society, but not in a world with no future where, all too soon, the very words “justice,” “compassion,” “society,” “struggle,” “evil,” would be unheard echoes on an empty air. Julian would say that it was worth the struggle and the suffering to save even one Sojourner from ill-treatment or prevent even one offender from being deported to the Man Penal Colony. But whatever the Five Fishes did, that wouldn’t happen. It wasn’t within their power. Rereading the five demands he felt a draining-away of his initial sympathy. He told himself that most men and women, human mules deprived of posterity, yet carried their burden of sorrow and regret with such fortitude as they could muster, contrived their compensating pleasures, indulged small personal vanities, behaved with decency to each other and to such Sojourners as they met. By what right did the Five Fishes seek to impose upon these stoical dispossessed the futile burden of heroic virtue? He took the paper into the lavatory and, after tearing it precisely into quarters, flushed them down the bowl. As they were sucked, swirling, out of sight he wished for a second, no more, that he could share the passion and the folly which bound together that pitiably unarmoured fellowship.

Saturday 6 March

Today Helena rang after breakfast and invited me to tea to see Mathilda’s kittens. She had sent me a postcard five days ago to say that they had arrived safely but I hadn’t been invited to the birthing party. I wondered whether there had been one, or whether they had kept the birth as a private indulgence, a shared experience which would belatedly celebrate and consolidate their new life together. Even so, it seemed unlikely that they would forgo what is generally accepted to be an obligation, the opportunity to let your friends witness the miracle of emerging life. A maximum of six people are usually invited to watch, but from a carefully judged distance so as not to fret or disturb the mother. And afterwards, if all goes well, there is a celebratory meal, often with champagne. The arrival of a litter is not untinged with sadness. The regulations regarding fecund domestic animals are plain and rigorously enforced. Mathilda will now be sterilized and Helena and Rupert will be allowed to keep one female from the litter for breeding. Alternatively, Mathilda will be permitted one more litter and all but one male kitten will be painlessly destroyed.

After Helena’s call I switched on the radio to listen to the eight o’clock news. Hearing the date broadcast, I realized for the first time that it is exactly one year today since she left me for Rupert. It is, perhaps, an appropriate day for my first visit to their home. I write “home” instead of “house” because I’m sure that is how Helena would describe it, dignifying a commonplace edifice in North Oxford with the sacramental importance of shared love and shared washing-up, commitment to total honesty and to a well-balanced diet, a new hygienic kitchen and hygienic sex twice a week. I wonder about the sex, half deploring my prurience, but telling myself that my curiosity is both natural and permissible. After all, Rupert is now enjoying, or perhaps failing to enjoy, the body which I once knew almost as intimately as I know my own. A failed marriage is the most humiliating confirmation of the transitory seduction of the flesh. Lovers can explore every line, every curve and hollow, of the beloved’s body, can together reach the height of inexpressible ecstasy; yet how little it matters when love or lust at last dies and we are left with disputed possessions, lawyers’ bills, the sad detritus of the lumber-room, when the house chosen, furnished, possessed with enthusiasm and hope has become a prison, when faces are set in lines of peevish resentment and bodies no longer desired are observed in all their imperfections with a dispassionate and disenchanted eye. I wonder whether Helena talks to Rupert about what went on between us in bed. I imagine so, not to would require greater self-control and greater delicacy than I have ever seen in her. There is a streak of vulgarity in Helena’s carefully nurtured social respectability and I can imagine what she would tell him.

“Theo thought he was a wonderful lover, but it was all technique. You’d think he’d learned it from a sex manual. And he never talked to me, not really talked. I could be any woman.”

I can imagine the words because I know that they are justified. I did her more harm than she did me, even if we take out of the calculation my killing of her only child. Why did I marry her? I married her because she was the Master’s daughter and that conferred prestige; because she, too, had taken a degree in history and I thought we had intellectual interests in common; and because I found her physically attractive and was thus able to convince my frugal heart that, if this wasn’t love, it was still as close to it as I was ever likely to get. Being the Master’s son-in-law produced more irritation than pleasure (he really was an appallingly pompous man, no wonder Helena couldn’t wait to get away from him); her intellectual interests were non-existent (she had been accepted by Oxford because she was the daughter of a college head and had, by hard work and good and expensive teaching, achieved the necessary three A-levels so that Oxford was able to justify a choice they wouldn’t otherwise have made). The sexual attraction? Well, that lasted longer, although subject to the law of diminishing returns, until it was finally killed when I killed Natalie. There is nothing more effective than the death of a child for exposing, without any possibility of self-deceit, the emptiness of a failing marriage.

I wonder if Helena is having better luck with Rupert. If they are enjoying their sex life, they are among the fortunate minority. Sex has become among the least important of man’s sensory pleasures. One might have imagined that with the fear of pregnancy permanently removed, and the unerotic paraphernalia of pills, rubber and ovulation arithmetic no longer necessary, sex would be freed for new and imaginative delights. The opposite has happened. Even those men and women who would normally have no wish to breed apparently need the assurance that they could have a child if they wished. Sex totally divorced from procreation has become almost meaninglessly acrobatic. Women complain increasingly of what they describe as painful orgasms: the spasm achieved but not the pleasure. Pages are devoted to this common phenomenon in the women’s magazines. Women, increasingly critical and intolerant of men throughout the 1980s and 1990s, have at last an overwhelming justification for the pent-up resentment of centuries. We who can no longer give them a child cannot even give them pleasure. Sex can still be a mutual comfort; it is seldom a mutual ecstasy. The government-sponsored porn shops, the increasingly explicit literature, all the devices to stimulate desire—none has worked. Men and women still marry, although less frequently, with less ceremony and often with the same sex. People still fall in love, or say that they are in love. There is an almost desperate searching for the one person, preferably younger but at least of one’s own age, with whom to face the inevitable decline and decay. We need the comfort of responsive flesh, of hand on hand, lip on lip. But we read the love poems of previous ages with a kind of wonder.

Walking down Walton Street this afternoon, I felt no particular reluctance at the prospect of meeting Helena again, and I thought of Mathilda with anticipatory pleasure. As the registered part-owner on the fecund-domestic-animal licence I could, of course, have applied to the Animal Custody Court for joint custody or an access order, but I had no wish to submit myself to that humiliation. Some of the animal custody cases are fiercely, expensively and publicly fought and I have no intention of adding to their number. I know I have lost Mathilda and she, perfidious, comfort-loving creature as are all cats, will by now have forgotten me.

When I saw her it was difficult not to deceive myself. She lay in her basket with two pulsating kittens like sleek white rats, pulling gently at her teats. She gazed at me with her blue expressionless eyes and began a loud and raucous purring which seemed to shake the basket. I put out my hand and touched her silken head.

I said: “Did everything go all right?”

“Oh, perfectly. Of course, we’ve had the vet here from the beginning of labour, but he said he’d seldom seen an easier birth. He took away two of the litter. We’re still deciding which of these two to keep.”

The house is small, architecturally undistinguished, a semi-detached, brick-built suburban villa, its main advantage being the long rear garden sloping down to the canal. Much of the furniture and all the carpets looked new, chosen, I suspected, by Helena, who had thrown out the paraphernalia of her lover’s old life, the friends, the clubs, the solitary bachelor consolations, with the family furniture and pictures bequeathed to him with the house. She had taken pleasure in making a home for him—I was sure this was the phrase she had used—and he basked in the result like a child with a new nursery. Everywhere there was the smell of fresh paint. The sitting-room, as is usual with this type of Oxford house, has had the rear wall removed to make one large room with a bay window at the front and french windows leading into a glass loggia at the rear. Down one wall of the white-painted hall has been hung a row of Rupert’s original drawings for book jackets, each framed in white wood. There are a dozen in all and I wondered whether this public display had been Helena’s idea or his. Either way, it justified me in a moment of contemptuous disapproval. I wanted to pause and study the drawings but that would have meant commenting on them and there was nothing I wanted to say. But even my cursory glance in passing showed me that they had considerable power; Rupert isn’t a negligible artist; this egotistical display of talent merely confirmed what I already knew.

We had tea in the conservatory, an over-lavish feast of pate sandwiches, home-made scones and fruitcake brought in on a tray with a newly starched linen tray-cloth and small matching napkins. The word that came to mind was “dainty.” Looking at the cloth, I recognized it as one Helena had been embroidering shortly before she left me. So this careful, drawn thread-work had been part of her adulterous household trousseau. Was this dainty feast—and I lingered on the pejorative adjective—designed to impress me, to show how good a wife she could be to a man prepared to appreciate her talents? It was obvious to me that Rupert appreciates them. He almost basked in her maternal cosseting. Perhaps as an artist he takes this solicitude as his due. The conservatory would, I thought, be cosy in spring and autumn. Even now, with only one radiator, it was comfortably warm and I could see dimly through the glass that they had been busy working on the garden. A row of spiky rose bushes, their root-balls shrouded in sackcloth, were propped against what looked like a new boundary fence. Security, comfort, pleasure. Xan and his Council would approve.

After tea Rupert briefly disappeared into the sitting-room. He returned and handed me a pamphlet. I recognized it at once. It was identical to that which the Five Fishes had pushed through my door. Pretending it was new to me, I read it with care. Rupert seemed to be waiting for some response. When I made none he said: “They were taking a risk going from door to door.”

I found myself saying what I knew must have happened, irritated that I did know, that I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.

“They wouldn’t do it like that. This is hardly a parish magazine, is it? It would be delivered by someone on his or her own, perhaps riding a bicycle, perhaps on foot, putting a leaflet through the occasional door when there was no one about, leaving a few of them in bus shelters, sticking one under the windscreen-wiper of a parked car.”

Helena said: “It’s still a risk, though, isn’t it? Or will be if the SSP decide to hunt them down.”

Rupert said: “I don’t suppose they’ll bother. No one will take this seriously.”

I asked: “Did you?”

He had, after all, kept it. The question, asked more sharply than I had intended, disconcerted him. He glanced at Helena and hesitated. I wondered whether over this they had disagreed. The first quarrel, perhaps. But I was being optimistic. If they had quarrelled, the leaflet would by now have been destroyed in the first exhilaration of reconciliation.

He said: “I did wonder whether we ought to mention it to the Local Council when we called in to have the kittens registered. We decided against it. I can’t see what they can do—the Local Council, I mean.”

“Except tell the SSP and get you arrested for possession of seditious material.”

“Well, we did wonder about that. We didn’t want officials to think we support all this.”

“Has anyone else in the street had one?”

“They haven’t said, and we didn’t like to ask.”

Helena said: “These aren’t things the Council can do anything about anyway. No one wants the Man Penal Colony closed down.”

Rupert was still holding the pamphlet as if uncertain what to do with it. He said: “On the other hand, one does hear rumours about what goes on in the camps for Sojourners and I suppose, since they’re here, that we ought to give them a fair deal.”

Helena said sharply: “They get a better deal here than they’d get back home. They’re glad enough to come. Nobody forces them. And it’s ridiculous to suggest closing down the Penal Colony.”

That was what was worrying her, I thought. It was crime and violence that threatened the little house, the embroidered tray-cloth, the cosy sitting-room, the conservatory with its vulnerable glass walls, its view of the dark garden in which she could now be confident that nothing malignant lurked.

I said: “They aren’t suggesting that it should be closed. But you can argue that it ought to be properly policed and the convicts given a reasonable life.”

“But that’s not what these Five Fishes are suggesting. The paper says that the deportations should stop. They want it closed. And policed by whom? I wouldn’t let Rupert volunteer for the job. And the convicts can have a reasonable life. It’s up to them. The island is large enough and they have food and shelter. Surely the Council wouldn’t evacuate the island. There would be an outcry—all those murderers and rapists loose again. And aren’t the Broadmoor inmates there too? They’re mad, mad and bad.”

I noticed that she used the word “inmate,” not “patient.” I said: “The worst of them must be getting too old to present much danger.”

She cried: “But some are only in their late forties and they’re sending new people there every year. Over two thousand last year, wasn’t it?” She turned to Rupert. “Darling, I think we ought to tear it up. There’s no point in keeping it. We can’t do anything. Whoever they are they have no right to print stuff like that. It only worries people.”

He said: “I’ll flush it down the lavatory.”

When he’d gone out she turned to me. “You don’t believe any of that, do you, Theo?”

“I can believe that life is peculiarly unpleasant on the Isle of Man.”

She reiterated obstinately: “Well, that’s up to the convicts themselves, isn’t it?”

We didn’t mention the leaflet again and ten minutes later, after a final visit to Mathilda which Helena obviously expected of me and Mathilda tolerated, I left them. I’m not sorry I made the visit. It wasn’t only the need to see Mathilda; our brief reunion had been pain rather than joy. Something left unfinished can now be put behind me. Helena is happy. She even looks younger, more handsome. The fair, willowy prettiness which I used to elevate into beauty has matured into an assured elegance. I can’t honestly say I’m glad for her. It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed. But at least I’m no longer responsible for her happiness or unhappiness. I have no particular wish to see either of them again, but I can think of them without bitterness or guilt.

There was only one moment shortly before I left when I felt more than a cynical, detached interest in their self-sufficient domesticity. I had left them to go to the lavatory, clean embroidered hand-towel, new soap, the bowl a frothy, disinfectant blue, a small bowl of potpourri; I noted and despised it all. On my quiet return I saw that, sitting a little apart, they had stretched out their hands across the gap to each other, then, hearing my step, had quickly, almost guiltily, drawn apart. That moment of delicacy, tact, perhaps even of pity, produced a second of conflicting emotions, experienced so faintly that they passed almost as soon as I recognized their nature. But I knew that what I had felt was envy and regret, not for something lost but for something never achieved.

Monday 15 March

Today I had a visit from two members of the State Security Police. The fact that I am able to write this shows that I wasn’t arrested and that they didn’t find the diary. Admittedly they didn’t search for it; they didn’t search for anything. God knows the diary is incriminating enough to anyone interested in moral deficiencies and personal inadequacy, but their minds were on more tangible malefactions. As I said, there were two of them, a young man, obviously an Omega—extraordinary how one can always tell—and a senior officer, a little younger than I, who was carrying a raincoat and a black leather attach6 case. He introduced himself as Chief Inspector George Rawlings and his companion as Sergeant Oliver Cathcart. Cathcart was saturnine, elegant, expressionless, a typical Omega. Rawlings, thick-set, a little clumsy in his movements, had a disciplined thatch of thick grey-white hair, which looked as if it had been expensively cut to emphasize the crimped waves at the side and back. His face was strong-featured with narrow eyes, so deep-set that the irises were invisible, and a long mouth with the upper lip arrow-shaped, sharp as a beak. Both were in civilian clothes, their suits extremely well cut. In other circumstances, I might have been tempted to inquire whether they went to the same tailor.

It was eleven o’clock when they arrived. I showed them into the ground-floor sitting-room and asked whether they would like coffee. They refused. Offered seats, Rawlings settled himself comfortably in a chair by the fireplace while Cathcart, after a moment’s hesitation, sat opposite him, sitting stiffly upright. I took the swivel chair at the desk and swung round to face them.

Rawlings said: “A niece of mine, my sister’s youngest, she just missed Omega by one year, attended your little talks on Victorian Life and Times. She’s not a very intelligent woman, you probably won’t remember her. But, then, of course, you might. Marion Hopcroft. It was a small class, she said, and got smaller by the week. People have no persistence. They take up enthusiasms but quickly tire, particularly if their interest isn’t continually stimulated.”

In a few sentences he had reduced the lectures to boring talks for a dwindling number of the unintelligent. The ploy had not been subtle but, then, I doubt whether he dealt in subtlety. I said: “The name is familiar but I can’t recall her.”

“Victorian Life and Times. I thought the word ‘times’ was redundant. Why not just Victorian Life? Or you could have advertised Life in Victorian England.”

“I didn’t choose the title of the course.”

“Didn’t you? That’s odd. I should have thought that you did. I think you should insist on choosing the title for your own talks.”

I made no reply. I had little doubt that he knew perfectly well that I had taken the course for Colin Seabrook, but if he didn’t I had no intention of enlightening him.

After a moment’s silence which neither he nor Cathcart seemed to find embarrassing, he went on: “I thought I might take one of these adult courses myself. In history, not literature. But I wouldn’t choose Victorian England. I’d go further back, the Tudors. I’ve always been fascinated by the Tudors, Elizabeth I particularly.”

I said: “What attracts you about the period? The violence and the splendour, the glory of their achievements, the admixture of poetry and cruelty, those shrewd clever faces above the ruffs, that magnificent court underpinned by the thumbscrew and the rack?”

He seemed to consider the question for a moment, then said: “I wouldn’t say the Tudor age was uniquely cruel, Dr. Faron. They died young in those days and I dare say most died in pain. Every age has its cruelties. And if we consider pain, dying of cancer without drugs which has been the lot of man through most of his history was a more horrible torment than anything the Tudors could devise. Particularly for the children, wouldn’t you say? It’s difficult to see the purpose of that, isn’t it? The torment of children.”

I said: “We should not, perhaps, assume that nature has a purpose.”

He went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “My grandfather, he was one of those hellfire preachers—thought that everything had a purpose, particularly pain. Born out of time, he would have been happier in your nineteenth century. I remember when I was nine I had a very bad toothache, an abscess. I said nothing, fearing the dentist, but then woke up one night in agony. My mother said we’d go along to the surgery as soon as it was open, but I lay until morning writhing with pain. My grandfather came in to see me. He said, ‘We can do something about the small pains of this world but not about the everlasting pains of the world to come. Remember that, boy.’ He certainly chose his moment well. Eternal toothache. It was a terrifying thought for a nine-year-old.”

I said: “Or for an adult.”

“Well, we’ve abandoned that belief, except for Roaring Roger. He still seems to have his following.” He paused for a minute as if to ruminate on the fulminations of Roaring Roger, then went on without any change of tone: “The Council are worried, ‘concerned’ is perhaps a more appropriate word, about the activities of certain people.”

He waited, perhaps for me to ask: “What activities? What people?” I said: “I have to leave in a little over half an hour. If your colleague wants to search the house perhaps he could do it now, while we’re talking. There are one or two small things I value, the caddy-spoons in the Georgian display cabinet, the Staffordshire Victorian commemorative pieces in the drawing-room, one or two of the first editions. Normally I would expect to be present during a search but I have every confidence in the probity of the SSP.”

With these last words I looked straight into Cathcart’s eyes. They didn’t even flicker.

Rawlings permitted in his voice a small note of reproach: “There’s no question of a search, Dr. Faron. Why would you suppose, now, that we want to search? Search for what? You’re not a subversive, sir. No, this is just a talk, a consultation if you like. As I said, there are things happening which cause some concern to the Council. I am speaking now, of course, in confidence. These matters have not been made public by newspapers, radio or TV.”

I said: “That was wise of the Council. Troublemakers, assuming you’ve got them, feed on publicity. Why give it to them?”

“Exactly. It’s taken governments a long time to realize that you don’t need to manipulate unwelcome news. Just don’t show it.”

“And what aren’t you showing?”

“Small incidents, unimportant in themselves, but possibly evidence of a conspiracy. The last two Quietus were interrupted. The ramps were blown up on the morning of the ceremony, just half an hour before the sacrificial victims—or perhaps ‘victims’ is hardly the appropriate word, let’s say the sacrificial martyrs—were due to arrive.”

He paused, then added: “But ‘martyrs’ is perhaps redundant. Let’s say before the potential suicides were due to arrive. It caused them considerable distress. The terrorist, he or she, was cutting it rather fine. Thirty minutes later and the old people would have died rather more spectacularly than was planned. There was a telephone warning—a young male voice—but it came too late to do more than keep the crowds away from the scene.”

I said: “An irritating inconvenience. I went to see a Quietus about a month ago. The ramp from which the boat embarked could, I should have thought, have been constructed fairly quickly. I don’t suppose that particular act of criminal damage held up the Quietus for more than a day.”

“As you implied, Dr. Faron, a minor inconvenience, but not, perhaps, without significance. There have been too many minor inconveniences recently. And then there are the pamphlets. Some of them are directed to the treatment of the Sojourners. The last batch of Sojourners, the sixty-year-olds and some who had fallen sick, had to be forcibly repatriated. There were unfortunate scenes at the quay. I don’t say there’s a connection between that d6bacle and the dissemination of the pamphlets but it could be more than a coincidence. The distribution of political material among Sojourners is illegal but we know that the subversive pamphlets have been circulated in the camps. Other leaflets have been delivered house to house, complaining about the treatment of Sojourners generally, conditions on the Isle of Man, compulsory semen testing and what the dissidents apparently see as a defect in the democratic process. A recent one incorporated all these dissatisfactions in a list of demands. You may perhaps have seen it?”

He reached down to the black leather attaché case, lifted it on to his lap and clicked it open. He was playing the part of an avuncular casual caller, not very confident about the purpose of this visit, and I half-expected him to pretend to rummage ineffectively among his papers before finding the one he wanted. However, he surprised me by laying his hand on it immediately.

He passed it to me and said: “Have you seen one of these before, sir?”

I glanced at it and said: “Yes, I’ve seen it. One was pushed through my door a few weeks ago.” There was little point in a denial. Almost certainly the SSP know that the leaflets have been distributed in St. John Street and why should my house have been neglected? After rereading it I handed it back.

“Has anyone else you know received one?”

“Not to my knowledge. But I imagine they must have been fairly widely disseminated. I wasn’t interested enough to inquire.”

Rawlings studied it as if it were new to him. He said: “The Five Fishes. Ingenious but not very clever. I suppose we look for a little group of five. Five friends, five family members, five fellow-workers, five fellow-conspirators. Perhaps they got the idea from the Council of England. It’s a useful number, wouldn’t you say, sir? In any discussion it ensures that there can always be a majority.” I didn’t reply. He went on: “The Five Fishes. I imagine they each have a code name probably based on forenames; that way it’s easy for everyone to remember. A would be difficult, though. I can’t offhand think of a fish with a name beginning with A. Perhaps none of them has A as an initial. They could have bream for B, I suppose, and C wouldn’t be difficult: cod, codling. Dogfish would do for D. E might present a difficulty. Although I may, of course, be wrong, I reckon they wouldn’t have chosen to call themselves the Five Fishes if they couldn’t find an appropriate fish for each member of the gang. What do you think of that, sir? As a process of reasoning, I mean.”

I said: “Ingenious. It’s interesting to see the thought processes of the SSP in action. Few citizens can have had that opportunity, at least few citizens actually at liberty.”

I might just as well not have spoken. He continued to study the pamphlet. Then he said: “A fish. Quite nicely drawn. Not, I think, by a professional artist, but by someone with a feeling for design. The fish is a Christian symbol. Could this be a Christian group, I wonder?” He looked up at me. “You admit that you had one of these pamphlets in your possession, sir, but you did nothing about it? You didn’t feel that it was your duty to report?”

“I treated it as I treat all unimportant, unsolicited mail.” Then, deciding it was time I went on the offensive, I said: “Forgive me, Chief Inspector, but I don’t see what precisely is worrying the Council. There are malcontents in any society. This particular group have apparently done little harm apart from blowing up a couple of flimsy, temporary ramps and distributing some ill-thought-out criticisms of the government.”

“Some might describe the pamphlets as seditious literature, sir.”

“You can use what words you like, but you can hardly elevate this into a great conspiracy. You’re surely not mobilizing the battalions of state security because a few bored malcontents prefer to amuse themselves by playing a more dangerous game than golf. What precisely is worrying the Council? If there is a group of dissidents they will be fairly young, or at least middle-aged. But time will pass for them, time is passing for all of us. Have you forgotten the figures? The Council of England reminds us of them often enough. A population of fifty-eight million in 1996, fallen to thirty-six million this year, 20 per cent of them over seventy. We’re a doomed race, Chief Inspector. With maturity, with old age, all enthusiasm fades, even for the seductive thrill of conspiracy. There’s no real opposition to the Warden of England. There never has been since he took power.”

“It is our business, sir, to see that there isn’t.”

“You will, of course, do what you think is necessary. But I would only take this seriously if I thought that it was, in fact, serious: opposition, perhaps within the Council itself, to the authority of the Warden.”

The words had been a calculated risk, perhaps even a dangerous one, and I saw that I had worried him. I had intended to.

After a moment’s pause, which was involuntary, not calculated, he said: “If there were any question of that, the matter wouldn’t be in my hands, sir. It would be dealt with at an altogether higher level.”

I got to my feet. I said: “The Warden of England is my cousin and my friend. He was kind to me in childhood, when kindness is particularly important. I am no longer his adviser on the Council but that doesn’t mean that I am no longer his cousin and his friend. If I have evidence of a conspiracy against him, I shall tell him. I shan’t tell you, Chief Inspector, nor shall I get in touch with the SSP. I shall tell the person most concerned, the Warden of England.”

This was play-acting, of course, and we knew it. We didn’t shake hands or speak as I showed them out but this wasn’t because I had made an enemy. Rawlings didn’t permit himself the indulgence of personal antipathy any more than he would have allowed himself to feel sympathy, liking or the stirrings of pity for the victims he visited and interrogated. I thought I understood his kind: the petty bureaucrats of tyranny, men who relish the carefully measured meed of power permitted to them, who need to walk in the aura of manufactured fear, to know that the fear precedes them as they enter a room and will linger like a smell after they have left, but who have neither the sadism nor the courage for the ultimate cruelty. But they need their part of the action. It isn’t sufficient for them, as it is for most of us, to stand a little way off to watch the crosses on the hill.

Theo closed the diary and put it in the top drawer of his desk, turning the key and slipping it into his pocket. The desk was well made, the drawers strong, but it would hardly resist an expert or determined assault. But then, one was hardly likely to be made and, if it were, he had taken care that his account of Rawlings’s visit should be innocuous. That he felt this need to self-censor was, he knew, evidence of unease. He was irritated that the precaution was necessary. He had begun the diary less as a record of his life (for whom and why? What life?) than as a regular and a self-indulgent exploration, a means of making sense of the past years, part catharsis, part comforting affirmation. The diary, which had become a routine part of his life, was pointless if he had to censor, to leave out, if he had to deceive not illumine.

He thought back over the visit of Rawlings and Cathcart. He had been surprised at the time how unfrightening he had found them. After they had left he had felt a certain satisfaction in this lack of fear, in the competence with which he had handled the encounter. Now he wondered whether his confidence was justified. He had almost perfect recall of what had been said; verbal recall had always been one of his talents. But the exercise of writing down their elliptical conversation raised anxieties that he hadn’t felt at the time. He told himself that he had nothing to fear. He had only lied directly once, when he had denied knowing anyone else who had received one of the Five Fishes pamphlets. It was a lie he could justify if challenged. Why, he would argue, should he name his ex-wife and expose her to the inconvenience and anxiety of a visit from the SSP? There was no particular relevance in the fact that she or anyone else had received a pamphlet; the sheets must have been pushed through practically every door on the street. One lie wasn’t evidence of guilt. He was unlikely to be arrested because of one small lie. There was, after all, still law in England, at least for Britons.

He moved down to the drawing-room and walked restlessly about the wide room, mysteriously aware of the unlit and empty storeys above and beneath him as if each of those silent rooms held a menace. He paused at a window overlooking the street and looked out over the wrought-iron balcony. A thin rain was falling. He could see silver shafts falling against the street lights and, far below, the dark tackiness of the pavement. The curtains opposite had been drawn and the flat stone facade showed no sign of life, not even a chink where the curtains met. Depression settled on him like a familiar heavy blanket. Weighted with guilt and memory and anxiety, he could almost smell the accumulated rubbish of the dead years. His confidence drained away and fear strengthened. He told himself that during the encounter he had thought only of himself, his safety, his cleverness, his self-respect. But they weren’t primarily interested in him, they were seeking Julian and the Five Fishes. He had given nothing away, he need feel no guilt about that, but still they had come to him, which meant they suspected he knew something. Of course they did. The Council had never really believed that his visit was entirely of his own volition. The SSP would come again; the next time the veneer of politeness would be thinner, the questions more searching, the outcome possibly more painful.

How much more did they know than Rawlings had revealed? Suddenly it seemed to him that they hadn’t already pulled in the group for questioning. But perhaps they had. Was that the reason for the call today? Were they already holding Julian and the group and testing how far he was involved? And surely they could get on to Miriam quickly enough. He remembered his question to the Council about conditions on the Isle of Man, and the reply: “We know; the question is, how do you?” They were looking for someone who had knowledge of conditions on the island; and with visitors forbidden and no letters to or from the island permitted, no publicity, how could that knowledge have been gained? The escape of Miriam’s brother would be on record. It was remarkable that once the Five Fishes began acting they hadn’t taken her in for questioning. But perhaps they had. Perhaps even now she and Julian were in their hands.

His thoughts had come full circle and he felt for the first time an extraordinary loneliness. It wasn’t an emotion with which he was familiar. He both distrusted and resented it. Looking down over the empty street, he wished for the first time that there was someone, a friend he could trust, in whom he could confide. Before she had left him, Helena had said: “We live in the same house, but we’re like lodgers or guests in the same hotel. We never really talk.” Irritated by such a banal, predictable complaint, the commonplace lament of discontented wives, he had answered: “Talk about what? Here I am. If you want to talk now, I’m listening.”

It seemed to him that it would be a comfort even to talk to her, to hear her reluctant and unhelpful response to his dilemma. And mixed with the fear, the guilt, the loneliness, there was a renewed irritation—with Julian, with the group, with himself that he had ever become involved. At least he’d done what they’d asked. He’d seen the Warden of England and then he’d warned Julian. It wasn’t his fault that the group hadn’t taken the warning. No doubt they would argue that he had an obligation to get a message to them, to let them know they were in danger. But they must know that they were in danger. And how could he warn them? He knew none of their addresses, where any of them worked or at what. The only thing he could do if Julian was taken would be to intercede with Xan on her behalf. But would he even know when she was arrested? It should be possible, if he searched, to find one of the gang, but how could he safely inquire without making the search obvious? From now on the SSP might even be keeping him under secret surveillance. There was nothing he could do but wait.

Friday 26 March

I saw her today for the first time since our meeting in the Pitt Rivers Museum. I was buying cheese in the covered market and had turned from the counter with my small, carefully wrapped packets of Roquefort, Danish blue, Camembert, when I saw her only a few yards from me. She was choosing fruit, not shopping as I was for the increasingly finicky taste of one, but pointing out her choice without hesitation, holding out an open canvas bag with liberality to receive fragile brown bags almost bursting with the golden, pitted globes of oranges, the gleaming curves of bananas, the russet of Cox’s Orange Pippins. I saw her in a glow of effulgent colour, skin and hair seeming to absorb radiance from the fruit, as if she were lit not by the hard glaring lights of the store, but by a warm southern sun. I watched while she handed over a note, then counted out coins to give the storekeeper the exact money, smiling as she handed it over, watched still as she hoisted the wide strap of the canvas bag over her shoulder, sagging a little with the weight. Shoppers shuffled between us but I stood rooted, unwilling, perhaps unable to move, my mind a tumult of extraordinary and unwelcome sensations. I was seized with a ludicrous urge to dash to the flower-stall, press notes into the florist’s hands, seize from their tubs the bundles of daffodils, tulips, hot-house roses and lilies, pile them into her arms and take the bag from her encumbered shoulder. It was a romantic impulse, childish and ridiculous, which I hadn’t felt since I was a boy. I had distrusted and resented it then. Now it appalled me by its strength, its irrationality, its destructive potential.

She turned, still not seeing me, and made her way towards the exit into the High Street. I followed, weaving my way through the Friday morning shoppers with their baskets on wheels, impatient when my path was momentarily blocked. I told myself that I was behaving like a fool, that I should let her pass out of sight, that she was a woman I had met only four times and on none of them had she shown any interest in me except an obstinate determination that I should do what she wanted, that I knew nothing about her except that she was married, that this overwhelming need to hear her voice, to touch her, was no more than the first symptom of the morbid emotional instability of solitary middle age. I tried not to hurry, a demeaning acknowledgement of need. Even so, I managed to catch her up as she turned into the High Street.

I touched her shoulder and said: “Good morning.”

Any greeting would have seemed banal. This at least was innocuous. She turned towards me and for a second I was able to deceive myself that her smile was one of joyous recognition. But it was the same smile she had given to the greengrocer.

I laid my hand on the bag and said: “May I carry this for you?” I felt like an importunate schoolboy.

She shook her head and said: “Thank you, but the van is parked very close.”

What van? I wondered. For whom was the fruit intended? Surely not just for the two of them, Rolf and herself. Did she work in some kind of institution? But I didn’t ask, knowing that she wouldn’t have told me.

I said: “Are you all right?”

Again she smiled. “Yes, as you see. And you?”

“As you see.”

She turned away. The action was gentle—she had no wish to hurt me—but it was deliberate and she meant it to be final.

I said in a low voice: “I have to speak to you. It’s important. It won’t take long. Isn’t there somewhere we can go?”

“It’s safer in the market than here.”

She turned back, and I walked at her side casually, not looking at her, two shoppers in the crowd forced into temporary proximity by the press of shuffling bodies. Once in the market she paused to look into a window where an elderly man and his assistant were selling flans and tarts fresh from the oven. I stood beside her, pretending an interest in the bubbling cheese, the seeping gravy. The smell came to me, savoury and strong, a remembered smell. They had been baking pies here since I was an undergraduate.

I stood watching as if considering what was on offer, then said very quietly into her ear: “The SSP have been to see me—they may be very close. They’re looking for a group of five.”

She turned from the window and walked on. I kept to her side.

She said: “Of course. They know there are five of us. There’s no secret about that.”

Standing at her shoulder, I said: “I don’t know what else they’ve found out or guessed. Stop now. You’re doing no good. There may not be much time. If the others won’t stop then get out yourself.”

It was then that she turned and looked at me. Our eyes met for only a second but now, away from the flaming lights and the richness of the gleaming fruit, I saw what I hadn’t noticed before: that her face looked tired, older, drained.

She said: “Please go. It’s better that we don’t see each other again.”

She held out her hand, and in defiance of risk I took it. I said: “I don’t know your surname. I don’t know where you live or where to find you. But you know where to find me. If you ever need me send for me at St. John Street and I’ll come.”

Then I turned and walked away so that I need not watch her walking away from me.

I am writing this after dinner, looking out from the small back window towards the distant slope of Wytham Wood.

I am fifty years old and I have never known what it is to love. I can write those words, know them to be true, but feel only the regret that a tone-deaf man must feel because he can’t appreciate music, a regret less keen because it is for something never known, not for something lost. But emotions have their own time and place. Fifty is not an age to invite the turbulence of love, particularly not on this doomed and joyless planet when man goes to his last rest and all desire fades. So I shall plan my escape. It isn’t easy for anyone under sixty-five to get an exit permit; since Omega only the aged can travel as they will. But I don’t expect any difficulty. There are still some advantages in being the Warden’s cousin, even if I never mention the relationship. As soon as I’m in touch with officialdom it is known. My passport is already stamped with the necessary travel permit. I shall get someone to take my summer course, relieved to be spared that shared boredom. I have no new knowledge, no enthusiasm to communicate. I shall take the ferry and drive, revisit the great cities, the cathedrals and temples of Europe while there are still roads that are passable, hotels with sufficient staff to provide at least an acceptable standard of comfort, where I can be reasonably sure of buying petrol, at least in the cities. I shall put behind me the memory of what I saw at Southwold, Xan and the Council, and this grey city, where even the stones bear witness to the transience of youth, of learning, of love. I shall tear this page from my journal. Writing these words was an indulgence; to let them stand would be folly. And I shall try to forget this morning’s promise. It was made in a moment of madness. I don’t suppose she will take it up. If she does, she will find this house empty.