1985 (28 page)

It seemed, from the light, to be about seven in the morning. He rose, bathed and shaved with the issue razor, then put on his old clothes and shoes. Carrying his ragged overcoat across his arm, he left the sickbay and walked the corridors and descended the stairs that led towards the eating-hall. He grieved distractedly at the low estate to which this eighteenth-century manor had fallen. What beauty of line and texture had been left in wall, pillar, curve of staircase had been wantonly rubbed
out with buff distemper, posters, cheap syntex carpeting, a three-metre cut-out representation of Bill the Symbolic Worker. All that beauty, all those exquisite possessions of the tax-ruined Crawford family – gone, sold to Americans or Arabs. No room for beauty, for beauty was always for minorities. Pettigrew and his like were at least consistent: no vestige of the privileged past to be left, even though this could not but be a self-inflicted wound on those who, knowing what privilege meant, must also know that the spiritual and imaginative transports they had started to liquidate (all that nonsense about the Inner World!) were what human life was about. Perversion, masochism, martyrdom. Taste and intelligence vociferously denied by those who, possessing them, knew they were the ultimate value. Such men were fanatical. Such men were dangerous. Approaching the eating-hall, Bev knew in his tripes that he would be pursued to the limit.
Pursued by his own kind
.

Two tables were already full with early arrivals for the new rehabilitation course. As Bev filled his tray at the counter – tea, yoghurt, buttersub, toast white as leprosy – he saw Mr Boosey the conducting officer slurping his tea while waiting for three eggs to be freshly fried. Mr Boosey recognized him and grinned unpleasantly.

‘Put you right, have they? A good boy now?'

‘Sod off,' said Bev. ‘Shove your gun in your fetid left armpit and squeeze the trigger, bastard.' Mr Boosey growled. Bev looked for a place and saw Mr Reynolds smiling up at him. Bev sat. Reynolds said:

‘Yes, I thought this was what must have happened to you. It happens to everybody, I'm told, sooner or later. Are you converted?'

‘No. What were you caught doing?'

‘I stole a whole ham. I ate much of it too, with some of our old friends of the community. Then they came from the grocery store with the police and said: That is the man.
Ecce homo.
Will I find it amusing here?'

‘A lot are converted,' Bev said. ‘Be on your guard.'

‘Drugs in the tea? Positive reinforcements? Torture?'

‘
I
was tortured,' said Bev. Reynolds went pale as the yolk of his fried egg. ‘But I leave here as I came.' Reynolds nodded and nodded. He said:

‘You remember my little black friend, Trevor? Illiterate, or near, but very stubborn about human rights. Well, he joined this free army or whatever it's called. Came round flashing a bottle of
bought
gin and his
first month's pay. A generous boy, happy as a king. Not a real army, man, he said. We ain't got no guns. A clever organization, I'd say. Not easily bannable. You can't even call what they wear a true uniform. Rather a smart suit really – green, belted, with a yellow enamel badge of rank on the lapel. Green for England, I suppose –'

‘Yellow for Islam,' Bev said. ‘You seem interested. Did you think of joining?'

‘My dear boy, at my age? With my arthritis? How old are you, by the way?'

‘Thirty-eight in February.'

‘Consider it. They need instructors, they say, but in what God knows. Trades, I gather. Black Trevor used to be a builder's labourer. I'm in the Engineers, man, he says, proudly of course. It sounds better than being a class three hod-carrier or whatever he was. Perhaps they need history courses too. It was history you taught, wasn't it? Wait –' He pulled from inside his ruined brown-bread-coloured suit a crumpled copy of the
Free Briton
. ‘Everybody reads it,' he said. ‘There's nothing else to read. I gather they put out radio and television programmes also. Formidable people. You'll find addresses and phone numbers in there somewhere. Not that the telephones are working at the moment, of course. The trains started just in time for our trip here. What a filthy mess it all is.

‘Have you,' asked Bev, ‘any money?'

Reynolds looked at him sternly. ‘Not here,' he said. ‘Is it forbidden to go unescorted to the toilets?'

In the toilets Reynolds handed Bev three ten-pound notes. ‘This is one little crime that went undiscovered. Not even the frisking police found this lot. They rarely look inside one's socks. As for a surgical stocking – I regret the crime in some ways. An old lady coming from the bank. Still, they've driven us to it, the swine. I'm sorry it's not more. It won't take you very far.'

It was with perky confidence that, jump on nine, Bev went to Mr Pettigrew's office. He wouldn't starve for a day or so. He would consider joining the Free Britons. He said, before Pettigrew uttered a word: ‘No. I'm not signing.'

Pettigrew's little office was something like a presbyterial interview-room, though there was no crucifix on the wall and no musty smell of unwashed soutanes. Pettigrew said:

‘A special dispensation is sometimes granted. You are more than
welcome to take the course again. Miss Cotton would help you. She seems genuinely fond –'

‘No,' said Bev.

‘Well,' said Pettigrew, and he rose from his chair for the commination. ‘I must deliver the secular equivalent of a curse. Everything possible has been done for you. On the bathroom scales this morning I noticed that I had lost several hectograms. My appetite is failing. I have never met such painful obduracy.'

‘Am I entitled to a travel warrant?'

‘Go and see Miss Lorenz, it's nothing to do with me. Get your travel warrant and go. Never let me see your face again. You're a flaw in the system, a blight. Death will come for you soon, make no mistake about it. You've cut yourself from the blood supply of the commonalty and must fall off, a piece of stinking gangrenous flesh. I can smell your putridity from here. Get out, you piece of death.'

‘You're mad, Pettigrew,' Bev said. ‘You prophesy my end, so let me prophesy yours and the end of the system you and your kind have brought into being –'

‘Get out. Now. At once. Or I'll have you thrown out –'

‘You'll come up against reality, Pettigrew. The reality of no more goods to consume, no more fuel to burn, no more money to inflate. The reality of the recovered sanity of the workers themselves, who know in their hearts that this cannot go on. The reality of the invader whose insanity will flood a sphere more fanatical than yours. If I'm to die, I say: so be it. But you believe that death is really life –'

‘Charlie,' called Pettigrew loudly. ‘Phil, Arnold.' His cry was a supererogatory act, for he had his finger pressed on a button on his empty desk.

‘Ah,' smiled Bev. The thugs are coming. I've finished, Pettigrew. I'm off.'

‘Finished, yes, yes, finished, finished, that's what you are, finished and ended and done for.'

Bev left just as the thugs started coming in. Charlie nodded at him without rancour. ‘Still not signed?' he said.

‘Not yet,' Bev said. ‘Mr Pettigrew seems to need you. A small fit of hysteria.' And he dashed off to get his travel warrant.

He breathed deeply of the free January air as he left Crawford Manor. He walked briskly and came to Batemans, Kipling's old house, now a cybernetic centre. Somebody there had remembered the poet, for there
was a kind of wayside pulpit near the entrance to the grounds, the text as follows:

OH IT'S TOMMY THIS, AN' TOMMY THAT, AN' TOMMY GO AWAY, BUT IT'S THANK YOU, MR ATKINS, WHEN THE BAND BEGINS TO PLAY
.

Bev walked into Burwash village, needing a bus to get to the station at Etchingham. There was no bus for another three hours. He thumbed at passing cars, of which, the price of gasoline being what it was, there were not many. Eventually a green Spivak stopped. A gaunt man leaned out to say:

‘Where?'

‘Well, London.'

‘Where in London?'

‘Anywhere.' Bev realized that he didn't honestly know where. Islington would come into it, but not just yet.

‘Hop in.'

‘Thanks.'

The gaunt man drove with skill. His ethnic group was hard to place: Armenian? Greek? Some obscure people of northern India? But it was he who asked the questions.

‘One of the dissidents they treat at the Manor?'

‘Right. Still a dissident.'

‘Trade? Profession?'

‘Confectionery operative. Before that, schoolmaster.'

The man digested this. ‘And you don't like things as they are,' he at last said. ‘Well, you're not the only one. It's all got to change.' His accent also was hard to place. Sharp and patrician, but with a round foreign
o
that could come from anywhere. ‘You'll see it soon, I think. Terrible change, terrible.'

‘What's
your
trade?' asked Bev, ‘or, of course, profession?'

‘I'm with Bevis the Builders,' said the man. ‘We specialize in the erection of mosques. I've built mosques all over the world. I built that one off the Via della Conciliazione in Rome. You know Rome?'

‘Unfortunately, I've never been able to afford to travel.'

‘Rome is not worth knowing. Not now. There you see what bankruptcy is really like. At present I'm engaged on the Great Smith Street contract.'

‘Ah,' said Bev. ‘The Masjid-ul-Haram.'

‘You speak Arabic?'

‘
La. Ma hiya jinsiyatuk?
'

The man chuckled. ‘First you say no, then you ask me where I'm from. Call me Islamic, no more. Islam is a country, just as your Tucland is a country. Ideas and beliefs make countries. The big difference between Islam and the materialistic syndicalist states is the difference between God and a bottle of beer. Does that shock you?'

‘Not at all.' Bev's dream was regurgitated in small gobbets.

‘You shivered. Are you cold? Shall I turn up the heating?

No, no, thank you. You talked about terrible change. I was reacting belatedly.'

‘I shudder too when I think of it,' said the man. ‘But I do not shudder for myself. No no no, not for myself.' A light snow began to fall.

The address was Number 41, Glebe Street, in Bev's own, or erstwhile, Chiswick. He checked it again with the last page of the
Free Briton
before ringing the bell. It was a very shabby terraced house with a neglected front garden and overflowing dustbin. A girl chewing something, frizzy auburn in a green suit with a yellow badge, opened for him. ‘You'll have to wait in there,' she said, head-jerking towards a door to her right. But, clattering down the carpetless stairs, came a moustached man with papers in his hands, green trousers, white shirt. He looked foxily at Bev while he handed the papers to the girl, saying:

‘Five of each there, Beryl. Good God, don't I know you?'

That was to Bev. Bev said: ‘Wait. You did that last inspection. HMI. Your name's Forster.'

‘Faulkner. Yes, indeed, I was one of His Majesty's Inspectorate. Welsh, aren't you, some Welsh name? You come for a job?'

‘I came to see about the possibility of a commission of some kind. Jones is the name. Master of Arts, University of –'

‘I'll get my jacket,' said Faulkner. ‘Very fuggy in there. I'm due for a break. I've got a thirst I wouldn't sell for – Beryl, tell the Democrat-
Major to carry on for a bit, will you? This gentleman and I will be at the Feathers.'

In the lounge-bar of the Feathers, Faulkner, whose yellow lapel badge was embossed with the black square of a major, drank off his gin and tonic thirstily and called for more. Bev ravaged a plate of cheese and chutney sandwiches and sipped at a double scotch. ‘The price of it,' said Faulkner. ‘Still, it won't be for much longer.'

‘You mean the price is going to go down?'

‘I mean that there just won't be any,' said Faulkner. ‘There'll be a hell of a row, but it has to happen. Never mind, never mind, first things first.' He surveyed shabby though clean-shaven Bev. He was natty, pretty, vulpine, his polished black hair short and parted as with a ruler. ‘You one of the naughty boys, then? All right, don't tell me. I was had up for my hundred-page report on the state of secondary level science teaching. If you don't like it, I said – you know the rest. What sort of job are you after?'

‘What sort of jobs are going?'

‘Entries to commissioned rank are dealt with at the top. That's the way his lordship wants it. I can't ring Al-Dorchester, but he's certain to be there tomorrow. You can go along with a note.'

‘His lordship?'

‘Oh, we call him that. The boss. Colonel-in-chief. Lawrence isn't his real name. He's not even Anglo-Irish, or whatever T.E. was. The money's good. The money is very very good.'

‘Accommodation?'

‘You married?'

‘My wife was burned to death just before Christmas. When the firemen were on strike. I have a daughter. Thirteen. Mentally retarded. A victim of one of the easy-birth drugs. Look, could I have another one of these?' His whisky glass shook in his hand.

‘You certainly could.' He waved at the barman. ‘A pretty girl, is she?'

‘In a blowsy way – oh God, I shouldn't say that about my own daughter. Sexually precocious, of course. A telly addict.'

‘She sounds like any other girl of thirteen,' Faulkner said. Then: ‘When you go to Al-Dorchester, take her along.'

‘Why? Thanks.' He took his new double and squirted soda in.

‘They'll want to know everything there,' he said vaguely. ‘I'll write you the note now.' He scribbled something on a message pad, tore, folded, gave. Then he said: ‘How religious are you?'