The Wanting Seed (28 page)

The corporal stared as Charles Baudelaire stares from his daguerreotype. ‘Nearest M.T. park’s at Dingle. Depends where you want to get to.’

‘I’ve got to report about this last show,’ said Tristram. ‘May I see that map?’ He walked over to the fubsy multi-coloured beast that was Ireland. Dingle was, of course, on Dingle Bay; Dingle Bay and Tralee Bay had carved a peninsula out of County Kerry. He saw everything now: various islands and teats on the west coast were marked with WD flags, leased presumably for ostensible training purposes by the Government of All
Ireland to the British War Department. ‘I see, I see,’ said Tristram.

‘Where would it be,’ said the corporal, ‘that you’d be wanting to get to?’

‘You should know better than to ask that question,’ reproved Tristram. ‘There
is
such a thing as security, you know.’

‘Sorry, Sarnt. Sarnt,’ asked the corporal shyly, ‘what
really
goes on in there, Sarnt?’ He pointed in the direction of the huge enclosed battleground.

‘You mean to say you don’t know?’

‘Nobody’s allowed in, Sarnt. Nobody’s ever let in there. We just hear the noises, that’s all. A very real kind of training it is, from the sound of it. But nobody’s ever allowed through to see it, Sarnt. That’s in the standing orders.’

‘And how about letting people out?’

‘Well, there’s nothing about that, you see. Nobody ever comes out this way, that’s why, I suppose. You’re the first I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been on this job nine months. Hardly worth while having a gate here, is it?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Tristram. ‘It’s served its purpose tonight, hasn’t it?’

‘That’s true,’ said the corporal, in a kind of awe as at the provisions of all-providing providence. ‘That’s very true.’ And then, helpfully, ‘Of course, you could always get a train to wherever it is you’ve got to go to, couldn’t you, Sarnt?’

‘The station?’

‘Oh, only a mile or two down that road. Branch-line to Tralee. There’s a train takes shift-workers to Killarney
about two in the morning. You’d easily get that if that’s any good to you.’

To think, just to think: it was still the same night and yet it seemed a whole slab of time somehow outside time since the blasting of those whistles. Sergeant Lightbody, he suddenly remembered, had talked about going to find a great perhaps: queer to think that he had already long found it. No longer a perhaps, of course. Tristram shivered.

‘You don’t look all that good, Sarnt. Are you sure you can make it?’

‘I can make it,’ said Tristram. ‘I’ve got to make it.’

Epilogue

One

T
RALEE
to Killarney, Killarney to Mallow. Tristram had bad dreams most of the way, slumped, greatcoat-collar up, in a corner seat. A high-pitched voice seemed to be keeping the score over the steam-train’s noise: ‘Say twelve hundred seen off tonight, say ten stone average, women being lighter than men, say twelve thousand stone deadweight. Multiply by one thousand, making twelve million stone – on the bone, on the hoof – for one night’s (convert to tons at leisure) good global work.’ His platoon paraded, pointing sadly at him because he was still alive. Coming into Mallow he awoke fighting. An Irish labourer held him down, calming him, saying, ‘Dere y’are, fella.’ He travelled by day from Mallow to Rosslare. He spent the night in a hotel in Rosslare and in the morning, having seen Military Police prowling around, bought a ready-made suit, raincoat, shirt, pair of shoes. He stuffed his army clothes into his pack – first having given away his tins of meat to a poor whining crone who said, ‘May Jesus, Mary and Joseph bless ya, acushla.’ His pistol in his pocket, he boarded the packet for Fishguard as a civilian.

It was a rough February crossing, St George’s Channel rearing and snorting like a dragon. He felt ill at Fishguard and spent the night there. The next day, in
chilled sunshine like hock, he travelled south-east to Brighton. At least, the ticket he bought was for Brighton. After Salisbury he yielded to a compulsive desire to count and re-count his money, the platoon’s money: it came consistently to thirty-nine guineas, three septs, one tanner. He shivered perpetually, so that the other occupants of his compartment gave him curious stares. As they drew in to Southampton he decided he was really ill but probably had enough strength to alight at Southampton and find accommodation there to have the illness out. There were plenty of good reasons for not arriving, staggering and collapsing, in obvious need of help, everything beyond his control, at Brighton.

Near Southampton Central Station he found an Army hostel – the five bottom storeys of a skyscraper. He went in, showed his paybook, and paid for five nights’ accommodation. He was taken by an old man in a faded blue servant’s jacket to a small cold room, monastic, but with plenty of blankets on the bed. ‘You all right?’ said the old man. ‘All right,’ said Tristram. When the old man had left, he locked the door, undressed quickly and crept into bed. There he relaxed his hold and let the fever, like some devil or lover, take complete possession of him.

The endless shivering and sweating ate up time, place, sensation. He calculated, by the natural alternation of dark and light, that he lay in his bed for thirty-six hours, the sickness worrying and gnawing his body like a dog with a bone, the sweating so intense that his bladder was given a holiday, feeling himself grow palpably thinner and lighter, ridden at the crisis by a conviction that his body had become transparent, that each several inner
organ shone phosphorescent in the dark, so that it seemed a scandalous waste no sister-tutor could bring her anatomy students to view him. Then he fell into a trench of sleep so deep that no dream or hallucination could reach him. He woke to morning, feeling he must have slept, like a bear or tortoise, a whole season away, for the sun in the room was like a spring sun. He yanked time painfully out of its hiding-place and computed that it must still be February, still winter.

Intense thirst drew him out of bed. He staggered to the wash-basin, took his chilled dentures out of their glass, then filled this again and again with the hard southern chalky water, glugging it down till finally he had to lie on his bed gasping. He had stopped shaking, but he still felt paper-thin. He rolled himself in his blankets and slept again. His brimming bladder woke him next time and, a little secret, he voided it in the wash-basin. Now he felt able to walk though very cold. That was because he had not eaten. The sun was setting, a chill evening closing in. He dressed without washing or shaving and went downstairs to the canteen. Soldiers sat about, drinking tea, moaning and bragging, their numbers not yet dry. Tristram asked for boiled heneggs and natural milk. Meat he did not dare even think of. He ate very slowly and felt a sort of promise of strength returning. He was intrigued to see that an ancient custom (its introduction to England attributed to a mythical seaman named John Player) had been revived: a few soldiers were choking over rolled paper tubes, the ends aglow. Cover yourselves in glow, in glow, dada
rump
. Tears burst audibly. He had better get back to bed.

He slept solid for another uncomputed slab of dark and light. When he woke, and this was suddenly, he found himself transferred to a region of great mental clarity. ‘What do you propose?’ asked the foot of the bed. ‘Not to get caught,’ answered Tristram aloud. He had been pressed into the army on 27 March, Easter Day of the previous year, and was due for demobilization exactly one year later. Till that date – over a month off – he could do nothing safely. He had failed to die: the War Department would probably chase him till he had made good that dereliction of duty. Would they, though, really care? He thought they would: they would be unhappy brooding over a nominal roll with a query instead of a tick against one name, a paybook missing. Perhaps even here, in this Army Hostel, he would not be safe. He felt, he thought, well enough to leave.

He washed and shaved thoroughly and then dressed with care as a civilian. He almost floated down the stairs, light as a shorn sheep: that illness had done him some good, purged him of gross humours. There were no military policemen in the vestibule. He had expected to walk out into morning but found, fully launched into the maritime city, that afternoon was well advanced. He ate fried fish in a back-street restaurant, then found, not too far from it, a dirty-looking lodging-block which would suit him well. No questions, no curiosity. He paid a week’s rent in advance. His money would just about, he thought, last.

Two

T
RISTRAM
spent the following four weeks fairly profitably. He recollected his function – that of a teacher of history and related subjects – and so, financed by his poor dead platoon, he treated himself to a brief course of rehabilitation. He sat all day in the Central Library, reading the great historians and historiographers of his age – Stott’s
Twentieth-Century Ideological Struggles;
Zuckmayer and Feldwebel’s
Principien der Rassensgeschichte;
Stebbing-Brown’s
History of Nuclear Warfare;
Ang Siong-Joo’s
Kung-Ch’an Chu I;
Sparrow’s
Religious Substitutes in the Prototechnic Age;
Radzinowicz on
The Doctrine of the Cycle
. They were all thin books in logogrammatic form, that clipped orthography designed to save space. But now there seemed to be enough space. For evening relaxation he read the new poets and novelists. The writers of the Pelphase seemed discredited, he noticed: one could not perhaps, after all, and it was a pity, make art out of that gentle old liberalism. The new books were full of sex and death, perhaps the only materials for a writer.

On 27 March, a Monday, in fine spring weather, Tristram travelled by rail to London. The War Office was situated in Fulham. He found it to be a block of offices in a skyscraper of moderate height (thirty storeys) called Juniper Building. A commissionaire said, ‘You can’t come in here, sir.’

‘Why not?’

‘Not without an appointment.’

Tristram snarled, ‘Out of my way. You don’t seem to know who I am,’ and he pushed the commissionaire aside and strode into the first office he came to. Here a number of fattish blonde women in uniform were clacking at electric speech-machines. ‘I want to see someone in charge,’ said Tristram.

‘You can’t see anyone without an appointment,’ said one of the young women. Tristram strode through this office and opened a door with a glazed upper half. A lieutenant sat, busily thinking, between two empty correspondence-trays. He said:

‘Who let you in?’ He had spectacles with big black frames, a sweet-eater’s complexion, close-bitten nails, a patch of nap on his neck where he had shaved ill. Tristram said:

‘That’s a pointless sort of question, isn’t it? My name’s Sergeant Foxe, T. I’m reporting as the sole survivor of one of those pleasantly contrived miniature massacres on the West Coast of Ireland. I should prefer to talk to someone more important than you.’

‘Survivor?’ The lieutenant looked startled. ‘You’d better come and report to Major Berkeley.’ He rose from his desk, disclosing a desk-worker’s paunch, then went out by a door opposite to the one by which Tristram had entered. A knock at this latter was answered by Tristram himself. It was the commissionaire. ‘Sorry I let him get past me, sir,’ he began to say. And then, ‘Oh,’ for Tristram had his pistol out: if they wanted to play at soldiers, let them. ‘Barmy,’ said the commissionaire and slammed the door quickly; his fast-retreating shadow could be seen through the glaze. The lieutenant returned. ‘This way,’ he said. Tristram followed him down
a corridor illuminated only by the light from other glazed doors; he pocketed his pistol.

‘Sergeant Foxe, sir,’ said the lieutenant, opening up on an officer pretending to be desperately engaged in the composition of an urgent despatch. He was a red-tabbed major with very fine auburn hair; he presented, writing, to Tristram a bald spot of the size and roundness of a communion host. On the walls were group photographs of dull-looking people mostly in shorts. ‘Just one moment,’ said the major severely, writing hard.

‘Oh, come off it,’ said Tristram.

‘I beg your pardon?’ The major glared up; his eyes were weak and oyster-coloured. ‘Why aren’t you in uniform?’

‘Because, according to the terms of contract listed in my paybook, my engagement terminated today at 1200 hours precisely.’

‘I see. You’d better leave us, Ralph,’ said the major to the lieutenant. The lieutenant bowed like a waiter and left. ‘Now,’ said the major to Tristram, ‘what’s all this about your being the only survivor?’ He did not seem to expect an immediate answer, for he followed up with, ‘Let me see your paybook.’ Tristram handed it over. He had not been asked to sit down, so he sat down. ‘Hm,’ said the major, opening, reading. He clicked a switch and spoke into a microphone: ‘7388026 Sergeant Foxe, T. File immediately, please.’ And then, to Tristram, ‘What have you come to see us about?’

‘To register protest,’ said Tristram. ‘To warn you that I’m going to blow the bloody gaff.’

The major looked puzzled. He had a long nose which he now rubbed, puzzled. A buff file shot from a wall-slit
into a wire basket; the major opened this file and read attentively. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I see. Everybody’s been looking for you, it seems. By rights you should be dead, shouldn’t you? Dead, with the rest of your comrades. You must have made a very quick getaway. I could still have you arrested as a deserter, you know. Retrospectively.’