by P. D. James
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 universel. 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 paleontology, 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 progra
mme. 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.
2
Tuesday 5 January 2021
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, schoolmasters 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 home-made soup, bread, cheese and pâté, slabs of rich home-made 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.