by P. D. James
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.
16
Saturday 6 March 2021
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 pâté 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.
17
Monday 15 March 2021
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 attaché 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.