He completed one seam, and turned the material over to inspect his handiwork.
“The glory and honour of war is hymned by old men. Sacrifice is demanded, even though, as a civilized people, we know that sacrifice is magical thinking.”
Brilliant put a lit cigarette between Hector’s expectant fingers. It was a mark of respect. The young stretcher sergeant was gone, and, in his place, Hector had become a more powerful and enigmatic figure, the dark curls clustered either side of his centre parting. Hector put down his sewing so that he could enjoy his cigarette.
“I see their faces in my mind. The red, pompous faces of the rich. The mean, shrunken faces of the poor. I hear their voices in my mind. Their senseless twaddle.”
Hector took a drag on his cigarette to quieten his anger.
“I know it all,” he said. “Their minds are ugly, their bodies degenerate. The ugliness of the war is a replica of the ugliness of their own minds. We must end the war.”
“End the war,” responded the hikers.
“We carry the war within us. It is our flame to extinguish. Everything ends with the Omega Order. And when war is ended, then we will end materialism and set our living fire to kindle the imagination of the people, and a new way of life will be born out of the Earth itself.”
He crushed the end of his cigarette with thumb and forefinger, pocketed the dog end, then took up his sewing once again.
“I have spoken,” he said.
The hikers dispersed. James dallied, hoping to speak personally with Hector. The pale man folded the flysheet away in his rucksack, took up his stave and set off back toward the forest.
James called after him, “I wanted to thank you.”
Hector stopped, stroked the bridge of his nose in consideration, and then continued his march toward the tree line.
* * *
James returned to the peace camp and found Ruth frying pancakes on a skillet.
“How have you been?”
“You left me.” She concentrated on cooking. “You left me in this madhouse.”
Ruth called Agnes from her play, and gave her the first plate of pancakes. When the child was gone, Ruth added more ladlefuls of batter to the hot skillet.
“Where are we, James? Do you know what is happening to us?”
“I know these people,” he gestured around the camp. “They were stretcher bearers like me in the war.”
“The war game.”
“It was not a game, Ruth. It was the war itself.”
“These men, though, they’re not real.”
He sighed.
“They are to me.”
“What happened to you?”
Sorrow tightened his throat. He felt a rising sense of panic in his chest; how could he answer that question without taking her through the war, hour by hour? The wailing chorus of the evicted had been transformed into something synthetic, into something that could be used. And then, just when he was swimming to his death, there was the armour at the bottom of the sea, waiting for him, a gift from Hector.
“I was ready to die,” he said.
She nodded. “Me too.”
“Hector saved me. He saved us both. He can influence the Process.”
She flipped the pancakes, smiling ruefully at the beautifully mundane undertow of life; she had been so close to death and yet here she was, making breakfast.
“So much suffering,” she said.
The wailing chorus of the evicted.
“We will have to carry their suffering around within us,” he said.
“I don’t know if I want to.”
She considered her husband.
“Once we have recovered, I want to get as far away from the Process as possible.”
“I don’t know if I can leave. My implant. Even if I could, I don’t know if I want to.”
“You want to stay here?”
“I have to be part of something greater than myself. I can’t survive on my own.”
“I can. I will.”
“What will you do with the children?” he asked.
“Take them with me, if their parents have not recovered.”
“Where will you go? What will you do?”
“Anywhere. Anything. Not this.”
“You could stay and be part of the Order.”
“None of this is real to me, James. It’s just terrifying.”
“Making order out of chaos is terrifying and beautiful at the same time. Hector knows what he is doing.”
“Hector is here?”
“He was changed by the war. That was the purpose of it.”
“A strange man called Omega John told me he started the war.”
“Omega John is John Hector. Or he was. Two corners of time have been folded together.” He mimed the bringing together of the two corners of a tablecloth. “Here,” he held up one imaginary corner, “John Hector and his fellow survivors of the 32nd Field Ambulance form the Order of the Omega to stop the war.” He held up the other imaginary corner. “Here, over a hundred years later, Omega John will die and John Hector will replace him so that the Process may continue to benefit mankind.”
“Omega John put his hand on Alex Drown. She had a fit. It almost killed her. It was horrible. The war is within him.”
She set two pancakes aside on a plate.
He grasped her hand.
“I never forgot you, Ruth. No matter how deep I went. And my memories of our life together were wonderful. It was as if we had been lovers before the war, you see. Part of history.”
“Our relationship is a memory of what it once was,” she said. “It’s only fit for remembering.”
* * *
He returned to the forest at night, across the rustling Downs. The sky was young-old, with starlight smears more ancient than antiquity yet as fresh as creek water. The land curved gently downward toward the forest where the top half of the trees stirred in the night wind. A tawny owl hooted. Under the canopy of trees, it was too dark to proceed with any certainty, and so he took pleasure in the uncertainty. The flat of his bare foot abraded damp roots and scuffed through mulched heaps of wet brown leaves. Ahead, a low campfire and a silhouette beside it. He swallowed nervously and felt a familiar craving in his gut.
“You made it out of the war,” said Hector.
James walked into the firelit clearing.
“I did. Thanks to you.”
“And how can I help you in the middle of the night?” Hector’s sharp features were half-shadowed under his cowl.
“I want to know how you intend to stop the war.”
James sat cross-legged and warmed his hands around the fire. Hector reached behind himself for another log.
“How many hundreds of thousands of years do you think that man has sat around campfires?”
The two men watched the flames in silence, the deeper shadows of the wood at their backs.
“A fire makes me feel young and old at the same time. I am as new as the finely-toothed green leaves on an ash tree yet as ancient as an oak’s rutted bark. The war made us all into young-old men.”
“How long ago was the war, for you?”
Hector’s layered, unreadable gaze.
“A part of me is always there, on Suvla Bay.”
Hector reached into his jerkin and took out his identity discs and inspected them by firelight.
“You scratched a name for me on this disc: Omega John.”
“Do you know what it means?”
“That I am the last of something, I presume. Civilization perhaps. Do you remember the first days of the war? We wondered then if civilization was about to end. It seemed only a question of when the Germans would break through the Allies’ lines and we would be overrun like Belgium. In London, the streets seemed strange and ominous, the darkening clouds before a storm.”
“I don’t remember that,” said James.
“I was working as an illustrator for a company called Thomas Nelson, and was something of a prodigy. The owner of the co
mpany, Mr Buchan, called me into his office and told me that I was to attend an important meeting as his representative. I didn’t know what to say. He merely instructed me to, ‘Tell them what you believe in. That is what they need to hear.’”
The fire spread along the underside of the new log. The smoke made his lungs tighten. James had not yet recovered from the choking fires at Chocolate Hill. Time, he realized, moved at a different pace for him: he was stuck in linear time, one day after another, whereas Hector and the other members of the Omega Order had jumped forward in their history by a year or so.
“Buchan sent me to a meeting at Wellington House in Buckingham Gate. Two years ago, almost to the day. I was shown into a grand government office with a great blue conference table. It was the biggest table I had ever seen and shaped like a crescent moon. There were many men around that table. Thirty, perhaps. They were all far older than I, and here’s the thing…”
Hector leant forward to impart a confidence.
“Nearly every one of those men was a great author. I counted them off: Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, venerable and long-bearded, James Barrie, an ardent scot, Newbolt and Galsworthy, and Wells – HG Wells! I was reared on Wells, you know. The Zionist Israel Zangwill, he talked a lot. So many great authors, the giants who had imagined our age.
“The meeting was called by a politician called Charles Masterman. He was a scruffy, odd-looking type, his loose straight hair hung down like soiled drapes and he had a gangling, indoors sort of body. Buchan told me Masterman was an expert on the crowd, and how to manipulate its spirit, and so he had been given the job of influencing international opinion concerning the war.
“Masterman explained his intent to the meeting: our aim would be to persuade the elite of each country of the justness of the British cause. Particularly the American elite. It was vital that the intellectual classes of America be persuaded by higher reason, for they would see through base manipulation of emotion. We would not be concerned with popular opinion. The best way to influence the mass was to influence the elite, that is how networks function. The more influence one has, the more influence one gains. To he who hath shall be given.
“What did the ordinary man matter? Kitchener already had two hundred thousand recruits. The nation’s blood was up. The will to fight was strong. We were to win the war of the mind, and any peace that ensured.
“I was the youngest man at the meeting by nearly twenty years, I would say. Masefield was the next youngest, and he was in his mid-thirties. The age of the authors was unignorable; they were all old men, formed by the old ways. Hardy said he would write a poem for the cause that very week. Each author had a profoundly different view of the world yet all of these views could be bent to Masterman’s will. I realized this when Chesterton, another shabby unkempt type, spoke. He admitted the faults of the British Empire, but in such a way that one still felt patriotic. He said the war would be ‘a moment of intense moral reality’. The war would not be about broken bodies – it was an affair of the mind. A debate with bullets.”
Hector’s humour was as bitter as the tarry end of his coffin nail. He picked a thread of tobacco from the tip of his tongue, cocked his head, and imitated Chesterton’s pompous obese tone: “‘The Teutonic mind does not accept the democratic concept of the citizen, which is that every citizen is a revolution, constantly and creatively altering the state.’
“The argument seemed sound enough, but when he was done speaking, his old face and unclipped whiskers fell; he knew that any rhetorical victory would, when tested by the reality of war, turn to defeat.
“The poets talked a great deal about the beauty of English fields. Of rooks over stubble after the harvest. Of cornfields and downland at twilight. They turned the land into a lyric. But with each agreement, there was an afternote of sadness. The great men were not so dull as to believe in their own fancy.
“Masterman and Wells were very much in agreement on an aristocracy of the intelligent. Someone suggested evoking patriotism and the King, but Wells dismissed it out of hand. ‘It is not the King’s war. What has he got to do with our war?’ he said. Both he and Zangwill saw the war as a way of achieving their progressive ideals. Of breaking up the old system to free the new.
“And then Wells turned to me and asked me what I intended to do. I explained I was of Quaker stock, and while I would not fight, I was prepared to serve. He respected this; he said that he foresaw an army of irregulars, made up of boy scouts and pacifists and invalids who would stay at home and carry the ideas of the civilization, to keep spirits up and to check any wavering courage. To set aside any who doubted and keep the community pure.”
Hector passed his pale palm over the flames, testing the heat.
“I said to the authors, ‘If a man imagines fire, fire will result. If war, then war will be the outcome. You are all great men of imagination. Could you not imagine a peace?’
“They were not there to listen to me. I had been sent to them as a difficult case to test their powers of persuasion.
“‘I will not fight,’ I repeated my belief. ‘But I will serve. I will serve this land but not your country. I will serve the people but not their rulers.’
“‘Aren’t you afraid of missing out on the Great Adventure?’ asked Conan Doyle.
“‘I’m not afraid of anything and I will not fight,’ I said.
“Not one of the great men begrudged me my arrogance.
“‘If you love peace,’” said Wells, ‘then you must appreciate how important it is that we defeat and discredit the war-like legends of Germany. The Teutonic mind is composed of blood and iron and hates freedom. Germany will exterminate the future.’
“I maintained that the Germans and the Allies are both machine civilizations. More alike than apart.
“Chesterton admitted the sins of the British Empire but put forward that each of these sins had been borrowed from Germany, that the nature of the British Empire had been corrupted by the far worse German Empire.
“‘Imagine a British Empire without Germany at its heels,’ he said. ‘You profess a love of ancient Britain. Of Merrie England. But there is no Merrie Prussia. The Teutonic mind mixes biology with history. There is no joy, and that is why there is no freedom.’
“Barrie disagreed. He was sardonic and provocative: ‘Britain is an overfed belly, timid, concerned with the past.’
“Zangwill replied that the past is a cradle, not a prison. And the debate went off in that direction. But it was decided. The great writers would all put their name to the cause. Wells took a moment to reassure me as we filed out: ‘The war will not last,’ he said. ‘An outbreak of common sense will ensue.’”
In the grove of tall beech trees, the heat from the campfire settled, and James felt drowsy. Hector prodded the logs with the point of his knife, releasing an upward stream of sparks.
“They failed us, James. Fat, old men in wilted collars, musty tweed and poorly-tied cravats. I know them all. I know their weaknesses and their appetites. I will go into their homes, into their sepulchral studies. I will give them the experience of Suvla Bay. It will stop their hearts.”
“But it will not stop the war.”
“I will go to Masterman himself. He feeds the lies into the bloodstream of the people. I will persuade him to stop. And then we will find a way to put the war directly into the minds of every man and woman. Once the people have experienced the war as it truly is, then an immediate peace will ensue.”
28
The patterned tent billowed and snapped in the breeze. He put a questioning hand on Ruth’s hip. Yes, she was awake too. She stroked his hair, her fingers reminding herself of the scar on the back of his head.
She planned to leave that morning. They made love for the last time. He put all his remaining intensity into the act. She held him inside her as preparation for letting him go. The ends of her pleasure were twisted with sorrow.
“Come with me,” she said, as they lay side by side in the little tent, their b
odies cooling.
“When I was in the war, I was underground, and for a time, cut off from the Process. I had an attack of vertigo and saw things as they were. Myself also. It was shattering. I couldn’t survive it for long.”
“Perhaps it will pass.”
“Perhaps.”
With his fingertips, he brushed order into the hairs on his chest.
“What if the Process expands its footprint? You might walk and walk and never break out of its dominion. London under the Process – can you imagine it?”
“They would never allow it.”
He sat up.
“Hector told me he was going to London to stop the war.”
“History tells us that he didn’t succeed.”
She sat up, fixed her bra and reached for her shirt.
“I must go.”
“To Saddlescombe?”
“And then on.”
She was intent upon returning to the city.
“London is closed to us,” he said.
“It’s a big city. There’s always a way in.”
“It’s not the city we left behind.”
Her tone was harsh: “What do you know about it?”
“Many of the evicted tried to get into London. I heard that they never got beyond the camps. London had its own round of evictions, using far cruder metrics than the Process.”
“I will take the long way around. I want to explore the country, take stock of what is left to us after the Seizure. Which forces can be rallied.”
“I want to protect you.”
“I know. When you went to war, I came looking for you because I thought I’d be lost without your protection. I don’t want it anymore.”
He helped her pack up the tent and Blue Raven brought out the children; Euan was thin-limbed and nervous, his sister protective of him. Jordison tethered a horse to the cart. James lifted the children onto it just as they had been lifted onto the cart during eviction. The children were almost weightless in his hands. Insubstantial. People outside of the Process were becoming like wraiths to him.
He watched Ruth lead the horse and cart away from the camp. At some point in the future he would feel entirely hollow.
If Then Page 34