The Wanting Seed

by Anthony Burgess

  THE

  WANTING

  SEED

  Anthony Burgess

  W * W * NORTON & COMPANY

  New York * London

  Part One

  One

  THIS was the day before the night when the knives of official disappointment struck.

  Beatrice-Joanna Foxe snuffled a bereaved mother's grief as the little corpse, in its yellow plastic casket, was handed over to the two men from the Ministry of Agriculture (Phosphorus Reclamation Department). They were cheerful creatures, coal-faced and with shining dentures, and one of them sang a song which had recently become popular. Much burbled on the television by epicene willowy youths, it sounded incongruous coming from this virile West Indian deep bass throat. Macabre, too.

  'My adorable Fred:

  He's so, so sweet,

  From the crown of his head

  To the soles of his feet.

  He's my meat.'

  The name of the tiny cadaver had been not Fred but Roger. Beatrice-Joanna sobbed, but the man went on singing, having no feeling of his business, custom having made it in him a property of easiness.

  'There we are, then,' said Dr Acheson heartily, a fat gelding of an Anglo-Saxon. 'Another dollop of phosphorus pentoxide for dear old Mother Earth. Rather less than half a kilo, I'd say. Still, every little helps.' The singer had now become a whistler. Whistling, he nodded, handing over a receipt. 'And if you'll just step into my office, Mrs Foxe,' smiled Dr Acheson, 'I'll give you your copy of the death certificate. Take it to the Ministry of Infertility, and they'll pay you your condolence. In cash.'

  'All I want,' she sniffed, 'is my son back again.'

  'You'll get over that,' said Dr Acheson cheerfully. 'Everyone does.' He watched benevolently the two black men carry the casket down the corridor towards the lift. Twenty-one storeys below, their van waited. 'And think,' he added. 'Think of this in national terms, in global terms. One mouth less to feed. One more half-kilo of phosphorus pentoxide to nourish the earth. In a sense, you know, Mrs Foxe, you'll be getting your son back again.' He led the way into his tiny office. 'Ah, Miss Herschhorn,' he said to his secretary, 'the death certificate, please.' Miss Herschhorn, a Teutonico-Chinese, rapidly quacked the details into her audiograph; a printed card slid out of a slot; Dr Acheson stamped his signature - flowing, womanly. 'There you are, Mrs Foxe,' he said. 'And do try to see all this rationally.'

  'What I do see,' she said with asperity, 'is that you could have saved him if you'd wanted to. But you didn't think it was worth while. One more mouth to feed, more useful to the State as phosphorus. Oh, you're all so heartless.' She cried again. Miss Herschhorn, a plain thin girl with dog's eyes and very lank straight black hair, made a moue at Dr Acheson. They were, apparently, used to this sort of thing.

  'He was in a very bad way,' said Dr Acheson gently.

  'We did our best, Dognose we did. But that sort of meningeal infection just gallops, you know, just gallops. Besides,' he said reproachfully, 'you didn't bring him to us early enough.'

  'I know, I know. I blame myself.' Her tiny nosewipe was soaked. 'But I think he could have been saved. And my husband thinks the same. But you just don't seem to care about human life any more. Any of you. Oh, my poor boy.'

  'We do care about human life,' said Dr Acheson, stern. 'We care about stability. We care about not letting the earth get overrun. We care about everybody getting enough to eat. I think,' he said, more kindly, 'you ought to go straight home and rest. Show that certificate to the Dispensary on the way out and ask them to give you a couple of pacifiers. There, there.' He patted her on the shoulder. 'You must try to be sensible. Try to be modern. An intelligent woman like you. Leave motherhood to the lower orders, as nature intended. Now, of course,' he smiled, 'according to the rules, that's what you're supposed to do. You've had your recommended ration. No more motherhood for you. Try to stop feeling like a mother.' He patted her again and then turned a pat into a slap of finality, saying, 'Now, if you'll forgive me -'

  'Never,' said Beatrice-Joanna. 'I'll never forgive you, any of you.'

  'Good afternoon, Mrs Foxe.' Miss Herschhorn had switched on a tiny speech-machine; this was reciting-in the manic tone of a synthetic voice - Dr Acheson's afternoon appointments. Dr Acheson's fat rump was turned rudely to Beatrice-Joanna. It was all over: her son on his way to be resolved into phosphorus pentoxide, she just a damned snivelling nuisance. She held her head up and marched into the corridor, marched towards the lift. She was a handsome woman of twenty-nine, handsome in the old way, a way no longer approved in a woman of her class. The straight graceless waistless black dress could not disguise the moving opulence of her haunches, nor could the splendid curve of her bosom be altogether flattened by its constraining bodice. Her cider-coloured hair was worn, according to the fashion, straight and fringed; her face was dusted with plain white powder; she wore no perfume, perfume being for men only - still, and despite the natural pallor of her grief, she seemed to glow and flame with health and, what was to be disapproved strongly, the threat of fecundity. There was something atavistic in Beatrice-Joanna: she instinctively shuddered now at the sight of two white-coated women radiographers who, leaving their department at the other end of the corridor, sauntered towards the lift, smiling fondly at each other, gazing into each other's eyes, fingers intertwined. That sort of thing was now encouraged - anything to divert sex from its natural end - and all over the country b1ared posters put out by the Ministry of Infertility, showing, in ironical nursery colours, an embracing pair of one sex or the other with the legend It's Sapiens to be Homo. The Homosex Institute even ran night-classes.

  Beatrice-Joanna looked with distaste, entering the lift, on the embracing giggling pair. The two women, both Caucasian types, were classically complementary - fluffy kitten answered stocky bullfrog. Beatrice-Joanna nearly retched, her back to the kissing. At the fifteenth floor the lift picked up a foppish steatopygous young man, stylish in well-cut jacket without lapels, tight calf-length trousers, flowery round-necked shirt. He turned sharp eyes of distaste on the two lovers, moving his shoulders pettishly, pouting with equal disgust at the full womanly presence of Beatrice-Joanna. He began, with swift expert strokes, to make up his face, simpering, as his lips kissed the lipstick, at his reflection in the lift-mirror. The lovers giggled at him, or at Beatrice-Joanna. 'What a world,' she thought, as they dropped. But, she reconsidered, glancing covertly but more keenly at him, perhaps this was a clever facade. Perhaps he, like her brother-in-law Derek, her lover Derek, was perpetually acting a public part, owing his position, his chance of promotion, to the gross lie. But, she couldn't help thinking yet again, having thought this often, there must be something fundamentally unsound about a man who could even act like that. She herself, she was sure, could never pretend, never go through the soggy motions of inverted love, even if her life depended on it. The world was mad; where would it all end? As the lift reached groundlevel she tucked her handbag under her arm, held her head high again and prepared to plunge bravely into the mad world outside. For some reason the lift-doors refused to open ('Really,' tutted the big-bottomed exquisite, shaking them) and, in that instant of automatic fear of being trapped, her sick imagination converted the lift-cabin into a yellow casket full of potential phosphorus pentoxide. 'Oh,' she sobbed quietly, 'poor little boy.'

  'Really.' The young dandy, bright with cyclamen lipstick, twittered at her tears. The lift-doors unjammed and opened. A poster on the vestibule wall showed a pair of male friends embracing. Love your Fellow-Men, ran the legend. The female friends giggled at Beatrice-Joanna. 'To hell with you,' she said, wiping her eyes, 'to hell with the lot of you. You're unclean, that's what you are, unclean.' The young man swayed, tut-tutted, undulated off. The bullfrog lesbian held
protective arms round her friend, hostile eyes on Beatrice-Joanna. 'I'll give her unclean,' she said hoarsely. 'I'll rub her face in the dirt, that's what I'll do.' 'Oh, Freda,' adored the other, 'you're so brave.'

  Two

  WHILE Beatrice-Joanna was going down, her husband Tristram Foxe was ascending. He was humming up to the thirty-second floor of the South London (Channel) Unitary School (Boys) Division Four. A sixty-strong Fifth Form (Stream 10) awaited him. He was to give a lesson in Modern History. On the rear wall of the lift, half-hidden by the bulk of Jordan, an art-master, was a map of Great Britain, a new one, a new school issue. Interesting. Greater London, bounded by sea to south and east, had eaten further into Northern Province and Western Province: the new northern limit was a line running from Lowestoft to Birmingham; to the west the boundary dropped from Birmingham to Bournemouth. Intending migrants from the Provinces to Greater London had, it was said, no need to move; they merely had to wait. The Provinces themselves still showed their ancient county divisions, but, owing to diaspora, immigration and miscegenation, the old national designations of 'Wales' and 'Scotland' no longer had any precise significance.

  Beck, who taught mathematics to the junior forms, was saying to Jordan, 'They ought to wipe out one or the other. Compromise, that's always been our trouble, the liberal vice of compromise. Seven septs to a guinea, ten tanners to a crown, eight tosheroons to a quid. The poor young devils don't know where they are. We can't bear to throw anything away, that's our big national sin -' Tristram got off, leaving old bald Beck to continue his invective. He marched to the Fifth Form classroom, entered, blinked at his boys. May light shone from the seaward window on their blank faces, on the blank walls. He started his lesson.

  '- The gradual subsumption of the two main opposing political ideologies under essentially theologico-mythical concepts.' Tristram was not a good teacher. He went too fast for his pupils, used words they found hard to spell, tended to mumble. Obediently the class tried to take down his words in their notebooks. 'Pelagianism,' he said, 'was once known as a heresy. It was even called the British Heresy. Can anybody tell me Pelagius's other name?'

  'Morgan,' said a boy called Morgan, a spotty boy.

  'Correct. Both names mean "man of the sea".' The boy behind Morgan whistled a kind of hornpipe through his teeth, digging Morgan in the back. 'Stop that,' said Morgan.

  'Yes,' continued Tristram. 'Pelagius was of the race that at one time inhabited Western Province. He was what, in the old religious days, used to be called a monk. A monk.' Tristram rose vigorously from his desk and yellowed this word, as if he were fearful that his pupils would not be able to spell it, on the blueboard. Then he sat down again. 'He denied the doctrine of Original Sin and said that man was capable of working out his own salvation.' The boys looked very blank. 'Never mind about that for the moment,' said Tristram kindly. 'What you have to remember is that all this suggests human perfectibility. Pelagianism was thus seen to be at the heart of liberalism and its derived doctrines, especially Socialism and Communism. Am I going too fast?'

  'Yes, sir.' Barks and squeals from sixty breaking voices.

  'Right.' Tristram had a mild face, blank as the boys', and his eyes gleamed feverishly from behind their contact-lenses. His hair had a negroid kink; his cuticles half-hid blue half-moons. He was thirty-five and had been a schoolmaster for nearly fourteen years. He earned just over two hundred guineas a month but was hoping, since Newick's death, to be promoted to the headship of the Social Studies Department. That would mean a substantial increase in salary, which would mean a bigger fiat, a better start in the world for young Roger. Roger, he then remembered, was dead. 'Right,' he repeated, like a sergeant-instructor of the days before Perpetual Peace had set in. 'Augustine, on the other hand, had insisted on man's inherent sinfulness and the need for his redemption through divine grace. This was seen to be at the bottom of Conservatism and other laissez-faire and non-progressive political beliefs.' He beamed at his class. 'The opposed thesis, you see,' he said, encouragingly. 'The whole thing is quite simple, really.'

  'I don't get it, sir,' boomed a big bold boy named Abney-Hastings.

  'Well, you see,' said Tristram amiably, 'the old Conservatives expected no good out of man. Man was regarded as naturally acquisitive, wanting more and more possessions for himself, an unco-operative and selfish creature, not much concerned about the progress of the community. Sin is really only another word for selfishness, gentlemen. Remember that.' He leaned forward, his hands joined, sliding his forearms into the yellow chalk-powder that covered the desk like windblown sand. 'What would you do with a selfish person?' he asked. 'Tell me that.'

  'Knock him about a bit,' said a very fair boy called Ibrahim ibn Abdullah.

  'No.' Tristram shook his head. 'No Augustinian would do that sort of thing. If you expect the worst from a person, you can't ever be disappointed. Only the disappointed resort to violence. The pessimist, which is another way of saying the Augustinian, takes a sort of gloomy pleasure in observing the depths to which human behaviour can sink. The more sin he sees, the more his belief in Original Sin is confirmed. Everyone likes to have his deepest convictions confirmed: that is one of the most abiding of human satisfactions.' Tristram suddenly seemed to grow bored with this trite exposition. He surveyed his sixty, row by row, as if seeking the diversion of bad behaviour; but all sat still and attentive, good as gold, as if bent on confirming the Pelagian thesis. The microradio on Tristram's wrist buzzed thrice. He lifted it to his ear. A gnat-song like the voice of conscience said, 'Please see the Principal at the end of the present period' - a tiny plopping of plosives. Good. This would be it, then, this would be it. Soon he would be standing in poor dead Newick's place, the salary perhaps back-dated. He now literally stood, his hands clutching in advocate-style his jacket where, in the days of lapels, the lapels would have been. He resumed with renewed vigour.

  'Nowadays,' he said, 'we have no political parties. The old dichotomy, we recognize, subsists in ourselves and requires no naive projection into sects or factions. We are both God and the Devil, though not at the same time. Only Mr Livedog can be that, and Mr Livedog, of course, is a mere fictional symbol.' All the boys smiled. They all loved The Adventures of Mr Livedog in the Cosmicomic. Mr Livedog was a big funny fubsy demiurge who, sufflaminandus like Shakespeare, spawned unwanted life all over the earth. Overpopulation was his doing. In none of his adventures, however, did he ever win: Mr Homo, his human boss, always brought him to heel. 'The theology subsisting in our opposed doctrines of Pelagianism and Augustinianism has no longer any validity. We use these mythical symbols because they are peculiarly suited to our age, an age relying more and more on the perceptual, the pictorial, the pictographic. Pettman!' Tristram shouted, with sudden joy. 'You're eating something. Eating in class. That won't do, will it?'

  'I'm not, sir,' said Pettman, 'please, sir.' He was a boy of purplish Dravidian colouring with strong Red Indian features. 'It's this tooth, sir. I have to keep sucking it, sir, to stop it aching, sir.'

  'A boy of your age should not have teeth,' said Tristram. 'Teeth are atavistic.' He paused. He had said that often to Beatrice-Joanna, who had a particularly fine natural set, top and bottom. In the early days of their marriage she had taken pleasure in biting his ear-lobes. 'Do stop that, darling. Ow, dear, that hurts.' And then little Roger. Poor little Roger. He sighed, then pushed on with his lesson.

  Three

  BEATRICE-JOANNA decided that, despite her tangle of nerves and the hammering at her occiput, she didn't want a pacifier from the Dispensary. She didn't want anything further from the State Health Service, thank you very much. She filled her lungs with air as if about to dive, then thrust her way into the jam of people packing the vast hospital vestibule. With its mixture of pigments, cephalic indices, noses and lips, it looked like some monstrous international airport lounge. She pushed to the steps and stood there awhile, drinking the clean street air. The age of private transport was all but over; only official vans, limousines
and microbuses crawled the street crammed with pedestrians. She gazed up. Buildings of uncountable storeys lunged at the May sky, duck-egg blue with a nacreous film. Pied and peeled. Blue-beating and hoary-glow height. The procession of seasons was one abiding fact, an eternal recurrence, the circle. But in this modern world the circle had become an emblem of the static, the limited globe, the prison. Up there, at least twenty storeys high, on the facrade of the Demographic Institute, stood a bas-relief circle with a straight line tangential to it. It symbolized the wished-for conquest of the population problem: that tangent, instead of stretching from everlasting to everlasting, equalled in length the circumference of the circle. Stasis. A balance of global population and global food supply. Her brain approved, but her body, the body of a bereaved mother, shouted no, no. It all meant a denial of so many things; life, in the name of reason, was being blasphemed against. The breath of the sea struck her left cheek.

  She walked due south down the great London street, the nobility of its sheer giddy loftiness of masonry and metal redeeming the vulgarity of the signs and slogans. Glowgold Sunsyrup. National Stereotelly. Syntheglot. She was pushing against the crowds, crowds all moving northward. There were, she observed, more uniforms than usual: policemen and policewomen in grey - awkward, many of them, as if they were new recruits. She walked on. At the end of the street, like a vision of sanity, glinted the sea. This was Brighton, London's administrative centre, if a coastline could be called a centre. Beatrice-Joanna strode as briskly as the tide of the north-moving crowd would let her towards the cool green water. Its vista, taken from this narrow giddy ravine, always promised normality, a width of freedom, but the actual arrival at the sea's edge always brought disappointment. Every hundred yards or so stood a stout sea-pier loaded with office-blocks or hives of flats, pushing out towards France. Still, the clean salt breath was there, and greedily she drank it in. She held an intuitive conviction that, if there were a God, He inhabited the sea. The sea spelled life, whispered or shouted fertility; that voice could never be completely stilled. If only, she felt crazily, poor Roger's body could have been thrown into those tigrine waters, swept out to be gnawed by fish, rather than changed coldly to chemicals and silently fed to the earth. She had a mad intuitive notion that the earth was dying, that the sea would soon be the final repository of life. 'Vast sea gifted with delirium, panther skin and mantle pierced with thousands and thousands of idols of the sun -' She had read that somewhere, a translation from one of the auxiliary languages of Europe. The sea drunk with its own blue flesh, a hydra, biting its tail. 'Sea,' she said quietly, for this promenade was as crowded as the street she had just left, 'sea, help us. We're sick, 0 sea. Restore us to health, restore us to life.'