P. James - The Children of Men

Julian got up from Luke’s body. Theo felt her cloak brush his arm but he did not turn to look at her. He was aware of a mixture of emotions, anger which he knew he had no right to feel, and relief, so strong that it was close to joy, that Rolf wasn’t the father of the child. But the anger was for the moment the stronger. He wanted to lash out at her, to say: “Is that what you were, then? Camp-follower to the group? What about Gascoigne? How do you know the child isn’t his?” But those words would be unforgivable and, worse, unforgettable. He knew that he had no right to question her but he couldn’t bite back the stark accusatory words nor hide the pain behind them.

“Did you love them, either of them? Do you love your husband?”

She said quietly: “Did you love your wife?”

It was, he saw, a serious question, not a retaliation, and he gave it a serious and truthful answer. “I convinced myself I did when I married. I willed myself into the appropriate feelings without knowing what the appropriate feelings were. I endowed her with qualities she didn’t have and then despised her for not having them. Afterwards I might have learned to love her if I had thought more of her needs and less of my own.”

He thought: Portrait of a marriage. Perhaps most marriages, good and bad, could be summed up in four sentences.

She looked at him steadily for a moment, then said: “That’s the answer to your question.”

“And Luke?”

“No, I didn’t love him, but I liked having him in love with me. I envied him because he could love so much, could feel so much. No one has wanted me with that intensity of emotion. So I gave him what he wanted. If I had loved him it would have been…” She paused for a moment, then said: “It would have been less sinful.”

“Isn’t that a strong word for a simple act of generosity?”

“But it wasn’t a simple act of generosity. It was an act of self-indulgence.”

It wasn’t, he knew, the time for such a conversation, but when would there be a time? He had to know, had to understand. He said: “But it would have been all right, ‘less sinful’ are the words you used, if you’d loved him. So you agree with Rosie McClure, love justifies everything, excuses everything?”

“No, but it’s natural, it’s human. What I did was to use Luke out of curiosity, boredom, perhaps to get back a little at Rolf for caring more for the group than he did for me, punishing Rolf because I’d stopped loving him. Can you understand that, the need to hurt someone because you can no longer love?”

“Yes, I understand that.”

She added: “It was all very commonplace, predictable, ignoble.”

Theo said: “And tawdry.”

“No. Not that. Nothing to do with Luke was tawdry. But it harmed him more than it gave him joy. But then you didn’t think I was a saint.”

“No, but I thought you were good.”

She said quietly: “Now you know that I’m not.”

Staring into the half-darkness, Theo saw that Rolf had detached himself from the tree and was walking back to join them. Miriam moved forward to meet him. The three pairs of eyes gazed at Rolf’s face, watching, waiting for his first words. When he got close, Theo saw that the left cheek and forehead were an open wound, the skin had been rubbed raw.

Rolf’s voice was perfectly calm but oddly pitched, so that, for one ridiculous moment, Theo thought a stranger had crept up on them in the darkness: “Before we move we must get him buried. That means waiting until it’s light. We’d better get his coat off before he stiffens too much. We need all the warm clothes we have.”

Miriam said: “Burying him won’t be easy without some kind of spade. The ground’s soft but we need to scrape a hole somehow. We can’t just cover him with leaves.”

Rolf said: “It can wait till morning. We’ll get the coat off now. It’s no use to him.”

Having made the suggestion, he took no action to carry it out and it was Miriam and Theo who between them rolled over the body and eased the coat from both arms. The sleeves were heavily bloodstained. Theo could feel them wet under his hands. They composed the body again on its back, the arms straight at the side.

Rolf said: “Tomorrow I’ll get hold of another car. In the meantime we’ll get what rest we can.”

They wedged themselves together in the wide fork of a fallen beech. A jutting branch, still thickly hung with the brittle bronze pennants of autumn, provided an illusion of security, and they huddled beneath it like children conscious of grave delinquencies, hiding ineffectively from the searching adults. Rolf took the outside place, with Miriam next to him, then Julian between Miriam and Theo. Their rigid bodies seemed to infect the air around them with anxiety. The wood itself was distraught; its ceaseless small noises hissed and whispered on the agitated air. Theo couldn’t sleep, and knew from the uneven breathing, suppressed coughs, and small grunts and sighs that the others shared his vigil. There would be a time for sleep. It would come with the greater warmth of the day, with the burial of that dark, stiffening shape which, out of sight on the other side of the fallen tree, was a living presence in all their minds. He was aware of the warmth of Julian’s body pressed against his and knew that she must feel from him a similar comfort. Miriam had tucked Luke’s coat around Julian and it seemed to Theo that he could smell the drying blood. He felt suspended in a limbo of time, aware of the cold, of thirst, of the innumerable small sounds of the wood, but not of the passing hours. Like his companions, he endured and waited for the dawn.

Daylight, tentative and bleak, stole like a chill breath into the wood, wrapping itself round barks and broken boughs, touching the boles of the trees and the low denuded branches, giving darkness and mystery form and substance. Opening his eyes, Theo couldn’t believe that he had actually dozed, although he must have momentarily lost consciousness since he had no recollection of Rolf getting up and leaving them.

Now he saw him striding back through the trees. Rolf said: “I’ve been exploring. This isn’t a proper wood, more a copse. It’s only about eighty yards wide. We can’t hide here for long. There’s a kind of ditch between the end of the wood and the field. That should do for him.”

Again Rolf made no move to touch Luke’s body. It was Miriam and Theo who managed between them to raise it. Miriam held Luke’s legs, parted, resting against her thighs.

Theo took the weight of the head and shoulders, sensing that he could already detect the onset of rigor. The body sagged between them as they followed Rolf through the trees. Julian walked beside them, her cloak clutched tightly round her, her face calm but very pale, Luke’s bloodstained coat and his cream stole folded over her arm. She carried them like trophies of battle.

It was only about fifty yards to the edge of the copse and they found themselves looking out over a gently rolling countryside. The harvest was over and bales of straw lay like pale bolsters haphazard on the distant uplands. The sun, a ball of harsh white light, was already beginning to dispel the thin mist which lay over fields and far hills, absorbing the autumn colours and merging them to a soft olive green in which the individual trees stood out like black cut-outs. It was going to be another mellow autumn day. With a lifting of the heart, Theo saw that there was a hedge of laden blackberry bushes edging the wood. It took all his self-control not to drop Luke’s body and fall on them.

The ditch was shallow, no more than a narrow gully between the copse and the field. But it would have been difficult to find a more convenient burial place. The field had recently been ploughed and the ridged earth looked relatively soft. Bending, Theo and Miriam let the body roll from their grasp and tumble into the shallow depression. Theo wished that they could have done it more reverently, less as if dumping an unwanted animal. Luke had come to rest face-downwards. Sensing that this wasn’t what Julian wanted, he jumped into the ditch and tried to turn the body over. The task was more difficult than he had expected, better not attempted. In the end Miriam had to help and they struggled together in the earth and leaves before what remained of Luke’s battered and mud-caked face was turned upwards to the sky.