P. James - The Children of Men

So where and in what direction? For a moment he wondered whether it would be an effective ploy to double back to Oxford, hide in Wytham Wood, above the city, surely the last place which Xan would think of searching. Too dangerous a journey? But any road was dangerous and would be doubly so when the old people were discovered at seven-thirty and told their story. Why did it seem more hazardous to go back than to go on? Perhaps because Xan was in London. And yet for an ordinary fugitive London itself was the obvious place of concealment. London, despite its depleted population, was still a collection of villages, of secret alleyways, of vast, half-empty tower blocks. But London was full of eyes and there was no one there to whom he could safely turn, no house to which he had entry. His instinct—and he guessed it would be Julian’s—was to put as many miles as possible between them and London and to keep to the original plan to hide in deep and remote country. Every mile from London seemed a mile towards safety.

As he drove along the mercifully deserted road, carefully, getting the feel of the car, he indulged a fantasy which he tried to convince himself was a rational, attainable aim. He pictured a woodman’s cottage, sweet-smelling, the resinous walls still holding the warmth of the summer sun, rooted as naturally as a tree in deep woodland under the sheltering canopy of strong, leaf-laden boughs, deserted years ago and now decaying, but with linen, matches, tinned food enough to provide for the three of them. There would be a spring of fresh waiter, wood they could gather for the fires when autumn gave way to winter. They could live there for months if necessary, perhaps even for years. It was the idyll which, standing beside the car at Swinbrook, he had mocked and despised, but now he took comfort in it, even while knowing that the dream was a fantasy.

Somewhere in the world other children would be born; he made himself share Julian’s confidence. This child would no longer be unique, no longer in special danger. Xan and the Council would have no need to take him from his mother even if he were known to be the first-born of a new age. But all that was in the future and could be faced and dealt with when the time came. For the next few weeks the three of them could live in safety until the child was born. He could see no further and he told himself that he need see no further.

His mind and all his physical energies had for the last two hours been so fiercely concentrated on the task in hand that it hadn’t occurred to him that he might have difficulty in recognizing the fringes of the wood. Turning right from the lane on to the road, he tried to remember how far he had travelled before taking the turning to the town. But the walk had in memory become a turbulence of fear, anxiety and resolution, of agonizing thirst, of panting breath and an aching side, with no clear recollection of distance or time. A small copse came into view on the left, seeming at once familiar, raising his spirits. But almost immediately the trees ended, giving way to a low hedge and open ground. And then there were more trees and the beginning of a stone wall. He drove slowly, his eyes on the road. Then he saw what he had both feared and hoped to see: Luke’s blood spattered on the tarmac, no longer red, a black splurge in the headlights, and to his left the broken stones of the wall.

When they didn’t at once come forward out of the trees to meet him, he felt a moment of appalled anxiety that they weren’t there, that they had been taken. He drove the Citizen close against the wall, vaulted over and passed into the wood. At the sound of his footsteps they came forward and he heard Miriam’s muttered “Thank God, we were beginning to get worried. Have you got a car?”

“A Citizen. That’s about all I have got. There wasn’t much to take in the house. Here’s a thermos of hot coffee.”

Miriam almost snatched it from him. She unscrewed the top and poured the coffee carefully, every drop precious, then handed it to Julian.

She said, her voice deliberately calm: “Things have changed, Theo. We haven’t much time now. The baby has started.”

Theo said: “How long?”

“You can’t always tell with a first labour. It might be only a few hours. It could be twenty-four. Julian’s in the very early stages but we have to find somewhere quickly.”

And then, suddenly, all his previous indecision was swept away by a cleansing wind of certainty and hope. A single name came into his mind, so clearly that it was as if a voice, not his own, had spoken it aloud. Wychwood Forest. He pictured a solitary summer walk, a shadowed path beside a broken stone wall leading deep into the forest, then opening out into a mossy glade with a lake and, further up the path to the right, a wood-shed. Wychwood wouldn’t have been his first or an obvious choice: too small, too easily searched, less than twenty miles from Oxford. But now that closeness was an advantage. Xan would expect them to press on. Instead they would double back to a place he remembered, a place he knew, a place where they could be certain of shelter.

He said: “Get in the car. We’re turning back. We’re making for Wychwood Forest. We’ll eat on the way.”

There was no time for discussion, for weighing up possible alternatives. The women had their own immense preoccupation. It must be for him to decide when to go and how to get there.

He had no real fear that they would again be attacked by the Painted Faces. That horror now seemed the fulfillment of his half-superstitious conviction at the start of the journey that they were destined for a tragedy as inescapable as its time and nature were unpredictable. Now it had come, had done its worst; it was over. Like an air-traveller, terrified of flying and expecting to crash each time his plane soared, he could rest knowing that the awaited disaster was behind him and that there were survivors. But he knew that neither Julian nor Miriam could so easily exorcise their terror of the Painted Faces. Their fear possessed the little car. For the first ten miles they sat rigid behind him, their eyes fixed on the road, as if expecting at every turn, at every small obstruction, to hear again the wild whoops of triumph, and to see the flaming torches and the glittering eyes.

There were other dangers, too, and the one over-riding fear. They had no way of telling at what hour Rolf had actually left them. If he had reached Xan, the search for them might even now be under way, the road blocks being unloaded and dragged into place, the helicopters wheeled out and fuelled to await the first light of day. The narrow side roads twisting between straggling, untamed hedges and broken dry-stone walls seemed, perhaps irrationally, to offer their best hope of safety. Like all hunted creatures, Theo’s instinct was to twist and turn, to remain hidden, to seek the darkness. But the country lanes presented their own hazards. Four times, fearing the risk of a second puncture, he had to brake sharply at an impassable stretch of creviced tarmac and reverse the car. Once, soon after two o’clock, this manoeuvre was almost disastrous. The back wheels rolled into a ditch, and it took half an hour before his and Miriam’s joint efforts got the Citizen back on the road.

He cursed the lack of maps but, as the hours wore by, the cloud-base cleared to reveal more clearly the pattern of the stars and he could see the smudge of the Milky Way and take his bearings from the Plough and the Pole Star. But this ancient lore was no more than a crude calculation of his route and he was in constant danger of getting lost. From time to time a signpost, stark as an eighteenth-century gallows, would rear up out of the darkness and he would make his careful way over the broken road towards it, half-expecting to hear the clank of chains and see a slowly twisting body with its elongated neck, while the pinpoint of light from the torch, like a searching eye, traced the half-obliterated names of unknown villages. The night was colder now, with a foretaste of winter chill; the air, no longer smelling of grass and sun-warmed earth, stung his nostrils with a faint antiseptic tang, as if they were close to the sea. Each time the engine was switched off the silence was absolute. Standing under a signpost whose names might as well have been written in a foreign language, he felt disorientated and alienated, as if the dark, desolate fields, the earth beneath his feet, this strange, unscented air, were no longer his natural habitat and there was no security or home for his endangered species anywhere under the uncaring sky.