If Then (22 page)

Arc lights spluttered and glared. The cots contained wounded men and women.

What can you do?

Ruth would check every cot for the children. The cool air of the barn was sweet and vile with medicinal vapours, burnt chemicals, sweat and blood. The wounded men did not see her. They were like the horse she had encountered up on the Downs: unfinished sculptures, incomplete constructions. These men came off the assembly line already broken. They were made to suffer. But, mixed in among the iodine and boracic powder, she could smell fear. Real human hormones. She walked quickly along the cots, checking to the left and to the right, until her path was blocked by a case of acute insanity, sitting up, crying and shaking. The automata, it seemed, had been invested with the very tips of human emotion. The nurses clustered around the cot. Coming closer, Ruth saw that the case of insanity was not in fact a manufactured soldier but Francis Sacks, one of the evicted, the man the people of Cliffe had fought to save. His scalp was splashed with iodine. The surgeon called for ether. The padre, his face in shadow, offered Sacks a cigarette to calm his nerves. She turned back rather than watch the procedure. The ether was administered. Sacks whimpered and fell silent, and she walked away from the awful thick sound of cutting, the sound of fat being scissored from a chop.

Her foot scuffed the wanton sprawl of a dead naked man on a stretcher. Her nerves would not hold much longer.

Through the sunlit entrance of the barn, stretcher bearers brought in more of the evicted, bound and restrained to the stretchers. They lowered the evicted directly upon the cots. Alex Drown carried a metal bowl of steaming hot water, and then, with her colleagues, began prepping the new arrivals for surgery.

A priest stood in her way.

“Can I help you?”

He was at the end of the line of cots, an intellectual type with the body of a long distance runner. Quite different from the others; under the hesitant glare of the arc lights, she could not be sure, but he might even be human.

“Cigarette?” he asked.

“I’m looking for a child,” she said.

“Your child?”

On the cots near to her, more of the evicted, the ones who had already been operated upon. Implants. They were giving them implants. Bringing more people into their war game. Making it real.

“A girl,” said Ruth. “And a boy. Their parents are injured, and I want to see that the children are safe.”

“Do you live near here?” asked the priest. “Are you one of the local ladies who serve tea and coffee to our patients? If so, I must say that we are very grateful.”

He introduced himself as Father Huxley, and inquired if the pastoral needs of the village were being met despite the presence of the army. She mistook the question for the stock phrase of an automaton. He pressed the point.

“What I mean is, do the villagers have a priest to take confession? We wouldn’t want you to go through such a trial without recourse to forgiveness.”

Ruth smiled weakly.

“Do you have faith?” he asked.

“No,” she replied.

“Faith is the element which stabilizes and divines the future. Without it, our actions have no meaning.”

A nurse lowered a blanket over the naked dead soldier.

“Are you sure you won’t have a cigarette?” He wrinkled his face at the smell of the barn. “A smoke clears the air of corruption. I like to think of cigarettes as secular incense.”

“I would like some air.”

The priest let her pass.

Ruth resumed her search of the cots. Steadily, the surgeon also moved down the line of the evicted, applying a local anaesthetic, making an incision through the scalp and skull, cutting through the tough fibre of the dura. Alex presented the implants to the surgeon in a curved white plastic container. Ruth had always imagined the implants to be like transmitters or filaments; they were not. In the quivering arc light, they seemed more like human tissue.

She did not find the children in the barn. Ruth crouched outside, gathering her resources. Father Huxley followed her. He squinted at the husky afternoon light, and took a deep breath of country air.

“It’s intense, isn’t it? Life, I mean.”

“What do you see, in the barn?” she asked.

“I see cement,” he said. “Living cement thrown by God into the stonework of the New City.”

“I see people I used to know. Men and women.”

The priest looked questioningly down at her.

“Women?”

“You don’t see them, do you? The barn looks different to you.”

“This is no place for a lady. Your nerves are shaken, I understand that.”

“It is monstrous. We’ve become evil.”

The priest was taken aback.

“I assure you, I have not. And neither have you. If God’s work seems brutal, then it is our role to pacify and soften it. To offer comfort and solace.”

“You believe this war is part of His work?”

“God has to set in motion the development of a whole universe to produce a being – an individual – he is determined to create. We’re all part of that process.”

If he was an automaton, then he was a higher order of forgery than the others, a work that a master forger had laboured over.

Ruth said, “My friend told me that the war is just a game.”

“‘Play up! Play up! And play the game!’” He enacted the line of poetry with false joviality.

“Newbolt, of course,” he added. “I met him once. A very conventional man with a highly unconventional private life. I don’t think anyone here regards this as a game. That is a sentiment for boys.”

“The war ended over a hundred years ago. You can’t understand that, can you?”

“Sometimes, I understand it,” he said, and then stopped, looked with longing at the poplar trees quivering in the breeze. “Life is so intense,” he began again. “The countryside seethes with creation and evolution.” He extinguished his cigarette carefully against the lifted sole of his boot; she recognized the gesture from other men who had been raised on a farm.

“The general is coming to inspect the troops, tonight. He could help you find your children. I have to warn you, though, that the general is less open-minded than myself. I would spare him your below-stairs, servant girl mysticism.”

C
ome dusk
, she had still not found the children in the village. She returned to the outlying country. The woodland on the north face of Newtimber Hill was ancient. The long moss-coloured branches of a lime tree were arthritic, and lay their weary tips upon the leafy ground to form startlingly crooked spokes. Over the years, the wood had conceded a few points to gravity’s remorseless argument; she stepped over bark husks and widowmakers, the thick branches that fall unannounced upon any unfortunates below. Slanted tree trunks parted before her.

This is where she would have hidden, when she was a girl; away from the horrors of the barn, away from the disturbed family home. The way that Jane did not recognize her was familiar to Ruth: her mother had ended up like that, indifferent to whoever came and went. For a parent to fail to recognize their child is terrible. When senility meant that her own mother was oblivious to her presence, then part of Ruth disappeared too.

Between the trees ahead, she glimpsed a flash of material. She had found them. Euan and Agnes were sitting in a small clearing with a plate of egg and chips between them. Invisible children do not think to hide.

“Hello Agnes,” said Ruth.

The girl stopped chewing.

“Hello, miss,” said Agnes. Euan, her little brother, watched her warily.

“I’m very sorry for what has happened, Agnes. It’s awful for you.”

Agnes nodded at her brother.

“He doesn’t know,” she said, warning Ruth from saying too much.

“I understand.”

“I come and go from the cottage as I please, and get us food.”

“My mum and dad are taking a break,” said Euan. The little boy needed to be loved and feel happiness around him. When she had taught reception class, she spent a lot of time just hugging the boys. They needed to know that they were part of the pack.

Ruth put her hand out to Agnes.

“I want to help.”

“You pushed me away,” said Agnes. “You evicted us.”

“I know. It was an evil thing that I did. Sometimes grownups make mistakes. We do what we think is best, instead of doing what we want or believe in. I made a calculation. I made a mistake.”

“You’re my teacher, but you don’t know right from wrong.”

On the edge of the clearing, a tarpaulin had been strung low from a tree trunk then pegged to the ground. Underneath, a heap of bedding and some mats.

“Did you make that?”

Agnes nodded.

“Why don’t you sleep in the house?”

The girl looked pained.

“We don’t like it there.”

Ruth put her hand on the boy’s warm head, stroked his hair, and felt around the back of the skull. No, he had not suffered an implant. Not yet. His stripe was scabby, but light still flitted here and there in its cells. If the children had implants, perhaps the family would be able to see one another again. But the surgeon had been so careless in operating on their father.

She would take the children to Lewes and force the community to accept them. The Process would demand their immediate eviction, and so they would have to turn against the Process. Reject it. Could she persuade the rest of the town that they must fight for their independence? She had not thought this through, for a very good reason:
what could you do?
Ask yourself that, and the answer is always the same: nothing. It is hopeless. Instead, she would act in a way that she knew to be right, and the world could react as it saw fit. Caution and calculation had led her to evil. She would save these children. Even if it meant that she could not save James.

She had discussed with the baron what might happen if they rejected the Process.

“It knows all our secrets and our weaknesses,” he said. “What might its revenge be like?”

While Agnes gathered their things from under the tarpaulin, Euan sat on her knee and played. In his hands, the dry leaves were ships and airplanes, space rockets and supermen.

Agnes was thoughtful.

“Is there a way we could take my mum and dad with us? If we get them far enough away from the Process, then maybe they will return to normal.”

How far would that be? she wondered.

“If we stay, it’s only a matter of time before what happened to your parents happens to you. And me. Let me get you to safety and then we will save your parents.”

Ruth stood up and offered her hands to the children. Euan held her hand unquestioningly. Agnes considered the other hand, and took it also.

18

H
ector is
at the foot end of the stretcher, Collinson is at the head, and James lies between them, drifting over the battlefield on bloodstained canvas. He is not quite a man, more a collection of ideas, and his friends are not stretcher bearers but idea carriers, bringing back new forms of thought from the frontline. If he is not much more than an idea, then let that idea be kindness.

The seething beacon of Chocolate Hill becomes the coal fire in the parlour, that night he first spoke to Ruth.

She had warmed her hands by the fire. She was shorter than her sisters and wore a green silk frock.

“Auntie told me you like to swim,” he said.

She nodded and smiled but remained silent.

He tried again, “The lido is awfully brisk this time of year.”

“I swim in the sea.” Her voice was quiet yet even. He remained silent so that she would have to elaborate.

“At Cuckmere Haven.” She took a risk. “It’s invigorating, don’t you think?”

She had recently spent some time outdoors without a parasol and her colouring set off her bright blue eyes and firm ponytail. Because of her shyness, he had never noticed her before. Now he saw that it was plausible that she knew more about life than he did.

“I wonder what role swimming played in human evolution,” he said. He was an undergraduate studying genetics and wanted her to know it. “What benefit did we gain from being the apes that fish? We lost our body hair and gained subcutaneous fat to help us swim. Our large brains are typical of marine mammals. And we walk upright which makes sense if you are wading and hunting for fish. Was some nutrient in fish pivotal for the development of the human brain?”

“Such as cod liver oil?”

Was she mocking him? Or did she merely want to laugh with him? He had never noticed her before because she was so quiet and her body was concealed by the shapelessness of her clothes. He was still too young to read a face with any accuracy.

“There is no direction to evolution other than what we impart to it,” he said. And then, against his better judgement, he continued: “We have bred qualities and traits into animals. When we advance socially we will breed new attributes into people.”

“In what manner will we advance?”

“We will be more open in our discussions of human relations. What makes a fit union and what makes an unfit one.”

“Is that what you believe?”

He blushed.

“I don’t know. The prospect of a splendid race, with all weakness and sickness bred out of it, is beautiful and terrifying. I do not believe in state-run eugenics. It would have to be voluntary. If institutions measured and classified every man and woman, and decided who mated with whom, then that would make mankind into a machine, and we would lose our connection with the life force.”

Ruth listened attentively, her hands moving slowly in a circular motion over the coal fire, warming the cold bony backs of her fingertips then drying the fleshy parts of her palms.

He continued: “Healthy intellectual men and women would seek each other out. They would live outdoors, I think.”

“And swim?”

“Yes, there would be lots of swimming.”

“Which stroke do you prefer?” she asked. Fixated upon her hands, he was flummoxed.

She continued, “In Australia, my instructor believed that breast stroke was very dangerous for a woman to learn. So I was taught their crawl. You do not push away the water, rather you swim just below the surface with the arms scooping like a waterwheel. The breathing is similar to the Trudgen, with the face mostly in the water.”

“How long were you there?”

“Two years. With my cousins. As a consequence, my blood is thin and I really feel the cold in England.” Her hands abraded quickly over the fire, turning in and out of one another.

“The outdoor life is very important for our evolution,” he said. His seriousness was not his best quality. He was seventeen years old. If a girl would not kiss him within the year, he was resolved to join a gypsy caravan. “Only by testing ourselves in nature, by staying close to our savagery, will we be able to keep our civilization strong.”

She was smaller than him but there was rude strength in her, on her own terms. She sat down on the armchair and kicked her legs; after they were married, she would be shocked to learn that the import of this gesture had been entirely lost upon him.

“In the summer, my father takes us camping,” she said. “Have you ever slept out under the stars?”

“No.”

“There is a field not far from the haven. The farmer doesn’t bother us so long as we buy his eggs and milk. When it’s cold, on a day like this, the sheep huddle together under the dry stone walls. Have you ever seen a lamb shiver? You don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

At the aid post, he is lowered onto a stretcher and back down to earth. James raises himself up to cough and then slumps back. A water bottle is pressed into his hand. He accepts a mouthful of water. He inhaled so much ash and smoke, his lungs feel strained and sore. Stretcher bearers pick him up again. The earth falls away and he is suspended in space. The Milky Way is livid as a wound, and the stars are beyond number. His lungs heave.

For their honeymoon, they had cycled and camped across Sussex in a silk tent made for him by a Brighton tailor. On their wedding night, they camped in a field half a mile back from Cuckmere Haven. “Here,” she said, as if she had it all planned out. Her nipples were cool to his lips. They were both virgins but she was unembarrassed by sex, and was as forgiving and pragmatic as required for the first few times.

She woke him at sunrise. He cooked bacon on a Mersey stove and heated a pot of coffee. They walked along the sinuous channel of the slow river until it spilt out into the sea. Seven peaks of the sheer chalk cliffs. Gulls rode the thermals and cried out for their lost mothers. Ruth climbed up onto a soft boulder and put her hand on his chest to steady herself. The morning air was warm but the breeze was still night-cold. She decided that the sea was calm enough for a swim, pulled her sundress over her head, and stepped naked into the shallows. As she walked deeper into the sea, she scooped handfuls of the cold water over her breasts and neck and hair. The water rose above the curve of her hips. She dived into a wave then broke the surface of a glittering swell. He followed her in.

Afterwards, they towelled themselves dry on the pebbled beach. The sunlight reflected sharply from the chalk cliffs. Great pieces of chalk had fallen here and there, and he was fascinated by their softness, digging into them with his nails so that wet white deposits filled the ridge between fingernail and fingertip.

“This is perfect,” she said. Her neat white teeth nibbled at her lower lip.

“You are perfect. You swim perfectly,” he said.

Something occurred to her.

“The way your head twists when you swim it’s as if you are violently disagreeing with the water. You should swim higher in the water; that way you will not waste so much effort.”

How should a husband react to a wife’s criticism? He brooded over the remark all day. After dinner, they argued about something, he could not remember what. He came out of the tent roughly, his emotions largely unexpressed and therefore unclear to him, his boots snagging in the guy ropes. He stalked along the river banks, the water lapping darkly. A star overhead. As bright as a star shell over the bay.

He coughs, hacking out the smoke of the scrub fire. Pain pushes him to the surface. The dugout has moved, and someone has found blankets in the stores. The sound of the waves against the bay, the Ouse exploring the reeds. The fathomless starfield across which he longs to drift. Other men, other wounded men nearby. Bad wounds. He bursts a juniper berry between his fingertips and raises its scent to his nostrils. All he can smell is burning.

Ruth sat sewing beside the fire.

“You do not believe in the war.” She did not look up from her stitch.

“The war is useless from any point of view. But I cannot remain behind. Every soldier I see makes me feel ashamed.”

“You would not die of shame.”

“Yes, I would. There was an opportunity to join the field ambulance, and I took it. They asked about my religious beliefs. I told them I was a mystic agnostic, and that was that: stretcher bearer. It’s not as glorious as being a soldier. But I can’t bring myself to kill.”

She put her needle and cloth aside. He knelt by the fire and she stroked his head as he spoke: “It is not wicked in us to fight, it is just mistaken. The buffoons in
The Times
maintain the war is necessary to purify the race. Nonsense. The strong were the first to die. No one knows what the outcome of this war will be, although I am convinced it will be contrary to the expectations of both sides. Something new will come of it, though. Some new expression of the life force.”

“But what can
you
do?”

“I can show kindness. Without kindness, all that the soldiers will bring back from the war is horror. I will dress wounds and take the other end of a stretcher and carry the wounded from the battlefield.”

“You’ve found a way to be heroic without the risk of being a conchie.”

“I don’t want to go to war. Nations appal me. Guns are revolting. But it is happening whether we agree with it or not. If I stay at home, we will never recover. You and I. The other women will shun you. I’ll go to prison. I’ll never be able to work.”

“It’s no different from boys pretending their sticks are rifles. You all think you can be heroes.”

“Do you think I want to go and live in some camp ground with dull filthy men?”

“And if it is unpleasant to you, then I must forgive you?”

“I will go for you.”

“Don’t you dare say that.”

“If I don’t go, you will suffer.”

The fire flickers in the grate. It is hard to leave the hearth behind. He thinks of cowardice, of St Peter warming his hands around the fire and denying his master.

“James?” Hector’s angular white face drifts over the cosmos. “Can you understand me?”

He pulls on Hector’s sleeve, and nods at the water bottle: water would make it easier to speak.

“Has the doctor been around to see you?”

The sergeant’s kindness moves him deeply, and his jaw aches with unexpected sorrow.

He pulls again on Hector’s sleeve, finds purchase on his shoulder, and pulls himself up.

“Jordison?” asks James.

“He was very brave,” says Hector. “I couldn’t go back for his body. We could only save the living.”

The cosmos fizzes and whirls overhead, and the indigo swirls of Milky Way seethe. Hector’s face is moon-pale and adrift.

“The sniper.” James coughs out his strength.

“The sniper was our fancy brought on by nerves,” Hector whispers.

“No. I saw him.”

The sniper was taller than a man, covered in branches and twigs and he wore a hood to protect him from the sun. In the shimmering haze of the scrub fire, he stepped forward and shot Jordison. Previously, the Turk had respected the red cross and had even sent over officers bearing the white flag to apologize when they accidentally killed a stretcher squad. Yet this sniper had sought out the stretcher bearer, and, having shot him, bent over to inspect Jordison’s head wound with a demonic diffidence.

“The sniper is connected to us. He is part of the convergence.”

“Let us make a pact: you will not speak of my sniper and I will not tell anyone about your convergence. We don’t want the men to think we are cracking up.”

Hector puts his hand on the back of James’ neck, encouraging him to rest. He is so tired that dream images and thoughts tumble unbidden beneath his eyelids. Ruth sings his name. She comes ashore, naked through the moonlit waters, her skin gleaming. She takes his hand and with one firm kick of her legs they fly upward. The earth falls away. He looks down to see the grey clouds and the termination line of the dawn advancing across the dark sea. The trenches and battle lines are scored across the earth. She touches his cheek. He is weary and too tired to kiss. The weariness of the soldiers and mules weighed down by packs and wagons. She is different from him. She is more highly evolved whereas he has devolved, become a troglodyte, a thing of the earth, an underground beast. She is of the air and of the water, intangible and quick. A contrary principle to him. “The life force speaks through us.” Her voice is fire and smoke. “Our actions are the words of God, which time strings together into sentences, paragraphs, pages. A marriage is a part of the Divine Argument.” She is the Eastern Queen of the Universe. He enters her and her face is transformed into the cosmos, into fire, time and space. The thoughts cascade, faster and faster, until he is no longer able to catch them.

Ruth was sat beside the fire, sewing a summer dress for the little girl in her class, Sylvia. He leant against the counter in the small dark kitchen. She often complained about the kitchen, its stained warped work surfaces and lack of ventilation. They had worked so hard all their lives and had less now than when they had first married. No home of their own, no children, and no work. Outside, the streets of Lewes were quiet. He took no solace in the Seizure. The only way to survive change was to align your interests with the interests of the powerful.

“I went back to the Institute,” he said. “They repeated their offer to find a role for me.”

“As what?”

“There will be no leaders under the Process. No state, no police, no army. But we will need protection and enforcement. The people will provide that by consensus, most of the time. But in exceptional circumstances, certain men will be used to enact the will of the people.”

“I don’t understand.”

“If I have a gun, then I will become a tyrant. But if I can only fire that gun when everyone agrees that it needs to be fired then I become an instrument for the maximum possible public good.”

“How will you know what the town wants?”

“The Process will aggregate the will of the people and enact it through me.”

“You will have an implant.”

“Yes.”

“You will not always be in control of your own actions.”