The Wanting Seed Read Free

said Pettman, ‘please, sir.’ He was a boy of purplish Dravidian colouring with strong Red Indianfeatures. ‘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
    B EATRICE -J OANNA 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 ofseasons 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 stoutsea-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