'Much of a catch?'
'Chub,' said the soldier. He laughed again. 'Measly little chub.'
'And,' said Tristram, 'if I may ask, what's been the purpose of your journey?'
'This journey? Oh, we'd had a report of a police ammunition dump along the road from Ealing to Finchley. Some swine had got there first, though. One of these gangs. They knocked off my corporal. He wasn't a very good corporal, but they shouldn't have knocked him off. Probably eating him now, blasted cannibals.' He spoke quite calmly.
'It would seem,' said Tristram, 'that we're all cannibals.'
'Yes, but, damn it all, we in Aylesbury are at least civilized cannibals. It makes all the difference if you get it out of a tin.'
Three
WEST of Hinckley Tristram saw his first ploughed fields. He had done well on the whole: a night in barracks in civilized Aylesbury; a walk in weather continuing fair along the Bicester road with a lift in an army truck five miles out of Aylesbury as far as Blackthorn; lunch in armed but kindly Bicester and even a shave and haircut there; a walk up the railway line to Ardley and there a surprise - an ancient steam train run on wood as far as Banbury. Tristram had only the few septs and tanners and tosheroons he had found in the pockets of the man he had truncheoned, but the amateurs who manned the three-coach train were archaeologists vague about fares. Tristram spent the night in a cobwebbed cellar on the Warwick Road and reached Warwick, with the aid of a lift on a truck musical with small arms, well before lunch-time the next day. At Warwick, which was sullen under martial law, he was told to beware of Kenilworth, this town apparently being ruled by a sort of Fifth Monarchy fanatics who preached a doctrine of rigid exophagy; Coventry, he was assured, was safe enough to the stranger. So Tristram plodded the secondary road through Leamington, the journey eased by a pillion lift on a cheerful dispatch-rider's motor-cycle. Coventry seemed almost a normal city except for its flavour of the garrison: communal messes, roll-calls outside factories, a curfew at nightfall. Tristram was asked eagerly for news at the city-frontier, but of course he had none to give. Still, he was made welcome and given the freedom of the Engineers' Sergeants' Mess. A couple of tins of meat were crammed into his pockets when he left at dawn and, for the first time in many years, he actually felt like singing as he marched, in this miraculous weather, towards Nuneaton. He was near the northern limit of Greater London now; he fancied he could snuff country air. At Bedworth he was picked up in a staff car (a Falstaffian colonel and his adjutant, redfaced on ale) and was taken through Nuneaton on to the Shrewsbury road. Here at last was country indeed: the flatness of ploughed fields, hardly a building in sight, the sky no longer challenged by proud monoliths. He lay down behind a gate and took a nap in the smell of earth. Thanked be Almighty God.
When he awoke he thought he was dreaming. He thought he heard a flute playing breathily and voices singing more breathily still. The words of the song seemed to resolve themselves into a statement so direct and final that it was as though he was hearing 'Eucharistic Ingestion' all over again. The words were something like 'Apples be ripe and nuts be brown, petticoats up and trousers down', and the simple tune went round and round, an endless da capo. And he saw, he saw, he saw men and women in the furrows - a pair here and a pair there - making, with ritual seriousness, beast after beast after beast with two backs. Petticoats up and trousers down in the spring sun, in the sown furrows, ripe apples and brown nuts, country copulatives. Six men, five men, four men, three men, two men, one man and his, and their - Why did the song say 'dog'? Sowing, not mowing, a meadow. But they would mow in due time, they would quite certainly mow. All life was one. That blight had been man's refusal to breed.
Four
'COME on, now,' called the leader crossly. He had the look of a morris-dance organizer, stringy and sniffly, red-nosed and blue-cheeked. 'Listen, please, everybody,' he said plaintively. 'The following partners have been drawn.' He read from the list in his hand. 'Mr Lipset with Miss Kemeny. Mr Minrath with Mrs Graham. Mr Evans with Mrs Evans. Mr Hilliard with Miss Ethel Duffus.' He read on. Tristram, blinking in the warm sun, sat outside the inn at Atherstone, watching benevolently as the men and women paired. 'Mr Finlay with Miss Rachel Duffus. Mr Mayo with Miss Lowrie.' As for country dancing, those called did a stand-and-faceyour-lover line-up, giggling, blushing, bold-faced, bashful, game, ready. 'Very well,' said the leader, tiredly. 'Into the fields.' And off, hand in hand, they went. The leader saw Tristram and, shaking his head resignedly, came over and sat next to him on the bench. 'These are strange times we're living in,' he said. 'Are you just passing through?'
'On my way to Preston,' said Tristram. 'Why, if I may ask, do you have all this organizing?'
'Oh, the usual. thing,' said the leader. 'Greed, selfishness. Some people getting all the plums. That man Hilliard, for instance. And poor Belinda Lowrie left out in the cold all the time. I wonder if it really does any good,' he wondered gloomily. 'I wonder if it's really anything more than sheer self-indulgence.'
'It's an affirmation,' said Tristram. 'It's a way of showing that reason is only one instrument for running our lives. A return to magic, that's what it is. It seems very healthy to me.'
'I foresee danger,' said the leader. 'Jealousy, fights, possessiveness, the breaking-up of marriages.' He was determined to look on the black side.
'Things will sort themselves out,' soothed Tristram. 'You'll see. A recapitulation of whole aeons of free love, and then the Christian values will be reasserted. Nothing to worry about at all.'
The leader gloomed at the sun, at the clouds gently and seriously propelled across the blue acres. 'I suppose you're normal,' he said at length. 'I suppose you're one of those like that man Hilliard. A real told-you-so, born and bred, that man. He was always saying that things couldn't go on as they were for ever. They laughed at me when I did what I did. Hilliard laughed louder than anybody. I could kill Hilliard,' he said, clenching his fists with the thumbs inside.
'Kill?' said Tristram. 'Kill in these days of,' he said, 'love?'
'It was when I was working at the Lichfield Housing Office,' bubbled the leader, 'that this thing happened. There was the question of a vacancy and me getting up-graded. I was senior, you see.' If not days of love, these were certainly days of open and frank confiding. 'Mr Consett, who was in charge, told me it was a toss-up between me and a man called Maugham, very much my junior Maugham was, but Maugham was homo. Well, I thought about that a good deal. I was never that way inclined myself but, of course, there was something I could do. I thought about it a good deal before taking action, because it was, after all, a pretty momentous step to take. Anyway, after a good deal of thought and lying in bed, tossing and turning, worrying about it, I made up my mind and went to see Dr Manchip. Dr Manchip said it was quite an easy job, no danger at all, and he did it. He said a general anaesthetic wasn't necessary. I watched him do it.'
'I see,' said Tristram. 'I wondered about your voice -'
'That's right. And look at me now.' He extended his arms. 'What's done can't be undone. How do I fit into this new world? I should have been warned, somebody should have told me. How was I to know that that sort of world wasn't going to go on for ever?' He lowered his voice. 'You know what that man Hilliard's been calling me lately? He's been calling me a capon. And he smacks his lips, joking of course, but it's not in very good taste.'
'I see,' said Tristram.
'I don't like it at all. I don't like it one little bit.'
'Sit tight and wait,' counselled Tristram. 'History is a wheel. This sort of world can't go on for ever, either. One of these days we're bound to go back to liberalism and Pelagianism and sexual inversion and, and - well, your sort of thing. We're obviously bound to, because of all this.' He waved his hand in the direction of the ploughed fields, whence came muffled noises of intense concentration. 'Because,' he clarified, 'of the biological purpose of all this.'
'But in the meantime,' said the leader sadly, 'I've people like Hilliard to contend with.' He shuddered
. 'Calling me a capon, indeed.'
Five
TRISTRAM, being still young and not ill-looking, was kindly received by the ladies of Shenstone. He excused himself courteously, pleading that he must reach Lichfield by nightfall. He was sped on his way with kisses.
Lichfield burst on him like a bomb. Here some kind of carnival was in progress (though it was no farewell to flesh, far from it) and Tristram's eyes were confused by a torch-procession and by banners and streamers dancing aloft: Lichfield Fecundity Guild and South Staffs Love Group. Tristram mingled with the crowd on the pavement to watch the parade go by. First marched a band of pre-electronic instruments booming and shrilling what sounded like that thin flute-tune of the fields outside Hinckley, but the tune was now, in an its brass, beefy, blood-red, confident. The crowd cheered. Next came two clowns buffeting and falling at the head of a comic squad in boots, long tunics, but no trousers. A woman behind Tristram screamed, 'Eeeee, there's our Arthur, Ethel.' The tunics and caps of this leering, waving, shouting, staggering bare-legged phalanx had evidently been stolen from the Poppol (where were they now, where were they?) and a card on a stick was held high, lettered neatly COPULATION POLICE. They belaboured each other with truncheons of stuffed sacking or thrust at the air with them in ithyphallic rhythms. 'What's that word mean, Ethel?' cried the woman behind Tristram. 'Real jaw-breaker, that is.' A small man with a hat on told her in one brief Lawrentian term. 'Eeeeeee,' she screamed.
Next toddled little boys and girls in green, sweet and pretty, soaring multicoloured sausage balloons moored to their fingers. 'Awwww,' went a droop-mouthed lankhaired girl next to Tristram. 'Em's nice, ennem?' The balloons jostled high in the torchlit air, an airy languid pillow-fight. After the children leaped and staggered more buffoons, men in antique billowing female skirts, enormously and unevenly breasted, others in skintight motley with Panurgian codpieces. Dancing clumsily, they engaged in brief spasmodic parodies of the clawbuttock act. 'Eeeeeee,' yelled the woman behind Tristram, 'I shall fair pass out of laughing, that I shall.' Then, to a hush of admiration followed by sincere cheers, there trundled up a white-decked float of paper flowers with, high on a throne, a buxom lass in blue, paper-flower-crowned, a staff in her grip, clustered about by all her starry fays, smiling and waving nubility, Lichfield's, so it would appear, festal queen. 'Real lovely she is,' said another woman. 'Joe Treadwell's daughter.' The float was pulled - crackling flower-twined ropes - by young men in white shirts and red leggings, handsome and muscular. After this float there walked sedate members of the clergy, bearing, in embroidered silk-surrogate, the motto God Is Love. The local army marched behind, terrible with banners: General Hapgood's Boys and We Saved Lichfield. The crowd cheered full-throatedly. And then, at the end, young girls trod daintily (not one of them more than fifteen), each with a streamer and each streamer attached to the top of a high thick pole, the Priapic emblem which evoked redoubled cheers, borne in the arms of a long robed comely matron, a blown rose in this garden of callow cowslips. The procession moved on to the town's outskirts and the crowd jostled, thumped, pushed on to the road to follow it. From the unseen head of the parade the jaunty six-eight tune - mulberry bush, nuts and may, apples be ripe - blasted and thumped brassily on, clearing the way through the spring night. Tristram was caught in the crowd, borne irresistibly, apples be ripe, through the town, home of a swan, and nuts be brown, and a lexicographer, petticoats up, Lich meaning a corpse in Middle English, and trousers down, how inappropriately named - Lichfield - tonight. Men and women, youths and girls, thrust, elbowed, laughed, in the procession's wake, the high white wooden phallus gleaming ahead, swaying, the focus of pretty ribbons, old men bent but game, middle-aged women solidly eager, young lusty boys, girls shy but ready, faces like moons, hatchets, flat-irons, flowers, eggs, mulberries, all the noses of the world (haughty Italian, crushed Oriental, snub, splayed, spur.red, bulbous, crested, tilted, flared), corn-hair, rust-hair, Eskimo-straight, crinkled, undulant, receding, gone, tonsures and bald spots, cheeks warmed to ripe-apple and nut-brown in the flares and fires and enthusiasm, the swish of petticoats, on to the sown furrows of the fields, and trousers.
Down, somewhere, had gone Tristram's near-empty food-sack; his truncheon had disappeared. His arms were free for dancing and embracing. On the green at the town's end the band had settled, squat on benches, blasting, cracking, clashing, skirling away. The Priapic pole was being plunged into a hole already dug in the centre of the green, the streamers flapping and entwining the men who pushed it down and tamped the soil at its base. The local army was smartly fallen out and started to pile arms. There were flares and a bonfire, there were glowing and spitting barbecues. Lichfield Sausages, said a notice. Tristram joined hungry wolfers of these, doled out free on skewers, and chewed the salty meat, ho', 'ery ho', his mouth smoking.
Dancing began round the Priapic pole, youths and putative maidens. On the periphery of the green (a euphemistic term for the brown near-bald half-acre) their elders twirled and clodhopped lustily. A warm dark woman in her thirties came up to Tristram and said, 'How about you and me, duck?' 'Gladly,' said Tristram. 'You look proper sad,' she said, 'as if you was pining away after somebody. Am I right?' 'Another couple of days, with a bit of luck,' said Tristram, 'and I'll be with her. In the meantime -' They rolled into the dance. The band played their rollicking six-eight tune over and over. Soon Tristram and his partner rolled into the furrows. Many were rolling into the furrows. It was a warm night for the time of year.
At midnight, the revellers breathing hard, unbuttoned about the fires, the contest for the male festal crown was fanfared. The queen sat aloof on her float, her dishevelled and rosy retinue settling their skirts, with many a giggle, at her feet. Below the float, at a rough table, passing from hand to wrinkled hand a flask of alc, sat the judges, elders of the town. There was a short list of five competitors in a trial of physical strength and agility. Desmond Seward bent a poker - teeth gritted, thews bursting - and walked forty yards on his hands. Jollyboy Adams turned innumerable somersaults and then leapt over a fire. Gerald Toynbee held his breath for five minutes and performed a frogdance. Jimmy Quair walked on all fours, supinated, a little boy (his brother, as it turned out) striking an Erospose upon his, Jimmy Quair's, stomach. This, for its novelty and aesthetic appeal, drew much applause. But the crown went to Melvin Johnson (illustrious surname) who, balanced on his head, feet high in the air, recited loudly a triolet of his own composition. It was strange to see the upside-down mouth, hear the right-way-up words:
This lovely queen, if I should win her, Shall have my heart for a medallion.
She'll never lack a hearty dinner,
This lovely queen, if I should win her.
My fire shall rouse the fire that's in her, She'll ride my sea, a golden galleon,
This lovely queen. If I should win her, She'll have my heart for a medallion.
In vain for the captious to grumble that the rules of the contest said nothing about facility in versifying and how, anyway, had this competitor shown strength and agility? He would show it soon enough, laughed some. There were roars of approval at the judges' unanimous decision. Melvin Johnson was crowned with castellar tinfoil and borne, amid cheers, on strong shoulders to meet his queen. Then the royal pair, hand in hand, youths and maidens singing behind them an old nuptial song whose words Tristram could not catch, proceeded majestically to the field for the consummation of their love. At a decent distance the common sort followed after.
There they all were under the moon, seed busy above seed busy below: Charlie Aaron with Gladys Woodward, Dan Abel with Monica Wilson, Howard Wilson with Clara Hoskyns-Abrahall, Freddie Adler with Diana-Gertrude Williams, Bill Agar with Mary Westcott, Harold Auld with Louisa Wertheimer, Jim Weeks with Pam Asimov, Ford Wolverton Avery with Lucy Vivian, Denis Brodrick with Dorothy Hodge, John Halberstram with Jessie Greenidge, Tristram Foxe with Ann Onymous, Ron Heinlein with Agnes Gelber, Sherman Feyler with Margaret Evans, George Fisher with Lily Ross, Alf Meldrum w
ith Joanie Crump, Elvis Fenwick with Brenda Fenwick, John-James De Ropp with Asmara Jones, Tommy Eliot with Kitty Elphick - and scores more. With the sinking of the moon and the rising of the wind they sought the fires, sleeping till dawn in a red crackling haze of fulfilment.
Tristram woke at dawn to hear bird-twitterings; he rubbed his eyes at the cool distant bass flute of a cuckoo. A priest appeared with his field-altar and a yawning cross boy-servitor. 'lntroibo ad altare Dei.' 'To God Who giveth joy to my youth.' The consecration of the roasted meat (bread and wine would doubtless be back soon), the donation of a eucharistic breakfast. Washed but unshaven, Tristram kissed his new friends good-bye and took the north-west road to Rugeley. The fine morning weather might well hold all day.
Six
THERE were Dionysian revels at Sandon, Meaford and the cross-roads near Whitmore, but at Nantwich there was the sophistication of a fair. Tristram was interested to see a brisk flow of small money at the stalls (riflerange, aunt sally, try-your-strength, roll-a-coin-on-to-alucky-square): people must be working and earning again. Food (he noticed small spitted birds among the kebabs and sausages) was being sold, not given away. Barkers urged lubricious males to pay a tosheroon to see Lola and Carmenita in their sensational seven-veils speciality. It seemed that, in one town at least, the novelty of free flesh had begun to pall.
But, in its lowliest form, an art had been revived. How long was it since anybody in England had seen a live play? For generations people had lain on their backs in the darkness of their bedrooms, their eyes on the blue watery square on the ceiling: mechanical stories about good people not having children and bad people having them, homos in love with each other, Origen-like heroes castrating themselves for the sake of global stability. Here in Nantwich customers queued outside a big tent to see The Unfortunate Father: A Comedy. Tristram shrugged over his small handful of coin and counted out the price of admission: one and a half septs. His feet were weary; it would be somewhere to rest.