The Children of Men by P. D. James Read Free Book Online

day’s over-filled diary, about how, with the prospect of endless broken nights, I would be able to cope, reiterating into the darkness my litany of justification—“For Christ’s sake, it was an accident. I didn’t mean to do it. I’m not the only father to have run down his child. She was supposed to be looking after Natalie, the child was her responsibility,she made it plain enough it wasn’t mine. The least she could have done was to look after her properly.” But angry self-justification was as banal and irrelevant as a child’s excuse for breaking a vase.
    We both knew that we had to leave Lathbury Road. Helena said: “We can’t stay here. We should look for a house near the centre of the city. After all, that’s always what you’ve wanted. You’ve never really liked this place.”
    The allegation was there but unspoken: you’re glad that we’re moving, glad that her death has made it possible.
    Six months after the funeral we moved to St. John Street, to a tall Georgian house with a front door on the street, where parking is difficult. Lathbury Road was a family house; this is a house for the unencumbered, if agile, and the solitary. The move suited me because I liked being close to the city centre, and Georgian architecture, even speculative Georgian requiring constant maintenance, has a greater cachet than Edwardian. We hadn’t made love since Natalie’s death but now Helena moved into her own room. It was never discussed between us but I knew that she was saying that there would be no second chance, that I had killed not only her beloved daughter but all hope of another child, of the son she suspected I had really wanted. But that was in October 1994 and the choice was no longer there. We didn’t stay permanently apart, of course. Sex and marriage are more complicated than that. From time to time I would cross the few feet of carpeted floor between her room and mine. She neither welcomed me nor rejected me. But there was a wider, more permanent gulf between us and that I made no effort to cross.
    This narrow, five-storeyed house is too large for me, but with our falling population I’m hardly likely to be criticized for not sharing my over-provision. There are no undergraduates clamouring for a bed-sitting-room, no young homeless families to prick the social conscience of the more privileged. I use it all, mounting from floor to floor through the routine of my day, as if methodically stamping my ownership on vinyl, on carpet and rugs and polished wood. The dining-room and kitchen are in the basement, the latter with a wide arc of stone steps leading to the garden. Above them, two small sitting-rooms have been converted into one which also serves as a library, a television-and-music room and a convenient place in which to see my students. On the first floor is a large L-shaped drawing-room. This too has been convertedfrom two smaller rooms, the two discordant fireplaces proclaiming its former use. From the back window I can look out over the small walled garden with its single silver birch tree. At the front, two elegant windows, ceiling-high, with a balcony beyond, face St. John Street.
    Anyone pacing between the two windows would have little difficulty describing the room’s owner. Obviously an academic; three walls are lined with bookshelves from ceiling to floor. A historian; the books themselves make that plain. A man concerned primarily with the nineteenth century; not only the books but the pictures and ornaments proclaim this obsession: the Staffordshire commemorative figures, the Victorian genre oil paintings, the William Morris wallpaper. The room, too, of a man who likes his comfort and who lives alone. There are no family photographs, no board games, no disarray, no dust, no feminine clutter, little evidence, indeed, that the room is ever used. And a visitor might guess, too, that nothing here is inherited, everything acquired. There are none of those unique or eccentric artefacts,