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

valued or tolerated because they are heirlooms, no family portraits, undistinguished oils given their place to proclaim ancestry. It is the room of a man who has risen in the world, surrounding himself with the symbols both of his achievements and his minor obsessions. Mrs. Kavanagh, the wife of one of the college scouts, comes in three times a week to clean for me and does it well enough. I have no wish to employ the Sojourners to whom, as ex-adviser to the Warden of England, I am entitled.
    The room I like best is at the top of the house, a small attic room with a charming fireplace in wrought iron and decorated tiles, furnished only with a desk and chair and containing the necessities for making coffee. An uncurtained window looks out over the campanile of St. Barnabas Church to the far green slope of Wytham Wood. It is here I write my diary, prepare my lectures and seminars, write my historical papers. The front door is four storeys down, inconvenient for answering the doorbell; but I have ensured that there are no unexpected visitors in my self-sufficient life.
    Last year, in March, Helena left me for Rupert Clavering, thirteen years younger than she, who combines the appearance of an over-enthusiastic rugby player with, one is forced to believe, the sensitivity of an artist. He designs posters and dust jackets and does them very well. I recall something she said during our pre-divorce discussions, which Iwas at pains to keep unacrimonious and unemotional: that I had slept with her only at carefully regulated intervals because I wanted my affairs with my students to be driven by more discriminating needs than the relief of crude sexual deprivation. Those weren’t, of course, her words, but that was her meaning. I think she surprised both of us by her perception.

6
    The task of writing his journal—and Theo thought of it as a task, not a pleasure—had become part of his over-organized life, a nightly addition to a weekly routine half imposed by circumstance, half deliberately devised in an attempt to impose order and purpose on the shapelessness of existence. The Council of England had decreed that all citizens should, in addition to their ordinary jobs, undertake two weekly training sessions in skills which would help them to survive if and when they became part of the remnant of civilization. The choice was voluntary. Xan had always known the wisdom of giving people a choice in matters where choice was unimportant. Theo had elected to do one stint in the John Radcliffe Hospital, not because he felt at home in its antiseptic hierarchy or imagined that his ministrations to the sick and aged flesh which both terrified and repelled him was any more gratifying to the recipients than it was to him, but because he thought the knowledge gained might be the most personally useful, and it was no bad idea to know where, should the need arise, he could with some cunning lay his hands on drugs. The second two-hour session he spent more agreeably on house maintenance, finding the good humour and crude critical comments of the artisans who taught there a welcome relief from the more refined disparagements of academe. His paid job was teaching the full- and part-time mature students who, with the few former undergraduates doing research or taking higher degrees, were the University’s justification for its existence. On two nights a week, Tuesday and Friday, he dined in Hall. On Wednesday he invariably attended the three o’clock service of Evensong in Magdalen Chapel. A small number ofcolleges with more than usually eccentric collegers or an obstinate determination to ignore reality still used their chapels for worship, some even reverting to the old Book of Common Prayer. But the choir at Magdalen was among the best regarded and Theo went to listen to the singing, not to take part in an archaic act of worship.
    It happened on the fourth Wednesday in January. Walking to Magdalen as was his custom, he had turned from St. John