provided at all tutorials of female students on the grounds that otherwise he and his male colleagues were at risk from unjustified allegations. No one was more adept at demolishing a woman’s self-confidence while treating her with meticulous, indeed almost insulting, consideration and courtesy.
He was a caricature of the popular idea of an Oxford don: high forehead, receding hairline, thin, slightly hooked nose, tight-lipped. He walked with his chin jutting forward as if confronting a strong gale, shoulders hunched, his faded gown billowing. One expected to see him pictured, high- collared as a Vanity Fair creation, holding one of his own books with slender-tipped, fastidious fingers.
He occasionally confided in me and treated me as if grooming me as his successor. That, of course, was nonsense; he gave me much but some things were not within his gift. But the impression his current favourite had of being in some sense a crown prince has made me wonder subsequently whether this wasn’t his way of confronting age, time, the inevitable blunting of the mind’s keen edge, his personal illusion of immortality.
He had often proclaimed his view of Omega, a reassuring litany of comfort shared by a number of his colleagues, particularly those who had laid down a good supply of wine or had access to their college cellar.
“It doesn’t worry me particularly. I’m not saying I hadn’t a moment of regret when I first knew Hilda was barren; the genes asserting their atavistic imperatives, I suppose. On the whole I’m glad; you can’t mourn for unborn grandchildren when there never was a hope of them. This planet is doomed anyway. Eventually the sun will explode or cool and one small insignificant particle of the universe will disappear with only a tremble. If man is doomed to perish, then universal infertility is as painless a way as any. And there are, after all, personal compensations. For the last sixty years we have sycophantically pandered to the most ignorant, the most criminal and the most selfish section of society. Now, for the rest of our lives, we’re going to be spared the intrusive barbarism of the young, their noise, their pounding, repetitive, computer-produced so-called music, their violence, their egotism disguised as idealism. My God, we might even succeed in getting rid of Christmas, that annual celebration of parental guilt and juvenile greed. I intend that my life shall be comfortable, and, when it no longer is, then I shall wash down my final pill with a bottle of claret.”
His personal plan for survival in comfort until the last natural moment was one thousands of people had adopted in those early years before Xan took power, when the great fear was of a total breakdown of order. Removal from the city—in his case from Clarendon Square—to a small country house or cottage in wooded country with a garden for food production, a nearby stream with water fresh enough to be drunk after boiling, an open fireplace and store of wood, tins of food carefully selected, enough matches to last for years, a medicine chest with drugs and syringes, above all strong doors and locks against the possibility that the less prudent might one day turn envious eyes on their husbandry. But in recent years Jasper has become obsessive. The wood store in the garden has been replaced by a brick-built structure with a metal door activated by remote control. There is a high wall round the garden and the door to the cellar is padlocked.
Usually when I visit, the wrought-iron gates are unlocked in anticipation of my arrival and I can open them and leave the car in the short driveway. This afternoon they were locked and I had to ring. When Jasper came to let me in I was shocked by the difference a month had made in his appearance. He was still upright, his step still firm, but as he came closer I saw that the skin stretched tightly over the strong bones of the face was greyer and there was a fiercer anxiety in the sunken eyes, almost a gleam of paranoia, which I hadn’t noticed before. Ageing is inevitable but it is not consistent. There are plateaux of time stretching over years when the faces of friends and acquaintances look virtually unchanged. Then time accelerates and within a week the metamorphosis takes place. It seemed to me that Jasper had aged ten years in a little over six weeks.
I followed him into the large sitting-room at the back of the house, with its French windows looking out over the terrace and the garden. Here, as in his study, the walls were completely covered with bookshelves. It was, as always, obsessively tidy, furniture, books, ornaments precisely in place. But I detected, for the first time, the small tell-tale signs of incipient neglect, the smeared windows, a few crumbs on the carpet, a thin layer of dust on the mantelshelf. There was an electric fire in the grate but the room was chilly. Jasper offered me a drink and, although mid-afternoon is not my favourite time for drinking wine, I accepted. I saw that the side-table was more liberally supplied with bottles than on my last visit. Jasper is one of the few people I know who use their best claret as an all-day, all-purpose tipple.
Hilda was sitting by the fire, a cardigan round her shoulders. She stared ahead, without a welcome or even a look, and made no sign when I greeted her other than a brief nod of the head. The change in her was even more marked than in Jasper. For years, so it seemed to me, she had looked always the same: the angular but upright figure, the well-cut tweed skirt with the three centre box pleats, the high-necked silk shirt and cashmere cardigan, the thick grey hair intricately and smoothly twisted into a high bun. Now the front of the cardigan, half-slipped from her shoulders, was stiff with congealed food, her tights, hanging in loose folds above uncleaned shoes, were grubby and her hair hung in strands about a face set rigidly in lines of rebarbative disapproval. I wondered, as I had on previous visits, what exactly was wrong with her. It could hardly be Alzheimer’s disease, which has been largely controlled since the late 1990s. But there are other kinds of senility which even our obsessive scientific concern with the problems of ageing has still been unable to alleviate. Perhaps she is just old, just tired, just sick to death of me. I suppose, in old age, there is advantage in retreating into a world of one’s own, but not if the place one finds is hell.
I wondered why I had been asked to call but didn’t like to ask directly. Finally Jasper said: “There’s something I wanted to discuss with you. I’m thinking of moving back into Oxford. It was that last television broadcast by the Warden that decided me. Apparently the eventual plan is for everyone to move into towns so that facilities and services can be concentrated. He said that the people who wished to remain in remote districts were free to do so but that he wouldn’t be able to guarantee supplies of power or petrol for transport. We’re rather isolated here.” I said: “What does Hilda think about it?” Jasper didn’t even bother to glance at her. “Hilda is hardly in a position to object. I’m the one who does the caring. If it’s easier for me, it’s what we ought to do. I was thinking that it might suit us both—I mean you and me—if I joined you in St. John Street. You don’t really need that large house. There’s plenty of room at the top for a separate flat. I’d pay for the conversion, of course.”
The idea appalled me. I hope I concealed my repugnance. I paused as if considering the idea, then said: “I don’t think it would really suit you. You’d very much miss the garden. And the stairs would be difficult for Hilda.”
There was a silence; then Jasper said: “You’ve heard of the Quietus, I suppose, the mass suicide of the old?”
“Only what I read briefly in the newspapers, or see on television.”
I remembered one picture, I think the only one ever shown on television: white-clad elderly being wheeled or helped on to the low barge-like ship, the high, reedy singing voices, the boat slowly pulling away into the twilight, a seductively peaceful scene, cunningly shot and lit.
I said: “I’m not attracted to gregarious death. Suicide should be like sex, a private activity. If we want to kill ourselves, the means are always at hand, so why not do it comfortably in one’s own bed? I would prefer to make my quietus with a bare bodkin.”
Jasper said: “Oh, I don’t know, there are people who like to make an occasion of these rites of passage. It’s happening in one form or another all over the world. I suppose there’s comfort in numbers, in ceremony. And their survivors get this pension from the State. Not exactly a pittance either, is it? No, I think I can see the attraction. Hilda was talking about it the other day.”
I thought that unlikely. I could imagine what the Hilda I had known would have thought of such a public exhibition of sacrifice and emotion. She had been a formidable academic in her day, cleverer, people said, than her husband, her sharp tongue venomous in his defence. After her marriage she taught and published less, talent and personality diminished by the appalling subservience of love.
Before leaving, I said: “It looks as if you could do with extra help. Why not apply for a couple of Sojourners? Surely you’d qualify.”
He dismissed the idea. “I don’t think I want strangers here, particularly not Sojourners. I don’t trust those people. It’s asking to get murdered under my own roof. And most of them don’t know what a day’s work means. They’re better used mending the roads, cleaning the sewers and collecting the
