The Children of Men Read Online Free PDF Page A

when, disastrously, we were all together at Woolcombe.
    “I sometimes wonder if Theo won’t go further than Xan in the end.”
    “Oh no. Theo is a good-looking, intelligent boy, but Xan is brilliant.”
    Xan and I colluded in that judgement. When I got my Oxford entrance they were gratified but surprised. When Xan was accepted at Balliol they took it as his due. When I got my First they said I was lucky. When Xan achieved no more than an upper second they complained, but indulgently, that he hadn’t bothered to work.
    He didn’t make demands, never treated me like a poor cousin, annually provided me with food, drink and a free holiday in return for companionship or subservience. If I wanted to be alone, I could be, without complaint or comment. Usually this was in the library, a room which delighted me with its shelves filled with leather-bound books, its pilasters and carved capitals, the great stone fireplace with its carved coat of arms, the marble busts in their niches, the huge map table where I could spread my books and holiday tasks, the deep leather armchairs, the view from the tall windows across the lawn down to the river and the bridge. It was here, browsing in the county histories, that I discovered that a skirmish had been fought on that bridge in the Civil War when five young Cavaliers had held the bridge against the Roundheads until all of them had fallen. Even their names were set out, a roll-call ofromantic courage: Ormerod, Freemantle, Cole, Bydder, Fairfax. I went to Xan in great excitement and dragged him into the library.
    “Look, the actual date of the fight is next Wednesday, August 16. We ought to celebrate.”
    “How? Throw flowers in the water?”
    But he was not being either dismissive or contemptuous and he was only slightly amused at my enthusiasm.
    “Why not drink to them anyway? Make a ceremony of it.”
    We did both. We went to the bridge at sunset with a bottle of his father’s claret, the two pistols, my arms filled with flowers from the walled garden. We drank the bottle between us; then Xan balanced on the parapet, firing both pistols into the air as I shouted out the names. It is one of the moments from my boyhood which have remained with me, an evening of pure joy, unshadowed, untainted by guilt or satiety or regret, immortalized for me in that image of Xan balanced against the sunset, of his flaming hair, of the pale petals of roses floating downstream under the bridge until they were lost to sight.

3
    Monday 18 January 2021
    I can remember my first holiday at Woolcombe. I followed Xan up a second flight of stairs at the end of the corridor to a room at the top of the house looking out over the terrace and the lawn towards the river and the bridge. At first, sensitive and contaminated by my mother’s resentment, I wondered if I was being put in the servants’ quarters.
    Then Xan said: “I’m next door. We have our own bathroom, it’s at the end of the corridor.”
    I can remember every detail of that room. It was the one I was to have every summer holiday throughout my schooldays and until I left Oxford. I changed, but the room never changed, and I see in imagination a succession of schoolboys and undergraduates, each one bearing an uncanny resemblance to myself, opening that door summer after summer and entering by right into that inheritance. I haven’t been back to Woolcombe since my mother died eight years ago and I shall never go back now. Sometimes I have a fantasy that I shall return to Woolcombe as an old man and die in that room, pushing open the door for the last time and seeing again the single four-poster bed with its carved bedposts, the cover of faded silk patchwork; the bentwood rocking-chair with its cushion embroidered by some long-dead female Lyppiatt; the patina of the Georgian desk, a little battered but firm, steady, usable; the bookcase with the editions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century boys’ books: Henty, Fenimore Cooper, Rider Haggard, Conan