The Long Utopia

And of course he felt compelled to attend.

It wasn’t hard to get away. Since the death of his wife Luis had lived alone, and his son and daughter, both grown, had long flown the nest, Ella to a comfortable marriage, Robert to take up engineering for which he showed an unusual aptitude, marrying somewhat later in his life. So Luis travelled to London by train from Bristol, where his financial interest in various steamship companies was based – controlled by means of a layer of company holdings under a false identity, and with no trail back to initial investments under his own name before Radcliffe’s attempted entrapment of the Waltzers in 1871.

Indeed, Hackett had insisted that their birth names should not be used at this meeting. Luis had even considered going in disguise, cropping his whiskers or shaving his head or some such, but when he contemplated the prospect it seemed an absurdity for a man in his seventies. No, he was going to London for lunch with old friends at the Drunken Clam, and he’d defy any man who challenged him otherwise.

And if Radcliffe’s successors caught up with him at last, then to the devil with it all, for he’d had enough of skulking.

His train was delayed.

And then, once he’d arrived in London, he couldn’t resist a stroll around some of his old haunts. Oxford Street was now a grand thoroughfare lined with fine, spacious shops; Fleet Street a medieval alley chock full of traffic; Covent Garden Market crowded with more than a thousand donkey barrows, he estimated, and women with loads balanced precariously on their heads, its cobbles slick with crushed leaves; and at last Lambeth’s New Cut itself, with the costermongers in their corduroy clothing, and soldiers strolling with uniforms casually unbuttoned, and coachmen in their livery and tradesmen in their frock coats, the street packed as ever with stalls and vendors of fried fish and hot potatoes, and beggars and entertainers, even street mummers – and, yes, with shoeless children, as much as it had ever been – as if the great reforms of the age, in education and public health and trade unionism, had been but fantasies.

Distracted by all this, he was a little late getting to the oyster-house.

The other two were here before him, and they stood to greet him. Both had aged well enough, Luis supposed. Fraser Burdon, who was about Luis’s age, was as whip-thin and fit-looking as ever, with a leathery tan that told of years spent in warmer climes. Oswald Hackett was a decade older, in his eighties now, and it showed; Hackett had fattened up, was as bald as an egg, and could stand only with a stick, but he lumbered to his feet to shake Luis’s hand.

Then they sat. Luis observed two books sitting on the table before Hackett, one an academic tome he recognized, the other a novel he did not, with a fawn cloth-bound cover featuring a sketch of an idealized sphinx.

A waitress briskly took their order.

Hackett gri

‘Woodrow Boyd,’ said Burdon. His accent had a new twang to it, and Luis studied him curiously; maybe he had moved away from the old country – permanently to America, perhaps?

Hackett prompted Luis. ‘And you, sir?’

‘John Smith,’ said Luis.

Hackett snorted laughter. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, man, you almost deserve to be hanging by your thumbs in some cellar under Whitehall. Now, I know you both have children, Mr Smith and Mr Boyd. What have you told them of your, ah, past indiscretions?’

Luis said softly, ‘I took each of mine aside at their age of majority and told them the lot. Seemed to me the best way to equip them to protect themselves in future, and their own children who may be blessed with our strange faculty – or cursed. As to the name, it’s not an issue for Ella, who’s married now. Robert, though, insisted on reverting to the old family name. Proud of the family origins, he says. The young! What can one do? In any case I have a close friend, a lawyer; we cooked up a story about an adoption, and so that’s all above board.’

Burdon said, ‘But it leaves you damned exposed, man. If anybody’s still on our tail after all these years, which I doubt. I’d condemn you if not for the fact that my middle ’un is going down the precise same route. There’ll always be Burdons.’ He turned to Hackett. ‘It’s probably a risk for us to be gathering here in London – indeed, in one of your old haunts, if I remember your anecdotes correctly. Maybe you should get to the point.’

Hackett said, ‘Let’s get to the oysters first, for here they come …’

The service in the Clam was as brisk and friendly as ever, Luis thought, and the oysters just as relishable, even if, half a century later, the prices would have shocked the Great Elusivo.

Burdon, however, tried one and all but spat it out. ‘My God. How can you eat these things? As if the Thames is one great mucky spittoon and I just took a mouthful of phlegm.’ He tapped Hackett’s book. ‘This is a volume of Darwin’s Origin of Species, is it not?’

‘Yes, and it’s a first edition, man, so keep your greasy fingers off.’

‘If Darwin were here I’d demand to know what theory of “natural selection” can possibly have produced something as ugly and as useless as an oyster.’

Luis laughed. ‘I dare say he’d have an answer.’

Hackett grunted. ‘And I’d invite Darwin to speculate on our own peculiar condition – and our future. I have followed his work since his accounts of the voyage of the Beagle, you know. Saw the man speak a couple of times, but never met him. It’s to my regret now that I didn’t approach him when I had the chance; he died a dozen years back – or was it more? But in a way it was his ideas that made me resolve to bring us together again – the three of us, the first of the Knights. And the last, I fear, for I’ve found no recent trace of the others with whom we worked. We need a way forward – for ourselves and our descendants. We three may go to the grave skulking like whipped dogs, but that’s not good enough for our children – for, believe me, some of ’em are going to inherit our uncomfortable, umm, faculties, just as you say, “Mr Smith”. And what’s to become of them, eh? What are we to do for them?’

‘Nothing,’ Burdon said. ‘For we’ll be long in our blessed graves. Let the future take care of itself.’

Luis said, ‘But it’s thirty years or more since Origin of Species was published. What is it that’s prompted you to call us together now, Hackett?’

Hackett actually clipped him around the back of the head for that indiscretion. ‘Good question, “Mr Smith”. The answer lies in the pages of this little book.’

The second tome on the table by his plate was a novel. ‘The Time Machine,’ Luis read from the spine.

‘By some chap who writes for the magazines. Calls it a “scientific romance”. The book’s a sort of fairy story about Darwin’s scheme of selection. Or a nightmare. It shows a future in which mankind changes, evolves – bifurcates – over a span of hundreds of thousands of years. Becoming something quite different from the modern stock.’ He searched their faces. ‘D’ye see? That’s one root of my idea, my scheme. The other comes from dear old Grandpa Darwin, and if you’ve ever read his book, which I’m sure you haven’t, you’d know that an early part of it, and a deuced long section it is and written in a rather lifeless tone, is all about pigeons.’

‘Pigeons?’

‘The breeding of fancy pigeons for particular traits. That’s the key to his argument, you see. Just as a man will breed his pigeons or his dogs for colour or body shape or whatnot by consciously matching up the types he wants to promote, so nature, all unconsciously, selectively shapes its stock of animals and plants using the blunt scalpels of hunger, a lack of room to live, changes in the weather, and extinction.’