The Children of Men: Chapter 9 Summary & Analysis

On the morning of the Quietus, Theo drives to Southwold. He has not been to the town in twenty-seven years, since he went with Helena and Natalie when she was under a year old, and he finds it much emptier than it was long ago. He lunches at a pub, observes a group of Sojourners doing roadwork, and decides to have coffee at a nearby inn—when he approaches it, though, he sees that it is closed. The proprietor tells him it is shut for the day out of “respect [for] the Quietus.” Theo parks his car and heads for the pier, where the ritual is to take place.

The elderly women who are the participants in the Quietus begin to arrive in coach buses, and make their way down to the beach to change into long white robes. A decorated band congregates, to play the women off to their deaths. The old women are arranged in a line, and each is given a small bunch of flowers—Theo thinks the women look like “a bevy of disheveled bridesmaids.” The band begins to play, and the women dance and sway to the music—Theo, observing their erratic movements, thinks that they have possibly been drugged.

A small crowd of relatives and friends, as well as some SSP officers, have gathered on the beach. The elderly women wade into the water, attach their legs to weights rigged along the underside of two large boats manned by even more SSP, and wait to be pulled into the ocean and deposited “out of sight of land.” Theo tells himself that he has seen enough, but remembers that he “promised” Julian he would watch the Quietus in its entirety.

There is a “commotion” on the beach—one of the women wading into the water cries and thrashes as she struggles back to the shore. Theo can see that the woman is Hilda Palmer-Smith. Though it’s unclear to Theo whether she’s been forced into the Quietus, by Jasper or by someone else, or whether she’s just changed her mind at the last minute, it’s clear that she needs to be rescued. She is only about twenty yards away from Theo, and he moves to help her, but then one of the soldiers strikes her in the head with his pistol and she falls into the sea. Theo swims out to Hilda, but an officer flings him aside and into the rolling waves.

Theo struggles back to shore—the officer “hadn’t intended him to drown.” Theo is weary, and falls unconscious. When he wakes, night has fallen, and he approaches a nearby bed and breakfast to see if there is a vacancy. The proprietor takes him in and offers him a meal and a room. At breakfast the next morning, Theo apologizes for his appearance, but the proprietor insists that she has been waiting for a guest for months. “The town is dying,” she says. When Theo asks her if she saw the Quietus the day before, the innkeeper answers firmly that there is “none of that kind of thing in Southwold.”