Tristram Foxe Timeline and Summary

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• On the morning of his son's death, Tristram reports for his regular shift at the South London (Channel) Unitary School (Boys) Division Four, where he teaches modern history. Although he's grieving for his son, he's also hoping to be offered a promotion.
• Tristram teaches a class of fifth-form students about the cyclical nature of social history, and gets word that the school principal wants to see him.
• As he heads into his meeting with Principal Joscelyne, Tristram is sure he's about to be promoted to Head of the Department of Social Studies. To his huge disappointment, Joscelyne tells him that the position is going to a younger man, and that Tristram's "family background" (i.e., being married with a child) is holding him back.
• Later that afternoon, Tristram skips out early and heads home. On the way, he notices a gang of young men wearing police uniforms and carrying carbines. A passer-by tells him that the city is now providing jobs to unemployed youth by making them part of the police force.
• Tristram stops at a pub on the way home, and gets into a conversation with a man who says he's a priest. When a group of young police officers enter the pub, the priest shouts homophobic slurs at them, and they retaliate by beating him up. Tristram escapes unharmed by insisting that he's never met the priest before in his life.
• When Tristram reaches his apartment building, he runs into his brother Derek, who's just leaving. Derek tells Tristram that he came to offer his sympathy for Roger's death, but Tristram doesn't believe him.
• While eating his measly supper, Tristram makes a move on Beatrice-Joanna, who declines his advances. Suddenly, she changes her mind, and the two get ready to go to bed. Tristram takes three birth control pills, just to be on the safe side.
• Two months later, Tristram can't figure out why Beatrice-Joanna is puking so often. As he sits having lunch with some of his colleagues at school, he suddenly realizes that Beatrice-Joanna's "cold" is actually morning sickness.
• Back at home, Tristram tries to convince Beatrice-Joanna that she needs to induce a miscarriage. The new Population Police force has really been cracking down on people who flout the State's population controls, and he's terrified that they'll be arrested.
• When Beatrice-Joanna refuses, he goes out on his own to buy the necessary drugs.
• As Tristram heads home from work the next day, he notices that he's being followed. After trying unsuccessfully to lose the guy, Tristram heads into a high-class bar to wait for him. Sure enough, the man appears, and sits down with him.
• The man (Captain Loosley) tells Tristram that Beatrice-Joanna has been having an affair with Derek. When Tristram realizes that Beatrice-Joanna is probably carrying Derek's child, not his, he swears he's done with her.
• Captain Loosley tries to convince Tristram to murder Derek, but Tristram leaves the bar in a drunken rage.
• Outside their apartment building, Tristram meets Beatrice-Joanna coming home from the State Provisions store, and confronts her about the affair. She slips into the building as a labor movement sweeps through the street, and Tristram gets caught up in it.
• When the police arrive to crush the labor march, Tristram is battered and carted off to prison. From there, he writes to Derek to demand his freedom, but Derek tells Police Headquarters to keep Tristram locked up "indefinitely" (2.10.3).
• Tristram is eventually transferred to another prison, where he goes through a series of cellmates.
• One of them is the same priest whose assault he witnessed in the pub; the last one decides to help him escape.
• After Tristram escapes from prison, he decides to head north, to Beatrice-Joanna's sister's place. As he moves through the city, he kills a man, and steals his clothes. Soon afterwards, he comes across a cannibalistic dining club, and gets his first taste of human meat.
• Tristram makes his way north by hitchhiking when he can, and walking when he must. As he moves through rural village after rural villages, he witnesses the rise of neo-pagan fertility rituals—i.e., men and women having sex in the open fields. In Lichfield, he even takes part.
• By the time Tristram makes it to Shonny and Mavis's farm, Beatrice-Joanna and the twins are long gone. So are his niece and nephew, who've been murdered and eaten by the locals.
• Tristram wants to turn right around and head back to Brighton, but he doesn't have any money or food. When he stops into a soup kitchen to be fed, he's tricked into joining the British Army.
• For months, Tristram works as an instructor in the British Army, teaching the soldiers basic reading, writing, and arithmetic. Eventually, his superior officers catch wind of the fact that Tristram is also teaching the soldiers to ask critical questions, like "Who Is The Enemy?" and "What's All The Fighting About?" (5.2.8). As punishment, he's transferred to a rifle company, and told that he'll soon be heading to the front.
• In a few days, Tristram's new company boards a ship to who-knows-where. He and the other men are kept below deck, and no one seems to have any idea of what's going on. Tristram and another officer, Sergeant Lightbody, are convinced that something very fishy is going on.
• When the ship casts anchor, Tristram and the other men are brought to a Base Camp in a dark, rugged terrain. One of the officers, Corporal Haskell, is pretty sure they're in Ireland. Tristram and Sergeant Lightbody are sure that the sounds of "battle" that they're hearing from afar are actually recordings—and bad ones at that.
• The next evening, Tristram's company moves out to the front. As they hunker down in a trench and wait for the fighting to begin, Tristram tries to convince the others that the whole war is a sham. They don't listen, and his superior officer threatens to put a bullet in him if he doesn't clam up.
• Soon, the battle erupts. When Tristram gets a look at "the enemy," he's horrified to see that it's the English Auxiliary Forces—i.e., English women.
• When a dead soldier topples onto Tristram, Tristram decides to play dead. Miraculously, he isn't shot by the cleanup party of women that comes through after the trench has been taken.
• Once he's sure the coast is clear, Tristram heads back towards the Base Camp. There, he bluffs his way into getting a transport back towards England.
• Tristram makes his way home, but decides to wait out the last month of his army contract before contacting anybody. Once the month is over, he travels to the London War Office, and gets himself officially discharged. Although he threatens to expose the British Army's new mass-murder regime, the major on duty doesn't seem to care. After all, they're all just following orders.
• Tristram finds himself a new apartment and a new job. Once he's settled everything, he heads to the seashore to reunite with Beatrice-Joanna and the twins.