In a Land of Plenty Read online

  About the Book

  In a small town somewhere in the heart of England, the aftermath of the Second World War brings change. For ambitious and expansive industrialist Charles Freeman, it brings new opportunities and marriage to Mary. He buys the big house on the hill to cement their union and to nail his aspirations to the future.

  In quick succession, three sons and a daughter bring life to the big house and with it, the seeds of joy and tragedy. As his children grow up, Charles’ business expands in direct proportion to his girth as Britain claws its way from the grey austerity of the war years.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  PART ONE: The Hospital (1)

  1. Cricket on the Lawn

  2. Growing Pains

  3. The Swimming Pool

  4. Welcome to the Ark

  PART TWO: The Hospital (2)

  5. Clarity

  6. The Assiduous Courtship of Harry Singh

  7. The Freeman Ten

  8. Freedom and Loneliness

  PART THREE: The Hospital (3)

  9. The House of Troy

  10. The Rival

  11. Chinese Whispers on the Wind

  12. Map of the Human Heart

  PART FOUR: The Hospital (4)

  13. The Travellers

  About the Author

  Also by Tim Pears

  Copyright

  In a Land of

  Plenty

  TIM PEARS

  For Hania

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The author gratefully acknowledges the financial support of a writer’s bursary from Southern Arts.

  For information and advice, many thanks to Tinker Stoddart, Mandeep Dillon, Atlanta Duffy, Mr Peter Teddy, Alison Charles-Edwards and Mariella de Martini.

  Special thanks to Bill Scott-Kerr at Transworld for his work on the final version; to Greta Stoddart for her support and acumen when most needed; and to Alexandra Pringle, without whose editing the author would have been flummoxed.

  PART ONE

  THE HOSPITAL (1)

  ‘WHEN I GO back to the beginning I have no single earliest memory of you, James,’ Zoe said. ‘Rather, a series of quick-cutting images of you, running. In and out of rooms and along the corridors of the big house; racing your brothers, chasing your sister, fleeing from your father across the lawn. That’s how I see you, an anxious, laughing child. Dashes at sports days, tearing after a football, imagining yourself as someone else: skittering like Hawkeye in and out of trees in a corner of the garden.’

  James lay unmoving, an effigy of flesh and bone, attached by a drip to liquid food and by wires to machines gauging the echoes of his vitality.

  ‘You always loved to run: like you had a discomfort, an impatience with yourself; you were happier running than walking, got off on the high of out of breath, gasping laughs of air. It began running through the house.’

  In the ward office the ward sister watched Zoe talk to James. ‘He can’t hear her,’ she told Gloria, the staff nurse. ‘He can’t hear a word she’s saying.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Gloria said quietly. ‘Maybe not.’

  Zoe took her cigarettes out of her bag and was about to light one when she saw the sister march towards her, remembered where she was and put them away.

  ‘Visiting times are over,’ the sister said. ‘You’ll have to leave now. We’ve got to check his drip and catheter.’

  ‘I’ll be back tomorrow,’ Zoe told James. She squeezed his hand before letting it go, limp once more upon the bedspread, and made her way out of the ward.

  Chapter 1

  CRICKET ON THE LAWN

  SATURDAY, 7 JUNE 1952, was the happiest day of Charles Freeman’s life. It was three weeks before his wedding.

  ‘I’ve a surprise for you, darling,’ he told his betrothed, Mary Wyndham, when he picked her up from her parents’ house in Northtown in his pre-war Rover. Instead of turning right and heading up Stratford Road, as Mary had expected, Charles drove back towards the centre.

  ‘I thought we were going to see the vicar,’ Mary frowned.

  ‘Change of plan.’

  ‘Where are we going, then?’ she asked.

  ‘Can’t tell you; it’s a top-secret surprise,’ Charles replied. ‘You’ll have to quell your anticipation for a few short minutes,’ he said, in the odd idiom he employed.

  ‘If you don’t tell me I’ll tickle you,’ Mary warned, ‘and you won’t be able to defend yourself because you’re driving.’

  ‘I’m not ticklish.’

  ‘But I want—’

  Mary was silenced by her fiancé’s thick forefinger pressed against her lips. She grasped his hand, snarled and bit his finger. Charles smirked at the road before him; he drove along as if he owned it. Mary held his hand in her lap – both hands lifting together when he had to change gear. She relaxed into the leather upholstery of the Rover as they skirted the town centre, and gazed at her husband-to-be.

  Charles Freeman was a large, powerful man – his wide shoulders accentuated by a double-breasted jacket – with ink-black hair, thick eyebrows, the dark-brown eyes of a gypsy, a proud nose and greedy lips.

  ‘Getting warmer,’ he announced with a grin that introduced one ear to the other as they drove over South Bridge and through St Peter’s, and up the hill. ‘You just have to contain your excitement,’ Charles murmured. He had a rotund and plangent voice that came rolling from deep in his lungs, as if his words had already been tried there before being issued forth. Charles Freeman was thirty-four years old and was a man entering his prime, with an energy whose engine was the sense of his own worth, and destiny.

  At the top of the hill Charles indicated and turned left through wrought-iron gates.

  ‘I know who lives here!’ Mary exclaimed. ‘Those sisters, what are they called? The Misses Fulbright. They’re Papa’s patients. Except they’re never ill. “The Sprightly Spinsters”, he calls them, neither of them need him from one year to the next. He has to visit and insist on giving them a check-up just so that he can justify his fee.’

  ‘Well, they may not fall ill,’ Charles informed her, ‘but the older one died last month.’

  ‘We’re going to make a condolence visit?’ Mary asked. ‘That’s considerate. I didn’t know you knew them.’

  ‘Put a sock in it, for God’s sake. Don’t spoil the surprise.’

  The drive led for a hundred yards directly to the front of the house, through a garden of lawns, umbrageous trees, lime walk, a herb garden and rampaging roses within a high surrounding wall. The two-storeyed Queen Anne façade of the rectangular house had single bay projections at each corner, with a one-storey bay added to the west side. In the centre Ionic pilasters supported a pediment above the front door, like an arrow pointing upward; above it, from behind an unadorned parapet, rose a steep pitched roof of stone tiles – perforated by dormer windows – enclosing the third, attic floor. The severity of the house’s geometrical façade was softened by its golden Cotswold stone.

  Charles steered the Rover around the parking bay and brought it to a satisfying halt on the crunchy gravel. They got out and Mary climbed the fanned flight of steps to the front door.

  ‘I’ll ring the bell,’ she said.

  ‘Go ahead,’ Charles agreed, from the other side of the car.

  Mary drew the bell-pull, released it and heard a distant dull clanging. No other sound came from inside the house. Charles was gazing at the garden, with his back to her. Mary rang again, and waited.

  ‘No answer, eh?’ Charles said, joining her on the steps. ‘How odd.’ He put a hand in his jacket pocket and produced a large key, with which he proceeded to un
lock the front door. He put his finger to his lips and winked at Mary, pushed open the door, and then before she knew it he’d bent towards her and scooped up her slender body in his arms.

  ‘Charles! Put me down!’ she screeched. ‘Someone’ll see! They’ll tell Papa. Put me down!’

  Charles ignored her and carried Mary over the threshold.

  ‘This is bad luck, whatever’s going on!’ Mary protested.

  Holding her effortlessly, Charles looked Mary in the eye. ‘I shall honour and protect you from everything, my darling, including superstition,’ he pledged in his leonine voice, before setting her down in a large, square-paved entrance hall. A wide staircase with twisted balusters climbed around the walls to a landing above them. Doors led off on either side and straight ahead.

  ‘Let’s explore,’ Charles suggested, and Mary followed him through the ground floor of the house, from the large drawing-room in the extended bay on one side of the entrance hall to the library on the other, through the dining-room to the kitchen and damp, dank larder and pantry beyond. It was like walking through a museum inhabited by squatters: the drawing-room was an Edwardian clutter of plump sofas, tattered armchairs and battered leather settees scattered with frayed velvet cushions and petit-point worked pillows; of sagging pouffes and embroidered stools covered with magazines on threadbare Oriental rugs; a vase of dying flowers dropping their petals on a grand piano by a window; faded chintz curtains and ruffled pelmets. The room had an air of exhausted wealth, and it was the same in the musty library of leather-bound books in built-in bookcases, and the dining-room with its scuffed herringbone parquet floor, oval mahogany table and scratched Regency chairs.

  Mary kept expecting to surprise a deaf old lady snoozing over her sewing in a deep reading chair, who would jump up and offer them tea, and was unable to accept the obvious answer to the riddle Charles had set before her, until they came back to the bottom of the curving staircase.

  ‘Well, what do you think?’ Charles asked.

  ‘It’s yours, isn’t it?’ Mary ventured.

  ‘No, darling,’ Charles corrected her. ‘It’s ours. Death duty,’ he explained, as they climbed the stairs. ‘The younger Miss Fulbright’s gone to live with her nephew. I bought it lock, stock and barrel for cash. She moved out yesterday.’

  Mary was bemused. ‘I thought we were going to live in St Peter’s. You’ve already paid the rent.’

  ‘Change of plan.’

  Upstairs was different from below because the two sisters had evidently inhabited only their respective bedrooms and one shared bathroom. Charles and Mary opened doors upon airless rooms with a faint smell of lavender in which it seemed all that had occurred in two generations was the accumulation of a layer of grey dust. It had settled on four-poster beds, embroidered linen, lace-covered dressing-tables, porcelain ewers and basins, writing desks and tilting mirrors, oak chests and walnut dressers.

  Mary found she had only to blow and dust lifted from velvet curtains and quilted eiderdowns to reveal the colours it had protected – rich reds, greens, blues – of another age. Gradually, though, her enchantment at papier mâché tray tables, Chinese vase lamps and carriage clocks that had stopped ticking in another century gave way to an awareness of how much there was to be done.

  ‘We’ve three weeks to get everything ready,’ she protested.

  ‘I’m afraid not, darling,’ Charles told her. ‘I don’t have any more money,’ he admitted. ‘Apart’, he said, emptying his pockets of change, ‘from this: two pounds … fifteen shillings … and threepence.’

  Mary slumped on a bed, releasing a cloud of dust that enveloped her.

  ‘What are we going to do? Move into an empty house?’

  Charles pondered for the merest moment. ‘Not at all,’ he declared. ‘We’ll leave it as it is. We’ll brighten it up with a splash of paint here and there. A spot of dusting and polishing. But otherwise we’ll call it all our own. Pretend everything’s been in our family for generations. You know: like a doctor buying goodwill when he takes over a practice. Come on,’ he said, taking Mary’s hand, ‘this is marvellous.’

  They carried on, and Charles showed her the master bedroom, for them; suggested which room could be Mary’s boudoir and which their dressing-rooms; how they would put his ageing parents here and house guests there. Up on the third, attic floor above the west wing they entered a nursery, intact with rocking-horse, dolls’ house, tin animals and lead soldiers, building blocks, a rocking chair and battered stuffed toys that must have belonged to the Victorian children in photographs on the wall.

  ‘I’ve got another surprise,’ Charles revealed. ‘Guess who I telephoned today. Can’t guess? I’ll tell you, then: I got hold of Robbie Forsyth. Remember, the March-Joneses told us about her? She was his old nanny. Battle-axe, they called her. Miss Syrup-of-Figs. Sounded to me like a wonderful woman. She’s agreed to come and work for us.’

  ‘What are you talking about, Charles?’ Mary demanded.

  ‘She said she needed to give a year’s notice to her present employer. I told her she was an old-fashioned fuddy-duddy, but that it didn’t matter, a year would suit us fine; we’d be sure to have some work for her by then.’ Charles smiled slyly. ‘So the point is, my sweet, we have to find her some work. Trouble is, I can’t think what, exactly. The only clue we have is that she’s a nanny. But’, he murmured in her ear in a voice that reverberated down through Mary’s body, ‘I’m sure we can come up with something, as the actress said to the bishop.’

  Charles drew Mary towards him, squeezing her in a bear-hug of an embrace, and pressed his hot mouth onto hers.

  ‘Not now, Charles,’ Mary gasped, struggling for breath. ‘Not here.’

  ‘Don’t resist me,’ Charles said, tightening his grip. ‘I want you now. I want you here.’ Mary could feel his temper as well as his ardour rise as she squirmed against his strength. ‘It’s all right, darling,’ he said, fishing in the same jacket pocket from which he’d produced the front door key. ‘I brought along a French letter.’

  He began undoing her garments as he lowered her to the dust-covered floor. A musty lavender cloud rose around them. Mary felt Charles’ thick fingers caress and mould her. Before they’d removed half their clothes he was ready: he entered her with a groaning sigh. She opened her eyes; Charles loomed above her.

  ‘Do you know how many rooms there are in the house?’ Charles asked. ‘Twenty-eight. After we’re married we can make love in every one of them,’ he gasped. ‘Where do you think he’ll be conceived? In the library?’

  ‘And be a writer?’

  ‘Not ruddy likely! Let him choose. Let’s give him every option. If not the library, then the next day,’ and Charles thrust forward, ‘the drawing-room.’

  Mary murmured, shifting her position.

  ‘And if not there,’ Charles grunted, ‘then the dining-room. On the dining-room table. All laid out for twenty fucking guests. And they can all watch, oh, Mary, sweet fucking Mary, we’ll fuck in every room in the house, oh, God, slow down, stay there … mother … Mary.’

  And as she felt his body shudder across her Mary cried out in anguish, a wordless cry Charles didn’t hear as, collapsing, he tried his best not to sneeze in her face.

  Afterwards, they climbed a short ladder out of a room at the east side of the attic floor up on to the roof, and picked their way carefully around the parapet. From the back of the house they looked down across a public park towards the middle of town.

  Charles produced a hip-flask from another jacket pocket, and two small leather-bound cups. They sipped whisky, and Charles embraced Mary from behind, in a tender version of his bear-hug.

  ‘When this pile was built,’ he told her, ‘it was a manor in the village of Hillmorton. Over time the town’s spread out and enclosed it. Do you know what? If you look at a map of the town, the house is now in its dead centre. This is my town now,’ Charles said in a faraway voice; and then the voice changed, as he squeezed her tight and whispered in her ear: �
��I love you, Mary. I want you with me. This is our town, darling.’

  Convinced that he was right, Mary pressed Charles’ hands tight against her belly, feeling her own destiny safe in his arms.

  The town that lay below them was shaped just like a spread-out, upturned left hand – they stood at the tip of the forefinger. The forearm was the northern side of town, down which two parallel roads ran, like the radius and ulna, surrounded by stalwart late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century houses. These roads converged at the wrist in a wide boulevard flanked by proud municipal buildings; with parking spaces, on either side between wide pavements and rows of plane trees, which were cleared of cars for the annual fair on the first weekend each September. The rest of the palm was filled with the shopping centre.

  The new comprehensive school and its playing fields lay either side of the thumb, which then continued as a link road across marshy pastures to reconnect with the town at the forefinger, at the side of a hill of houses and a public park on the top of which stood Hillmorton Manor.

  At the end of the middle finger lay Charles Freeman’s small factory, and mushrooming in the fields around it was the council estate, where most of the factory workers lived. The third and little fingers were roads sided by town houses less grand than those in the northern part, leading to suburbs.

  The railway line ran along the outer edge of the little finger and the side of the palm and wrist; beyond it a meadow stretched across the valley towards wooded slopes and, beyond, the pastures of the wolds, in which nestled Mary’s sister Margaret’s small farm.

  Between these fingers of roads and houses lay green: playing fields, allotments, parks, and patches of wasteland. In the centre, too, there was a certain amount of space around buildings, in the wide boulevard and squares and a park just north of the centre. It gave the town an airiness that was accentuated, in soft evening light, by the warm brown sandstone of many of the buildings.