In a Land of Plenty Read online

  ‘But it hurts sometimes, Edna,’ James told her. ‘In my legs.’

  ‘Oh, that’s growing pains, child. Everyone has them. You’ll be shooting up tall before you know it.’

  Maybe she said that because she recognized James’ envy of his best friend: Lewis was growing taller, and even thinner, by the day.

  ‘What a waste,’ Garfield moaned. ‘The Lord done made you for fast bowling.’

  One Saturday James and Lewis were cycling slowly home from a boys’ football game, along the wide cycle path beside the link road connecting the north of town where their school was with the south-east where they lived.

  ‘What are you going to be when you grow up, Lew?’ James asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he replied indignantly, as if the question were totally absurd. ‘A politician, I suppose. Or music something. I don’t know.’ He carried on cycling in silence, but he couldn’t think of any other options, so he asked James:

  ‘Why? What about you?’

  ‘I want to be a footballer of course,’ James replied emphatically.

  Lewis laughed, indulgently. ‘That’s your problem. You’re a dreamer, Jay.’

  Lewis was probably right. James didn’t enjoy being at a bigger school. He hadn’t joined any of the gangs that formed, broke up and re-formed every few weeks; he made friends with other boys and girls independently, some of whom only spoke to each other in his neutral company, until he was a kind of loner but with an alternative, part-time gang of his own. The lessons bored him as much here as they had at primary school, and he lost the superiority he’d consoled himself with in mathematics, as other children were either brainier than he was or else caught up and overtook him. He found his mind drifting in the classroom, the teacher’s voice becoming distant, the text-book going out of focus, the hard desk-seat and everything else in the physical world softening, receding, disappearing, as his mind drifted into space. The lessons passed him by. He was unengaged. He didn’t know why.

  ‘I know, I’ve noticed,’ Charles agreed with the headmaster, at the beginning of James’ second year. ‘Like his mother. Don’t be afraid to use discipline, you have my full support.’

  Fortunately for James, discipline was going out of fashion. It was the end of the summer of love, when force was met with flowers. Zoe’s father dropped her off home from a six-month trip to India and she appeared in Simon’s class – her absences setting her back two years at school – smoking flat cigarettes that smelled like bonfires and wearing a bandanna and beads. Instead of sending Zoe home and telling her not to come back until she was wearing the school uniform, her form mistress, a young woman newly arrived from teacher-training college, only asked if Zoe could get her a caftan dress like hers.

  Even Charles surprised everyone with his tolerance. When a free music festival was held one Saturday afternoon in the park on the hill below them, and then continued all night, keeping everyone awake, Charles came down to breakfast not in a foul temper, as expected, but in high spirits.

  ‘Young people should enjoy themselves while they can,’ he announced. ‘Responsibility comes soon enough.’

  Simon, emboldened by his father’s unpredictable indulgence, asked Alfred for a bouquet of marigolds, and he entwined them in his hair. Since, encouraged by Zoe, he’d recently dispensed with a tie and given up tucking his white school shirt inside his trousers, the garland gave him the look of a young and decadent Roman emperor. Charles came home from work one day and saw his chubby eldest son sitting by the pond with two of his friends: between them they were strumming a guitar with one string missing, blowing a harmonica and beating a tambourine, while singing a song in loud tuneless voices. ‘Come, mothers and fathers throughout the land …’

  Alfred in the rose beds, Edna at the kitchen window, James and Alice coming at that moment out of the front door, and his chauffeur: all watched Charles jump out of the back of the car and stride across the lawn.

  ‘Then don’t criticize what you can’t understand …’

  The witnesses could tell from the abruptness of his movement and his hunched shoulders that the man-in-charge had blown a fuse, and was about to throw one of his tantrums.

  ‘Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command …’

  Simon and his two friends, however, were playing and singing with their soulful eyes closed, so they didn’t see Charles coming, and they didn’t interpret the tremor of his furious footsteps making the ground tremble beneath them, until it was too late.

  ‘Your old road is rapidly ageing.’

  Charles grabbed the harmonica out of the mouth of a ginger-haired boy and tossed it in the pond. Then he picked the boy up and threw him in after it.

  The tambourine man, a short, bespectacled and spotty boy called Rupert, leapt to his feet. In a moment of panicked inspiration, as Charles strode over to him, he threw the tambourine into the pond himself, perhaps hoping by such an act of propitiation to escape the same fate himself. If so, he was wrong. He landed with a spreadeagled splash out of all proportion to his size.

  Charles turned to Simon, who was in a state of shock, his constitution unable to cope with the plethora of abject emotions with which his father’s behaviour had besieged him: fear, shame, confusion, ridicule. Charles came right up to Simon. But he didn’t touch him. Instead he inclined his head towards Simon’s and proceeded to bellow in his face.

  ‘If I ever find you wearing flowers, playing a ruddy guitar, singing those songs, mixing with these morons or in any other way making fun of your father, you won’t know what hit you! Understand?’

  Simon didn’t respond. He was dumbstruck.

  ‘Good!’ Charles declared, and he strode across the lawn and into the house. It was the first act of rebellion of Simon’s youth; and also the last.

  Mary was furious with Charles’ disgraceful behaviour, but maybe he had his own reasons beyond those of a tyrant. He’d been in a strange mood all that week, since the previous Sunday lunch, at which Alice had revealed the awareness of her own mortality at the age of eight, in a moment of illumination. She’d been absent from the conversation for some while, with that faraway look of hers that showed she was thinking of something else, when she suddenly snapped back to reality and interrupted her father:

  ‘Daddy, I’m going to die one day, aren’t I? We all are.’

  Most people apprehend the inevitability of their own demise through their children, whose very existence reveals the inexorable cycle of birth and death, but in a benign fashion. So it was for Charles, except that in his case his fourth child opened his eyes not through the simple fact of her being but rather with a direct statement.

  ‘I’m going to die one day, aren’t I?’ she said. ‘We all are.’

  Charles looked at her. ‘Are we?’ he asked. Then he collected himself and said: ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Yes, you are, Daddy,’ Alice assured him. ‘I just worked it out. You see, we live with angels for a long time, then one day they say: “You! Go and live with that family down there!” And so we’re born. We live here. And then we die again.’

  ‘Then what?’ Charles asked, disarmed by his daughter’s matter-of-factness.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Alice admitted. ‘We might go back to the angels or we might just go to sleep for ever.’

  ‘Oh,’ Charles replied.

  ‘It’s a bit sad I suppose but it doesn’t really matter, does it?’ Alice proposed. Then she asked Edna if there was any more summer pudding.

  At primary school the children had little conception of what their parents did, or their parents’ relationship to each other. In his second year at comprehensive, however, James began to realize that a good many of his fellow pupils’ fathers – and mothers, elder brothers, aunts and uncles – worked in one capacity or another, in this or that department, for his father’s company. It was something none of them spoke of. Just occasionally he interrupted a conversation from which stray words informed him that they were discussing his father, swapping some story
of the generosity or the wealth or the temper of the man-in-charge. They would stop what they were saying and clumsily change the subject, more out of embarrassment than any kind of resentment, since apart from the odd father sacked on one of Charles’ whims they were mostly grateful to him for providing an increasing number of jobs: it was a boom time. The business was expanding in all directions and Charles was investing in new plant and machinery, and building new workshops and warehouses. The factory site was coming to resemble a small industrial village.

  When the students from the college of further education in town tried to follow their successful sit-in of the principal’s office with a march to the gates of the factory and a declaration of solidarity with the oppressed, put-upon workers, whom they proposed to join in a strike designed to turn that purgatory of capitalist exploitation into a co-operative of the proletariat, they stood shouting all day until their voices were hoarse. When, at four o’clock, they heard the blare of a hooter, and saw hundreds of men in overalls carrying lunch boxes walking and cycling towards them, they thought for a brief moment that the workers, inspired by their clarion call, had mobilized themselves along the assembly lines.

  It was a brief moment indeed. The gates swung slowly open by remote control and the factory workers poured out and, setting off home at the end of their shift, succeeded in entirely ignoring the fifty or so long-haired students, who were left lying disillusioned in the road, placards broken, noses bleeding from stray elbows. They happened to be studying in the wrong town.

  Things were also changing in the big house on the hill. They seemed to see more of Charles’ face in the newspapers, and hear his resonant voice on the radio, than at home. He was always having meetings in London and other cities, sometimes travelling in a helicopter that took off from the lawn.

  The children weren’t sorry: when Charles was away Mary was more relaxed. Not that they saw much more of her – when he was gone she spent even more time in her dressing-room, which had recently developed beyond being a study. Mary created a bedsit inside her own house by moving a divan in there.

  James came up to ask her for extra pocket money for a new pair of shin-pads and found her sat staring out of the window. Her jowls were pasty, he saw creases at the sides of her eyes and grey hairs he hadn’t noticed before in her long brown hair, and it struck him that his mother was growing older.

  ‘Mummy—’

  ‘Zut!’ Mary jumped. ‘You shouldn’t creep up on people, James,’ she said, recovering. ‘You startled me.’ He could smell her sour whisky breath.

  ‘Mum, why have you got a bed in here now?’ he asked her. ‘Do people need more sleep as they get older?’

  ‘Don’t be so rude!’ she gasped. ‘Look, it’s quite normal. You know I find it hard to fall asleep in the first place, James; I have to take pills to help me. If your father wakes me with all his snuffling and snorting, then I can never get back to sleep. I get scared he’ll crush me.’ Mary laughed and lit a cigarette. ‘Be off with you, little man. I’m working.’

  Charles, not wishing to lose face, moved a bed into his dressing-room, hoping to convince the children that it was a mutual arrangement. When Charles was at home Simon came in in the mornings and joined him, sitting on Charles’ bed as his father talked back to BBC newsreaders and politicians on the radio while he shaved.

  Without Charles’ loud and blustering presence the large house was quiet and empty. Simon came home from school alone and went straight to his room, where he stayed until he heard Edna bang the gong for supper. And afterwards he returned there.

  ‘Hey, Simon,’ James asked him, ‘do you want to play darts in the scullery with me and Lewis?’

  ‘Lewis and me,’ Simon corrected him.

  ‘Yeh, OK; Lewis and me. Do you want to or not?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’ James persisted.

  ‘Homework,’ Simon told him. Charles had given Simon his own telephone for his fourteenth birthday; Simon’s friends who knocked on the door and asked for him were directed to the phone in the hallway and told to dial his number.

  ‘What are you doing?’ they asked. ‘You want to come out?’

  ‘I’m busy,’ he told them, and replaced the receiver. Since his father had thrown his friends into the pond he didn’t seem to want to see them any more. He had a television in his room, too, and James and the others often saw the sad blue light seeping out from under his door.

  Robert’s friends from school weren’t the kind to spend time playing in each other’s houses. He achieved intimacy with boys he’d fought with; once they’d bruised and bloodied each other then they could embrace in the afterglow of combat, blood brothers, and then indulge in delinquent acts in wastelands and derelict buildings.

  Robert’s companion when he was, rarely, at home was Stanley. Robert followed him as James had once followed Alfred around the garden, though less in his case a gabbling distraction than a small, silent shadow.

  Stanley was a practical man. He took the view that every man-made device could, since it had been designed and assembled by other men, be understood by him.

  ‘All you need is common sense, lad,’ he told Robert. ‘Don’t be scared to have a go.’

  Stanley could take apart any broken machine, study its mechanism, isolate and replace the defective part and put it all back together again in full working order. Whether it was a combustion engine, an electric device or a plumbing unit made no difference: nothing daunted him. He laid an old sheet out on the floor and placed upon it nuts and bolts, washers, wires, screws, pistons and gaskets, committing their connections to each other to memory as he did so. His fingers, flattened and thickened by physical labour, closed around a spanner or screwdriver, his knuckles large as walnuts.

  It wasn’t in Stanley’s nature to be openly friendly with anyone. He didn’t invite Robert to give him a hand when he got out the long ladders to clear the gutters, and neither did Robert ask if he could. He just stepped forward and placed his small, steadying weight on the bottom rung. Theirs was an almost wordless relationship. They could drive in the pick-up to the builders’ yard to pick up sand and cement or wood and nails and drive all the way back again without a word exchanged between them.

  When James saw how engrossed his brother was he suspected he was missing out on something. It was obvious that Robert’s silence was not lack of curiosity but pride, a reluctance to display his ignorance of how things worked: all they said, under the bonnet of Mary’s Zephyr, were things like: ‘Pass the big daddy, lad,’ or ‘Do you want the adjustables or the mole-grips, Stan?’

  So James squeezed between them and annoyed them both by asking a stream of questions: ‘What’s that do? What makes it bob up and down like that? Why’s the plug so small? Maybe there’s a leak. Why don’t you just hit it with a big hammer?’ He left, though, before they had to tell him to, because in the event James found a car engine utterly captivating for about two and a half minutes, and then he found himself yawning with boredom.

  Although it would have been difficult for anyone else to tell, from his stony expression, Robert never got bored. He loved the smell of grease and oil and hot metal, of a blowtorch on flux, the feel of a ratchet-spanner tightening a nut, the sound of an idling car engine improving as he adjusted the points. He marched around the house in a cut-off pair of Stanley’s old blue overalls carrying a screwdriver, pausing to check and tighten loose things like doorknobs and saucepan handles. Outside, in the back yard, delivery men sometimes mistook the ten-year-old son of the man-in-charge for a midget mechanic.

  When Stanley needed to do some welding the blue-purple flame and the showering sparks entranced Robert. Stanley told him not to look at the flame, but when he saw that the boy clearly couldn’t help himself he gave him a helmet of his own, punching extra holes in the headband, and it hung like a shield in front of Robert, covering most of his torso.

  Edna sent Laura out with mugs of tea and bacon betties for ‘the men’, as she called them. When he
heard that, Robert was unable to stop his stony face from cracking into a fleeting smile.

  Having recovered from Pascale’s brief intrusion, Laura and Alice at nine were more like sisters than ever. Although they looked quite different – Alice with her porcelain skin and rich auburn hair, slight and fragile, Laura still resembling more her mother than her father, robust and bouncy, with short brown hair – they spent so much time together that for a time they took on the same rhythms, had the same thoughts and adopted each other’s mannerisms. Alice would stroke a brother’s arm absent-mindedly at tea, while Laura acquired Alice’s habit of suddenly being seized with some strange idea and running off to do whatever it was had sprung into her head: her dolls needed to be taken outside to enjoy the evening air, or she had a compulsion to check that the goldfish in the pond hadn’t been eaten by a neighbour’s cat. They often slept together, Mary or Edna finding them in one or other of their bedrooms and seeing no point in moving them.

  James was closer to the girls than to either of his brothers. Simon hadn’t minded James joining in, when he was bored, the impromptu parties of which Simon was host and ringleader. His sudden withdrawal was unequivocal, and he didn’t like being pestered when he was, he said, trying to do his homework in front of the television in his room. And neither did James find common interest with Robert, who liked hunting animals and taking machines apart, and thought football was for idiots running around like demented rats.

  Lewis had to pick up his sister Gloria from primary school and look after her till his parents came home from work, and often Garfield would then dragoon Lewis into accompanying him to his allotment between the football ground and the cemetery.

  ‘Come along, boy, you’re not too young to start earnin’ yer keep with a few chores,’ he told him.