In a Land of Plenty Page 3

  He could remember her in the small drawing-room in her suite of rooms in the east wing of the big house, perching forward from the seat of a vast armchair. On the coffee table before her were scattered black-and-white photographs: accumulated in odd boxes over the course of her busy life, now grandmother Beatrice was attempting to order them into albums. It was clear, however, that the task was beyond her: Beatrice picked up photos, stared at them, tried to match them with others as if playing a cruel game of Pelmanism. She filled the first page of one album with a picture of herself as a toddler beside another of her wedding, and continued in such a manner to paste a senseless mosaic; she had lost touch with the chronology of her own life.

  Much later, James would remember his early years as a group of photographic images. He had a poor memory. Friends would recount their earliest recollections – of things seen from a cot or pram – and he couldn’t believe they weren’t deluding themselves.

  James’ memories were photographic partly because photographs were a literal substitute for actual memories. They provided confirmation of other people’s recollections. ‘No wonder James can’t sit still!’ his father roared when James was itching to leave the dinner table and go outside to kick a football in the dying light; ‘He spent his formative years in a ruddy wheelbarrow!’ Sure enough, there were black-and-white photos in the family album of James being steered by the gardener, Alfred, in a heavy wooden wheelbarrow, or standing on his unsteady toddler’s legs and leaning against the barrow while Alfred mulched the roses.

  The first time he saw Garfield Roberts, walking up the drive hand in hand with Pauline, Stanley the caretaker’s sister, apparently James ran through the house shrieking: ‘Robbie! Robbie! Come and see! It’s Little Black Sambo!’ The doll (of which James had no actual recall) responsible for his response to the first black man he encountered at the house was there in a photograph of Simon and himself sitting with their mother in the drawing-room, clasped in James’ hand.

  He studied another photograph: a hot high-contrast summer’s day; Simon standing on the edge of the pond grinning inanely towards the camera (with their father’s grin and his double-chin, too); himself, James, shielding his weak eyes from the sun behind the camera, looking like he was talking; the unidentified shadow of the photographer thrown up across the lawn from the bottom of the picture; Robert, off to one side, on his face … what? a scowl? a grimace?; on the other side little Alice, naked except for a halter around her chest attached to a rope that trailed across the grass to a stake, allowing her to reach only as far as the edge of the pond.

  Their mother sat on the wall of the pond, close to Simon, one hand resting in her lap, the other hovering in the air between herself and her son, as her smile revealed not only its remoteness but also a nervous flickering of her lips. She was looking at the camera but was also aware of her chubby, grinning son wobbling on the low wall, with the water behind him. Mary wore a white blouse and a long, black pleated skirt, and a slide around her brown hair. She looked like a young and lovely maiden aunt of these children around her, enjoying their company for the day, not quite at ease with them.

  But where was his father? He was surely there, for his presence was evident in the others’ postures: in Simon’s wheedling enthusiasm; in his, James’, self-protection; in Robert’s sullen distance; in Alice’s proscribed activity; in their mother’s uncertain smile. James could even hear his voice now, cajoling Simon: ‘That’s my boy, my simple pieman,’ his rich voice, laughing. ‘Dance, my belly boy, my dancing jelly baby.’ And Simon grinning back, stepping unsteadily on the wall around the edge of the pond.

  He was surely there, James could hear him, he could feel him. And then he saw him: their father was taking the picture; the shadow swelling into the frame was the shadow cast by the 18-stone bulk of the man-in-charge.

  * * *

  The originals in the family albums of these photographs were usually disappointing: they were snapshots grabbed by amateurs, essential details blurred or cut off at the edge of the frame, and they had inessential paraphernalia – a hedge, part of a car – leading one’s eye astray. Studying them years later James would find himself closing his eyes and recomposing them – improving the subjects’ arrangement, changing gestures – as if retouching them in the darkroom of his mind.

  Robert was born with his left arm wrapped around his head, which was squeezed during his passage through the birth canal: when he opened his eyes they had vivid red splotches. It made him look furious with the world; and it turned out that he was. In his cot he didn’t cry for milk like Simon and James before him so much as bleat, like a tiny, disgruntled goat. As soon as he was replete, however, instead of snoozing in Mary’s arms Robert started bleating again and only stopped when she put him back down.

  When Mary blew raspberries into his tummy, played peek-a-boo and made silly faces that had amused her first babies, Robert just stared at her with a grim, disconcerting expression. What did make him laugh was when his boisterous father, home from work, picked the baby boy up and threw him high in the air. Robert loved such treatment, the wilder the better, giggling helplessly as he spun perilous cartwheels in the air.

  Robert came out of the womb nursing a grievance; his eyeballs were bloodshot with envy, and it was exacerbated by the unwelcome arrival of both a real sister, Alice, and what would prove to be a surrogate one, Stanley the caretaker’s and Edna the cook’s daughter Laura, in the same household in the same month when he was not quite two years old.

  From then on Robert’s childhood was coloured by rage at others’ preferential treatment. He couldn’t stand to lose out or be left out: he scrutinized portions of dessert at mealtimes, and snatched the biggest plate for himself; when one of the other children was given a present, he threw a tantrum and tried to break it.

  ‘He’s got a chip on his shoulder, that one,’ Edna told Stanley.

  ‘I don’t blame him,’ said Stanley, ‘with two brothers above and like two sisters below.’

  Mary tried to reason with him. He listened with hunched, resentful shoulders, a brittle countenance and wary eyes, making no response, until she left the room. At which point he sprang to his feet and attacked those he blamed for spilling the beans. But then when Mary returned and ordered Robert to apologize he reverted to his posture of an aggrieved statue, and proved perfectly capable of withstanding solitary confinement in his room, missing his favourite TV programmes and even Robbie’s stinging slaps, rather than say the word ‘sorry’ to a brother or sister.

  Charles tried a different approach, that of ridicule. If Robert found Alice and Laura playing some soppy girls’ game with dolls or paint or teddy bears it reduced him to a state of befuddled rage, since he couldn’t bear to be excluded even from something he had no wish to be a part of. Charles found Robert trembling on the verge of violence, and started laughing.

  ‘Our little hornet’s buzzing!’ Charles mocked. ‘Our tiny Tartar’s having a temper tantrum!’ he teased – ignoring the fact that it was one trait he’d clearly bequeathed Robert himself.

  Far from pacifying Robert, his father’s ridicule only enraged him further, and when Charles tickled him Robert became so furious that he turned purple, and Mary had to intervene to save him from bursting a blood vessel.

  The trouble was it was impossible to discern exactly what Robert wanted: when someone else got too much attention and Robert yanked them out of the spotlight it was only to stand dumbly centre-stage; if any adult hugged him for more than a moment he struggled free ungraciously, wiping avuncular kisses from his face with distaste.

  ‘Don’t worry yourself, darling,’ Charles reassured Mary. ‘He’ll grow out of it.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ she doubted. ‘You haven’t.’

  ‘He’ll have to, won’t he? He can’t beat up the whole world.’

  Robert was tough. Afflicted by childhood ailments, he refused to succumb: as if they were rites of passage, challenges to his infant masculinity, he wrestled with them. He co
ughed and groaned through thick sinusy nights but emerged, bad-tempered and unbowed, at breakfast – to Robbie’s delight, who held him up as an example to the others; he was her favourite, which he didn’t mind, since with her such preference didn’t bring with it unwelcome tenderness or intimacy.

  By the time Robert started school he was as tall as James, his next oldest brother (and would even catch up with Simon, although he would eventually be overtaken again by both of them). But no one would have mistaken James and Robert for twins. Robert had dark, hooded eyes and his mother’s finely carved features; he appeared entirely unrelated to James with his unruly haystack of sandy hair over sticking-out ears and a spattering of freckles passed down from farming ancestors. And while James was as verbose as and more articulate than Simon, Robert was taciturn and grimly charismatic.

  ‘It’s all yackety-yack with ye, is it not, James?’ Robbie told him. She was right. James chattered away, asking interminable questions or telling never-ending, inconsequential stories that no one could listen to for more than thirty seconds without their attention wandering, while Robert rarely opened his mouth except to eat. Yet James overheard Charles informing Mary:

  ‘Did you hear what Robert said today? Stanley told me. He heard Simon explaining to him why I’ve got so many people working for me, and Robert said: “People are stupid. They don’t deserve any better.” Isn’t that smart, darling? The boy’s not six years old.’

  Robert said little but it was remembered; he smiled seldom, but when he did then his smile lit up a room. James was disappointed that his mother at least couldn’t see through Robert, being impressed as everyone else by his disdainful words and begrudging affection. Whereas James knew that he made little impression on people; no one disliked him, but he was no one’s favourite, really. Mary made him feel special when she needed to, but weeks went by when she hardly noticed he was there.

  As well as taking on a nanny for the children and retaining the Misses Fulbright’s gardener, Alfred, Charles had also employed a caretaker for the house and a cook. Mary found herself adrift in her own home. The household and her children’s welfare were taken care of, and Mary withdrew from the hubbub.

  The preoccupied child had inherited her father’s periodic depressions, but in inverse proportions. She stayed in her dressing-room, writing poetry at a table by the window, or just staring out of it, and the children learned not to disturb her.

  ‘Can’t you see? Your mother needs time to herself,’ Charles told them. ‘I don’t want you upsetting her, buzzing around like ruddy flies.’

  The children acquired patience, and it was rewarded: every two or three weeks she emerged with her brown eyes burning bright and an ironic smile playing around her lips, to tease and divert them like a flirtatious older sister.

  On Wednesday evenings Charles went to Round Table meetings, and Mary invited two friends round to discuss each other’s poetry in her dressing-room. Then one Friday night when Charles was away on business, shortly before bedtime Mary whispered to James: ‘Get your coat and meet me at the back door in five minutes. And don’t tell anyone.’

  ‘Don’t worry about James,’ he heard her tell Robbie. ‘I’ll put him to bed. He wants me to read him a story.’

  A few minutes later they were driving away in Mary’s Zephyr, James brimming with anxious excitement.

  ‘Where are we going?’ he whispered.

  ‘That’s a surprise,’ Mary laughed. ‘You’re here to give me confidence, little man.’

  James tried to remember if he’d ever been driven late at night before. It felt different from a dark afternoon. Car headlights zoomed into his eyes as they passed, then into country darkness like a long tunnel opened up by the Zephyr’s lights.

  ‘Where’s this?’ James asked, as they re-entered urban landscape.

  ‘We’re coming into Birmingham,’ Mary told him. ‘Don’t you recognize it?’

  They went into a huge room above a pub, smoky and loud and crammed full. They sat down on the floor against a wall. James couldn’t see any other children. There were men wearing donkey jackets and duffel coats, and women with cropped hair and men’s overcoats that made them look elegant in the same way as his mother did. Mary got herself a beer and let James have a sip: it tasted of soap.

  Then a man stood up at the front of the room and introduced another man, and he stood up when everyone started clapping. He had a big, bushy beard and was wearing sunglasses indoors. Mary squeezed James’ arm, and he looked up at her, but she was looking at the man with the beard, who then read out poems in a voice like a cowboy’s.

  James drifted in and out of the evening, dropping off then being woken by applause or shouts of approval, slipping between brief, curtailed dreams and the sweaty, smoky room. After the American had finished, people in the audience were invited to read poems of their own. James was woken by Mary squeezing his arm again, and he stirred to find her standing up. He was just about to follow, assuming it was time to leave, when she began reading out a poem. It was something about blood and ice. When she’d finished there was silence, then everybody clapped her and Mary sat down again beside James, her cheeks flushed, breathing hard. She put her arm around him and pulled him tight. James leaned into her, and felt her ribs heave against him through her clothing.

  Stanley was five years younger than Charles, who’d taken the welder aside on his factory floor and offered him better wages and free accommodation to come and look after the house. He was the one man that Charles never shouted at. Coming home in a foul temper he strode into the hall yelling at everyone in sight or – since they scurried away along corridors and up stairs – what he knew to be within earshot, for his deep voice chased them: ‘Where’s my ruddy smoking jacket? What have those children been up to? I’ve never seen such a mess! What time’s dinner? I’m hungry, damn it, bring me some food!’

  If Mary was in the hallway then she shouted back at him to: ‘Grow up, Charles! What kind of an example are you?’ and they yelled at each other until all of a sudden Charles shouted even louder:

  ‘I’m sorry, my darling, I’m a galumphing boor, you’re right, come here. Let me hold you. Forgive me.’

  More often, though, she couldn’t be bothered with Charles’ storms, and simply closed the door of her dressing-room.

  Those like Simon or Edna or Robbie who rushed to fulfil his demands only made Charles more mad, and he reduced people to tears with his careless humiliations. When he reached Stanley, however, Charles quietened down, he stopped quaking and his voice returned to a human level. If they were outside then Stanley rolled a thick cigarette as he told Charles what had been done and needed doing in the house and grounds, and Charles listened in unnatural silence.

  Stanley and Edna were married a couple of years after she came to be the cook, and there was nothing surprising about their union – much the same age, they worked and lived together – except for their physical dissimilarity: Stanley was a short, wiry man with a composure that made him seem more compact than he actually was. His nakedness would never fail to surprise Edna, for in daily life he possessed a manly stature far outweighing his actual frame. She, on the other hand, though no taller, was big-bosomed and wide-girthed, broad-beamed and thick-thighed, twice his width and weight, my roly-poly pudding of a woman, as he came to call her.

  They moved through time at different speeds. Stanley was precise, quick, sharp, making only relevant movement to perform the task of the moment. He often looked like he was snatching at things. Edna, on the other hand, was slow but flowing, for anyone watching her in the kitchen there seemed no discernible break between one task and another: while doing one thing she was already planning the next, clearing a space (first mental, then actual) on the table for the mixing bowl, reaching flour from the cupboard but remembering there was only half a pound left in that bag, moving towards the pantry for more.

  She liked Stanley from the beginning, attracted to his calm authority and his stony countenance. It took him longer to notice
her, but she was always there at the end of the evening, they seemed to find themselves alone in the kitchen, discussing the events of the day or just drinking tea and sharing the quiet twilight of the busy house. Stanley would not be able to remember exactly when companionship grew into courtship, and Edna had to remind him of a look exchanged – eyes seeing, searching, finding something new in a familiar face – of holding hands one Sunday evening, of a goodnight kiss in the doorway of her room.

  By the time Stanley realized he’d been seduced it was too late, but he didn’t mind. He came to love her amplitude, the generosity of her flesh a perfect physical expression of a strength he knew he lacked himself, and he would never lose his gratitude towards her for saving him from the loneliness of a hard man.

  While Stanley roamed freely around the house and garden, his territory extending to the perimeter wall, Edna was confined within the large kitchen. The floor was paved with great flagstones, on which the girls played hopscotch, and there was a large oblong table in the middle of the room. That was where James sat, surrounded by measuring jugs and cold joints, and ingredients in various stages of preparation. If he was lucky a bowl of cake-filling had to be licked clean (if he got there before Simon). James sat on top of the table, entranced by the dexterity of Edna’s chubby fingers as she chopped vegetables with percussive precision or rolled sheets of pastry like sails on the table beside him – scattering flour over his bare legs – and cut intricate shapes to be laid across the tops of pies. Sleeves rolled up revealing the great white hams of her forearms, beads of perspiration beneath the brow of her white cap, Edna moved smoothly from one task to the next, six different pots muttering on the stove and more in the oven, her eyes full, never glazed, always checking this quantity and that texture.

  Edna’s size was an oft-remarked oddity among the inhabitants of the house, a running joke at every meal, for she had the appetite of a sparrow: she’d serve them all and then put no more than a spoonful or two on her own plate. And even then she left half of it uneaten. But James knew better: for Edna was constantly testing and tasting her cooking throughout the day, adding herbs or spices or sugar or salt when necessary, because she was insecure and didn’t trust her recipes. The result was that, without realizing, her eating habits were not those of a normal person but a grazing animal, and she consumed twice as much as anyone else in the steady accumulation of tiny mouthfuls.