In a Land of Plenty Page 4

  If at bedtime James was absent from the nursery Robbie knew where to find him: sitting on the table with a milk moustache or else on the window sill, setting sun behind, a tired silhouette with translucent orange ears. She got fed up with traipsing from the third floor of the west wing down the stairs to the kitchen to fetch the boy, so she asked Stanley to install a bell between her room beside the nursery and the kitchen. When it rang, three sharp times, Edna lifted James off the table in her fat arms.

  ‘Bedtime, James,’ she said, and he smelled the sweetness of her perspiring flesh as she lowered him to the floor and pointed him in the direction of the door, through which he obediently, cheerfully ran.

  Stanley and Edna both agreed, when they married, that they wanted many children, but they managed only one. Laura was born just a couple of weeks before Alice, and she shared Alice’s and the boys’ lives from the beginning.

  Little Alice had white skin and autumnal hair, rich auburn, a miniature pre-Raphaelite, and her eyes were odd colours – one green, one blue – which added to the impression that Alice perhaps belonged to some place or time other than this one. She was both a solemn and a spontaneous child with a vigilant demeanour, who watched her brothers running around or scrambling up trees in the grounds as if searching for clues in their behaviour as to how she should act herself, only to wander off in another direction entirely. She developed something of the distracted air of her mother, entering a parallel world of her own invention, occupied by fantasy companions. But just when someone began to worry about her Alice burst into action with effervescent energy and ran with the boys for hours, winding herself up with excitement until she just as suddenly collapsed like a broken spring.

  It was as well that Alice had another friend in the house.

  Laura was practical, and tended to look after her absent-minded semi-sister, because left to her own devices Alice neglected her own well-being. At the beginning of every summer she took her clothes off at the earliest opportunity, exposing her pale skin to the sun with painful results: the sun’s hot breath turned her pink, and Edna had to soothe her with calamine lotion, her gentle hands feeling the heat radiating from the sobbing child’s scorched body. But Alice never learned: each year she suffered the same ordeal, and the rest of the summer Laura had to keep an eye on her – plonking sun-hats on her head, rubbing Skol lotion into her face and shoulders and leading her forcibly into the shade when she noticed that Alice had been out in the open too long and had a look of disorientated excitement.

  It was the same in winter. Alice declined to use her umbrella with Walt Disney characters on it because she didn’t want Pluto to get wet, and neither did she wish slushy snow to ruin her new gloves. Even when Laura did manage to wrap her up before Alice got out of the door, she turned out to possess the innate talent of an escapologist: scarves unwound themselves from around her neck and trailed in her frosted wake, her squashed auburn hair sprang woolly hats into the crisp air, and tightly buttoned jackets popped free and shimmied themselves loose from her limbs. Laura followed a trail of winter garments through the garden to find her surrogate sister with her ears red, nose running and teeth chattering, a shivering pixie oblivious to the reason why.

  Alice would prove to be the most intelligent of the Freeman children; or at least the most academic. She was just incapable of making certain connections. And she had to pay the price, a snuffly, bronchial child, spending half the winter under a towel over a jug of steaming water, inhaling Friar’s Balsam.

  Laura, in contrast, had a calm, controlled relationship with her body: whereas Alice was always caught out by her own sneezes, which came upon her suddenly, Laura had plenty of time to find a handkerchief, raise it to her face and ‘aachoo!’ with perfect manners; when she had an upset stomach she felt a warning swim through her body well in advance, and recognized it for what it was.

  ‘I’m just going off to be sick, Mum,’ she told Edna matter-of-factly, and calmly made her way to the bathroom. She learned to take her own temperature – and Alice’s too – at an early age, went to bed when she was tired without having to be told, and helped herself to Disprin when she had a headache.

  The only odd thing was that at family and other social gatherings it was Alice, not Laura, who volunteered to look after even younger cousins, playing with them, feeding them, and staggering around with a paunchy toddler on her slender hip; while Laura preferred the company of children older than herself, with whom she could have a sensible conversation. To her annoyance, she ended up having to rescue Alice from a chaos of wailing, unfed babies, and restore order.

  ‘You know what?’ Alice asked Laura one day. ‘I’m going to have masses of children when I grow up.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ Laura told her, ‘you can’t even look after yourself.’

  ‘I know,’ she replied, unbothered. ‘But that’s different.’

  Laura accomplished the remarkable feat of beginning her journey through childhood as her mother’s daughter and somehow ending it as her father’s. She had his almond eyes, which assessed the world before her, unruffled, prepared for whatever might come her way. Otherwise, though, as a child she was plump, moonfaced and open-hearted like Edna, with the same strange combination of clumsiness and grace, and the same awareness of others even when she appeared fully absorbed in what she was doing: Alice or James would come up behind her as she helped her mother core apples from Margaret’s orchard or painted at the kitchen table; they stood beside her for a moment, silently, and Laura, without saying anything or looking up or indicating in any way that she was aware of their presence, raised her hand and touched them on the arm, reassuringly, letting them know that she knew they were there and were welcome, and could join in whenever they wanted.

  She developed so gradually that no one noticed, but by the time she became a woman she would have the boyish figure as well as the eyes and shape of her father’s face. She would also have his self-reliance, his hard and lonely grit; which was just as well, for the time was going to come when Laura would need them.

  Back then, James loathed and adored his father in equal measure. Charles came home from sacking workers and intimidating secretaries, and went straight to the nursery to play with his children. There were times when he brought home distinguished visitors with whom he was in some business negotiation and promptly forgot them behind him as he saw his sons on the lawn and rushed towards them, removing his jacket and loosening his tie on the way. The VIPs watched their formidable opponent in the boardroom, renowned pugilist of the manufacturing world, roll around on the grass with his children, just another fat daddy, oblivious to the chlorophyll stains on his Summer Island cotton shirts and his Savile Row trousers, scuffing his hand-stitched shoes from Jermyn Street, until they had little option but to join in.

  The fact was that Charles was more childlike than the children. He organized croquet tournaments on the lawn, asked Alfred to make a football goal out of raspberry netting at the back of the orchard, and ushered everybody outside for cricket after Sunday lunch, games of Children against Grown-ups that were sure to end in tears, because Charles was an even worse loser than Robert.

  Mary was designated wicket-keeper, with a pair of gardening gloves – though no one could tell whether today she’d be in the mood to catch everything that came her way or ignore the ball disdainfully. Robert demanded first bat and slugged away, aiming for the windows with a grin. Alice wandered around the unmarked boundary, losing interest, while Laura kept score from silly mid-off. Simon gamely persisted, with a tubby child’s surprising agility, producing wonders beside cousin Zoe in the slips. Edna bowled generous underarms.

  Alfred the gardener, a tall, rangy man who still bit his nails at the age of sixty-five, bemoaned the damage done to his grass. But Charles bellowed at him to: ‘Returf it, man!’ He even persuaded Alfred to join in; only for everyone else to regret it, because Alfred had played in his distant youth and kept a frustrating straight bat, content to stay at the crease without sco
ring any runs, a strategy suited to the opening day of a Test match but hardly an impromptu children’s game on the wide lawn of the house on the hill. Instead of having a quiet word, though, Charles joined him for an unbudgeable partnership, twisting his mouth with satisfaction in imitation of young Geoffrey Boycott as they reached the half-hour mark standing at nought for no wicket.

  So that tempers inevitably rose, as Robert bowled aiming less at the stumps than at the man, and James saw his increasingly desperate spinners met with Alfred’s stonewalling straight bat and, copying him at the other end, Charles’ too.

  And it had to end in tears because when James finally produced a googly that sent his father’s middle stump flying, Charles yelled: ‘That wasn’t fair! I wasn’t ready! It’s not cricket!’

  ‘I got him fair and square, Mummy!’ James pleaded.

  ‘Grow up, man,’ Mary told him. ‘Walk, Charles!’

  ‘Not out!’ came a Scottish voice from the front steps.

  And then all hell broke loose, the game evaporated in a mayhem of shouting and sulking, with adults stalking off and children being sent to bed.

  * * *

  One Saturday Charles bundled the family into his Rover for an impromptu trip to Oxford, an hour and a half’s drive away, to celebrate Midsummer’s Day. He dragged them around the centre, pointing out the college a great-uncle had been to (‘Maybe you’ll come here one day,’ Mary whispered in five-year-old Alice’s ear) before reaching the river and hiring a punt. The six of them crammed into it, pushed off, and there was no escape.

  Charles was in his element. Having steered the punt in circles for a while he let the boys have a go and lay in the middle broadcasting advice on correct poling technique. With his voice like a fruity fog-horn he regaled other punters passing by, as well as people lounging on the bank, as if they were guests invited to his party, as if they were there only because he was.

  ‘Marvellous day, isn’t it?’ he boomed. ‘Ruddy useless gondoliers we’ve got,’ he laughed. ‘Oops! Direct hit, Robert, you big booby!’

  Mary put on her dark glasses, lit a cigarette and ignored him. The children shrank inside the low sides of the punt – apart from Simon, who copied Charles’ conviviality, his voice a husky echo of his father’s. But even the others couldn’t help but appreciate that, despite the horror of being addressed by a stranger – by this clear breach of English etiquette – those whom Charles addressed appeared honoured to be so, such was the charisma of his self-importance.

  Charles was so gregarious that when he saw his sons go into the lavatory he was reminded of his own needs and followed, to pee into the toilet bowl beside them, chatting away unnervingly. When he had more serious business he kept the door open, engaging anyone who passed by along the corridor in conversation. He organized surprise parties for the children, invited their friends himself, and then laughed at their embarrassed ingratitude. He was an overpowering father, who had no idea what he was doing. And his wife, their mother, couldn’t quite be bothered to compete with him.

  As the children grew up, so for a transitory period between nursery and outside interests of their own they shared much of their parents’ lives. They had their supper with Robbie at the kitchen table at six o’clock each evening, but on Wednesdays they sat on the landing watching through the banister rails as Mary’s guests arrived. Her friends had brought other friends until soon there were too many to fit into her dressing-room, and so they began to meet in the drawing-room.

  ‘Keep out of the way,’ Mary ordered her children. ‘My friends don’t want to be distracted by you lot.’

  The children were enthralled by the sight of lugubrious, underfed strangers in polo-neck pullovers and threadbare jackets and women wearing denim trousers, and also by the air of secrecy surrounding the event: the poets always skulked out shortly before nine thirty.

  Then one Wednesday Charles arrived home early, and found the drawing-room door not only closed but, to his astonishment, locked. He stood there for a moment, stupefied, and then the door opened. A cheerful, middle-aged man wearing a sailor’s cap and smoking a pipe emerged.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked Charles.

  ‘Who am I?’ Charles wondered. ‘WHAT THE RUDDY HELL DO YOU MEAN, WHO AM I?’ he exploded. ‘WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?’

  ‘I’m Brian,’ the man said cheerfully. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘GET OUT OF MY WAY!’ Charles commanded him.

  ‘Wait a minute, friend,’ Brian smiled. ‘You can’t come in without a poem. Do you have a poem? That’s the rule here.’

  James and Simon on the landing knew they had a moral duty to warn the unfortunate Brian. Neither moved a muscle.

  ‘I MAKE THE BLOODY RULES HERE!’ Charles shouted. ‘THIS IS MY HOUSE, YOU RUDDY IDIOT.’

  ‘Oh, well, in that case, my friend,’ Brian smiled, ‘can you tell me where the toilet is?’

  ‘I’M NOT YOUR FRIEND, YOU MORON!’ Charles yelled. He knocked Brian’s cap off his head, pushed him out of the way and strode into the drawing-room, where he proceeded to bellow at the uninvited guests as he threw them out of his house one by one. When he’d finished he came back in and confronted Mary. ‘What the hell’s the meaning of this?’ he demanded. ‘Who were these layabouts? Where have they come from? Why wasn’t I invited?’

  Mary looked at Charles coldly, stubbed out her cigarette, stood up and walked past him.

  ‘Where are you going? COME BACK HERE!’ Charles shouted. But she carried on across the hall and up the stairs, where the children crouched stock-still as she passed them, and Charles came after her, crying: ‘COME BACK HERE, WOMAN!’ even as he followed Mary to her dressing-room.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Charles exclaimed. ‘I demand an explanation. What do you think you’re doing?’

  Mary took no notice of Charles as she calmly took clothes from her wardrobe, folded them and put them in a suitcase.

  ‘Look, hang on a minute,’ Charles told her. ‘TALK TO ME! All right, darling, I was a bit hasty, I can see that, but will you tell me who those people were? I thought they were burglars. What do you think you’re doing, damn it? STOP! NOW!’

  Mary continued to ignore him, and came back down the stairs, past the boys in the exact same postures as before, and through the hall, with Charles behind her saying: ‘Darling, look, I was out of order, yes, I know that now, I’m sorry, it won’t happen again. Ever. I can see your point, darling. Where are you going? Speak to me, for God’s sake! Please!’

  Mary walked out of the front door and across the crunchy gravel to her car. She threw in her suitcase and got in herself, followed by Charles’ now pleading voice. ‘They’re your friends, darling, I realize that now, it’s clear to me. They can come whenever they want, they’re welcome here, of course they are. They can sleep here if they want, I’d like that. Just speak to me, woman. Darling. Tell me what you want. I love you, Mary, I need you. I’m lost without you. I should be horse-whipped. Look, I’m on my knees. On this bloody gravel.’

  Mary looked at Charles once more, still coldly, but nodded, and got slowly out of the car. She hauled her suitcase out too and took it back to her dressing-room, where she drew the curtains and shut herself in for the next three days.

  From then on Mary’s Wednesday poetry group became a regular and above-board event, although the door remained firmly closed to outsiders. Charles sometimes stood outside it, fuming: like his youngest son, he couldn’t bear to be excluded even from something he had no wish to be a part of (and Charles had no interest whatsoever in poetry) and he found it insufferable to accept that his wife had a world which had nothing to do with him.

  Once, he came home and found two beatnik idlers browsing through the ancient books in his study while drinking his whisky, but Charles controlled his natural impulses, smiled obsequiously, and asked if they’d like him to fetch them some ice. He never made a fuss again. He could cope with Mary’s cool distance, and he could ignore her need for solitude, but he couldn’t stand to lose her.


  The weekends were very different. Then Mary joined forces with her husband for extravagant cocktail parties to which were invited his business associates, town councillors, newspaper proprietors and editors, bank managers, solicitors, lawyers, the mayor, the local Member of Parliament, doctors, surgeons, churchmen and other worthies of the town. The children bolted their supper down and raced upstairs to help their parents get ready, Simon and Alice drawn to the perfume, lipstick and rustling dresses of their mother, while the younger boys ran to Charles’ dressing-room. James cloaked himself in his father’s voluminous jacket and shuffled around in his huge shoes, before Robert took over and polished them in silent concentration.

  ‘Robert! Haven’t you done those ruddy shoes yet?’ Charles demanded. ‘By God, you’d make a good squaddie.’

  Then James joined Simon and Alice in their mother’s dressing-room, where they watched her apply make-up at her mirror, and inhaled the intoxicating scent of her perfume.

  When the guests arrived they were received by the whole family, whose younger members stayed a while on their best behaviour as the adults drank cocktails in the drawing-room. Before the children were spirited away by Robbie they watched their gigantic father hold court, and they watched their mother, resembling on those social occasions some European princess. Women who approached her seemed by their movement to be fighting off a strange impulse to curtsy; she turned young men into speechless idiots and had to use all her charm to elicit normal conversation, while old men visibly shed their years in her company. Few of the pictures that appeared in the local newspaper of Charles at that time failed to include Mary at his side, the beautiful wife of the man-in-charge.