In a Land of Plenty Read online

  When James was seven he and Simon shared a room. Despite their proximity, once the boys fell asleep they entered different worlds. James had prosaic, reassuring dreams, inhabited by people he knew in familiar places, so that he readily confused them with reality: he asked Alfred in the morning why he’d laid out the tools on the lawn like that, and told his mother that he liked her experiment of having everyone sleep squashed up together in one room, only maybe the drawing-room would be a better choice than the downstairs lavatory.

  Simon’s dreams, in contrast, were invariably fantastic. He was an untroubled child who laughed as much as his father while lacking his bad temper. Once he fell asleep, however, his dream world took over and it was either frightening or fabulous, with nothing in between. In the morning he told Robbie of journeys through fairytale lands of glass palaces and mythical beasts. But sometimes she found him in James’ bed, huddled up beside his younger brother, and she knew he’d had another nightmare.

  Simon became scared of the dark, insisting upon the door being left open; he woke up in the middle of the night and stumbled around the house switching on lights, seeking to dispel the alien worlds of his own mind. Sometimes he bumped into his mother in a doorway, and they startled each other, because while Simon was recovering from a nightmare, Mary was sleepwalking.

  It only happened when she was depressed, and everyone knew it was coming, because their elegant mother became pale and inert, with slack cheeks and dead, puffy eyes, and withdrew to her dressing-room for days on end. Her poetry group was cancelled, Charles had to have his personal assistant, Judith Peach, stand in for her at the cocktail parties, and the children spoke in whispers when they passed her door.

  On the evenings of James’ parents’ cocktail parties the drawing-room became a strange, enchanted place. He was always disappointed the following morning. His dreams were so often extensions of what he’d experienced in the hours before sleep that he woke up thinking the party was still going on. But when he went downstairs he found everything already cleared up, and Edna finishing washing-up in the kitchen.

  The library, on the other hand, had a different, consoling effect on him: he was only really happy in there when he was alone. It was his father’s study, where Charles entertained his own important visitors, or where after smaller dinner parties the men retreated for port and cigars around the fire. Once or twice James eavesdropped on their dirty, guttural laughter, their brittle intimacy, their loud assumptions.

  He preferred to sneak in there after school, to get away from the crowd. At the far end, between two tall sash-windows, was Charles’ enormous desk. The fireplace was in the middle of the left-hand wall, surrounded by armchairs and small tables mushrooming out into the middle of the room. Bookcases filled the alcoves either side of the fireplace and lined the entire right-hand wall, while either side of the double doorway hung a single large painting, the same size, by the same nineteenth-century artist, of views of the town.

  The leather-bound books of the previous owners still filled the shelves, and were only ever opened to be dusted. Except, occasionally, by James. He perused those books no one else read, took one off the shelf, inhaled its musty smell – which would ever after trigger feelings of solitary, almost forbidden activity – and lost himself in the adventure stories of Arthur Conan Doyle, H. Rider Haggard and James Fenimore Cooper, despite vast numbers of words he couldn’t understand, deaf to noises from outside the library door and oblivious to the passing of time.

  So that James didn’t hear his father sweeping into the house, even when he burst straight into the library and strode over to his desk to make phone calls there. And neither did Charles notice his middle son curled up at the bottom of a bookcase, engrossed in some wondrous tale, less in the room than lost on some other continent. James was invisible.

  Usually Charles would complete his calls and sweep out again. But sometimes he stayed a while longer, enjoying his few moments of solitude, fiddling with a row of pendulous balls which, set swinging, thumped against each other and sent their momentum right through the row, so that the ones on each end kept clacking in and out, ad infinitum.

  Charles sat there, brooding on some new product he was planning, unaware of his invisible son; while James, wrapped up in a story, was sealed off from Charles at his desk; until eventually the click-clack, click-clack of the pendulum – its rhythm aping and perhaps aiding the thump and punch of Charles’ thought – awakened James. Coming groggily out of another world he stood up, the book hanging from his limp hand, and Charles saw him for the first time.

  ‘James!’ he yelled. ‘How long have you been hiding there, you little joker? Put that ridiculous object down: you’ll damage your eyes and soften your brain! Didn’t you hear the gong? Edna rang it twice already. Come on, race you to the kitchen, you scoundrel!’

  Charles regarded reading as a waste of time, that most valuable resource, and made no secret of the fact. He didn’t mean to antagonize Mary, or belittle her. He did his best to be supportive of her writing; he just didn’t make the connection between writing and reading, assuming that her poetry was a hobby Mary pursued cloistered in her dressing-room when she was in a bad mood, or else exchanged aloud with fellow enthusiasts on Wednesday evenings.

  When her first slim volume of poems was published that year, 1963, by a small local press, Charles held the copy she signed for him and stared at it, as if waiting for its significance to magically reveal itself. He turned it over in his hands until he saw the price, five shillings, written on the back.

  ‘How many have been printed, darling?’ he asked.

  ‘Five hundred,’ she told him.

  ‘That’s a hundred and twenty-five pounds,’ he said instantly. ‘What’s your cut?’

  ‘Look, Charles,’ she said, ‘if we sell them all we’ll cover the costs, OK?’

  Charles frowned. ‘I don’t get it,’ he puzzled.

  ‘When I think about what a barbarian I married,’ Mary told him, ‘I try to remind myself why. And do you know what?’

  ‘What, darling?’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  Still, Charles provided the champagne for a party to celebrate the publication, at which Mary’s bohemian friends mixed with Charles’ business acquaintances, because he was loudly proud of her.

  ‘Yes, there are one or two about me, I believe,’ he told the mayor. ‘But of course they’re metaphorical, you know: that’s the fashion in poetry these days.’

  Mary gave James a copy, too, which she inscribed: To my little man, who helped me speak out loud.

  ‘The poem on page twelve,’ she told him. ‘It’s the one I read out that night, remember?’

  He didn’t tell her he couldn’t recall the poem, that what he did remember was Mary’s arm squeezing him tight, and her ribs against him as she recovered her composure.

  Charles was both generous and acquisitive – with a huge appetite for both: generous with what he had, greedy for what he hadn’t. He gave extravagant presents that he sent his personal assistant Judith Peach out to buy; no one could reciprocate in scale, but Charles didn’t mind. On his forty-fifth birthday Mary gave him a dictaphone, a fantastically tiny tape-recorder with a built-in microphone.

  ‘You can record your thoughts on the spot,’ she told him; ‘whenever you want, wherever you are.’

  ‘Thank you, darling,’ he said as he kissed her. ‘I’ve got some thoughts right now,’ he whispered hoarsely. ‘But I’d like to record them in your ear. In private. You remind me of Christine Keeler in this light, and I don’t want to leave any evidence.’

  Charles was such an impractical man that by the time he worked out how to operate the dictaphone – being shown how to by Simon – he’d forgotten what it was he wanted to say. So he tossed it into a corner and forgot all about it, until a few days later he came across Simon in Mary’s dressing-room making an inventory of his mother’s wardrobe.

  ‘Hey, that’s mine!’ Charles exclaimed, grabbing it from his nine-year-ol
d son. He took it straight downstairs to his study and spent the next half-hour recording ideas on his intentions to investigate drilling equipment that might be required for a project such as a Channel tunnel. Except that he pushed rewind instead of record, spoke for ten minutes with the pause button on, and finally succeeded in taping something only to try to listen back to what he’d said and in doing so erased the entire thing. At which point Charles lost his temper and hurled the dictaphone against the door, smashing it into plastic smithereens. The man for whom technology made money was defeated by it himself.

  When the first domestic record players that had separate speakers were manufactured the Freeman Company provided parts and assembled them in the factory. Charles took one look at the finished product and ordered one record deck and twenty-eight pairs of speakers. When they were delivered to the house he had Stanley wire up two in every room, all leading back to the record player in his and Mary’s bedroom, for the simple reason that Charles loved to share the good things of life. He took to putting a record on when it was time to get up in the morning – and if he had to get up, why should anyone else laze around all day? – and then he hollered in the bath along with one of Mary’s Beatles records or, better still, ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’, his pleasure amplified fiftyfold by the knowledge that the rest of the household were being thrilled by the same bombast blasted into their rooms.

  It was a habit Charles carried on for many months, long after Mary had adopted the use of earplugs, and everyone else had worked out how to snip the wires to their speakers.

  The only things Charles really understood, in truth, were numbers. They had more reality for him than letters: he couldn’t spell, and was unable to write more than the incomprehensible memos of an angry dyslexic, which his PA translated into the English language. In the boardroom he unnerved opponents by doodling while they were talking to him, scribbling columns of figures in various currencies, which he could mentally convert into sterling quicker than any abacus and add up in an instant.

  Charles regarded himself as a pragmatic man with his feet on the ground, immune to the temptations of abstract thought or the dangers of introspection; his chief measure of things in life was the effect they had on the stock market.

  ‘Wealth is built on mud and silt!’ he proclaimed. ‘Money is round, and rolls away!’ he warned. ‘If you’ve got a good harvest, never mind a few thistles,’ he advised.

  The more eager of his employees seized upon these home-made proverbs as if they were complex acrostics and discussed them in the staff canteen, attempting to decipher their true meaning.

  Charles Freeman, bullying guru in a suit and tie, addressed the world in abstruse generalizations. He spoke in specifics to his accountant, his general manager and his personal stockbroker, and then not in their native tongue but in monetary units.

  He liked to move his managers around in a game of musical chairs that left most of them with higher salaries and less responsibility. His personal assistant would stay with him until the day of her retirement (the day of his bankruptcy) thirty years later, but ordinary secretaries changed with horrendous regularity: a constant supply of them arrived with a confidence born of glamorous efficiency, only to be seen tottering away on their high-heels with make-up running down their cheeks, having taken dictation of their own letter of dismissal.

  Charles had no more sympathy with feminine complaints than he did with back pains or influenza: ‘We work daily shifts here, not monthly rotas!’ he declared when one of his periodical secretaries phoned in poorly.

  ‘If women can’t work to the same routines as men, they shouldn’t expect to get the same wages!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘We don’t,’ Judith Peach quietly reminded him. Her surname was descriptive: Judith was not yet thirty, and there was something over-ripe about her; she was both louchely attractive and matronly, and she was Charles’ most loyal confidante.

  The one legitimate cause for time off, in Charles’ opinion, was an accident at work. When there was an industrial accident in the factory, however small, the manager responsible for that section was sacked on the spot, and an investigation into its causes ordered. The embarrassed victim found himself visited in hospital by the boss: in Charles burst, full of apologies and encouragement, to autograph the plaster-cast, berate the nurses and plump up the pillows. And then flowers, chocolates and toys were delivered by his chauffeur, not just to the patient but to his family as well, with everyone’s names on gift-wrapped labels. And their next pay-packet showed an impromptu increase in salary.

  ‘But we need proper procedures for this sort of thing,’ the chief shop steward complained. ‘You can’t buy off my members with back-handers, Mr Freeman. What’s more, it mucks up our differentials.’

  ‘Tommyrot!’ Charles declared. ‘Any man gets injured working for me, I’m going to see he’s all right.’

  Charles had an uplifting effect as he marched along corridors, through offices, across the factory floor, his transient secretaries and humbled mandarins flapping in his wake. He could give his voice the peculiar bark of a megaphone; when he addressed somebody more than two feet away, everyone else within a radius of half a mile stopped what they were doing and looked up, afraid they were being reprimanded.

  He also had the habit of standing a little too close to people, invading their personal territory with his laughter, his smell, his energy; and if they took a step back he merely followed, keeping them enclosed within his orbit. Charles treated everyone the same, as a stupid yet vital colleague on a joint venture of huge importance, and would stop at a welder’s bench or at Garfield Roberts’ side to tell a joke, ask after the kids, make an off-the-cuff suggestion. He could dress shirkers down with his arm around their shoulder, tear them off a strip grinning as he did so, while if he was in a good mood then he might suddenly embrace them in an almighty bear-hug, squeezing them so hard he caused the victim to both belch and fart at the same time.

  He became known for reducing distinguished men to tears; for facing down lesser bullies than himself; for firing people on Tuesday and reinstating them on Thursday in a higher position; for commending workers in public and then transferring them to oblivion; for entering negotiations for a wage rise and striding out of them after four sleepless days and nights having agreed an across-the-board pay-cut, only to announce a week later a universal salary increase greater than the union had initially demanded.

  Charles’ extraordinary self-confidence surged through the workforce and productivity increased steadily. The workers, despite his reliance on caprice and whim, regarded him paradoxically as a good boss, hard but fair. The white-collar workers saw him as a still youthful promoter of talent, of their own potential. And, once he’d got rid of the last few stuck-in-the-mud old-timers, the management team saluted him as their captain on an exciting voyage into clear, uncharted waters – the only question each had was whether he’d throw them overboard on the way.

  One Tuesday after school that winter Simon took his cousin Zoe to his father’s factory out at the edge of town between the railway line and the canal. It was a wet, dark afternoon and she suspected that Simon, who’d become a server in the local church, was punishing her for making fun of his religious piety. He led her round the site, past slag heaps and through oily puddles, jumping out of the way of lorries, fork-lifts and dump-trucks that appeared to thunder out of nowhere through smoky, sulphurous air.

  Simon pointed through filthy windows at blast furnaces with orange raging flames, at rivers of white molten metal, at showers of purple sparks from arc-welding torches, at huge hooks like anchors swinging on wires thick as pythons, at great squat engines whose insides whirred and strained as if furious at their immobility.

  Zoe stared at men in greasy overalls with owls’ eyes, their black faces flashing white-toothed grimaces that looked like inexplicable smiles, the soot and grime of their working day steadily erasing racial differences. They shouted at each other desperately above the hammering torrent of noise
in which they stood. She thought this must be hell, and wondered what crimes those men had committed to be sentenced to work there.

  The entire way home Simon reeled off a list of items the factory produced, a list Zoe couldn’t hear because her ears were filled with the roar of internal combustion engines. Gradually, though, as if approaching from far away, Simon’s voice joined up with his lips.

  ‘We make manhole covers, Zoe, iron railings, precision tools, door handles, hinges, buckles, nails and screws.’

  The strange expression on Simon’s chubby face – fat rolling over his schoolboy’s collar – turned out to be pride. ‘We make staples, parts for cigarette lighters, spectacle frames,’ he continued, counting them off on his hands till he ran out of fingers and started again. ‘We make coathangers, keys, hairgrips, drawing-pins, needles. See, Zoe, father makes everything. Things that people need so he makes millions of them. There’s going to be something of ours in every house in England one day. We make tie pins, rubber-holders for the ends of pencils, and the wires holding in the eyes of children’s teddy bears. Now you can understand,’ Simon concluded, smiling benignly, ‘why we’re going to be so rich.’

  Once all her children were at school, Mary thought the time had come to take an interest in the house, only to discover she was too late: Charles had already made the decision to spend some of his wealth on their home.

  Stanley took care of maintenance, repairs and decoration with a minimum of fuss. Mary woke one morning to find there’d been a discreet invasion of their home: the sound of many people talking in low voices far away drew her to the east wing, where she found men in paint-splattered white overalls. Some were stripping paint from doors with blow-torches, others scrubbing ceilings with sugar soap, still more scraping off the old wallpaper, and they were working on every floor. Mary climbed the stairs – upon which the youngest, the apprentices, were sandpapering the banisters, the most fiddly and tedious job of the lot. Mostly they worked in silence but occasionally they leaned towards each other and quietly conversed: it looked as if they were passing on instructions, their whispers were like a stream rippling through the rooms and down the staircase, a whispering fountain of words containing advice and commands. Mary weaved her way up the stairs following those susurrations to their source on the top, third floor, where she found Stanley calmly giving orders.