In a Land of Plenty Read online

  ‘That’s right, the moulding a different shade from the ceiling,’ he informed the foreman of the decorating firm. ‘Royal blue the dado, then scumble up to the picture rail, that’s what the boss wants. And none of your watering down the beer, Jocky, we don’t want none of your grinning through around here.’

  Mary went outside and accompanied Alfred on a walk around the grounds, whose every square inch was carefully divided up: rose beds and ornamental ponds, avenues of acacias and rock gardens, creeping plants and flowering shrubs, a walled vegetable garden and a croquet lawn were all plotted on an architectural map hanging on one wall back in Alfred’s potting shed. He took Mary over to another wall covered with gardening tools hung on large nails, and he lifted off a small pair of red-handled secateurs.

  ‘These could be yours, Mary, and no one else will use them,’ he suggested. ‘You can prune the roses whenever you feel like it. I’ve just bought some lovely weeping standards: this morning I planted a Félicité et Perpétue by the gateway to the west.’

  Mary then made the mistake of coming up with suggestions of her own. She went shopping for children’s clothes without Robbie; cut a recipe out of a women’s magazine for Graham Cracker Chocolate Pudding and cooked it herself in Edna’s kitchen; bought some decorators’ stencils and began painting Rococo patterns on the wall in the hallway; and ordered bulbs and seeds from a Sutton’s catalogue which she planted right under Alfred’s nose.

  Stanley, Edna and Alfred began to treat Mary with an icy politeness, and Charles found her in her dressing-room with the curtains drawn.

  ‘They think you’re criticizing them,’ he explained. ‘They feel undermined. Anyway, those are menial activities, darling. You know I hate to see you upset. I can see you might be bored. Why don’t you speak to my friends’ wives? Join them in golf, shopping, charity work, that sort of thing.’

  Mary shrugged. ‘I don’t like your friends’ wives,’ she told him blankly.

  It was soon after that that Mary had an accident sleepwalking. Usually she was found standing in some doorway, hovering, as if on the verge of escape but not quite able to make up her mind. But then one night Mary got confused inside her dream and thrust a door open, only to find that in reality it was a window that she’d smashed her arms through. Thirty-five stitches seemed to cure her; and for the time being, they did.

  In the mornings the children set off together to go to the same primary school, halfway between their house on the hill and the factory (which was where most of the other pupils’ fathers, and a good many of their mothers, worked). Mary had assumed that her children would go to the twin private establishments – a boys’ and a girls’ preparatory school – in the north of town, but Charles wouldn’t hear of it.

  ‘If there’s one thing I can’t abide,’ he told her, ‘it’s privilege. The old school tie, the old boys’ network; it’s been the ruin of this country, an aberration, a divided nation, Mary. The playing fields of Eton, the Oxbridge connection, we’re having none of it.’ He grew red in the face and his eyes bored into her.

  ‘Look at me!’ he said, using himself as exemplar of what he most admired. ‘I went straight to work, I never learned a ruddy thing at school. No, darling, I got my education on the factory floor. I raised myself up by my own bootstraps, through my own efforts!’ he proclaimed, choosing to ignore the fact that his mother owned the firm in the first place. ‘If Simon expects to take over,’ Charles concluded, ‘he’ll have to prove himself just as I did. And,’ he added with an emphatic grin, ‘he’ll have me to contend with.’

  Mary watched the children go off to school each morning. One day she followed them a short while later, and marched into each of their classrooms. ‘There’s been a crisis at home, I’m afraid,’ she told their teachers, as she rounded them up and packed them into her Zephyr saloon and drove away.

  ‘What’s wrong, Mummy?’ James asked anxiously.

  ‘What’s happened?’ Simon demanded.

  ‘You won’t be young for ever,’ she told them brightly. ‘You don’t realize it yet. But that’s the tragedy,’ she explained, as she swept them off on a mad adventure: they drove all the way to Brighton on the south coast, where she gave them her allowance to lose as gaily as she did on slot machines on the pier, they got sick on toffee apples and candy floss, and watched her strip to her underwear before following her example and chasing her into the sea.

  Until suddenly Mary said: ‘Simon! James! Look at the time! Quick, hurry! Find Alice! Robert, come here! We’ve got to get back. And don’t anyone tell your father. It’s our secret, OK?’

  The children took a long time to fall asleep that night, despite the sea air in their lungs, intoxicated still by their mother’s high spirits, and their illicit behaviour.

  The primary school was a small brick building with four classes, each presided over by a woman, and the children graduated from one teacher to the next: Miss Shufflebotham in the infants’ class was insanely unpredictable, flipping from tears to fury to rapture throughout the day; Miss Edwards was stern and lovely, and when she first smiled she released a wave of bliss through the classroom; Mrs Beech – the headmistress – was absent-mindedly affectionate, and caused many generations of her pupils to confuse her memory, in later life, with that of their mother; and Mrs Claiple was a statuesque matron with no sense of humour, angrily mystified by the rude puns and innuendoes children competed with each other to insert into their answers to her questions.

  Competition was the common factor in James’ experience of primary school: seeing who could piss the highest in the outside, open-roofed urinal, saving it for the afternoon break when their bladders were so full that sometimes one of the boys managed to send his stream right over the wall and into the playground; races at summer sports days James always won; autumn conker fights he always lost; walking in orderly crocodile formation to the swimming pool on the link road and then leaping, yelling, into the chlorinated water (James got stinging eyes, gulped in water and felt sick, and hated it when Robert’s class came too, for his younger brother ploughed up and down, totting up impressive lengths); prolonged, shifting winter snowball fights; and the lunchtime when Eleanor Patterson, a girl in Mrs Claiple’s class above him, invited him inside her classroom while the others were all out in the playground and, unable to think of how else to articulate their mutual attraction, they decided to arm wrestle, during which he was startled by his first erection.

  James was called the Bat at school on account of his sticking-out ears, and his habit of hanging by his knees from the climbing-frame, enjoying the sensation of blood filling his head and the sight of the playground turned upside down. He didn’t mind the nickname because there was a Batman series on TV, and he turned the ridicule to his advantage by coming to school one day in a black cape he’d stolen from Robbie’s trunk, as well as bringing a home-made mask he gave to Eleanor, explaining that she could be Catwoman. They swooped around the playground during dinner-break, and James went from being an oddball to the coolest kid in the class as the others queued up to convince him of their credentials for the roles of Robin, Penguin and the Riddler.

  As for education, James most enjoyed Mrs Beech’s impromptu oral arithmetic tests, because they made his brain fizz, his hand the first to shoot up and then waving it desperately, high, bursting with his knowledge and the glory. It was the only time in class James could remember not being bored. He preferred to be outside, dashing around the playground playing any kind of sport, although the one he liked most, from the very beginning, was football.

  Once a week the headmistress’s husband, Mr Beech, came in to take the older boys for football. He divided them into two teams, handed out different-coloured bibs, and proceeded to referee. He was such a stickler for the rules that it appeared as if the game itself were a side-issue to the more serious subject of discipline: if anyone questioned one of Mr Beech’s decisions with so much as a quizzical frown, he made them shiver on the touchline for five minutes; and if the game flowed
freely for more than a minute, Mr Beech grew visibly frustrated, until he was unable to restrain himself from blowing his whistle and then having quickly to invent some offence.

  The only thing that allowed the game to continue without interruption was if Mr Beech got carried away shouting instructions.

  ‘Get rid of it, lad!’ he yelled. ‘Don’t mess about with the ball, Hayhurst! Leather it!’

  He shouted himself hoarse and – if the boys were lucky – too breathless to blow the whistle.

  ‘Get stuck in, lad! Back! Back! Thump it, you great softie! Put the boot in, boy! Go on, don’t be scared, hit him! Show some character, Freeman!’

  And then one Wednesday Mr Beech announced that the following week they would be playing not each other but a proper match, against a primary school on the other side of town. It was an unprecedented event and the whole school began to buzz with excitement, because everyone was to be given the afternoon off lessons in order to cheer the team on.

  Mr Beech declared that he would be considering his players during the intervening days and would announce the team via a sheet of paper pinned to the school notice-board the day before the match. James was certain he would be selected, because he was one of the best two or three players. He wasn’t so sure, however, about his best friend, Lewis; and on his account he began to worry.

  Lewis was the first-born son of Garfield, the immigrant, and Pauline, Stanley’s sister. Garfield worked on the assembly-line in the Freeman factory. He was only in this country, he often told James and anyone else who cared to listen, by mistake: he’d just come to visit a friend before going on to settle in America. Garfield never quite got used to the fact that he was still here, and would maintain throughout his life that he was ‘on me way to ’Merica, James’. He’d taken temporary work in the factory, met Pauline there, and before he knew it he had a wife and a son, a permanent job and a council house on the estate that sprawled out of the east side of the town.

  Garfield was a fine cricketer, almost as good a batsman as Harry Singh’s father, proprietor of the Post Office Stores and Newsagent, with whom he shared the opening partnership in the East Side Social Club cricket team, and he never really forgave Lewis for reneging on endless patient coaching in the back garden and preferring soccer to cricket – especially when Mr Singh’s son was such a promising youngster, and had recently fielded for their team when someone was taken ill.

  Harry was in the same class as James and Lewis. He thought football was a rather undignified, scrambling-around-in-the-mud sort of sport, a game for barbarians and almost as primitive as rugby.

  ‘People should never begrudge the Empire,’ Harry’s father had told him, ‘because it gave cricket to the world.’ It was one of the few things they agreed on.

  Lewis, though, loved football. He just wasn’t very good at it. He was gangly and awkward, his limbs – giving notice of the height he would achieve in maturity – long and uncontrolled, like the young shoots of some wild plant. No one could remember a time when Lewis wasn’t a full head and shoulders taller than his friends. His mother Pauline’s memories of him even as a toddler were of staggering around like a spindly giant. She did know (it was a recorded fact) that he’d been a normal enough weight at birth – 8½ lbs – and so she came to the conclusion that, although it hadn’t made an impression at the time (since after all he was her first and she hadn’t been sure what to expect), he must have been born a long and skinny baby. And she imagined him before that with his limbs curled up tight inside her, like a string of bony sausages in her womb.

  Lewis had the intelligence of an athlete but his body let him down. It wouldn’t do what he wanted: he couldn’t trap the ball to save his life, it bounced off his shins, and he was unable to pass it in a straight line, putting an unintentional spin and curve to its direction. He also had, already, a certain sense of personal elegance which made him unwilling to head the ball and mess up his hair or to get his long legs muddy by slide-tackling an opponent.

  In fact, if James were honest, he wouldn’t pick Lewis if he were choosing the team, at least not on merit, which both his father and his teachers – and certainly Mr Beech – clearly regarded as the only basis for selection in such matters. James, however, was aware of another consideration: Lewis was his best friend.

  ‘We’ll both score three goals each, Jay,’ Lewis told him. ‘I dreamed it last night: one with each foot and one with my head.’

  ‘You must have been dreaming, Lew.’

  ‘Oh, I wasn’t really asleep, exactly.’

  By the weekend, though, he began to think that Lewis’s selection in the team was more important to him than to Lewis himself. While James was becoming more and more excited, Lewis appeared to be losing interest, and kept changing the subject. On Friday afternoon they walked together after school to Lewis’s house, discussing their geography project on the rivers of the African continent. Garfield was at home, having worked the early shift, and was bouncing Lewis’s baby sister Gloria on his knee.

  ‘Just look at these hands, man,’ he told James; ‘she’s a born wicket-keeper.’

  Lewis took a bottle of milk from the fridge and was pouring them a glass when his father said: ‘I hope you’re not frettin’ like this son of mine over so stupid a thing as a football team. At least when I was your age and forcin’ me way into the Bridgetown Boys Eleven I didn’t bite me nails.’

  James saw Lewis’s eyes blaze.

  ‘I didn’t go losin’ sleep like this here misguided son of mine, wide awake when I’m off to work at five in the morning. I hope you’re not so foolish, boy.’

  ‘No, Garfield.’

  ‘Good. Well, have a word with him, then.’

  ‘Yes, Garfield.’

  Of course James didn’t. He tried to persuade Lewis to test him on statistics from his Rothman’s Football Year Book, or to go outside and let loose his rabbits in the back garden, or even to discuss the stupid geography project. Anything to get Lewis out of his silently fuming mood. But Lewis just dumped himself down in front of the television and glared at the screen, and James let himself out of the back door.

  James walked home, racking his brains for a way to make sure Lewis got picked. He even considered writing Mr Beech a note saying he’d play only if Lewis did too, but he suspected that Mr Beech was impervious to blackmail and would perfectly happily drop James, as a matter of discipline. And James wasn’t sure that he was ready for quite such a sacrifice. It was then that he thought of God. He knew – or at least he’d been told – that God was everywhere, saw every action and could hear every thought (if, that is, he existed at all, the one detail over which adults tended to disagree). James closed his eyes and tilted his head up, disregarding passing pedestrians or motorists who might think him insane.

  ‘Please, God,’ he said inside his head, ‘please, if you’re there, and if you’ll do something for me – and I’ve never asked you for anything before so I don’t see why you shouldn’t – please, make Mr Beech put Lewis in the team for Wednesday. If you do, I’ll … I’ll … put back Simon’s Action Man he thinks he lost.’

  On Tuesday morning James approached the notice-board in the school corridor in a confident frame of mind, and stared at the note pinned up there with horror and dismay: Lewis’s name was on the list, but he’d been named as substitute, twelfth man.

  So, God, you won’t listen to me, won’t you? James thought to himself, in his first crisis of faith; but he didn’t dwell on it because the real problem was more pressing than a religious one, and James wasn’t yet ready to concede defeat.

  The solution when it came to him, halfway through science later that morning, was simple: to put one of the other players named in the team out of the picture. And the means of doing so made James feel both inadequate and evil.

  Robert was two years younger than James but he was just as big and was the most feared boy in the school. His entry into a game marked the beginning of its end. The most popular one involved boys and girls taking tu
rns to catch prisoners and drag them to a base at the centre of the yard, where those caught had to submit to kisses. The game’s viability rested upon the children’s agreement that once caught they had to give in to their captors. Robert, though, was uncivilized. He kicked and yanked himself free or else, if held by two or three girls, went coyly limp and waited his chance till he felt a girl’s hold on his arm go slack, and then he’d wrench it free and punch her and the others, and make his escape leaving behind pain, tears and a game in ruins.

  Robert was eight years old, and everyone knew not to cross his path. He tended not to bother anyone as long as no one called him dumb or stupid, and few made that mistake: other children sensed that Robert had little compunction about hitting someone, about inflicting pain. Nor indeed (what was truly unnerving) about receiving it.

  Now, as soon as the bell for dinner-break was rung, James went to look for Robert, having decided upon the most suitable candidate for intimidation on the team list. When he found his brother, James simply said: ‘Come and help me a minute.’ Robert didn’t ask what he wanted, he just followed James, and they cornered Gary Evans at the back of the playground.

  ‘If you tell Mr Beech that your knee’s bad, and your mum says you can’t play tomorrow, I’ll give you all my spare bubblegum cards,’ James told him.