In a Land of Plenty Read online

  On his way downstairs James was overtaken by Robert chasing Alice and Laura – one already in her choirgirl’s surplice, the other in her bridesmaid’s dress – along the corridors until he tripped Laura up and ripped her dress, which Simon mended for her with his own needle and thread.

  ‘Stop trembling, Laura,’ he told her, ‘I don’t want to stick the needle in your leg. Stop crying.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re not hurt,’ said Robert.

  ‘Shut up!’ she replied in a sniffly voice. ‘I’ll get you.’

  ‘Ha!’

  ‘Go away, Robert,’ Simon pleaded. ‘You’re only making it worse.’

  James was on the telephone when Mary rounded them up to drive down the hill to church. Lewis had rung because he just had to, because he was sure they were going to lose without Jimmy Greaves in the team. It made him feel sick, he said.

  ‘Don’t worry, Lew,’ James tried to reassure him, although Lewis had infected him with the same queasy feeling. ‘Stanley says we beat them at Dunkirk and we’ll beat them at Wembley.’

  ‘We didn’t beat anyone at Dunkirk,’ Lewis’s confused voice replied.

  ‘JAMES!’ Mary’s voice, unnaturally loud, echoed through the house.

  ‘My mum’s calling, Lew. You sure you organized the TV?’

  ‘Yes, we’re going to Harry Singh’s, I told you. His dad’ll be working in the shop and his grandma can’t get out of her chair.’

  ‘JAMES! WHERE ARE YOU?’

  ‘I’ve got to go. See you in a minute.’

  ‘See you in church.’

  ‘Bye.’

  ‘James! There you are! We’ll be late! Come on! Where’s your carnation, for goodness’ sake. In your pocket? It’s all crumpled! Give it to me, James. Have you got the camera? Well, go and get it then. Hurry up. Your father’s waiting in the car. RUN!’

  From the moment they reached their pew and settled down, James became aware of something in the air that he’d never associated with church. In fact he’d never associated it with anywhere, because he’d never sensed it before and he didn’t know what it was.

  Jack and Ben stood up at the front in black- and grey-striped trousers and long-tailed jackets. The choir took their positions in a rustle of surplices and sheet music. The vicar whispered something to Simon. The church was filling up. James forgot about Lewis, who with his parents and little sister Gloria had sat down a few rows behind James and was waiting for him to turn around so that he could give him a look that communicated the depths of their mutual anxiety about the forthcoming match. But when the organist hit the first notes of ‘Here Comes the Bride’ and everyone stood up, James turned round and didn’t see Lewis at all, he only saw Aunt Clare in white on his father’s arm proceeding down the aisle, followed by Zoe holding her train and Laura and the other two bridesmaids carrying small bouquets of flowers.

  James felt his throat constrict and his ears grow hot, and his eyes prickled but they also opened wide as he watched the ritual unfurl before him.

  It passed with the speed and the continuity of a dream. James sat as still as Robert, to his mother’s amazed relief. So much so that she felt towards the end a twinge of annoyance at his absorption, and during the final hymn leant down and reminded him in a curt whisper of the camera she’d bought to avert a social disaster. James wrinkled his brow in irritation and said: ‘Sssh!’

  In the marquee afterwards Charles congratulated Mary on controlling their fidgety son and she told him it was nothing to do with her, James was just engrossed in the occasion.

  ‘Boys aren’t supposed to enjoy weddings, they’re supposed to endure them,’ he declared. He frowned. ‘For God’s sake, Mary, we’ve not got one of those for a son, have we?’

  ‘Don’t be an idiot, Charles,’ Mary replied. ‘I think it’s rather appealing in a boy.’

  Charles, still frowning, marched off towards the bar. James, meanwhile, was finding that the reception promised to be as engrossing as the wedding service itself. He was watching Jack and Clare greet the last in a long line of guests when Lewis sneaked up behind him and whispered in his ear: ‘Come on, Jay, it’s time to leave.’

  James didn’t even look at him. ‘You go on ahead, Lewis,’ he replied. ‘See if Robert wants to go.’ And before Lewis could say anything James marched into the crowd inside the marquee and disappeared.

  Lewis was devastated. He stayed where he was for some minutes, rooted to the spot, released from his trance only by his father’s hearty slap upon his back.

  ‘Here’s my boy! We’re on that table over there, Lewis. Look at these eats! What a spread! Get yourself over before I gobble yours up.’

  Lewis slipped away from his father and, in order to find time and space to think, into the big house. He was wandering through the empty rooms in a state of abject loneliness when he heard the sound of a number of men groan in unison. Lewis carried on, past the kitchen, and found Charles’ chauffeur, the best man, one of the marquee bar staff, a dozen already inebriated wedding guests, and the vicar, all squashed into Stanley’s and Edna’s sitting-room around a small black-and-white television set. Haller had just scored the opening goal for West Germany.

  Two hours later there were more men packed into that tiny room than in the vast marquee. Sat and stood and knelt and crouched in nail-biting silence. Alfred’s head poked around the door.

  ‘The bride and groom are ready to leave,’ he announced.

  ‘Hang on, mate,’ a single voice – the chauffeur’s – replied.

  ‘The fans are on the pitch!’ declared the commentator. ‘They think it’s all over … IT IS NOW!’

  The men spilled out of the house, the vicar dancing like Nobby Stiles, wishing he had dentures he could remove in imitation of England’s toothless hero. The chauffeur dashed over to the Rover and brought it, tyres squealing, to the side of the lawn just as Jack and Clare were saying their final goodbyes – to be driven away through a whole town that seemed to be celebrating their wedding.

  At the very last moment James remembered the camera in his pocket, just in time to take one single photograph. It would have an original composition, the world tilted at a forty-five-degree angle. In the bottom left-hand corner half of Jack’s body and most of Clare’s were climbing into the back of Charles’ Rover in a blizzard of confetti. In the bottom right-hand corner was a forest of guests waving goodbye, leaning over like trees in a terrible storm, as if bidding farewell to two of their fellows uprooted and blowing away for ever. In the top left-hand corner, above the car, Lewis was turning a cartwheel on the grass in the belief that he’d been transformed into Alan Ball, except that because of the camera angle he resembled more a levitating starfish. In the centre of the picture Mary, out of focus, stood with one arm raised. While in the top right-hand corner, on the green grass in front of the dangerously teetering white marquee, Robert was chasing Laura, her dress torn from the hem to above the knee. Owing to James’ photographic inexperience those two occupied the only area of the image that was in focus, and despite their small size, and the fact that it looked like they were attempting to fly, it was possible to make out the expression of panicky excitement on Laura’s face and the blazing determination in Robert’s eyes.

  That evening James wound the film off and gave it to his mother to have developed. A few days later he contrived to pick it up himself, and so hid from her the fact that it had only one image on it. But that skew-whiff photo was to be the first in a secret album, which James would never show to anyone. Until, many years later, a small girl discovered it, and would use it to help mend her broken life, containing as it did pictures of her history.

  It was in the following spring, of 1967, that the children woke one morning of their own accord, because no one had called them: they found Robbie in her room, lying on the floor in her night-dress. Her jet-black hair, which she only ever wore in a tight bun, was spread out around her in weird disarray; some strands were startling white. She was as formidable in death as she had been in life and t
hey were loath to disturb her. Robert, though, plucked up courage, leaned forward and touched her cheek.

  ‘She’s cold,’ he said, frowning.

  The following afternoon James, alone on the third floor, heard the sound of crying coming from Robbie’s room. He crept towards the open door and peeked around the corner, to sigh with relief when he saw it wasn’t Robbie’s ghost but only his mother. Mary was kneeling on the floor by Robbie’s wardrobe, stopped in the midst of putting her clothes into a suitcase, her shoulders shaking. She didn’t hear James come into the room and started when he put his arms round her shoulders.

  ‘What’s the matter, Mummy?’ he asked. ‘Are you crying because of Robbie?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, blowing her nose. ‘Yes, that’s right, James. Of course it is. Give me a hug, little man.’

  Charles and Mary decided not to replace their nanny, but at least to get an au pair for the summer, for Alice’s sake in particular. Pascale arrived in June. She was seventeen years old, and spoke a few words of English with a thick accent, in a low voice that made the boys want to die. They stared at her with open mouths and weak knees, unaware that they were doing so, until Alice took her by the hand and led her upstairs to show Pascale her room.

  James fell helplessly in love. His voice was beginning to break in a haphazard way, his balls had dropped and his limbs were gangly, his whole body become awkward and intense, and Pascale sailed into the first confusion of his puberty like a French Helen of Troy. He lusted after her with a dreadful intensity: at first he had to keep out of her way because even the sound of her voice in the next room or the faint smell of garlic she left in corridors gave him an instant erection he found difficult to conceal; to actually find himself in her immediate presence provided a rush of blood that amounted to a medical crisis, and he fainted. The trouble was he couldn’t keep away. He followed her round the house in a state of servile agitation, opening doors, carrying her bags, making the tiny cups of bitter coffee she drank sweetened with six spoonfuls of sugar, running her bath and providing fresh towels until she pushed him backwards out of the bathroom, his hard-on aching towards her, the last of him to leave.

  Pascale couldn’t help being provocative. She smoked thick, white, foul-smelling cigarettes the boys devoted much energy to stealing from her pockets and which made them retch. Within a fortnight of her arrival her command of the English language was such that she was able to render anyone unwise enough to enter into debate with her speechless, through a combination of skittishness and Gallic rationality, confusing everyone with logic. When she sunbathed on the lawn James and Robert came to blows for the privilege of rubbing Ambre Solaire into her brown skin.

  Robert was just as imprisoned as James by Pascale, only he didn’t break out. He scrutinized Pascale with a look less of passion than of mistrust, as if resenting the impression she made upon him that he could not deny. His response was furtive: he tried to spy on her in the bathroom through the keyhole; he crept into her room and fondled her underwear, unsure whether he wanted to suffocate in it or rip it to pieces. He lowered his guard rarely: once when they went swimming Robert dived into the pool and swam underwater towards Pascale and grabbed her legs; he pulled her under and wrapped his limbs around her body, oblivious to their need for air, a limpet of pre-pubertal fascination. It took all Pascale’s strength to struggle to the surface and reach the side, where she hauled herself out of the water with the boy still clinging to her.

  Simon, too, was helpless. Pascale flirted with everyone, not on purpose so much as with the abstract self-confidence of her youth. Only with Simon did Pascale flirt openly – maybe she knew it was safe. The way she kissed him goodnight, fluttered her eyes at the door and blew kisses across the room made him laugh, and he copied her, returning her seductive gestures, throwing them back at her, and that made her laugh. He did funny walks, he aped her smoking her sickly cigarettes, he told silly jokes. What Pascale liked most of all was Simon’s mimicry of his brothers in their attentions towards her: both James and Robert were too intense for irony, theirs was a desperate, humourless passion and ripe for caricature. Of course they knew it, and they knew too when they were being made fun of, they’d hear Pascale’s laughter just a little out of control and they traced it through the house to where they found their older brother mimicking their hopeless, helpless desires. And Simon would become aware of them too, their fury escaping from them like smoke, but he carried on in a state of mounting elation, because the happiness he got from making Pascale laugh was greater than any fear he might have to pay for it later.

  James, however, was her favourite: his flattering adoration, more innocent than Robert’s, was ultimately more welcome even than laughter.

  ‘You are my little prince, non?’ she told him. ‘You must grow up queek, Jams,’ she demanded ‘so’s I can marry you, non?’ He knew she was kidding and tried to tickle her, so she tickled him, and soon they were wrestling. Pascale needed little encouragement to join in. It was a voluptuous game with her: she didn’t hurt him, she wasn’t clumsy like Simon, who was likely to crush him with his weight; neither did she fight underhand like Robert, who in a good mood could start a mock fight playfully enough but as soon as he got the worst of it responded with a jerky kick or flailing fist.

  Pascale was different. She embraced him and he embraced her and then they struggled and strained for supremacy. It wasn’t really fighting at all; James realized that this was a kind of artful pastiche, not just of wrestling either but of some other struggle too. He loved the smell of her, of sweat and garlic. He loved the feel of her breasts through her jumper, squashing beneath his weight. They rolled over slowly, as if in a medium thicker than air, she rolled him over with a great effort. All his limbs strained but he couldn’t quite resist her. He loved the colour in her cheeks and the sweat on her upper lip, and the grimaces and grunts she made as if it were mortal combat when really he knew she was stronger than he was and she was only feigning.

  The game drew towards an end when she raised herself up and pinned him down. Then she started to tickle him and to laugh: ‘I’m the winner, Jams, zis ees the end, you can never escape me,’ as he spluttered and wailed and begged for mercy.

  * * *

  It was a time of civil war among the children. And it wasn’t only the boys who’d been afflicted. Alice thought she must have been living in a vacuum before, because Pascale arrived and filled her life. She was a big sister, best friend, protectress, wise counsellor and heroine, rolled into one. Pascale taught her the French words for bodily functions, lent her clothes, and taught Alice that summer to write in joined-up handwriting, in strangely chequered rather than horizontally lined exercise books; Alice would for ever after cross her sevens, in the French style, in a repeated act of unconscious homage.

  It was a difficult time for Laura, who found herself cast out. She was the only one immune to Pascale’s charm and kept out of her way; she wasn’t immune to jealousy, though, and waited impatiently for Alice to return to their friendship.

  Despite the season Alice was struck down that summer with several of her minor illnesses. Pascale joined her in bed and sang Rolling Stones songs with a tuneless, husky accent, and stroked Alice’s forehead to help her sleep. Robert, who’d always withstood sickness with Stoic grit, now feigned it, only to be sent packing because he couldn’t fake the symptoms. Assuming Alice had only been doing the same, but successfully, he cornered her one day by the fruit trees. Pascale caught him twisting each of Alice’s limbs in turn: she grabbed a stick and gave Robert a furious beating which caused even him unaccustomed, squealing tears that brought Mary outside and almost cost Pascale her job. She was only saved from being sent straight back to France by her capacity for rational argument: a long discussion took place in Charles’ study, within a silent house in which four children all held their breath, at the end of which a compromise had been reached whereby Pascale promised not to strike anyone with a sharp or indeed a blunt instrument, in return for the children to ref
rain from bullying, sarcasm and mimicry, a once-and-for-all truce that lasted a whole day.

  The object of the boys’ desire was short, with a slightly bent nose, eyes close together, olive skin and the close-cropped hair of a gamine, and she was as sexy as they thought she was. When she took the children to buy sweets in Mr Singh’s store young men of the neighbourhood gaped from a distance.

  ‘What eez wrong wiz Ingleesh boys?’ she asked seven-year-old Alice. ‘Zey don’t even know ’ow to whistle.’

  They did, though, rack their brains for excuses to visit the house on the hill, and Stanley and Edna got fed up with answering the back door to obscure offers of assistance or purchase. Did they need anyone to mow the lawn? Would they like to buy this used rabbit hutch for the kids or that second-hand radio in perfect working order? Edna pondered those offers at length, but Stanley soon cottoned on, and told them to bugger off.

  When the children went back to school Pascale left to take up her place at the University of Rennes. And the house was plunged into a period of mourning, as if to make up for the fact that such had failed to occur after Robbie’s death.

  From that day James, as if in psycho-metabolic response to his first love’s departure, began to put on weight.

  ‘It’s only puppy fat, little man,’ his mother tried to reassure him. ‘I think it’s sweet.’ He thought she might prove this by kissing his pudgy cheek or hugging his chubby body, but she was floating past him.

  ‘You’re getting slow!’ Lewis yelled at him on the football field when James failed to reach a miscued pass up the wing.

  ‘You’d better drop back into midfield,’ the games teacher at their new, comprehensive, school told him.

  ‘What’s wrong with not being a scrawny skeleton anyway?’ Simon complained at tea. Simon had always been tubby.

  ‘He’s right,’ Edna agreed. ‘Anyway, your body’s got to find its own size, and at your age it tries out different shapes to see what suits it.’ She set plates of sandwiches and soggy cake on the table and poured glasses of milk. James noticed her wedding ring squashed in place by the flesh of her fingers.