In a Land of Plenty

by Tim Pears

  ‘Since you clearly know what you want to do I won’t stand in your way, James,’ she told him. She was a large, elderly lady on the verge of retirement, with an aristocratic manner quite incongruous in the school, who frowned upon any attempt to copy what had gone before.

  ‘Do you think they’re good?’ James whispered, showing her some prints he’d made of the garden pictures.

  ‘They’re wonderful, James,’ she assured him. ‘But rather life-like, don’t you think?’ She frowned. ‘In photography a certain surface realism is a given, and is therefore that much easier to subvert.’

  ‘But I want them to be realistic,’ he objected.

  ‘Well, I won’t stand in your way, James. But do think about it. For heaven’s sake don’t just snap.’

  The fact was he didn’t think about a great deal else. He spent more time inside the darkroom than outside it; at supper time Edna stood at the foot of the stairs banging the gong until he opened the door and came swaying down the stairs.

  ‘Jumping jellybeans!’ Alice exclaimed, staring boggle-eyed at James’ face as he came into the kitchen. They all turned and stared at him. ‘Horrible haggises!’ Alice cried. ‘You’ve been so long in there your skin’s infrared!’ she teased. They all laughed and James blushed, obligingly turning her joke into reality.

  ‘What’s that infernal smell?’ Charles demanded.

  ‘It’s those bloody chemicals,’ Robert said in his sandpaper voice.

  ‘They’re probably poisonous, James,’ said Simon.

  ‘There’s no need to swear at the dinner table,’ Laura told Robert.

  ‘Best wash your hands, dear,’ Edna suggested to James.

  ‘Ouch!’ Robert exclaimed. He’d tried to stamp on Laura’s foot under the table, but she’d been attacked enough times to know when it was coming, and Robert had stubbed his heel on the floor instead.

  Charles ignored him. He nodded to Stanley, who produced an already opened bottle of red wine from nowhere.

  ‘I want us to drink a toast tonight,’ Charles loudly proclaimed. ‘Dilute the girls’ with water, Edna, if you will.’

  ‘That’s not fair, Daddy,’ Alice complained. ‘What about him?’ she protested, pointing at Robert.

  ‘Now, now,’ Charles scolded. ‘He’s fifteen, he can cope with a glass of wine.’

  Robert flashed his stony grin at Alice and Laura. When the glasses were filled Charles stood up and said: ‘I’d like to propose a toast to Simon, here. He doesn’t know it yet, but he’s about to be promoted: junior manager in the Marketing Department. Everyone tells me he’s doing his father credit down there. We’re proud of you, boy!’

  Charles chinked his glass against Simon’s, and everyone else did likewise, including Robert, who slammed his against the others’, each one a little more startling, until when he reached Simon there was the sound of shattering glass and bits sprinkling into a bowl of Brussels sprouts.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Edna.

  ‘Now look what you’ve done,’ said Laura.

  ‘It’s only a glass,’ James whispered.

  ‘It’s only blood,’ said Robert, inspecting his cut finger.

  ‘Congratulations, lad,’ Stanley told Simon, scolding his protégé Robert by ignoring him.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Edna, picking shards of glass from among the Brussels sprouts.

  No one was surprised by Simon’s rapid promotion. Quite apart from the fact that it was inevitable – since despite Charles Freeman’s demands of the various heads of department of his business that they should treat Simon exactly the same as any other young trainee, they each came to the same conclusion: that it was safer to grant favour than to deny it to the pleasant young son of the man-in-charge. Apart from that, James could see for himself Simon’s own development. His ability to listen to other people with a tolerant smile and to then afford them the benefit of his advice hadn’t deserted him; in fact he’d developed it into a personal trait, except that he found he needed to listen less and advise more: Simon (and everyone around him) discovered he possessed an opinion on any subject that arose and revealed himself to be an expert in all fields of human endeavour.

  ‘You’d do best to plant the begonias over there in the shade,’ he told one of the team of three gardeners that had been required to replace Alfred. ‘Train clematis up a west-facing wall, if I were you, and bed those tulips down in July.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ the gardener replied.

  ‘Take a left, then a right, and straight on over the roundabout,’ Simon told a car-load of late, lost German tourists who’d meandered down the drive by mistake one Saturday afternoon. ‘Right at the lights, keep going for half a mile, and it’s there on your left,’ he continued.

  ‘Danke, sank you,’ they nodded, frowning, as they reversed away.

  ‘That won’t take them anywhere near the museum, Simon,’ James frowned.

  ‘If you don’t understand something, James,’ Simon told him, ‘if you’re not sure, make it up.’

  James eyed his older brother sceptically, but Simon waved his objections aside.

  ‘It’s better to be wrong than confused,’ he explained. ‘Remember that, James. It makes people feel safer.’ Simon had a certainty of always being right, presumably copied from his father, and it was a confidence rarely dented by error. He came upon Alice and Laura conducting a chemistry experiment in Alice’s room with a set she had been given that Christmas. Simon watched from the doorway for between three and four seconds before striding over.

  ‘What on earth are you two trying to do?’ he demanded.

  Alice explained that they were combining hydrogen and sulphur. ‘Mr Hughes said we wouldn’t be able to do it at home,’ she told Simon, ‘but I’m going to prove him wrong.’

  ‘Well, your tubing’s too long for a start,’ Simon said, grabbing hold of it. ‘This bit here should be shorter,’ he said, twisting it. It split like a peapod.

  ‘Simon!’ Laura exclaimed.

  ‘Er, yes, that’s much better, you see, cut it off there,’ he told them. And then, when they’d done it, he advised: ‘You need more heat, the Bunsen’s on too low.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Alice demanded.

  ‘Oh, we did all this sort of thing in fourth year,’ Simon assured them, turning up the flame, which changed from yellow to blue and white and attacked the retort suspended above. The glass shrieked and then cracked and exploded apart, pouring liquid onto the naked flame and filling the room with a sudden putrid smell.

  ‘Simon!’ Alice yelled.

  ‘Look,’ he said calmly. ‘See? There’s your problem,’ he said, backing out of the room, holding his nose. ‘Your beaker was too thid. Why od earth did’t you use a stronger wud?’

  It wasn’t just in the small, practical details of existence that Simon was an expert. He understood the deeper mysteries of life as well, and in those early days he provided answers to people’s problems with a mixture of astrological wisdom gleaned from women’s magazines and Edna’s kitchen aphorisms.

  ‘I suspect that a fear you’ve had in the back of your mind since childhood,’ he told one of the girls from the typing-pool, who’d followed him home for some further, more private advice, ‘could be a contributory factor, Debbie, to the history of a certain complaint.’

  She thought about it for a while. ‘Our dad was a womanizing drinker,’ she told Simon, nodding. ‘Mum always put up with him. She was so stupid. You think I’m repeating her mistake?’

  ‘Or else you’re looking for the same behaviour in your boyfriend, Debbie, finding things that aren’t there.’

  ‘I’m sure he’s seeing someone, I can feel it,’ she said vehemently. ‘I know he’s lying.’

  ‘Get him to make you toast for breakfast,’ Simon advised her. ‘Watch him. I always say: if a person can’t cut bread straight, it’s a sure sign of dishonesty.’

  A few people in the company’s departments thought Simon possessed an oracular wisdom. Some were merely perplexed by this precociou
s, overweight sage. The truth was, though, that most people called him Bullshit Simon, at first behind his back (since no one was stupid enough to antagonize the son of the boss), until gradually it emerged that the other thing Simon enjoyed was having the mickey taken, and what saved him from being unbearably pompous was that he didn’t take himself seriously, and even the young men of his own age who derided him quite liked Simon at the same time.

  The one thing that Simon did take seriously was his health. The hypochondria of his childhood afflicted him still in adult life. In the morning he staggered downstairs clutching the banisters with his eyes glued together like a baby’s, unable to open them until Edna had administered a mug of strong coffee; but he then went the rest of the day without having another cup because even if he drank it for elevenses it kept him awake at night with heart palpitations. He was unable to enjoy cheese after dessert because it played havoc with his dreams, while after-dinner chocolates made him wake up in the middle of the night with a migraine – and when that happened he’d spend the following day mooning around the house in his silk pyjamas and dressing-gown, confusing his father later on with a request for the compulsory (and in this case parental) sick-note.

  Despite his size – the same as Charles’, who had an iron constitution – Simon was fragile.

  ‘We are what we eat,’ he chided Robert, who was pausing to shovel into his mouth whatever was on the sideboard as he passed.

  ‘Sugar rots the brain,’ he told Alice, who was able to consume a box of chocolates within the duration of a single soap-opera episode.

  Simon believed that diet was the key to healthy living. He was constantly on a diet, which he stuck to with unwavering discipline, except that it was always a different one, changing constantly. For a time he ate nothing but fruit that Edna had to order in bulk from the market.

  ‘You must have a varied diet,’ Edna tried to convince him.

  ‘You’re absolutely right,’ he replied. ‘Maybe you could get hold of some cumquats?’ And she had to give further orders to the immigrant greengrocers on Factory Road.

  At supper, instead of the normal meal everyone else shared (allowing, of course, for Alice’s vegetarian dish and the fact that Robert was most likely somewhere else), Simon piled up a small mountain of plantains, raspberries, oranges, mangoes, apples, pomegranates and pears, a pyramid of fruit from behind which he lectured the others on the beneficial effects of cleaning the system with food that was a combination of water and sunlight, that was all, becoming visible as he ate his way through it from the top down, leaving a plateful of peelings and pips.

  ‘And look at that, you see,’ he rounded off: ‘all good stuff for the compost heap.’

  A couple of days later Simon announced that fruit was all very well but too much of it gave you acid, and also caused a person to pass wind more than was strictly necessary (a fact that had already been pointed out to him, but which he had ignored). They assumed Simon had seen sense, only to be informed, with equal conviction, that the body knows best what it needs and therefore a person should eat exactly what they like most, when they crave it. For the next few weeks he drove Edna mad by swooping into the kitchen at odd hours of the day and requesting coq au vin for breakfast, pâté de foie gras and champagne for a mid-afternoon snack, and a full grill of ‘sausage, chips, bacon, eggs, tomatoes, beans, black pudding and fried bread, please, Edna,’ for supper.

  It was an unpredictable diet that Edna managed to provide without complaint, thanks to her unfailingly servile generosity and a good deal of assistance from the deep freezer she’d recently had installed in the pantry.

  ‘Bloody hell, Mum! Let him make it himself!’ said Laura, who regarded Simon’s demands as beyond the bounds of reason, and disliked seeing her mother being taken advantage of.

  ‘It won’t take me a moment, dear,’ Edna told her.

  Even so, Simon’s whimsical diet had pushed even Edna close to the end of her tether when he abruptly announced that in fact there was nothing wrong with what they normally ate, it was simply a question of moderation, and furthermore most of the major problems people encountered in their day-to-day wellbeing could be traced back – as recent research showed – to the fact that everyone swallowed their food too quickly.

  The rest of the family breathed a sigh of relief as Simon rejoined them for meals and ate the same as they did, and what did it matter that he made sure Edna only served him with minute portions of everything? ‘One thin slice of chicken breast, please, two carrots, thank you, half a potato, yes, twenty-five peas, please, no, not thirty, twenty-five, and a soupçon of gravy, that’s it, a touch more, stop! Thank you, Edna.’

  That was fine, there was nothing wrong with such behaviour, they welcomed Simon back into the culinary fold. Except that he then insisted upon chewing each small mouthful fifty-two times.

  ‘You all gobble up your food, you see,’ he told them. ‘You don’t give your stomach time to tell your brain it’s full. And then when it complains later you’re surprised.’ Simon shook his head. ‘People are so silly.’

  It took Simon so long to finish his food that gravy congealed and vegetables sagged, but that didn’t affect his appetite: he nibbled his way like a tenacious rabbit through to the last pea, while the others had to watch, having finished their much larger portions ages before but unable, owing to the etiquette of table manners, to begin to clear away until the last person – Simon – had put down his knife and fork.

  The other children lobbied their father for a change in the unwritten rules of dinner time, and he was about to succumb when Simon discovered a new diet.

  ‘We are not sheep!’ he declared. ‘We are not cows! We are human beings! Carnivores, that’s what we are. How about a barbecue, anyone?’

  And so it went on, Simon promiscuous but utterly dedicated to each new diet. Whether it was the period he refused to come to table without a pocket calculator, in order to count the calories, or when he ate nothing but grapes two days a week, Simon stuck to it with a fastidiousness and willpower altogether absent from the rest of his life, and left his family fuming – and wondering how it was that the only thing that didn’t change was Simon’s size.

  ‘The thing is, James,’ Simon told his brother, ‘some people like someone to tell them what to do, and other people like to pretend they don’t ever listen to anyone else. But we all end up in the shit.’

  James admired his brother’s confidence, and envied it, but he couldn’t make him out. There was something clearly parodic about Simon’s counsellor’s posturing, both an apprenticeship for their father’s actual power and a pastiche of it. Except that Simon rarely broadcast his wisdom without utter conviction.

  ‘You don’t know anything, Simon, why are you always pretending you do?’ James whispered. ‘Why do you tell everyone how to live their lives?’ he demanded.

  ‘You might well ask,’ Simon replied. ‘Pearls before swine. I mean, it doesn’t matter what you plant if it doesn’t rain. A complete waste of breath. I do sometimes wonder why I bother.’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ James persisted.

  ‘Haven’t a clue, James.’ Simon shrugged.

  He had his reasons, James reckoned. Quite often girls spent the evening in the old nursery that had been converted into a sitting-room up on the third floor. Simon read them their horoscopes or quizzes from the women’s magazines he bought, and advised them on their make-up.

  ‘They’re a good smokescreen,’ Simon confided cryptically in James. ‘They’ll keep Dad off my back. Stick around, James,’ he continued, ‘Cheryl’ll be here any minute. And Sue. I think she likes you. Come back! You can hide in your darkroom any time.’

  But James didn’t enjoy their company. For one thing, none of the family would see more of Robert for days on end than a brief, blurred glimpse of him grabbing a handful of fruit and nuts on his way in or out of the house; but whenever Simon’s friends from the typing-pool dropped by and were directed by Charles, with a conspiratorial wink, up t
o the third floor, then Robert would appear out of nowhere.

  ‘He just smells their perfume, that’s all,’ said Alice.

  ‘He’s got very good hearing,’ said Simon. ‘He can even hear what you say,’ he told James.

  ‘He spies on people,’ said Laura.

  Most of Simon’s young women visitors ignored James. They appreciated Simon’s gnomic advice, and they enjoyed the way he made them giggle when he read from articles outlining what real men really want or how to be an independent woman and still have a satisfying relationship. James could see that his big brother was like a big sister to them. Whereas he, James, was just a little brother. When he plucked up the courage to whisper something they lost interest before he’d got halfway through. So if he hung around at all, then he just sat back in a corner of the room, and contented himself with composing imaginary photographic portraits of Simon’s young women.

  Robert, however, changed the chemistry in the room, just as he had with Pascale years before. He sat cross-legged in an opposite corner of the room, fiddling with a padlock with oily fingers: he smelled of old engine oil and fresh sweat. And the young women stopped joking freely with Simon, they turned serious, said less than ever and let Simon read whole articles without interruptions other than his own, and now and again their eyes would glance into the corner and meet Robert’s with an almost perceptible, abrasive sound. Occasionally at the end of an evening one of them would get up to leave and then lose her sense of direction making her way down the three flights of stairs and along the corridors and through the hallways, and by some fluke end up not at the back door but in Robert’s room, right next to the old nursery.

  James was the middle son and he was lost somewhere between Simon’s camp self-confidence and Robert’s sexual allure. He realized he didn’t need to hide behind a camera to be invisible. He could be in a room for half an hour and someone would bump into him and jump: ‘James! Where did you come from?’ At school, teachers questioned his absence the day before, having failed to notice him in the middle of the class. Yet he also felt intensely self-conscious, that unless he kept a low profile he would stand out for his ugliness and awkwardness.