In a Land of Plenty

by Tim Pears

  ‘It’s horrible,’ James whispered to Joanna, ‘warning the birds to keep away like that; it’s like bullying.’

  Joanna looked at him pitifully. ‘You don’t know anything, James,’ she told him. ‘They hang them up for maggots, then the maggots drop and the pheasants eat them. It’s food, that’s all.’

  James spent the daylight hours of his weekends on the farm when he should have been revising for A-levels, and when the exams were over he spent every day of whole weeks there, finally loading a film in the camera one Tuesday in July: he no longer startled animals every time he entered a field – birds panicking into the sky, bolting rabbits swallowed by the ground – and was able to skirt around the women at their work without them stopping to watch what he was doing; he was no longer under the illusion that he was invisible, but at least hoped that he was inconspicuous. In reality, whenever any of the women saw him prowling around with one eye closed, they were reminded of the pantomime of his first arrival, and had to stifle their laughter.

  Gradually, though, his absorption in his ridiculous hobby, and his persistence, won them over, and they found him more endearing than absurd.

  ‘Are you sure you’re a Freeman?’ Margaret asked him. It was no secret that she didn’t much like the rest of her relatives. ‘You’re not a bad chap at all, really,’ she told him approvingly. ‘And I’m sure you’ll find something better to do with yourself eventually,’ she added to encourage him. She never referred to his mother Mary, her sister. She’d never understood her sister’s marriage, or how anyone could stomach being yoked to someone else like that for more than a week. And as for bringing up children twenty-four hours a day, they were more trouble than turkeys, with their moods and illnesses. Not that Margaret was quite insensitive enough to share this opinion with James; it did, though, mean that she had little sympathy with him, and she treated him with the same straightforwardness as she did everyone else.

  ‘What are you wasting your time for, James, taking snaps of sheep?’ she demanded as he got in the way while they were bedding the sheep down the night before shearing, not on straw but on stinging nettles, which wouldn’t catch in their fleece. ‘Sheep are all the same, they’ve got no character. Why don’t you go and photograph the pigs? Now they’re worth it.’

  The two sows were Margaret’s favourite animals. She wouldn’t let Joanna or Hilary go near them, insisting on looking after them herself.

  ‘A dog looks up to you, James. A cat looks down on you. But a pig is equal. Scratch her behind the ears like this, that’s what she likes.’

  James caught the bus out every day and walked into the farmyard. He’d bought himself a pair of wellington boots, which as well as keeping him clean also protected him from the ferocious beaks of the geese, whose aggression was unrelenting. They were the only animals he didn’t like, and he gained a great deal of pleasure from standing still and letting them peck at rubber, as he looked around the yard. It was a mess. Odd pieces of rusting machinery poked through grass and nettles. Smoke rose from a pile of rubbish. Hens pecked at grit and dirt. He breathed in the sweet smell of silage from a mass of it underneath black plastic covered with hundreds of old tyres. It had mulched into a huge cake, from whose side moist bricks were cut to be loaded on a trailer and scattered across a field. There was something edible, something mouthwatering, about that mixture of shit and straw; it looked as soggy and heavy as Sarah’s carrot cake.

  ‘Can I do anything to help, Aunt Margaret?’ James volunteered once at tea, thinking he should make some contribution for all the meals Sarah gave him. ‘Shall I clean up the yard or something?’ he asked.

  ‘What’s wrong with the yard?’ she countered. ‘Did you hear that, Sarah? What a cheek!’

  ‘He’s right. It’s a shambles.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We don’t need a man’s help around here, do we, Marge?’ said Hilary.

  ‘Of course not!’ Margaret agreed.

  ‘We don’t need his either,’ said Joanna, nodding towards James.

  ‘You look like a strapping young man to me,’ said Sarah, who noticed James’ blushes.

  ‘We’re only fooling, aren’t we, girls?’ said Margaret. ‘No, James,’ she said, ‘really, it’s rather quaint to have a man about the place.’

  The time when James had been frozen was coming to an end, although he didn’t yet realize it. He spent a week photographing the horses: an old nag put out to grass and a temperamental mare Margaret was looking after that some local girl couldn’t handle. Joanna rode her most evenings, and James took his first photographs of a human being under the pretence of capturing an airborne horse flying over a jump in the horses’ field.

  ‘Go on, lie right under the beam, James,’ Joanna called to him. Having saved him from the geese, now she wanted to trample him to death. ‘Don’t look so scared,’ she shouted, ‘I’ll clear it easily.’

  ‘I’m not scared,’ he whispered, his finger trembling on the shutter release.

  ‘I’m coming!’ she yelled, as the horse’s hooves grew louder.

  Joanna was tall and strongly built, and she smelled of milk. She and Hilary were the same age as the nurses back in the hospital ward, and they were just as brusque and just as sophisticated. It always sounded strange when Margaret or Sarah referred to them as the ‘girls’, but James loved it when they did; it made them appear a bit less intimidating.

  Joanna looked after the cows: it was the closest thing to a full-time job on the farm, because apart from the fruit trees – whose produce diminished each year, since Margaret never made time to prune and replant properly, but which still provided a crop of pears for perry and apples for a local chutney factory – the small dairy herd was the only thing that earned any real income. Joanna brought them in for milking twice a day – or, rather, they came of their own accord, loping across fields, their heavy udders swaying, and into the yard.

  It was Joanna who, when it was time for calves to be weaned, took their mothers to the furthest field on Margaret’s land, where it butted up against Jack’s much larger farm, beside their pine copse.

  ‘Why are you bringing them all the way over here?’ James whispered.

  ‘You’ll find out soon enough,’ Joanna told him. She was right. The cows mooed constantly, a bathetic chorus. By lunchtime the next day, even though he was photographing the farmyard cats basking in the sunshine outside the farmhouse porch half a mile away, James couldn’t stand it any more.

  ‘I ought to get back and process some of these films,’ he told Joanna. ‘I think there’s a bus in half an hour,’ he whispered.

  She peered at him, her face muddy. She leaned her mouth to his ear. ‘They’ll do this for another two days, and then they’ll forget all about their calves and stop,’ she whispered back. She smelled of milk and sweat, and made James nervous. He lurched away.

  ‘Don’t forget to come back,’ Joanna called after him.

  ‘Is my sister-in-law turning you into a country bumpkin?’ Charles boomed at the breakfast table the next morning, ‘now that you’re coming home smelling of manure instead of chemicals?’

  Simon and Robert chortled.

  ‘Talk to the animals, do you?’ Robert asked him.

  ‘Shut up, Robert,’ said Alice.

  ‘Ee-ore. Oink, oink. Baaa,’ Robert mimicked, but in a whisper. Laura, who was sitting beside James, put a hand on his arm and the other over her mouth. When she’d recovered herself she glared at Robert. His eyes narrowed. He leaned across the table towards her and made obscene snuffling noises.

  ‘Now, now, children!’ Charles declared. ‘Cut this nonsense out.’ Charles was always disconcerted by how much less servile his children were than his employees.

  ‘Do you want a game of chess later on?’ Laura asked James after breakfast.

  ‘Not today, I can’t,’ he replied. ‘Sorry. I’ve got to go into school. I’ve got to pick something up.’

  James waited till the next day, Saturday, before taking his A-level res
ults to his father’s study before lunch: he’d passed each exam with the minimum grade, and he thought Charles might be in a better mood at the weekend.

  ‘My God! Three Es!’ Charles roared. ‘Is that the height of my son’s achievement? My God! It’s just as well I don’t set much store by education.’

  Alice was turning out to be the only academic success among the children. She was top of her class, gaining straight As without really trying, without any apparent ambition. At the age of fourteen she tried to explain the thirty-two proofs of Euclid to her older brothers, who each came up as best they could with hurried excuses: ‘I don’t have time now, Alice, I’m late, yes, of course I understand, I remember doing these when I was your age, a bit younger actually, but I’ve got to run now.’

  She did well enough in arts subjects, but it was in science that she really excelled. Charles was confused. He’d always assumed that one of the boys would be good with numbers, a girl with words or pictures. Eventually he accepted that it was possible for Alice to have inherited his head for figures and his business acumen, except that he could see from brief perusals of her homework that the algebraic equations, formulae and periodic table that engrossed her were in fact quite different – with their strange symbols, and letters mixed in with the numbers – from the columns of accounts that represented money.

  Robert, on the other hand, had failed most of his O-levels; but then no one had expected him to pass any. They all knew he’d been no more than a fleeting visitor to school and had already started selling the old cars Stanley towed into the yard for him and which he repaired and then tested at high speed up and down the drive in noisy exhibitions of black smoke and burning rubber.

  ‘Look at Robert!’ Charles boomed at James in his study. ‘Hardly learned to read, poor boy. They’ve barely taught him the shadow of a shade. But,’ Charles tapped his skull, ‘he knows which way’s up. He might be uneducated but he’s not stupid, I don’t care what anyone says. But you, young man, what are you going to do?’

  James wasn’t sure. His art teacher hadn’t been much help. Miss Stubbs was so surprised that he’d been given a pass at all for his weak drawings and his straightforward photographs that when he’d bumped into her at school the day before to find out his results she hugged him to her ample bosom.

  ‘Well done, you stubborn boy,’ she cried.

  James extricated himself gracelessly from her embrace. ‘What should I do now?’ he asked. ‘Should I go on to college, do you think?’

  ‘You should have thought about it last year, when everybody else did,’ she told him. ‘Still, taking a year out’s a good idea, in my opinion, as you know. I certainly wouldn’t stand in your way. But you must do what you want to do, dear boy. As you surely will, no matter what I say.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he whispered. ‘If I go to college, Father’s too rich for me to get a grant. But I don’t want him to support me.’ He shook his head. ‘I just want to take photographs.’

  ‘I should hope so,’ she replied, ‘after avoiding my life-drawing classes for two years. Just don’t snap,’ she begged. ‘And study the great painters,’ she added as she turned towards another pupil approaching them, another student to congratulate or console.

  ‘What? You mean the great photographers?’ he murmured after her.

  She turned her head without breaking stride. ‘The painters, dear boy. Turner, Vermeer, Caravaggio.’ She waved her hand as if pointing them out among the group of pupils a few yards away. ‘We’ve been struggling with light for centuries. You snappers have only just started.’

  ‘Yes, you, James!’ His father’s voice now boomed into his thoughts. ‘What are you going to do?’

  James felt his heart racing and his cheeks burn; he was fatally unprepared, but he couldn’t, he wouldn’t, admit it. He swallowed.

  ‘Well,’ he whispered, ‘I’ve been thinking, Father. I should go to London. And Amsterdam. And Florence. To take photographs, study the painters, look at the light—’

  ‘All right, James,’ Charles interrupted. ‘Stop your gibberish. I don’t understand a word you’re saying. You want a holiday, is that it? Fine.’

  James’ cheeks burned deeper. ‘You don’t listen to me,’ he hissed. ‘You never listen. It’s not a holiday.’

  ‘When you get back, I suppose you’ll be wanting me to see you through college, eh? Rely on your old man to see you through? The thing is, James, I can’t see the point in supporting you now you’re old enough to earn your own keep, when you don’t even like studying to judge by these lamentable grades.’

  ‘I’ll get a job then, Father,’ James whispered.

  ‘Rubbish!’ Charles proclaimed. ‘I want at least one of my sons to get a decent education. You should go to university. Anyway, who’s going to give you a job? I know I wouldn’t!’ Charles laughed heartily. ‘Do you want a whisky, James? I’m going to pour myself one.’

  James could feel himself trembling with impotent rage. ‘No,’ he whispered.

  ‘Please yourself, boy,’ Charles yelled from the drinks cabinet.

  ‘No,’ James repeated. ‘I’m going to be a photographer, Father. I’m going to get a job as a photographer.’ He turned and made for the door, swaying.

  ‘Fine!’ Charles called after him. ‘Good! But where are you going to study? Which college do you want to go to?’ he shouted. ‘I need to know if I’m to help you get in.’ But James was already limping up the stairs.

  James went straight to the darkroom and stayed there, processing negatives and then making a print of the temperamental mare, except that instead of printing the whole frame he blew up a detail, excluding the horse entirely apart from a few hairs of her mane. He was left with a grainy, soft close-up of Joanna’s face: she looked so calmly concentrated that anyone would have thought she was sitting in a chair watching TV and not on an unstable horse flying through the air.

  It happened to be one of the hottest days of the summer, and James missed most of it, shut up in the infrared light of the darkroom. While the prints were washing in the old guests’ bath he went outside for some fresh air, and the light was so glaring he could hardly even squint for some minutes.

  ‘It’s too bright out here,’ he said.

  ‘James!’ Simon’s voice called. ‘There you are. Bring your camera over here. I’ve got you some work. Robert wants some photos.’

  Alice and Laura still went to the cinema on Saturday afternoons, though less often now to watch the children’s matinée than to copy Zoe’s clothes and her gestures and listen to her stories on the flat roof of the Electra, where she sat on warm afternoons sharing good Lebanese black with the projectionist, while the film drifted in and out of focus on the screen below. When Zoe heard from the girls about James’ impending travels, which news Charles had immediately shared over lunch, she gave them a lift home from the cinema, excited by the possibility that someone else in the family had inherited wanderlust genes. And she suspected that James could do with some traveller’s tips, since he’d be too shy to even ask directions, and anyway if people couldn’t hear what he was saying in English, what chance would he have in Italy?

  ‘So James is setting out on the yellow brick road,’ she said, accelerating dangerously past a double-decker bus up the hill. ‘The Tin Man’s setting off on his own.’

  The boys were round the back of the house in a rare tableau of fraternity: James had agreed to photograph a couple of Robert’s resurrected rattletraps for the Midlands Trader, while Simon advised him on the most flattering angle, as well as telling Robert how to give the small engine of some tin lizzie a fruitier noise. The girls had to close their eyes and brace their knees as Zoe careered her Morris Minor around the side of the house, accelerated towards the yard, and came to a crunching halt a few inches from the scrapheap Robert was working on. Robert was the only one who stayed where he was: Simon and James picked themselves up from the ground where they’d flung themselves, and the girls opened their eyes, as Zoe got out of her car.
/>
  ‘How much you want for this old banger?’ Robert asked her in his gritty voice, tapping her bonnet.

  ‘It’s not for sale, mighty mouse,’ Zoe said, going up to him. ‘And another thing: my ticket seller said she caught you trying to get into the X-film again on Thursday night. I’ve told you before, you little squirt, I could lose my licence. I’m warning you, Robert, don’t do it again. At least,’ she added, ‘not until you’ve grown a few inches.’

  The girls tittered. Robert scowled. He grabbed a spanner and ducked back under the raised bonnet, banging his head.

  Simon finished dusting off his elegant jacket and trousers. ‘I thought all those drugs were meant to relax you, darling,’ he told Zoe ruefully.

  ‘Don’t be simple, Simon,’ Zoe replied.

  ‘And what is that extraordinary animal on your back?’ he continued. ‘You must let me take you shopping some time.’

  Zoe was wearing clogs, loon pants, a cheesecloth shirt, two rainbow scarves around her neck and one round her ringleted hair, and an Afghan coat. She raised her chin at Simon and stroked it with her thumb in a gesture of disdain, without breaking her stride towards James, whose face was split in two by a huge grin: their cousin Zoe was the only woman he knew who was neither charmed by Simon nor impressed by Robert, who even seemed to actively prefer his, James’, company.

  ‘Hi, sweetheart,’ she said, kissing him three times on the cheeks. ‘What’s all this about you hitting the open road, you sly mole, you?’

  They drank tea by the pond and James tried to smoke one of Zoe’s multi-coloured Sobranie cigarettes.

  ‘Why haven’t you been to my cinema lately, you rotten stay-away?’ she demanded. ‘Hasn’t Alice shown you the programme? And don’t tell me you’re put off by subtitles, or I’ll throw your cake in the water.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ he asked. ‘I thought you didn’t really like films.’

  ‘Not any more, James,’ she told him. ‘I’ve been converted. I just saw a print of this film some idiot was raving about on the radio.’ It was the first time Zoe had sat through an entire film without falling asleep, she admitted, since the last time she’d watched The Wizard of Oz as a child in her grandmother’s cinema, wondering whether her mother bore any resemblance to the Wicked Witch.