In a Land of Plenty

by Tim Pears

  When James had got dressed Zoe gave him a brandy and then she rubbed his hair with a big blue towel, slowly, massaging his scalp as much as she was drying it.

  When James’ hair was dry, Zoe dropped the towel but carried on stroking his scalp with her hands. Music from her record player drifted into his head.

  Queen Victoria,

  do you have a punishment under the white lace,

  will you be short with her,

  make her read those little Bibles …

  Eventually James said: ‘I’m never going back there again.’

  ‘You can stay here,’ Zoe told him. ‘You know that.’

  ‘I’m never going back there again,’ James whispered.

  PART TWO

  THE HOSPITAL (2)

  ZOE CAME INTO the hospital ward in the department of Neurology, and made her way to James’ bedside. She bent to kiss him – carefully, since as well as the wires and drip attached to him, he had also been put on a ventilator – but then she saw that there was now a bandage across his throat covering a scar, with a metal object inserted into the wound.

  ‘It’s quite normal,’ a voice behind Zoe said. She turned. It was Gloria, the staff nurse. ‘A tracheotomy. With this his body will ventilate on its own again.’

  Zoe nodded. ‘Thank you,’ she said, and Gloria left them.

  Zoe threw out flowers from a vase on the bedside table and put others in their place: yellow roses, whose peachy smell she hoped might reach him. She sat down and took his hand, and held it for a long time lost in thought.

  ‘We sat on the roof of the cinema on warm summer evenings after the last film had started. We sipped white wine, ate olives, smoked. A mouthful of wine held before swallowing, a drag on a cigarette. Talking about nothing, time going by. A black olive; a segment of orange. On the roof on a warm summer evening.’

  ‘I want to show you something.’

  Zoe realized she was being addressed, and turned round. It was the ward sister.

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘The patient is unconscious. He’s in a persistent vegetative state. He can’t hear a word. His body maintains its heart beat, blood pressure, ventilation and respiration, but that is all. Occasionally he blinks; that is all. His only response to the world is a mechanical one.’ She struck James’ midriff through the sheet, and his limbs flexed rigid. ‘He didn’t feel that,’ she explained. ‘He’s comatose. But’, she added, as she turned to go, ‘it’s your breath you’re wasting.’

  Zoe sat a while, to recover her composure. Then she squeezed James’ hand goodbye, and made her way out of the ward.

  Chapter 5

  CLARITY

  JAMES STAYED WITH Zoe for some weeks, contributing towards his food and board by selling tickets and ice-cream in the cinema, and wearing Zoe’s father’s cast-off clothes, which hung loosely on his skinny frame. Then a vacancy appeared for a trainee photographer on the local newspaper, the Echo, and Zoe helped James fill out the application form, type a CV and prepare for his interview over mid-morning breakfast in her tiny kitchen: smoking French cinéphiles’ cigarettes and drinking foul cups of herbal tea, Zoe read out questions she’d prepared the night before, after James had gone to bed, that drove him to equal extremes of inferiority and irritation.

  ‘Do you agree with Auden, James,’ she asked, ‘that photography brought a new sadness into the world?’

  ‘A new sadness?’ James struggled.

  ‘OK: is photography inevitably less an aesthetic medium than an anthropological tool?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ James complained. ‘Ask me about f-stops,’ he suggested. ‘I know what f-stops to use.’

  ‘Look, James,’ Zoe said, exasperated with her cousin’s obtuseness. ‘Think about it. As Lévi-Strauss said, history is the source of our greatest anxiety: the past, once harmonious, now broken and crumbling before our eyes. We seek consolation through knowledge, and yet that knowledge gives us no hope, no optimism, only, if we’re lucky, a certain detachment. Right?’ James stared dumbly back at her. ‘Yes?’

  ‘So: in photographs we see, above all, the past. Whether a photograph’s of a person, a building, a landscape, whatever, more than anything else it’s a record of something we know – as Lucretius pointed out – has since changed, decayed. Which in turn reminds us of our own state, and fills us with pessimism.’

  James frowned. ‘And that’s what Auden was on about?’

  Zoe waved her cigarette impatiently. ‘No, no, James, he meant something else, he was referring to the way photographs force us to look at what in life we have the freedom to turn away from. Anyway—’

  ‘But, Zoe,’ James interrupted, ‘they’ll just want to see if I know the different grades of printing paper and stuff like that. Here, test me on my depth of field tables.’

  ‘If they don’t ask you these sorts of questions,’ Zoe responded, her voice rising, ‘they bloody well should do. You should ask them. They’re fundamental. Don’t you ever read, James?’

  Zoe went up to the house to retrieve James’ own clothes and most necessary possessions – which mostly meant his camera equipment – as well as his boxes of prints, from which, spread around the floors of Zoe’s small flat, they selected a portfolio of his best work. For the first time Zoe saw the evidence of what James had been doing with his hermetic youth and was impressed, if not by the derivative and banal pictures themselves, then at least by his commitment.

  ‘You’re really doing this thing, aren’t you?’ she said, perusing the prints.

  ‘Sure I am,’ James replied quietly.

  James got the job, after a disconcertingly brief interview with the chief photographer, a stooping man called Roger Warner. He barely glanced at the portfolio, his main concern apparently less James’ aptitude than his contract.

  ‘We don’t want a lad who’s looking to head off to London as soon as we’ve trained him,’ he told James.

  ‘I’ve got no plans of that sort,’ James reassured him honestly.

  He offered James the job on the spot, start Monday, and on the way out he asked him: ‘You related to Charles Freeman, James?’

  ‘Yes,’ James replied curtly, hurrying away.

  The flat above the cinema which Zoe had inherited from her grandmother Agatha was a suite of tiny rooms. ‘Of course I’m twice as big as she was,’ Zoe told James. ‘Or maybe human beings required less personal space in those days. It’s no wonder Harold went travelling: he was probably suffering from claustrophobia.’

  Those cramped quarters seemed to James, who’d grown up in the big house on the hill, like a miniature museum whose curator, rather than opening it to the public, had chosen to live inside it. It was stuffed with artefacts Harold had brought back as presents for his mother and then Zoe had carried home for herself: a Makonde carving, Kenyan sandstone sculptures, a voodoo mask from Haiti, Tibetan bells, a wooden statue from Benin, a pot-bellied Buddha and a shrunken head from Borneo. They crowded in upon each other, totems from distant cultures jostling among themselves for breathing space.

  The walls were covered with Turkish rugs, an Aboriginal hide-painting and Indian miniatures illustrating episodes from the Kama Sutra, all of which left little room for the hundreds of dog-eared, travel-worn paperbacks Zoe owned. She read them at great speed but couldn’t bear to throw any away, no matter how frayed they were, and so, with no space for bookshelves, she’d discovered places other people would have overlooked in which to stack them: on the stairs, either side, leaving a narrow funnel up which to climb; on top of the toilet cistern; underneath chairs; and wedged in the window frames, which, as she explained to James, provided insulation from wind and noise and also saved money on curtains.

  ‘But they block out the light, Zoe,’ he pointed out. ‘You may not have noticed, sweetheart, but I’m a nocturnal animal,’ she told him. ‘I’m a night-owl.’ It was true. After locking up the cinema at eleven in the evening – or one in the morning when she had late-night screenings, Friday and Saturday – Zoe sat up half the n
ight reading. She lit a joss-stick, poured herself a glass of brandy and rolled a joint, which she shared with James but which made him feel even sicklier than the incense did: it gave him a dry mouth and a headache, and the way it loosened his moorings to reality made him feel anxious rather than relaxed. So Zoe let him roll them for her; the ritual gave him more pleasure than the drug itself. He stuck three papers together to make a large taper; broke up an ordinary cigarette and spread the tobacco; held a flame to Zoe’s block of Lebanese black until it crumbled easily.

  ‘Hurry up, James,’ Zoe berated him, ‘I’m waiting over here.’

  James rolled the joint up, licked the paper and eased it tight. He twisted one end, and tore a tiny strip of cardboard off the cigarette packet to insert in the other. Then he handed it to Zoe. She held the crooked, wrinkled reefer in front of her.

  ‘Keep practising, kiddo,’ she sighed.

  ‘Shall I try it again?’ James asked eagerly, reaching a hand towards her.

  ‘No way,’ Zoe replied, snatching it away from him. ‘I’m not that patient.’

  Zoe lit the joint and took a deep drag, holding it in her lungs – looking as if she’d been assailed by some painful memory – before exhaling: the intoxicating smell mingled with the incense.

  ‘It’s like coffee,’ James opined, ‘it smells better than it tastes.’

  They talked more about the family. Zoe told him what she learned when she went up to the house for a subdued Sunday lunch: that Laura was healing; Edna was out of hospital; everyone was lying low, hoping it would all blow over. What else could they do?

  ‘It’s a bad place,’ James said. His anger was all confused. He hated Stanley, and his father, and Robert; and he knew he hated Laura for having got pregnant – with Robert – without actually admitting that he did, and he didn’t understand any of it. Zoe listened patiently; she told him that families screwed up, sometimes, and that there would always be a refuge for him here.

  They read together. It was a habit Zoe had acquired on travels with her father, she explained: as studies showed, travellers spend 15 per cent of their time on the move, 5 per cent searching for places to eat and sleep, and 80 per cent waiting in railway stations, docks, airports and at the sides of roads. So she’d read voraciously, swapping books with fellow travellers.

  ‘Listen to this,’ she said. ‘Orwell kept a childhood photograph of himself on the mantelpiece, right? He says: “I have nothing in common with the boy in the photo, except that he and I are the same person.” Good, eh, James?’

  James had never seen anyone read as fast as Zoe. She scanned one page, then the other, and turned over to the next. And whenever he looked to see what book she was reading, it always seemed to be a new one. James, who was trying to follow her lead, only found himself watching her, her speed-reading a hypnotic spectacle.

  ‘How can you take anything in?’ James demanded. ‘I don’t see how you can.’

  ‘Well,’ Zoe pondered, ‘I suppose as you get older, you find that you sort of know what you’re looking for.’

  ‘So you’ve just gradually speeded up through practice?’

  ‘Who, me? No. I’ve always read this fast.’

  Zoe often forgot that James was present, and talked back to the authors.

  ‘Oh, bollocks!’ she announced.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ James asked, startled. ‘Did I do something?’

  ‘What? Who?’ Zoe responded dreamily. ‘Did you say something?’

  ‘No, you did,’ he told her.

  ‘But why did you start?’ she asked.

  ‘I didn’t, you d— Nothing,’ he said. ‘Forget it.’

  Or else he heard her murmur: ‘That’s a nice way of looking at it. Interesting.’

  ‘What’s interesting?’ James enquired.

  ‘God, you must be psychic, James,’ Zoe informed him. ‘I told you you might be. I was just reading this: “He who has a true idea at the same time knows he has a true idea, and cannot doubt the truth of the thing … As the light makes both itself and the darkness plain, so truth is the standard both of itself and of the false.”’

  James smiled. ‘You were talking to yourself again, Zoe.’

  ‘No, I wasn’t,’ she replied. ‘I was speaking to Spinoza.’ As if it were quite natural that her only intellectual companions had died, some hundreds of years ago.

  When James had read a chapter of his book (borrowed from Zoe’s library) he closed it with a yawn and went to bed. The first nights he stayed there Zoe put a sheet and blankets on her small sofa for him. He awoke every hour with a different joint aching, and Zoe found him in the mornings half on the sofa and half on the floor, contorted and snoring; eventually she took pity and shared her own bed with him. It was big enough, a double mattress that took up most of the floor space in Zoe’s bedroom, leaving only room for a shallow chest-of-drawers. That in fact was the most surprising thing about Zoe’s entire flat: James imagined she must own a huge wardrobe, because whenever he saw her she was always wearing something different. In reality Zoe only ever wore one of two pairs of jeans or a cotton skirt, with a blouse and pullover, and the apparent variety of her attire was an illusion created by scarves, bandannas, beads, bracelets and rings.

  James slept soundly in Zoe’s bed. She informed him in the morning, with unusual bad humour, that he’d snored, snuffled, tossed and turned all night, waking her up every fifteen minutes. He apologized profusely, and she forbore from banishing him back to the sofa. The only things that woke James were scented steam wafting through from the bathroom in the middle of the night, or noises from the kitchen, where Zoe made herself the snacks of an insomniac.

  Now that he had a job, though, it was time for James to find a place of his own. He took Zoe’s invitation to stay as long as he wished as generosity; he didn’t like imposing on her, and he felt clumsy in her tiny flat, where he was always knocking his head or elbows, and endangering her Third World antiques. He knew he must be restricting her life, a life filled with ticket sales, deals with distributors, special screenings with invited guests – actors, directors – she appeared to know well. Even though she was only twenty-three years old she seemed much older than he was and he assumed he was getting in her way. So that James didn’t wonder whether, if he wasn’t there, she would be reading and smoking alone in her small flat above the cinema.

  ‘You can stay as long as you like, sweetheart,’ she told him. ‘It’s nice having you around, James.’

  ‘Thanks, Zoe,’ he said, looking through his own paper’s ‘To Let’ ads.

  Back at the house, meanwhile, it was true what Zoe told James: Robert kept a low profile, rarely sleeping in the house; Laura was healing, remarkably quickly and well. Edna was out of hospital, her heart no longer fluttering – instead it was hardening inside her. And there was much that remained unsaid.

  Edna was so straightforward and matter-of-fact a woman, and Stanley so naturally taciturn, that no one except Laura realized that after Edna came out of hospital she resolved never to speak to her husband again. She was unable to forgive his assault on their daughter, who thenceforth became their go-between. The first message Edna gave her was to instruct Stanley to arrange separate sleeping arrangements: so he swapped their marriage bed for two single ones from a distant guest room. What Edna had meant was that she wanted separate rooms, but she didn’t want to enter an argument, or even a negotiation, via Laura, and so she accepted the arrangement, and from then on she and Stanley slept on opposite sides of their bedroom.

  Stanley too had been stunned by the ferocity of his anger, but he was too proud a man for it to occur to him to apologize to anyone. Edna refused to speak to him, and he couldn’t say the words he had to say – ‘I’m sorry’.

  The strange thing was that Laura understood him – both his brief, sudden violence and his pride. She knew that deep inside he felt contrition, but had no way of expressing it, and she forgave him: his entire subdued demeanour she perceived as an apology. But Stanley didn’t know
that. He carried on with his work, he took his seat at mealtimes, he watched television in their small sitting-room in the back quarters, and he made his way to a single bed across the room from Edna, who sometimes woke to the sound of her husband weeping in his sleep.

  As for Laura, the only physical evidence that remained of the beating was a slight twist in her nose; the gynaecologist assured her there’d been no damage to her reproductive organs. There seemed to be no lasting damage to her personality, either. If anything, she grew closer to her father once Edna stopped talking to him, the role of go-between forcing her into a kind of pitying complicity; and she spent more time with her mother, too, helping her in the kitchen after school. Since neither mother nor daughter knew how to articulate their feelings directly, they did so through the medium of food. Edna’s hardening of her heart towards her husband had not yet extended to other people, and she taught Laura her basic recipes, imparting the knowledge that cookery is a scientific process relying on precise quantities, preparation and cooking time; while Laura in turn made her mother appreciate that after you’ve made a dish once it’s fun to experiment the next time.

  It took James a while to find his way around the newspaper offices because, due to his shyness, he was content to remain inside the photographers’ department filing negatives, developing film and assisting the printer, Keith, in the darkroom, where he had to learn the procedure.

  Keith was a tubby, enigmatic young man with a pale, lardy complexion who peered at the world through tinted spectacles, with the look of an anxious bat. James soon realized, having spent most of the waking hours of his youth in a darkroom of his own, both that he was a far better printer than Keith and that this was irrelevant: Keith had acquired the necessary craft for grading prints for reproduction in the newspaper.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he demanded as James used a piece of cardboard as a mask to give part of a print more exposure to the light.