In a Land of Plenty

by Tim Pears

  ‘Not me,’ he apologized. ‘I can only turn pink like a lobster. You can have me white or pink, but not brown. Limited colours available. Sorry.’

  ‘And how do you call yourself a photographer when you see the world through sunglasses only?’ she chided him.

  ‘All the great photographers wore shades,’ he assured her. ‘They’ve all had weak eyes.’

  ‘Oh, yeh?’ she said.

  ‘It’s a well-known historical fact,’ he lied. ‘Otherwise they’d have invented colour photos to begin with, wouldn’t they, instead of sepia? There’s the proof. Think about it, Anna.’

  He suffered, he told her, from photophobia: an aversion to light. An ironic condition for a photographer, to be sure, but one that would one day put him, he said, in celebrated company. He’d be compared with the deaf composer Beethoven; with the crippled footballer Garrincha; the blind painter Alan Benson; the stuttering poet Charles Lamb.

  ‘Idiota,’ Anna Maria murmured. She lay on her stomach with her back browning as James, hidden in the shade of his wrappings, got carried away with his thesis: he wouldn’t produce his eventual masterpieces until the ailment had reached an advanced stage and he was living entirely in the shadows, and his photographs would take on the added poignancy of his condition – of his human fragility, his fragile humanity – and people would weep with the poignant pity of it. Until even, he proclaimed, the infrared lamp of the darkroom would be too bright for his eyes, and he would retreat for ever into darkness.

  ‘My last pictures will be black,’ James declared. ‘But what a black! Beyond the black of death, mere mortality, a black that holds a consciousness of consciousness.’ He paused. ‘Or maybe of unconsciousness. You see what I mean, though, right?’

  But from Anna Maria there came no reply, for she’d fallen asleep in the sun.

  Anna Maria stayed more and more often with James in his cramped bedsit, until she was practically another lodger in the house. In fact she spent more time there than James, and she soon knew the other lodgers better than he did. The Plant Woman gave her a chrysanthemum in a terracotta pot, Jim repaired a puncture on her scooter, and she even extracted a smile from the young cleaning lady.

  ‘I like the Eenglish,’ she told James. ‘They are not nosy.’

  ‘I hope not,’ James replied; he thought that if his landlady found out about this extra tenant she might double the rent.

  Anna Maria soon had more of her clothes in the room than James did, in a heap on the floor. He squashed all his clothes into one of the two deep drawers in the chest. ‘This other one’s free now,’ he said, ‘you can put yours in here.’ Anna Maria stuffed them in, but within a couple of days most were scattered across the carpet again.

  ‘It’s such a small room,’ James ventured, ‘maybe we should try and keep it tidy.’

  James was both irritated and enchanted by Anna Maria’s habits. She hung her washing on a spider’s web of string outside his first-floor window. She only bought cigarettes in packets of ten because she was going to give up tomorrow, smoked the last one two minutes after the shops shut, and filched his tobacco all evening – so that they both ran out before midnight. She never bought a lighter, for the same reason, and put dead matches back in the box, and they were the ones James picked out when he tried to light a cigarette in the dark.

  When Anna Maria hankered after an espresso she made an entire super-strength jug of coffee (so that James had to rush into the market in the middle of the week) and whenever she cooked she somehow managed, despite the size of the bedsit Baby Belling, to make massive, wasteful portions, because she only knew how to cook in the generous quantities of Neapolitan hospitality.

  And she was always late for their rendezvous, because she neglected to wear a watch, claiming that something inside her (‘my magnetic feel, James’) broke them within a week.

  ‘Carry a clock in your bag, then,’ James pleaded. ‘I’ll give you one.’

  But Anna Maria declined the offer. ‘It’s only my body that does the thing that I want to do,’ she told him. ‘Why should I live with somebody else’s time?’

  ‘It’s my time,’ he moaned, to no avail.

  Anna Maria brought many of her habits to bed – although maybe it only seemed that way because they spent so much time there. She cut her toenails, the clicking of the clippers putting James’ teeth on edge. She was also capable of forgetting to eat all day; then, after making love, just as James was drifting off to sleep Anna Maria’s tummy would rumble, and she sprang from his arms, returning with a plate of crisps, fruit, cheese and biscuits, which she munched beside him, sprinkling apple pips and crumbs in the sheets.

  When James did finally get to sleep he kept waking up at intervals through the night, woken less by specific noises or movements Anna Maria made than by the novelty of having another human being beside him.

  ‘I’m sure I never had that problem when I slept with Alice and Laura,’ he told her in the morning (before he’d told her much at all about his family). Anna Maria managed to bite James, get dressed, throw the chrysanthemum pot at him – it shattered on the wall above his bed – and break his only classical record, all the while cursing him in incomprehensible lingo, before James had the brains to realize what was going on.

  ‘They’re my sister and my … nearly sister,’ he yelled from behind a pillow. ‘They were eight years old.’

  Anna Maria stopped her tirade for a second to gasp and glare at him. ‘Then you’re a feelthy, disgusting Eenglish pork as well,’ she exclaimed, before storming out.

  James spent the day in agonies of remorse, as well as stupefaction. That evening he found her in the pub where her fellow foreign students hung out. He had flowers for her, and a speech prepared of explanation, and apology for his stupidity. To his surprise, Anna Maria had a record for him, of Puccini’s Madam Butterfly.

  ‘Opera is better than balletto, James,’ she said, kissing him. ‘Italian is better than Russian.’

  James was bemused. He thought he’d made a mistake, and would have to make up for it now with a siege of her pride and affections. He didn’t know what to do, exactly, but he thought it would be difficult, and might take some time. In fact Anna Maria was in such a hurry to be reconciled that within half an hour they were back in the bedsit; within another five minutes they were back in bed. James thought they’d hardly begun to get to know each other, while for Anna Maria they were already intimate enough for lovers’ quarrels. From then on they flared up twice a week, on the slightest pretext.

  ‘You bastard,’ she cursed as they left the house together one morning.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘I see the way you look at that cleaner girl,’ Anna Maria told him. ‘How long has she cleaned up your rubbish, you two-time Eenglish goat?’

  ‘Are you crazy?’ James wailed. ‘The woman scares me.’

  ‘I shall not take your nonsense no more,’ Anna Maria told him firmly as she unlocked her Vespa. ‘Find another stupid foreign girl to spoil,’ she called out as she pulled away.

  ‘You scare me,’ James whispered after her departing figure, his heart thumping with shocked anxiety, caught unawares by her outburst.

  A few days later she was in a grumpy mood with him all day, and when he’d had enough and asked what the matter was, it transpired that she’d had a dream in which James had stolen her study books.

  ‘You’re blaming me for your dreams?’ James demanded. ‘Your insane psyche is my fault? That is the most unreasonable thing I’ve ever heard.’

  Anna Maria was twenty years old, two years younger than James, but she was more like a child. And she made him feel middle-aged: stodgy in his placidity, peppery in his trivial irritations. But a middle-aged man who knew nothing of the mystery between men and women.

  The next time they went out to the river there was another group of people in their favourite spot, so they camped a little further along. The interlopers were climbing the willow tree that branched over the water and jumping in, and one girl
among them was topless. James realized that Anna Maria saw him watching her, but this time he was ready: he already looked forward to the fight, and to an angry reconciliation among the reeds, as he said: ‘I should have brought my long lens.’ He grinned. ‘That’s not a sight a man sees every day. Not in this part of the world.’

  He turned cockily to Anna Maria, ready for her furious onslaught. Her expression, though, was not one of attack, but rather that of a distraught child, and before James had had time to reassess the situation Anna Maria burst into tears.

  He’d got it wrong again. Except that he hadn’t, entirely: an hour later, after a parallel river of tears, a cascade of soothing words and caresses and a reservoir of promises, they were making love just out of sight of the rest of the world, among reeds by the slow-moving river, as the sky above them clouded over.

  James never knew what Anna Maria would do from one moment to the next, but he did know that he was in love. In the absence of parents he sought Zoe’s approval of his beloved, inviting himself and Anna Maria round for supper, a meal Zoe began with hors d’oeuvres containing liberal quantities of hashish. James spent the rest of the evening in a stupefied silence, while Zoe and Anna Maria giggled together till after midnight.

  The next day James phoned Zoe from work.

  ‘Yes, she’s great,’ Zoe assured him. ‘I liked her a lot. A summer romance, it’s just what you needed, sweetheart.’

  ‘I think I’m in love, Zoe,’ he ventured.

  ‘Of course you are,’ she said. ‘You should be.’

  Anna Maria met him after work and they walked home through warm softly falling rain.

  ‘It is grizzling, James,’ she said.

  ‘You’re right,’ he agreed, squeezing her hand.

  She made him his favourite of her Italian dishes on his Baby Belling, a creamy carbonara with pasta, and they drank red wine, and she asked him if he thought the course had improved her command of this ridiculous irregular language of his.

  ‘I love the way you speak,’ he said. ‘I loved the way you spoke when I met you.’

  ‘Well, it is your fault I didn’t get more good, James. I spend too much time with you. You’re too naughty. Of course I could not concentrate in the class.’

  James smiled. Anna Maria’s flunking her course seemed a worthwhile measure of his worth. ‘Wait a minute,’ he clicked. ‘You mean it’s over?’

  ‘Of course,’ Anna Maria replied, without looking at him. ‘Last day today. Did I no tell you?’

  ‘Well, no,’ James replied.

  ‘I am sure I did,’ she murmured.

  ‘What now?’ he ventured bravely.

  ‘The flight back is the day after tomorrow,’ she told him. ‘From Heathrow.’

  It was James’ turn for tears, now – and then for anger, too. And there was another reconciliation – the most emotionally confused sex of their brief history together – before, finally, in the early hours of the morning, reality.

  ‘I’ll come and visit you, soon,’ James said. ‘I’m due a holiday. I’ll come to Naples,’ he suggested. ‘Will I?’

  ‘Maybe not, James,’ Anna Maria replied. ‘Maybe it is not a good idea.’

  ‘You don’t want me to come. You don’t want to see me again.’

  ‘Don’t spoil it now, James. I shall never forget you.’

  ‘Of course not,’ he scowled.

  ‘Will you forget me?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, Anna,’ he groaned. ‘How can you even ask that?’

  ‘Well, James James,’ she said, ‘you’re my Eenglish boy. When I dream of you, I blow a kiss across the ocean.’

  ‘If you dream of me, just don’t be angry, that’s all,’ James relented.

  ‘And you blow a kiss to me sometimes, James.’

  ‘Kisses are keys,’ he said, and kissed her. The rain, harder now, splattered against the window. Anna Maria was the first to fall asleep. She smelled of the sea. And as James drifted off, he thought he heard, in his small bedsit in that town in the middle of England, the remote murmur of the ocean.

  Chapter 6

  THE ASSIDUOUS COURTSHIP OF HARRY SINGH

  BACK IN 1975 a woman had become leader of the Conservative Party, and now four years later she led them to victory in the general election. Her father was a shopkeeper; she knew Napoleon’s dictum – that England was a nation of shopkeepers – and she took it as a compliment (although she wasn’t stupid: she knew it had been meant as an insult, and she never forgave the French nation).

  The new Prime Minister was a woman of unforgiving conviction and unwavering resolve. She reminded James of Robbie, the Freeman children’s old nanny, and it was true that she aroused in people’s hearts a nostalgia for the certainties of childhood: she answered the tiresome questions of journalists with patience and forbearing beyond the call of duty, treating them like infants; her opponents in the House of Commons and her own Cabinet she intimidated with a combination of feminine charm and masculine force; as for the electorate, as well as telling them what she intended to do, as other leaders did, she told them off as well.

  After a generation of consensual politics, the Prime Minister provoked two extremes of response, enmity and adoration, and she thrived on both: the first strengthened her convictions, the second her presidential aspirations; she was a nanny with regal pretensions. She split every political constituency down the middle – the aristocracy, the working class, white-collar workers, women, men, pensioners, students and housewives.

  She split the inhabitants of the house on the hill as well. Charles was a huge admirer; he hadn’t been so smitten by a public figure since the death of Marilyn Monroe. Robert liked her; but then he’d been Robbie’s favourite, so it wasn’t surprising. Laura thought she set a good example for women (Laura also shared her mistrust of foreign neighbours, because she had a different Frenchman’s jibe Blu-Tacked to the wall by the stove: ‘England has one hundred religions, but only one sauce’). Many years later, Laura’s daughter would ask whether a man was allowed to be Prime Minister, which might have been seen to vindicate Laura’s initial opinion, except that by then she’d long since changed her mind. Alice for her part even then disagreed with Laura – Alice wasn’t sure she was a woman at all.

  Simon, doubtless taking his lead from Charles, admired the Prime Minister, although (and maybe because) he never imagined she was serious. He didn’t believe anyone could possibly possess convictions of such intransigent certainty, and he thought she was play-acting; being himself a pastiche of a businessman, he assumed she was parodying politicians, especially when she delivered a homily on finance likening the economic affairs of the country to a housewife’s weekly budget.

  ‘She’s taking the piss, darling, don’t you see?’ he told Alice. ‘Can’t you see the glint in her eye?’

  ‘Of course I can,’ Alice replied. ‘It’s madness, Simon.’

  Alice was going through her radical phase at university. She had thrived at the boarding school – or ladies’ college, as it was misleadingly called. It was made up of a cluster of Georgian buildings – plus a modern science block – surrounded by a green sea of playing fields, and it was a cross between a military academy and an orphanage, presided over by a remarkable headmistress. Miss Lipton was a short, doughty woman well into the relieved middle age of a respectable spinster, prim and proper, and the only thing wrong with her was that she looked somehow too small for her own body, as if she’d been inadvertently squashed at some point in her life. And that, in fact, was just what had happened many years earlier: as a young teacher she’d fallen asleep at the wheel of her Morris Oxford and woken up in a hospital bed with one kidney, one lung, and one foot less than when she’d got into the car, and her skeleton was all bunched in on itself. But Miss Lipton had overcome these infirmities, acquiring the resilience of the disabled, and no one in the entire school suspected that her left foot was made not of flesh and bone but of plastic; generations of teachers and pupils, including Alice, would only find out years later,
when reading her obituary in The Times.

  Miss Lipton had both the zeal and the resolve of a true pedagogue, born as they were of a basic mistrust of parents, who, she believed, lacked the slightest idea as to what was best for their daughters: she refused to divulge fine details of the curriculum in advance because as far as she was concerned parents entered into a contract whereby they handed over all responsibility for their children’s welfare along with the extortionate fees; and such was the reputation of the school that places were always oversubscribed. Parents sent their beloved little girls away to boarding school and they returned in the holidays as strangers – but such clearly intelligent, composed and well-mannered ones that no one felt able to complain.

  Alice settled in immediately, thriving on the strict timetable, supervised homework, intense friendships, crushes on teachers and vigorous sports. (Her brothers would have been astonished to see their frail and clumsy little sister participating in the most violent of games, hockey and lacrosse; fortunately the girls’ maroon uniforms matched their ever-present bruises.) Alice sang in the choir, learned ballroom dancing in the gym (taking turns in the man’s role) and after a short settling-in period moved to the top of the class in her science subjects.

  When Alice had first come home in the holidays Laura asked a hundred questions (‘Do you have to wear uniform at weekends? What’s the food like? Is there a tuck shop? Who’s your best friend? Is it true there are communal toilets without doors? Is there bullying?’), none of which received a satisfactory answer, because Alice had learned to confine secrets to her school dormitory. Laura’s last question – ‘Where do you meet boys?’ – received a dismissive shrug.

  ‘Who needs boys? We don’t, Laura,’ Alice replied. She’d acquired the art of walking past the youths who hung around the school gate with her nose in the air, ignoring them completely.

  As for Harry Singh, Alice no longer ignored him: now that she was aware of his interest, she laughed at him. Laura had told her all about his intrepid visit and his outlandish proposal, and the two girls mocked him all through Alice’s first Easter vacation – rediscovering thereby their sisterly bond.