In a Land of Plenty

by Tim Pears

  ‘You should have seen your dad after Harry left. He’s brave, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Sounds stupid to me.’

  ‘He’s dishy, though. Don’t you fancy him?’

  ‘He’s a big booby, Laura. Like all boys.’

  From around that point on, however, Alice began to receive weekly letters from Harry Singh. She passed them around her dormitory for weekly sessions of reading aloud, scornful hilarity, and she never once replied. But the letters kept punctually arriving, and pretty soon the rest of the dormitory looked forward to them; and so too, at some point, did Alice.

  As well as learning the waltz and the Charleston by dancing with each other, the girls also practised more modern steps in the dorm after dark. Since any noise was forbidden, on pain of being sent to Coventry, one girl would listen to a disco record through headphones and begin dancing. The other girls picked up the rhythm from her bodily movement and distributed it among themselves, jiving sinuously rather than energetically so as not to shake the floorboards, dancing in the silent darkness.

  Many things were shared in the dormitory. Moods, periods, homesickness and jokes came and went in communal waves. It was the healthiest time of Alice’s life, or at least it seemed so to her, because illnesses too were scrupulously shared: instead of suffering alone, as she had at home, Alice was merely one of a whole row of girls sitting in their beds of a winter evening, inhaling aromatic steam beneath towels. And the next day, instead of having to stay in bed, she went to classes as usual and snuffled determinedly through lessons, because Miss Lipton refused to regard being a little bit poorly as an authentic reason for a young girl to have to miss out on study.

  ‘You girls are the élite,’ Miss Lipton told Alice’s year at their final assembly. ‘You have privilege and responsibility,’ she proclaimed (sounding misleadingly like Alice’s father). ‘Above all,’ Miss Lipton told them, ‘you have a responsibility to yourselves. When you leave here you won’t need anyone to support you. My girls graduate as self-sufficient, independent women.’

  Alice left school with five A-levels, and a grade A in each of them. She was a demure, modest young lady, as Charles had hoped she would be; but that was just on the outside. Underneath, her views were rather different from what he might have wished; it was just that she felt little need to publicize them. Four years under the influence of Miss Lipton’s combination of tradition, discipline and sisterly self-reliance had enabled Alice to sail through the choppy waters of adolescence without undue distraction, and she reached adulthood with her innate character intact. At eighteen, she was in many ways the same six-year-old child who’d one day announced without any fuss that she was a vegetarian, and stuck to it for the rest of her life.

  * * *

  Alice duly fulfilled her father’s wish that one at least of his children would go on to university, taking a chemistry degree at Oxford, enrolling – on Miss Lipton’s advice – in one of the last women-only colleges. It was, gratifyingly, much like a continuation of school, and although there were boys around they didn’t present too much of an intrusion, in their sexless white coats, in the science laboratory where penicillin had once been discovered.

  As for exercise, Alice gave up violent sports and joined the rowing club, but as she was the smallest of the new recruits she was immediately designated a cox. It didn’t last long: Alice lacked the aggression to shout at other human beings. Even with a megaphone she failed to pass muster: it amplified the volume of her voice, but couldn’t make it any more authoritative. Alice’s resolve was internal and she could apply it to what she took in – stopping the intake of meat or studying more books – but not to what came out.

  After a brief career on the river, Alice took up jogging. She didn’t particularly enjoy it, but perhaps she knew she’d have a tendency to put on weight and some form of exercise was necessary for her. Every day in the early evening Alice put on a Sony Walkman and listened to tapes of whatever she was learning to sing in the college choir. Others with headphones passed her, but while they pounded the ground to drumbeat rhythms Alice jogged across university parks to the accompaniment of Thomas Tallis and William Byrd, oblivious to the occasional heads she turned: as well as having avoided, in the seclusion of her boarding school, the emotional crises of adolescence, Alice had skirted the physical ones as well. Unlike many pretty children, she’d survived to become an attractive woman, too, with her pre-Raphaelite auburn hair, her different-coloured eyes, her delicate features and pale skin.

  Alice knew she was pretty. It bothered her that – as she also knew – she wasn’t sexy. She’d had plenty of time to come to terms with this, since it was evident from the moment she and Laura had first begun to try on her cousin Zoe’s clothes, to play with lipstick, to see themselves in the mirror as females, years – half a lifetime – ago. Laura’s sexuality was apparent long before puberty, whereas long after hers there remained something otherworldly and remote about Alice.

  Alice had the habit of greeting someone by extending her graceful neck towards them while tilting her head away, kissing the air some inches from them while allowing her cheek to be brushed against. Since her rippling auburn hair fell at the sides of her face, friends and acquaintances were used to coming away with strands sticking to their moist lips. Alice kissed like a duchess wary of physical contact: she thrust her head forward with friendly intent but then seemed to change her mind and turn it away; and that’s how she was. Alice was affectionate at a distance. She didn’t invite men’s advances, and they, on the whole, withheld them.

  In her second year a fellow chemistry student, a tall young man with owly glasses, asked Alice out for a beer.

  ‘I don’t drink, thanks,’ Alice told him.

  ‘Don’t you?’ he replied disbelievingly.

  ‘Well, not for pleasure,’ Alice said.

  ‘I guess there’s no other reason, is there?’ he said, and walked away in his white coat. Alice was a bluestocking despite herself. In fact she longed to be different, she ached for sexy clothes to look sexy on her. But she knew her one black dress, even while it showed off her generous bosom, looked faintly absurd, like fancy dress; she knew that mascara, far from enhancing her eyes (one green, one blue) only made her look blowzy and overblown.

  No one else, though, would have imagined that Alice Freeman was troubled by such matters, she appeared so calmly self-reliant and at ease with herself, not even her best friend at university, Natalie Bryson, a tall cockney and fellow member of the college Women’s Action Group. Alice never mentioned it to Natalie, because they were too busy handing out free mirrors so women could know their own bodies, marching through the city reclaiming the night, and picketing the Ashmolean Museum for displaying misogynistic representations of women.

  ‘A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle,’ Natalie told Alice.

  ‘A good dump is better than bad sex,’ one of their friends declared.

  So Alice kept those few of her thoughts to herself, but she shared the rest as she had back in the school dormitory. Although Natalie had come to Oxford from a Hackney comprehensive, she shared Alice’s views on privilege and responsibility: they made a vow to each other that they wouldn’t waste their lives, that they would use their intelligence and learning to better the world of their sisters, both now and for those to come. At the beginning of her finals year Alice cut her gorgeous hair as short as Natalie did, although she only managed one session of the self-defence classes that Natalie ran for female students, because they gave Alice the giggles.

  Natalie was an androgynous tomboy, to whom people were always saying ‘Thank you, young man’ and ‘Certainly, sir.’ She had a series of girlfriends, most of them not students but secretaries in the city. Just once Natalie asked Alice – late one night in Alice’s room after a fund-raising disco for Solidarity with Nicaraguan Women – if she wanted to kiss.

  ‘Sorry, Nat,’ Alice demurred. ‘I love you, but I don’t fancy you.’

  ‘You don’t seem
to like men,’ Natalie opined.

  ‘I think I do,’ Alice told her.

  ‘You poor cow,’ Natalie sympathized. ‘The crap you’ve got coming your way.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ Alice replied.

  ‘What are you going to do afterwards, anyway?’ Natalie asked her. ‘Have you decided yet? You’re not really going to do that teacher-training course?’

  ‘Yes. I like children,’ Alice replied.

  ‘You’re nuts,’ Natalie told her.

  And so Alice spent her university years attending lectures, writing essays, choir-singing, jogging in the parks, engaged in feminist activism and debate, and in white-coated days in the chemistry labs; but, just like Harry Singh, she remained aloof from experiments in a more human chemistry.

  Harry’s letters, meanwhile, had followed Alice from school to university, despite his having made no attempt at contact during her vacations. Alice literally hadn’t seen Harry since the last time (she had no particular memory) he’d been in the house on the hill with James, carrying his decoy camera, plodding upstairs to the darkroom. He just carried on writing his letters every week without fail; by the time she graduated (with a first-class honours degree) Alice reckoned she’d received around three hundred and fifty letters (she only stopped throwing them away when she went up to Oxford; the first two hundred – scorned in dormitories, laughed at with Laura, dropped into waste-paper bins – were scattered to oblivion), yet he’d made not a single attempt to see her. How strange men are, Alice thought, how very strange; until it dawned on her that he might just be waiting for a reply.

  Harry Singh’s letters to his beloved were friendly, one-sided conversations, in which he informed her (in the impersonal tone of a child’s thank-you letters) of his life. They were like succinct diary entries, a list of the mundane, told banally, for the record. He made no mention of marriage nor a single declaration of love, gave no hint of emotions of any kind, and ended each letter, at the bottom of the second page: ‘Respectfully yours, Harry Singh’.

  The letters told Alice of Harry’s life. He’d left university and returned home, and got a job in an estate agent’s.

  ‘I thought you wanted to go places,’ his brother Anil mocked him. ‘I thought you always told me you were going to be your own man,’ he sneered. ‘Get-rich-quick, Flash Harry, that’s what you were going to be. Estate agent!’ he snorted. ‘At least I’m self-employed. I’ve got a licence to sell alcohol now.’ Anil shook his head. ‘I’m not a nine-to-five man, Harry.’

  His father, though, was impressed. ‘Now that is a good, sensible line of work,’ he said when Harry told him. ‘Property in this country’s a stable market. And people always need a roof over their heads. Good for you, my boy.’

  ‘Thank you, Dad,’ Harry responded.

  The estate agent’s paid for Harry to take a day-release course in surveying, which also entailed hours of study in the evenings. Between the course and his employment Harry learned about damp courses, attic insulation, loft extensions, crumbling foundations, planning permission, supporting walls, preservation orders, listed buildings, boundary markers and elevated views (as, in turn, did Alice through his weekly missives). Within a year Harry’s name was top of the list in the back office; at twenty-three he was the highest paid agent in the firm.

  Harry’s secret was hard work: he did his homework; he knew the difference between impressive and notable houses, between elegant apartments and superbly presented flats, open countryside and rural views; between unspoilt and well-regarded villages, restored, converted or reconstructed barns. He didn’t hoodwink his clients with flim-flam and humbug, though; he escorted them around properties providing a commentary in a phlegmatic tone of voice – similar to the tone of his letters to Alice. He explained the architectural, decorative and structural qualities of the house, while also adding other things he perceived they might need to know: reliable local builders, shopping facilities, school catchment areas, the prevalence of baby-sitters in the neighbourhood and local crime statistics. And to every question they asked he gave a truthful answer.

  Harry Singh was good-looking in a jowly way, with a neat moustache and dark, tired eyes that gave him a rakish air. He had the appearance of a well-fed, unimaginative son who knows he’ll never have to make much effort in life because there’ll always be women to look after him; and it was deceptive. He moved and worked at a sluggish, stolid pace, it was just that he never stopped. Harry was as assiduous an estate agent as he was an epistolary suitor. He was unpopular in the office: his colleagues regarded him as being a workaholic drudge who had nothing to say unless it was about bloody buildings, since he didn’t watch TV, come out for a drink after work or play a sport at the weekend. All he did was bore people into buying houses they probably didn’t want and then go home to work his way through the sixteen encyclopaedias required to understand the finer points of conveyancing.

  In fact Harry’s colleagues were only half right. Far from taking up all of his time, Harry regarded his job as a temporary apprenticeship that gave him pocket money, personal contacts and a basic expertise in the buying and selling of property. He’d already embarked upon his real work: shortly after coming home Harry had taken out a mortgage on a dilapidated terraced house in East town and moved in. With a further bank loan he paid young plumbers, electricians and other artisans, from within the Asian community, cash in hand to renovate the house ‘from top to bottom and inside out’, he wrote to Alice. It took three months and he then sold it at a 25 per cent profit – to a fellow Asian – bought another, moved in and started again. He employed bricklayers and chippies one at a time to work only in the evenings and weekends and he assisted them, both to save money and to learn how to do the work himself, ‘because you can only be ripped off if you’re ignorant’, as he told Alice.

  Harry Singh was a diligent man. He worked as an estate agent till six in the evening, as a building labourer on his own houses till midnight, studied till two, and slept till eight. Neither his colleagues nor his employers knew of his double life because he only bought from and sold to Asians, and employed illegal immigrants – and also because every night he used copious quantities of Swarfega and Boots’ moisturizing cream to ‘transform the hands of a working man, into those of a pen-pusher’, as he put it in one of his letters to Alice.

  The only time off Harry allowed himself was on a Sunday evening. He downed tools at four in the afternoon to go and visit his family, stopping off at the Indian deli on Factory Road on the way over to pick up food, and he spent three hours cooking; it was Harry’s one and only hobby and relaxation. He cut vegetables and ground spices with his father and ate with the family (soon to be joined by Anil’s bride-to-be) in the flat above the shop. They didn’t have much to say to each other but they didn’t need to, they were content to savour the massallas and muktaajs; all except for Harry’s grandmother, who had lost her appetite in recent years and preferred to sit in front of the television, popping bubble-wrap.

  Then, when he returned to his temporary accommodation in some house in the midst of renovation, Harry wrote a once-a-week letter to his beloved, surrounded by builders’ rubble. Far from being the perfunctory ten-minute chore it appeared to Alice, it took Harry many hours and many rejected, crumpled-up sheets of Basildon Bond paper to say exactly what he wanted to say, on two full pages precisely, in the perfectly appropriate tone, in his assiduous courtship of the woman he’d chosen. On countless Sunday nights he crawled into bed in the early hours of the morning, exhausted at the end of another week, to obtain far less than his customary six hours’ sleep. But Harry always emerged on Monday morning with renewed, if phlegmatic, vigour for the week ahead. Like the man-in-charge in the house on the hill, Charles Freeman, his intended father-in-law (to whom he’d foolishly proposed eight years before he would eventually manage to bring up the subject with Alice herself), Harry Singh was an empire builder in the making.

  In the last letter Alice received at Westminster Teacher-training College in
Oxford (which was the last but one letter she would ever receive from him) Harry informed her that he’d handed in his notice at the estate agent’s; that he had eight properties in various stages of renovation; that he was worth £372,428 on paper, although he actually possessed, he wrote (such was his honesty) £180 in his wallet; and that he would be a millionaire within two years. As well as, of course, that he remained ‘Respectfully yours, Harry Singh’.

  In 1982, during the Falklands War, Charles had a flagpole erected on the lawn of the big house, from which he flew a large Union Jack. Zoe came home from Sunday lunches there still fuming after fruitless confrontations that were cut short because farming Uncle Jack’s and Aunt Clare’s son Edward was serving on HMS Sheffield, and whatever people’s political opinions familial disloyalty was taboo.

  ‘I can’t call my cousin cannon fodder, even though it’s the truth,’ Zoe despaired, having tea with James back at the cinema.

  ‘Forget it,’ he advised her. ‘The lunatics have taken over the asylum, Zoe. Ignore them.’

  ‘But she’ll win the next election on the strength of being a war leader, a Boadicea, bloody Churchill in a skirt.’

  ‘Just ignore them, Zoe. We’ve got enough problems of our own without letting politicians add to them.’

  ‘What problems have you got?’ she demanded. ‘You’re not still pining after your Italian inamorata, are you?’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of me,’ James protested. ‘I just meant in general. Anyway, I know I was an idiot. I won’t fall in love again.’

  ‘You, James, will always be falling in love,’ Zoe scoffed.

  ‘No, I won’t,’ he averred, his jaw set hard. ‘Not again.’

  ‘Oh, God, I forgot,’ Zoe remembered, ‘you’re a stubborn little bastard. Don’t go and hide your heart away, now.’