In a Land of Plenty

by Tim Pears

  ‘It’s my heart,’ he told her.

  James had other things on his mind at that time. He’d joined the town’s Artists’ Group – twenty-odd people who included three photographers – which met once a month to buy materials at wholesale prices, to lobby the council and other bodies for grants, and to provide each other with moral support. Their immediate project was the creation of an Artweek (inspired by a member’s visit to Boston, USA) during which sculptors, painters and craftsmen and women would open up their studios to the public. A special map for the purpose was being designed, and James volunteered to take photographs for publicity material, less to ingratiate himself than because the photographers who already belonged to the Group refused to use their cameras for such menial purposes.

  James found his free time over the following weeks filled with visits to studios. Having advertised for participants, the Group was overwhelmed by the response: every street, it transpired, had a water colourist or a weaver or a potter working away in quiet isolation; they emerged from obscure avenues and hidden cul-de-sacs and every day James was given a new address to visit.

  ‘There are artists all over the town,’ he told Zoe, showing her the first proof of the special map with little red dots clustered all over it (which corresponded to a new mental map in James’ head).

  ‘Artists?’ she queried. ‘That’s a big word, James.’

  ‘There’s over a hundred of them,’ he maintained.

  Not that James considered himself one (‘I can’t very well open the photographers’ office, can I?’ he said); he was content to get to know the other photographers in the Artists’ Group in the pub after their meetings. At first he was disappointed to discover that, instead of discussing their work, the main topic of conversation was money, since they were all broke. James felt some guilt at being the only one with a salary: the other three scraped a living doing odd-jobs, teaching, picture-framing, driving, as well as claiming whatever benefits were available.

  As the Artweek approached, though, he saw their work. Karel, a big, shambling Czech refugee, made exquisite still-lives of bottles, wood, flowers, and naked women; Terry had found fame in the Sixties but retreated from its glare into dark alleyways of his own imagining, where he photographed minute details of life that people couldn’t understand too clearly but which they discerned as indications of a baffling integrity; and Celia created long ‘narrative sequences’, as she called them, of unpopulated photos until, in a massive step, she took a single one of an unmade bed, recently vacated. When she saw it framed (in the Artweek’s coordinating exhibition in the Tourist Centre) Celia felt naked, exposed, she’d revealed too much of herself, and, resolving never to do so again, returned to the inanimate.

  As James got to know the Artists’ Group photographers they softened towards him after their initial suspicion; he felt as if he were undergoing a second apprenticeship as they revealed their mentors and lent him books (he discovered there were great Czech photographers during the Prague Spring as well as the film-makers Zoe had already alerted him to; Terry convinced him of the blurred clarity of Robert Frank; Celia showed him the work of Eugene Atget), although none of them became any more forthcoming about their own work, still preferring to discuss the finer points of claiming tax back for working clothes and the possibilities of joining the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, the new employment programme, by which you could get £40 a week for taking pictures and still do odd jobs without having to deny them to the DHSS.

  James kept his new friendships secret from his colleagues at work. To Roger and the others photography was a job. They sought no aesthetic dimension in their images beyond clarity. But it was an honest living. The occasional views of the town or surrounding countryside they took to fill a space in the Saturday edition were an indulgence they allowed each other, but that was the limit, as they made clear whenever the arts page listed an exhibition by one of James’ new acquaintances.

  ‘We’ve got one of those clickers in again,’ said Frank. ‘Look, he couldn’t even get the flicking thing in focus.’

  ‘Piss-artists, the lot of them,’ said Derek.

  ‘I’d like to see him try and do a proper job,’ said Frank.

  ‘He can cover for you next time you have a holiday,’ said Derek.

  ‘Wouldn’t last a bloody week,’ said Roger.

  The newspapermen scoffed at those aspiring artists whose work no one bought, who were not just amateurs but pretentious with it, walking around with holes in their shoes and noses in the air. Their existence was the only thing that really annoyed Roger; it was the one time James heard him swear.

  ‘They do what they bloody want, that’s the problem,’ he told James. ‘Not like us, boy.’

  ‘You’re right,’ James agreed. ‘I can see that.’

  What his colleagues would have made of the other artists emerging from anonymity around the town James shuddered to imagine. They might have approved of one or two of the elderly watercolour painters and would respect the furniture-maker in Otley and maybe the potter in Northtown. Most of the rest James himself couldn’t understand, composed on the one hand of Sunday painters and on the other of young people stumbling through dust raised by the avant-garde elsewhere. Some took their materials from scrap-yards and skips. Others held joint exhibitions with titles like Work in Progress, Marks on Paper or Forms in Space. They were deluded but undaunted, James thought, talentless but obstinate; they didn’t really have anything to say but were determined to say it anyway. He took Zoe and Simon on a tour of the studios on the opening day of the Artweek.

  ‘At least they’ve got the courage to show their work,’ Simon argued.

  ‘You’ve got to start somewhere,’ James agreed. ‘They can only get better.’

  ‘It’s mostly crap, but as long as we recognize the fact, who cares?’ Zoe said. ‘When are you going to show us some of your pictures?’

  ‘Oh, I’m not ready yet,’ James protested.

  ‘My feet are killing me, dears,’ Simon complained. ‘What say I treat you both to a cream tea in Rosie’s?’ he offered, linking arms with Zoe and James and leading the trio to tea.

  In the middle of the week James dragged Zoe to a screening of films made by members of a Film Co-op in the Old Fire Station. ‘It’s my turn,’ he said gleefully. ‘Come along, cousin.’

  Three minutes into the first film Zoe hissed in James’ ear: ‘I’ve sat through Andy Warhol, Michael Snow and Alfred Hitchcock in my time, honey, and I don’t need this.’ She got up and left, and although she might have been the first she certainly wasn’t the last. Even close friends of the film-makers sneaked out before the end. They left bent forward at right angles to the ground, whether so as not to block the projector or in imitation of Groucho Marx it was difficult to tell.

  All in all, though, that first Artweek was a success, if not in artistic (never mind commercial) terms, then at least in social ones. The solitary sculptors and painters felt less illegitimate and alone in the world, and their neighbours tended to like the idea of an artist living in their midst, an artist-in-residence in their own street, and from then on they greeted each other in shops and post offices with a new camaraderie.

  Alice returned home with a teacher’s diploma shortly after the end of the Artweek (‘I always said you had fate on your side, Alice,’ Simon told her) to take a job teaching chemistry to eleven-to thirteen-year-olds in the comprehensive school on the edge of the housing estate. She’d applied for the job in secret; it was the only job she’d applied for.

  The school was a sprawling mass of concrete-and-glass buildings in the shadows of the twin tower blocks. Across the rutted playing fields stood the Freeman factory buildings, in which most of the school’s pupils would expect to get work.

  ‘I always said you were quite mad, darling,’ Simon proclaimed. ‘Now everyone else can see I was right.’

  ‘I’ve been living in ivory towers all my life, Simon,’ Alice told him. ‘What’s wrong with a bit of reality?’

>   ‘You don’t need it, dear, that’s what’s wrong,’ he replied.

  Alice moved back into her old room on the third floor of the house.

  ‘I never thought you’d come back here,’ said Laura. ‘I thought you were up and away, Alice.’

  ‘I was,’ Alice assured her. ‘I am. I’m not going backwards, I’m going forwards. Anyway,’ she added, ‘I love this town.’

  ‘You don’t know this town,’ Laura mocked her.

  ‘Well, all right, Laura, the truth is I came back for your cooking. That’s why I came back.’

  ‘You’re such an enigma, Alice,’ Laura said matter-of-factly. ‘Hey, you remember Harry Singh? He used to write you those letters?’

  ‘Used to?’

  ‘Look, he’s in today’s Echo.’ She unfolded the paper and handed it to Alice: there was a photo of Harry shaking hands with the local Conservative Member of Parliament and holding an enormous cheque, beneath a caption that read ‘Young Businessman of the Year’.

  ‘James took the picture, see?’ Laura pointed out. ‘I’ll say one thing for Harry Singh: his suit’s a lot sharper than the politician’s is.’

  ‘I thought we had a Labour MP,’ Alice mused. ‘He used to come to Daddy’s parties.’

  ‘Not any more, Alice. God, where have you been? This one’s true blue. Your dad doesn’t like him very much, I don’t think, even though they agree about everything.’

  ‘Well, it looks like Harry likes him!’ Alice said.

  ‘I think I’d like someone giving me five hundred quid,’ Laura agreed.

  The next day, when no one was looking, Alice took the newspaper off the pile in the pantry and cut out the picture in question. It would turn out to have an ironic historical value: it prefigured the same situation being repeated over ensuing years, except that the cheque would be worth rather more each time, and it would also be going in the opposite direction.

  Charles, meanwhile, was delighted to have his daughter home again, but he was also dismayed that she was no more than a secondary-school teacher.

  ‘You always told us we had responsibilities, Daddy,’ she reminded him.

  ‘Quite right!’ Charles declared. ‘And I’m proud of you, Alice. The thing is, though, times change. It’s a rough old world out there; it’s time for the strong to be strong, it’s what’s needed.’

  ‘What about the weak?’ she demanded.

  ‘The weak don’t want to be mollycoddled any more,’ Charles claimed. ‘They’re sick of it. They need incentives, initiative, industry. It’s a time for the lean and fit to survive.’

  Alice grinned at her enormous father.

  ‘I’m speaking rhetorically, young lady, as you well know!’ he boomed. ‘You’re not too old to put across my knee.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Daddy,’ Alice laughed. ‘You never did that when I was young. Anyway, there’s a proven link between being overweight and heart problems. And what with your temper as well, I’m only thinking of you.’

  ‘Don’t you worry,’ Charles assured her. ‘I’m as strong as an ox.’

  The other thing Alice did, soon after she came home, was to send a brief note to Harry Singh, informing him of her return and inviting him out for a drink. Harry read and reread the note a dozen times, unsure what it meant. He stared at it for an hour or more. Was it a riddle to be deciphered? A hoax, God forbid? A joke? His letters had been unanswered for so many years that at some point he’d stopped expecting a reply, and only carried on writing them out of a mixture of willpower and habit. (In addition, although his daily postbag was often too large for the letterbox, they were all typed, official documents to do with property and money; Harry couldn’t remember receiving a personal, handwritten envelope.)

  Finally, though, Harry accepted that the note probably meant what it said, to meet Alice in Diego’s Wine Bar at seven thirty on Thursday evening. He picked up the telephone to confirm he’d be there, but found the receiver trembling in his fingers. So he wrote a reply instead. He only meant to reciprocate Alice’s note with a succinct memo of his own, but such was the discipline he’d attained through eight years of weekly letter-writing that he was unable to stop himself from stretching it to include his latest news and fill two pages (with a number of aborted attempts crumpled up in a bin beside him) and ending, as ever,

  ‘Respectfully yours, Harry Singh’.

  By seven thirty on Thursday evening Harry had calmed down: it had been as much surprise as amorous trepidation that had unnerved him. Alice was equally at ease. They sat in a corner and told each other what they were doing and what plans they had. Alice found that Harry was much as she had expected him to be: she wasn’t conversing with a stranger; she knew him. There had been nothing extraordinary about his letters (apart from their unbroken regularity), they’d contained no great insights or offered revelations of Harry’s inner world. But as she’d read them so she’d been drawn into Harry’s phlegmatically self-confident view of the world and his place in it. Which, so it appeared (though he hadn’t actually mentioned it), included her somewhere beside him.

  Now, as he spoke, leaning towards her because of the noise from the speakers, his breath smelling of cardamom (she wondered whether there had been a trace of that smell on the Basildon Bond paper), Alice found both the content and the tone of Harry’s speech reassuringly familiar.

  ‘The thing about property’, he was explaining, ‘is that it’s a fetish with us Brits. An Englishman’s home is his castle, we push prices up and people follow. It’s nothing to do with supply and demand per se, you see, in the accepted sense, it’s a strangely arbitrary market, which is what most people don’t realize—’

  ‘Harry,’ Alice interrupted him, smiling, ‘you’re just as pompous in real life as you are on paper.’

  ‘I am?’ he frowned.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she reassured him. ‘It’s sort of endearing.’

  ‘It is?’

  As for Harry, as he listened to Alice describing her plans he realized that he knew nothing about her. She was a complete stranger, an unknown entity. He was also somewhat devastated by the fact that she’d cut off her auburn hair. As she spoke it slowly dawned on him, with icy advance, that for eight years of his life he’d been sending letters into a void.

  ‘We made a pact when we left, Harry, that we’d do what we were most qualified to. “Footsoldiers of feminism”, Natalie called us. She’s got a job in the women’s refuge, yes, she’s coming to live with us, you know, a lodger in the house, what do you think of that? You’d like her. Or maybe you wouldn’t. You’re such a huckster, Harry.’

  ‘I am?’

  ‘But you’ve got the same haircut as her,’ Alice laughed. ‘With plenty of gel.’

  ‘It’s important to look your best in my line of work,’ said Harry, unsure whether Alice was encouraging or teasing him. ‘I have my clothes tailored,’ he continued. ‘My clients have to have complete confidence in me. Clothes make the man, Alice, it’s old but true.’

  ‘You’ll get on well with Simon, anyway,’ Alice told him. ‘He’s as pompous as you are.’

  ‘I’m serious, Alice,’ Harry replied. ‘I know what I want, and I’m going to get it.’

  ‘What do you want?’ she asked him.

  Harry paused. ‘I want you,’ he answered.

  ‘How can you be sure?’ she demanded. ‘You don’t know me.’

  ‘I know that,’ he told her. ‘I know.’

  Alice took another sip of her cocktail. ‘This White Russian is delicious,’ she said, changing the subject. ‘You want a sip, Harry?

  ‘I don’t touch it, thank you.’

  ‘Neither do I much. But I could start now.’

  Harry drank mineral water. Alice sipped her cocktail through a straw. She had no idea whether she should feel insulted or flattered by Harry’s single-minded choice of her, whom he hardly knew. But what she did feel was a strong sense of reassurance.

  For his part, Harry felt no assurance at all. What if, as he did get
to know her, he didn’t like her? She was lovely, of course, but that was the basis for the fumblings of his fellow students and colleagues at work: his correspondence had raised the stakes to some quite different realm. What an idiot I am, he thought. I’m just like all the rest, I just want to screw her, that’s the truth; my bloody little brother’s right, chase the white girls and marry our own; my parents are right, damn it, I should have let them choose.

  Harry had rejected an arranged marriage only to arrange one of his own; and maybe, he conceded for the first time, matchmakers were better qualified than he was. It was a gamble, that’s what it was; and Harry Singh didn’t like to gamble unless he knew the precise odds. And all of this conjecture presupposed that Alice would succumb to his advances anyway, when he got round to making them, which, of course, she wouldn’t; he was mad, she was only here for a laugh, just for a closer look at this mental defective who’d been sending her unsolicited mail all these years. Damn it to hell, he thought, sipping his Perrier. What am I doing? He put the glass down and looked at Alice. She was gazing at something else in the bar; she raised her eyebrows and sighed, then lifted the straw to her lips and took another sip of her cocktail, which slurped among the ice-cubes at the bottom of the glass. Who is this woman? Harry wondered.

  ‘I don’t drink,’ Harry broke the silence. ‘But I do eat.’

  ‘I’m very glad to hear that, Harry,’ Alice assured him.

  ‘What I mean to say is that I cook. Pretty well, if I say so myself. Might I invite you to my house next week?’

  ‘That would be very nice,’ Alice replied. ‘I should warn you, though, that I’m a vegetarian.’

  ‘That,’ Harry told her, ‘will be no problem at all.’

  And so Harry Singh’s courtship of Alice Freeman entered its second phase. They met at first once a week, just as they had by letter, and it suited them both because Alice was as busy as Harry was. She loved teaching. She’d been warned at the teacher-training college not to smile in front of her new class for six weeks, because they’d perceive it as weakness; after such a period a smile would come across as warmth. Alice, however, didn’t need to rely on such tactics. The boys fell in love at once with their pretty teacher who looked younger than some of the sixth-formers, and desperately sought her approval, while the girls soon followed. She was an impartial teacher, with no pets, but she gave the younger girls particular attention, reasoning that she had a short time to get them hooked on a science subject before the distractions of adolescence came along.