In a Land of Plenty

by Tim Pears

  Then he moved in, photographing the town across the river and the meadow and down from the hill by the big house. For the first time he seriously considered going back home: he remembered sitting up on the forbidden roof as a child, gazing at the town below, and he contemplated sneaking in and creeping up the back stairs. But he rejected the notion and made do with some shots from the park below.

  When James first moved into the flat the noise at night – amplified, as if by the dark – kept him awake: drunken voices, car doors slamming, revving engines of thoughtless revellers emerging from places all around him on that busy road. He got used to it, though, as he did to getting up so early: he’d already reached an age when he no longer lay in in the mornings with any pleasure, and once he was out of doors in the pre-dawn he was grateful to be so, to see the light infusing the world, to hear birdsong and scattered sounds of humanity, sober versions of the night before, which would build towards the raucous symphony of rush-hour.

  ‘It could become addictive,’ he told Zoe. She had persisted longer than anyone with messages on his answerphone that became increasingly enraged with his smug announcement, and his infuriating postcards.

  ‘I know you’re there, James Freeman!’ her last call had yelled. ‘Pick up this bloody phone and talk to me!’

  James’ hand hovered above the telephone.

  ‘Right! That’s it, you little twerp!’ Zoe declared and slammed down the receiver.

  She came round one morning, early, so as to catch him still in bed, only to meet him at the door as he returned home with his camera bag and tripod. He made coffee and toast.

  ‘So what is it?’ Zoe demanded. ‘You’re turning into a crepuscular animal now?’

  James shrugged.

  ‘It means twilight,’ she explained. ‘It also means dim; not yet enlightened. So either way it fits you.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Zoe. I’ve been really busy. I’ve taken any job I’ve been offered, and begged for others: I’ve done portraits, pets, publicity shots for amateur dramatic groups, that dance centre—’

  ‘All right,’ Zoe put her hands up, ‘I’ve heard enough.’

  ‘I’ve just got my first colour postcards printed. Look at these.’

  He opened a box; Zoe flipped through them, wrinkling her nose in disgust.

  ‘Our town doesn’t look anything like this,’ she declared. ‘You’ve made it look like Bath, or Oxford. How have you hidden the factory? And the high-rise? And the pylons?’

  ‘The camera never lies,’ James laughed.

  ‘Merchant–Ivory Postcards Incorporated,’ Zoe said.

  ‘Who are you to talk? I’ve seen the queues round the block for their films.’

  ‘Just because I’m a pimp doesn’t mean you have to be a whore. Especially not, in fact.’

  ‘So I’m a hack,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing wrong with that.’

  Alice and Harry’s Taurean children were quiet and well behaved from the very beginning. Wheeling her placid children around the stores, Alice drew envious, admiring glances from those whose offspring were chasing each other up and down aisles screaming. In fact, most people assumed that Alice was their nanny: she still had the pixie face of a child and was short enough to make people think she may yet grow some more. And she was still all arms and legs, unco-ordinated, as if she hadn’t worked out the precise use of her own limbs. From a distance Alice looked like a child still trying to gauge the best way to walk; her older children looked more grown-up than she did.

  While Alice was mistaken for her own children’s nanny, her Indian au pair – a series of Harry’s young female relatives came over for six months or a year each – was routinely taken to be their mother. Each of Alice and Harry’s five children would be born with light-brown skin and dark-brown hair; if they had a trace of their mother’s auburn, people only assumed that was due to the use of henna. They would also all have their father’s curranty eyes; Alice’s eyes – one blue, one green – would, through her choice of a partner who proved to have dominant chromosomes, be a genetic freak, a one-off, lost in the family history.

  Having given up her career, Alice transferred her scientific bent and pedagogical training to the realm of motherhood, inventing gadgets and devices for her babies. She attached mirrors to the skirting-boards so they could locate themselves in the world; she created mazes with furniture, into whose centre she would lower them and which they had to crawl their way out of.

  Alice also constructed wire cages in which she placed the children’s food, but which could only be opened by pressing certain levers in the correct order, transforming mealtimes into tantalizing games.

  ‘It’s like being in a laboratory, poor things,’ Uncle Simon protested. ‘They’re babies, darling, not experimental rats. Look!’ he remonstrated, ‘they’d much rather play with me.’ Which was true: there was nothing Simon liked better than crawling around on the floor, letting his nieces and nephews clamber over his body. They adored him. He entered the east wing with his pockets filled, both with sweets and with scraps of paper on which riddles and jokes were scrawled.

  ‘What do you get if you cross a dinosaur with a tangerine?’ he asked Amy.

  When he saw Simon crawling across the carpet with his children it made Harry feel slightly queasy.

  ‘It’s undignified behaviour,’ he told Alice when they were alone. ‘I worry it will spoil them.’

  Harry doted on his children, but from a distance. Maybe he assumed they knew how wonderful he thought they were. They were miracles of creation. He would see in each of them small reflections of himself, in their appearance, gestures, character, and it moved him. Even better, though, he saw echoes of Alice, the wife whom he adored, and he loved them for carrying her on, reprises of her echoing in space and time.

  Harry approved wholeheartedly of Alice’s scientific experiments (even if he did ask her to confine her creations to the playroom, since however functional they were, they all looked hopelessly home-made and clashed with the antiques with which they’d ended up furnishing their wing of the house). Not only did Harry approve, he encouraged further ideas, having been impressed by what he’d heard of hot-housing in America: he brought a music tutor in to teach them on miniature instruments and enrolled them in Saturday classes in computer skills, gymnastics and chess.

  Not that either Harry or Alice saw any reason to wait until their children were born before giving them the stimulus they needed to fulfil their potential. Alice continued with her cyclic pregnancies, her production of Taurean babies, taking them in her crab-like stride, and she and Harry bought cassette tapes with heartbeat rhythms, which Alice placed on her stomach during her afternoon naps, in order to energize the developing brain of the foetus inside her. They also recorded tapes of their own with messages saying: ‘Mummy loves you. Daddy loves you. We can’t wait to meet you. Have a nice day.’

  ‘Our children are special,’ Harry told Alice.

  ‘Their children are creepy,’ Natalie told Laura. ‘And so are they.’

  ‘Don’t exaggerate, Nat,’ Laura reproved her. ‘They’re just a bit overzealous, maybe.’

  ‘Just make sure you keep yours out of their kitchen kindergarten,’ Natalie warned.

  ‘I don’t think she’ll need it somehow,’ Laura ventured.

  Laura had been warned, in her ante-natal classes, of the possibility of post-natal depression. But when it happened she forgot the advice she’d been given and sank into it. It was a physical condition, which dragged her down: she ceased to see the world around her in colour, colours drained away leaving monochromatic vision. She became addicted to sleeping. When the baby slept, so did Laura; when awake, all she wanted was to slink back to bed.

  Some days she didn’t get dressed, and slopped around the cottage in dressing-gown and slippers, feeding herself and Adamina. The cook she’d hired for the big house got on with the job, occasionally checking things with Laura; otherwise she heaved herself out and down to the post office to cash her child benefit
and buy groceries.

  Alice had just had her third baby, Tom, and had her hands full in the east wing. Natalie dropped in, and so did Simon, but Laura told them she was fine and didn’t need anything and she really wanted to grab some sleep while Mina was dozing, would they mind very much if she did?

  Ever since her parents had died she’d regarded herself as removed from those around her; although when she thought about it she realized she’d always felt that way. She’d grown up as an only child but in the margin of that large family; and since her parents’ deaths she’d stayed at the house, unsure whether she was an orphan, a parasite or, like her mother, the keeper of its heart, the only sane person in a house of fools whose role, or destiny, was to keep it somehow together.

  Now, with a child totally dependent on her, Laura had never felt so isolated. From the day she’d confirmed her pregnancy Robert had said barely a word to her. Initial anger gave way to relief: it made things clearer. This was her child, her responsibility. She’d bring her up as she wanted, answerable to no one.

  But it meant Laura was alone. She knew people saw her – had always seen her – as self-sufficient. And it wasn’t altogether an illusion. She wasn’t even sure she was lonely, in a way that others could be even when surrounded by people; Laura wasn’t insecure. She was simply alone. And now, sunk in a depressive stupor, there was no one to drag her out.

  Laura found her own escape route – through food. She began to spend a little longer preparing her meals, and used them to try out new recipes. Taste was the first of her senses to come back to life, she would one day tell James, followed by smell.

  Laura began by experimenting with neglected recipes in the cookery books she’d inherited, adapting them, rediscovering forgotten flavours, substituting new ingredients for old, and it became clear how limited a cook she (and Edna before her) actually was: Laura had served an apprenticeship of sorts under her mother in the mundane quartermaster’s art of catering for a household, and then she’d assumed she had to go abroad for new ideas and ingredients which she brought back as formulae to be repeated in the kitchen of the big house.

  Now an antiquarian bookseller in the High Street sent out requests along his grapevine and obtained for Laura the Victorian Modern Cookery of Eliza Acton and Alexis Soyer’s Shilling Cookery for the People; Mrs Raffald’s Experienced English Housekeeper and Hannah Glasse’s Art of Cookery from the eighteenth century; and a facsimile copy of Robert May’s The Accomplisht Cook of 1660.

  Laura read the archaic cookery books while breast-feeding Adamina, but now instead of going back to sleep she put Adamina in her cot and went downstairs to the kitchen. Her world was reduced to a primitive realm but it was an exciting one, her kitchen a laboratory of rediscovery and reordering of essential ingredients: of meat and fish, fruit and vegetables, herbs and spices, flour, cheese and cream. Of chopping crisp vegetables, kneading dough, breaking eggs, baking cakes and roasting joints, blending juices and simmering stews, pounding meat and grinding spices with pestle and mortar, of sautéeing onion and garlic in hot butter, of coddling, boiling and seething.

  The ends of Laura’s fingers were always burnt or snicked but she didn’t mind, as she spent hours making complicated dishes in minute portions, just to test and taste them, recording the results in a card-index system.

  The task Laura found she was setting herself was so enormous and so absorbing that she simply forgot she was unhappy. She discovered that she wasn’t altogether alone, either. Jane Grigson and Elizabeth David stood over her shoulder, encouraging or chiding her to throw away that corn oil, it’s good for nothing; always make your own bouquets garnis, woman, don’t be lazy, and don’t forget lemon peel with fish, and try fennel, too, and how about tarragon? Don’t be lazy, girl.

  Laura got one of the gardeners to dig over a plot of land by the side of the cottage and she planted small quantities of rocket, lovage, orache, garlic, fenugreek, mallow, rue and tansy in a miniature medieval garden, as well as sorrel, parsley, chives, lemon, thyme, mint, carrots, onions, leeks, shallots and globe artichokes.

  Indoors, she revived the sixteenth-century custom of burning rosemary, juniper or bayleaves as herbal incense, or simply strewing aromatic herbs on the kitchen floor and raising their fragrance with her footsteps.

  Those aromas and the smells of her cooking emanated from Laura’s cottage. Simon and Natalie came over ever more often but instead of sending them away she invited them inside to taste this mackerel in gooseberry sauce or that lamb with plums: is it as good as with laverbread, or should I stick to that ragoût I made last week? Whenever he dropped in Simon begged Laura for a pot of crème brûlée and she got into the habit of having one on hand, even though each time she tried in vain to get him to ask for burnt cream.

  ‘This is nectar,’ Simon drooled. ‘Those French know what they’re doing,’ he slavered.

  ‘I’ve explained a hundred times, Simon,’ Laura admonished him, ‘it’s English. It’s an export, not an import.’

  ‘Have you got any more of those Brazil-nutty mushrooms?’ he asked her. ‘Umbrellas or something.’

  ‘No more parasols, but I found these field mushrooms in the park this morning. I’ll do you some on toast with clotted cream. I think you’ll like them.’

  By the time Laura was back at work in the big house, six months after Adamina’s birth, she had grounded herself back in reality.

  Laura never blamed Adamina for her brief depression (now no more than a dim memory). Her daughter was easy; Adamina had seemed at home in the world from her first days. She responded to visitors with gurgles and smiles that put them at their ease, but she was equally content with her own company: she lay in her cot, cooing and sighing to herself as if reminiscing.

  ‘She’s been here before,’ Laura told Alice. ‘She looks around like she’s taking stock, ticking things off on an inventory.’

  ‘They’re who they are from the word go,’ Alice agreed. ‘They come out of the womb with their characters formed. Every mother can see that.’

  Adamina was so quiet and contented that Laura occasionally forgot she had a baby. She’d be surprised to hear the mobile in Adamina’s cot tinkling, or to open a cupboard and find it full of baby food.

  Laura didn’t tell Alice that one day she decided to go shopping on the spur of the moment and threw on a coat and walked out of the door. She got into her car, turned on the ignition, and was half-way down the drive when she suddenly remembered that she was a mother with a six-month-old baby in a cot back in her room. Laura reversed and rushed in, to find Adamina softly sighing to herself.

  Adamina was such an easy baby that when people sympathized with Laura about how hard it must be being a single parent she didn’t know whether to agree, fraudulently, or contradict them with the truth. The only problems Adamina gave her mother came at night: she seemed to lack the ability to fall asleep. During the day she snoozed soundly enough between feeds, dozing off at the nipple, eyes glazing and closing and lips sliding off. Laura put her in her cot, and Adamina slept deeply – even if she did have the strange habit of turning her body round in her sleep, ending up with her feet on the pillow.

  At night when Laura put her down Adamina gurgled to herself as usual, but gradually her utterances and behaviour became more agitated, until she ended up crying out of sheer tiredness.

  ‘Put a tot of brandy in her milk, darling,’ Simon advised when he visited one evening, yelling above the baby’s bawling.

  Laura carried Adamina around on her shoulder, cooed soothing sounds in her ear, rocked her to and fro in her pram in the kitchen with one hand as she held an old cookery book she was reading with the other, in an effort to help her daughter fall asleep. Before long, though, Laura discovered that the only place Adamina was guaranteed to drop off was in a moving car; and Laura lost count of the number of times she drove around the block until Adamina was asleep on the seat beside her.

  ‘You know what that means?’ Zoe demanded at Sunday lunch. ‘It means she�
��s a traveller.’

  ‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ Laura replied. ‘It’s just the rhythm soothes her.’

  ‘Everything means something, Laura,’ Zoe assured her.

  Late in the evening of Adamina’s first birthday, in December 1987, there was a knock on the door of the cottage. Laura turned off her food processor, wiped her hands on her apron and opened the door. There before her were so many parcels wrapped up in the same red shiny paper, stacked one on top of another, that it took Laura a moment to notice someone standing behind them.

  Laura looked from Robert to the pile of gifts, back at him again, then once more at the presents. Unable to resist a rush of gratitude at this display of generosity – it looked as if Robert must have walked into the Early Learning Centre and bought one of everything – Laura had to then collect herself.

  ‘What is this all about?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s our daughter’s birthday, isn’t it?’ Robert smiled. ‘There’s stuff here I thought she might like. A swing. A paddling pool. Toys. Games.’

  ‘Are you mad?’ Laura asked. ‘You’ve ignored me – and her – all this time, and now you bring all these? It’s too late, Robert.’

  ‘We can talk,’ he suggested. ‘Aren’t you going to invite me in?’

  Laura shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, as she reached behind her and closed the door. ‘No, I’m not.’

  Robert was undeterred. ‘They’re not all for her, babe. That one on top’s for you.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ she replied.

  ‘I’ll show you,’ Robert said, and stepped forward. He picked up a small packet from on top of the pile and tore open the gift-wrap: inside was a jewellery box, and he opened that too, and held it towards Laura, so that she could see the twenty-carat gold chain he’d bought her.