In a Land of Plenty

by Tim Pears

  Laura rubbed her forehead. ‘It’s different now, can’t you see that? I’ve got over you, Robert. I don’t need you, and neither does she. I’ve decided.’

  ‘I decide when something’s over,’ Robert replied.

  ‘Not this time, Robert,’ Laura said. She turned round and let herself back inside, slipping the catch as she closed the door.

  Half an hour later she glanced out of the window and saw Robert standing, immobile, not having moved an inch from where he’d stood. When she went to bed a couple of hours later she looked again and he was still there; she could see the red glow of his cigarette in the dark.

  In the morning, however, he was gone, and his abundant gifts with him.

  As well as being easy, Adamina was also precocious. She never crawled, for one thing, but watched Laura walking about the place and one day stood up and tried to copy her. Of course, she didn’t succeed right away but, undeterred, stumbled and fell a hundred times rather than revert to the more conventional first stage of ambulation, crawling on her stomach like a porpoise on the beach.

  ‘You are a sea creature,’ Laura tried to reason with her. ‘You can’t expect to change from swimming in the womb to walking upright on dry land overnight. Be patient, little one.’

  Adamina took no notice. She pulled herself up the side of a chair with a look of intense concentration and launched herself forward for one or two doomed, ludicrous footsteps before crumpling to the floor in a heap, astonished. But when Laura reached towards her with a calming or a guiding hand Adamina only pushed it away, stood herself up unsteadily and tried again, determined to master this thing on her own or not at all. And maybe that’s why it gave her so much pleasure: within a couple of weeks Adamina could totter clear across the living-room and she did so laughing with delight, happy to let Laura join in now, toddling across the carpet into her mother’s arms.

  It was the same with speech. When Adamina first began to utter the experimental syllables of a toddler Laura responded in kind, to encourage her.

  ‘Coo coo pa?’ Adamina asked, pointing out of the window.

  ‘Coo coo pa, yes,’ Laura agreed. ‘Coo coo pa.’

  But instead of appreciating this nonsensical solidarity Adamina glared at her mother, and clammed up. While Alice’s children spouted streams of gobbledygook, from which odd words leapt, miraculous, Adamina remained mute. Not, however, that anyone imagined her to be backward: her sense of self-possession made clear that she’d simply chosen to bide her time because baby-talk was beneath her. And that was how it was: when her contemporaries finally managed to glue intelligible words together Adamina all of a sudden deigned to join them. The silent child learned to talk overnight, and the only eccentricity of her speech – which may or may not have been due to her unwillingness to learn by trial and error – was that she spoke for ever after with a slight lisp.

  Adamina also mastered the art of falling asleep without having to be driven around the block, but developed a new habit of waking up half-way through the night and stumbling sleepily through to Laura’s room. Adamina climbed into Laura’s bed without fully waking her, and mother and daughter slept the rest of the night side by side.

  It became such a routine that when Laura woke in the morning to find her bed empty she rushed through to make sure Adamina was all right. Sometimes, seeing her daughter sleeping peacefully, Laura was unable to resist the temptation to snuggle in beside her for a few more minutes of shared, luxurious comfort.

  As Adamina grew Laura, instead of reducing her workload, proceeded to expand her business. She negotiated with Charles a raise in her salary and then subcontracted the woman who’d filled in during her maternity on a part-time basis. She was soon employing an occasional assistant in her cottage as well, after knocking down walls and converting the whole of the downstairs into one large kitchen, with her and Adamina’s living space above. Laura prepared meals and took them out to dinner parties once or twice a week; and she specialized in traditional English cooking.

  Laura had revealed her plans at one of the Sunday lunches – a lunch of roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes and fresh vegetables.

  ‘This is the best meal in the world,’ Simon proclaimed. ‘But what about the other six days in the week?’ he demanded. ‘Not to mention breakfast and supper. You’re quite mad, Laura.’

  ‘I have to disagree, actually,’ Harry chipped in. ‘There’s a great deal to be grateful for in our national cuisine, but as usual we knock it instead of celebrating it.’

  ‘Ha!’ Alice spluttered. ‘What do you know, Mr Harry Hautecuisine? The only thing you know how to cook is curry!’

  ‘I thought you liked my cooking,’ Harry complained.

  ‘Of course I do, silly, it’s my favourite. You’re a Muglai magician, Harry, you’re the chapati champ. You’re prince of passandas, my love. But since when have you been an expert in English food?’

  ‘There’s lots of things, actually, for which these islands have a right to be proud: Welsh rarebit, cottage pie—’

  ‘Roast parsnips,’ added Simon.

  ‘Fish and chips!’ said Amy, catching on.

  ‘I was thinking of more salubrious sorts of dishes,’ Laura tried to interject.

  ‘Cauliflower cheese,’ Simon, ignoring her, continued.

  ‘Ice-cream!’ said Sam, slightly missing the point.

  ‘Steak-and-kidney pie,’ Harry resumed. ‘Bread-and-butter pudding, bubble and squeak, beef stew with dumplings.’

  ‘I say, Harry,’ said Charles, who’d been unnaturally absent from the conversation. ‘I think you’re on to something,’ he opined, having found an angle on the subject that interested him. ‘We’ve spent the last hundred years importing other people’s food. It’s high time we started exporting our own.’

  ‘Well, yes, actually,’ Harry agreed. ‘You see, Charles, we don’t blow our own trumpet. We prefer hearing our competitors’. But think of the market out there.’

  ‘Enormous,’ Charles enthused. ‘Untouched.’

  ‘And chocolate sauce!’ Sam shouted.

  ‘Yes, thank you, Sam,’ Alice told him. ‘That’s enough.’

  ‘Thanks to all of you,’ said Laura, standing up and clearing away the dishes. ‘You’re all very helpful, as usual.’

  ‘Trifle!’ Sam yelled.

  ‘Shush!’ Alice scolded. ‘You’ll wake the baby.’

  ‘No,’ Simon said, ‘he’s right. Trifle’s a very good example.’

  Adamina grew up, just like her mother before her, in the kitchen. Her first toys were pots and pans and the more robust vegetables; she explored shapes by cutting them out of pastry; she learned to count by adding up ingredients, and understood weight and volume through the use of a measuring jug; while the first books she learned to read were less often children’s stories than illustrated recipes.

  Laura’s reputation spread and her clientele enlarged in an ever-widening circle around the town. One summer evening in 1989, when Adamina was almost three, Natalie rang to say a crisis had occurred at the refuge and she couldn’t baby-sit. Laura put Adamina as well as her dishes in the car; she wasn’t worried, she knew Adamina would entertain herself in someone else’s kitchen. Tonight’s clients lived some miles south-west of the town. As she drove Laura went over in her mind preparations for the meal: what had to be cooked fresh and what merely reheated, how to lay out the hors d’oeuvres. Adamina sat silently beside her, and Laura forgot that she was there (except that every time she braked her arm left the steering-wheel and hovered in front of Adamina’s chest). So Laura didn’t notice the puzzled frown on the child’s face. When they were about half-way there Adamina asked: ‘Mummy, have you been to their house before?’

  ‘No, I haven’t,’ Laura replied.

  Adamina was silent again, but ten minutes later she again piped up: ‘Mummy?’

  ‘What, Mina?’

  ‘If you’ve never been there before, how do you know where to go?’ Adamina demanded. For half an hour she’d been b
affled at the succession of choices her mother was making, whether to go left, right or straight on, at every new junction and turn-off.

  It took Laura a moment to realize what it was Adamina was oblivious to.

  ‘Mummy knows everything, honey, don’t you know that by now?’ she laughed.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ Adamina replied; she wasn’t fooled. So Laura explained what signposts were.

  ‘Don’t worry, Mina,’ she concluded. ‘You’ll soon be able to read them; you’ll be able to find your way around.’

  It might have been in response to Uncle Simon and Auntie Natalie’s guarded criticisms. Or maybe even Alice thought it was going too far when Harry gave Amy her own personal computer on her fifth birthday, in April 1990. Whatever the reason, it was then that Alice went into town one day and came home with a dog.

  ‘A companion for the children,’ she told Harry. ‘They’ll grow up together.’

  Neither Harry nor Alice had ever had a pet themselves. In fact it was the first domestic animal to reside in the big house.

  ‘Are you sure it’s a dog?’ Harry asked. He was nonplussed. ‘It looks more like a rat to me.’

  ‘It’s a puppy, silly,’ Alice told him. ‘It’s less than a month old.’

  ‘I suppose it’s going to grow into a wolf and bite them, is it?’ he wondered. ‘This might be very irresponsible, Alice.’

  ‘No, it won’t, grumpy-features. It’s a short-haired terrier. They’re tiny.’

  The children christened him Dick, and were captivated by their pet. They prodded and poked him; carried him around; bathed him; and they antagonized him with a long ribbon Dick chased in enraged circles, until he discovered his own short tail and chased that instead.

  No one thought to train Dick, so he grew up with a mind of his own. The first thing to become clear was that he didn’t like children. He began turning his nose up at them, and when they tried to ruffle his wiry hair or stroke his belly he snapped at their fingers. Dick treated beings the same sort of size as himself with utter disdain. The only humans he regarded as his equals were those looming high above him. He abandoned the children and trotted jauntily around the house in the footsteps of adults who had no idea he was there, and they stepped on and tripped over him, and kicked him out of the way.

  The sad thing was that none of the adults liked Dick. Harry had been right: even when fully grown Dick looked more like a rat than a dog, with his short, wiry hair and an ugly snout. The children were above such superficial judgements but he pranced out of their rooms and into Alice and Harry’s on a Sunday morning, walked up to the bed and, without preparation or warning, bounded vertically up in the air and landed on top of them.

  ‘Agh!’ Harry cried. ‘Get off!’

  Because he wasn’t trained, Dick the dog only learned to do things he wanted to, thus acquiring the obstinate eccentricity of an autodidact. He liked to unwrap other people’s Christmas presents with his front paws, to take a siesta at the back of the Aga like a cat, and to move people’s shoes from one room to another – during which exercise he revealed a natural propensity for neatness by always making two trips in order to keep each pair intact.

  Dick was, on the other hand, and for all his intelligence, neurotically insecure. When, on rare occasions, he found himself somewhere where another dog twice his size was being given attention he walked around in tight, disgruntled circles, cranking himself on a coiled spring of jealousy, until he unwound instantly with a suicidal snap.

  Although Dick didn’t like the people he was supposed to and the people he did like didn’t like him, it never occurred to anyone to get rid of him. Except, that is, for Robert, who on his rare appearances in the house offered to dispose of the ugly little runt.

  ‘Bash him on the head, drown him, bury him. Gone and forgotten,’ Robert volunteered.

  ‘Oh, how could you, Robert?’ Alice rebuked him. ‘Look, you’ve upset Sam.’

  ‘Don’t say I didn’t offer,’ Robert told her.

  Harry was tempted by that option. Even-tempered in all other known circumstances, there was one thing that reduced Harry to primitive rage. Dick usually made no more noise than a low growl in some corner as he chewed an old tennis ball to pieces. Just occasionally, however, he toddled into the hallway and started yapping – an intolerable, high-pitched yap of exquisite unpleasantness. Irate people came rushing from all directions but Harry got there first, to grab Dick by the scruff of the neck, carry him outside and drop him in the pond.

  ‘I do wonder’, Harry ventured the next time he found himself alone with Robert, ‘whether anyone would miss him if he was quietly disposed of.’

  ‘Just say the word,’ his brother-in-law said.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Harry prevaricated. ‘You never know with children.’

  ‘He’s not trained, that’s the trouble,’ Robert stated.

  ‘I know,’ Harry agreed. ‘It’s irresponsible. And it’s too late now.’

  ‘It’s never too late,’ Robert told him. ‘Tell you what. I’ll take him next time I go shooting, if you like. He looks like a squashed ferret. If he’s got a nose for rabbits, I’ll train him up.’

  Harry wasn’t sure what Robert was on about, but it sounded like a generous offer.

  ‘Thanks, yes, good idea,’ he said.

  From then on Dick would disappear from time to time, and when someone noted his absence someone else would say, ‘He must be with Robert,’ because Robert never told anyone, he just spirited the dog away. Sometimes he took him for a few hours, sometimes for a few days. And then Dick would simply reappear, again without warning – although with his behaviour altered. He lost interest in tennis balls, ceased yapping altogether, and spent hours in the hallway in a tensed posture with his ears pricked back, waiting. Until, after days – weeks – of neurotic patience, he heard Robert’s whistle, bounced up and leapt like a hare through the dog flap.

  James’ postcards were on sale all over the town. The rose-tinted, sun-kissed pictures were coming to define the town’s image. It was true that not enough tourists visited the town for them to sell in phenomenal numbers; instead, townspeople themselves bought them, to send to distant friends and relatives to prove what a lovely town it was they lived in. The postcards provided James with a staple income. In fact, it tended to be virtually all his income. He wanted to be a freelance professional, but when it came to it James lacked the skills necessary to secure work.

  ‘You need to sell yourself,’ Zoe explained. ‘Letterdrops, portfolios, headed notepaper. And smarten up, James, that’s what people do. You’ve gone and got scruffy again.’

  His heart, though, wasn’t really in it. Occasionally marketing agencies who’d seen his postcards tracked him down, wanting to advertise some product by giving it an image of idyllic English wholesomeness. To Zoe’s surprise, James turned them down.

  ‘I don’t need to do that kind of work,’ he explained. ‘I’m not starving. I don’t have a family to feed.’

  ‘You’ve got to start somewhere,’ she suggested.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ he said.

  James also received calls from people who wanted photos but couldn’t afford to pay for them. They came from people he’d once taken them for for free: young actors and musicians of their shared youth who were now involved in campaigns, for AIDS research and against the poll tax.

  ‘You’ll have to pay for film and chemicals,’ James stated (although he always found it difficult to remind people again) and he also explained that he hated demonstrations and would rather not photograph them.

  ‘Why not?’ he was asked. ‘They’re vital.’

  ‘I don’t feel comfortable with a lot of people I’m supposed to agree with,’ he replied. ‘I don’t like being part of a crowd.’

  ‘You won’t be,’ they assured him. ‘You’ll be outside it, wherever you are. People don’t trust photographers any more.’

  James’ favourite work, though, was a project, also unpaid, of his own choosing. He’d grown up
in the sealed-off house on the hill, then spent ten years in a bedsit in a quiet quarter of the town; now he lived in a flat on Factory Road. It was a vital artery of the town and more lively than the centre, because residents lived there, and most of its small shops and restaurants were worked by their owners, who also lived above them.

  Soon after moving in James set up a tripod at his living-room window and took pictures of the busy street below, in the manner of André Kertesz, discovering that it’s easiest to observe people from above because they never look up. He found it, though, a dishonest and unsatisfying activity; he felt like a paparazzo of ordinary people. So he left the tripod behind and took his camera down to the pavement. He wandered to and fro, watched the flow of shoppers, walkers, workers, children, parents; and took photographs; and realized that other people were watching him.

  Photographers are shifty figures, James knew that. Ones like him, anyway, their whole purpose to capture, to steal, an image from the people they move among, stealthy as pickpockets, cold-eyed and heartless. In a crowd at some public event it doesn’t matter: everyone, whether nominally performer or audience, being to some extent on show, on parade, by common assent.

  In a residential neighbourhood, though, he found this wasn’t so. James wasn’t invisible behind his camera. He felt as conspicuous as he had that day, many years before, when he first ventured outside the walls around the big house to take pictures in town, only to be jostled and yelled at and to retreat home. It was the same thing now, because people weren’t in this place for a special occasion – this was where they lived. Despite the bustle of traffic, shoppers, ghetto-blasters, bicycles, buses, children and dogs, residents and shopkeepers alike took in the life around them, and they took in the lurching man snapping photographs. James saw their suspicion and hostility.

  It didn’t take him long to find a solution. Unable to remain inconspicuous, he went up and down the road introducing himself to people who were, after all, his neighbours. And he asked whether he might photograph them because he was, he explained, chronicling his – their – shared neighbourhood. They all said yes. He photographed them standing in front of their shop signs, their trays of vegetables, their discount-price posters, their life-size, smiling butcher, their second-hand furniture, their racks of newspapers, the sallow-faced waiters in the burger joint, the bad-tempered Chinaman in his take-away, the nonchalant Greeks in their fish-and-chip shop, the friendly gangsters in the Lebanese restaurant, the melancholy Turk in his kebab van. Taking inspiration now from August Sander, he photographed them gazing steadfastly back at him in their aprons and caps and other working clothes. Someone called him the Camera Man and the nickname stuck: within a few weeks it accompanied him along the road. People waved and called to him but now in affectionate greeting, and invited him to photograph a new shop assistant or waiter or a relative who happened to be visiting.