In a Land of Plenty

by Tim Pears

  ‘I’m going to think about what you said,’ Laura told him. ‘We’ll talk about it again.’

  Robert didn’t respond, but then his body lurched from its immobility, and he marched towards and through the doorway. Laura and Natalie waited until they heard the sound of his footsteps on the stairs, and then the front door of the cottage opening and closing.

  Natalie moved – to check Robert was gone – but Laura beat her to the doorway and rushed to Adamina’s room. She was sure she’d find her cowering in her bed. But she didn’t. Somehow Adamina had not been woken by either Laura’s scream or Natalie’s martial arts shriek; she lay asleep exactly as Laura had placed her.

  Laura stroked Adamina’s hair. ‘My love,’ she whispered, ‘my heart, may nothing ever harm you.’

  Laura returned to the sitting-room. Natalie had poured two glasses from what was left of Robert’s whisky.

  ‘That was brilliant, Laura,’ she said, ‘Jesus, that was so cool. Where did you learn that? I would have killed him.’

  She passed Laura a glass. Laura took it, only to find that her hand was trembling, and she watched the glass fall from her fingers onto the carpet. Her whole body was shaking. Natalie hugged her tight.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Natalie soothed her, ‘it’s OK. He’s gone.’ She held Laura, shaking, and stroked her back. ‘I said I’d protect you, remember? I said I’d be here. It’s OK now,’ she said, as Laura shook for a long time in her arms.

  One Saturday afternoon in August James stepped out of the camera shop on the High Street with a carrier bag full of film and paper. His bike was parked in a lane just round the corner. He pulled his keyring out of his pocket and as he flipped it through his fingers to select the bike-lock key he almost collided with a couple of pedestrians on the pavement.

  ‘Sorry. Excuse me,’ James said, as he looked up and into the eyes of Sonia.

  ‘James,’ she said. ‘Hello. How are you?’

  ‘Sonia. I’m fine. Good. You look good. You haven’t changed a bit.’

  ‘This is David. David – James.’

  James shook hands with a smartly dressed, middle-aged man with translucent blue eyes.

  ‘How’s it going?’ James asked.

  ‘OK,’ Sonia replied. ‘You still dancing?’

  ‘Not so much,’ he said. ‘You look good.’

  They hadn’t talked since he’d left her four years before. Now they exchanged uncomfortable, vacuous words. It was hard to believe that they were once lovers, that he had made love with this stranger. He looked at the man with a tanned face and translucent eyes and thought it could have been him.

  ‘Well. See you around, James,’ Sonia said.

  ‘Take care,’ he told her.

  * * *

  Robert came back to Laura’s cottage sober and contrite, and with a wad of money that he offered Laura for Adamina’s maintenance, as well as promises of regular payments in the future.

  Laura was prepared. She’d thought it over and discussed it, not with Natalie but with Zoe: Natalie’s anger, Laura reckoned, might have been useful against violence, but less so for the negotiations that had to follow.

  So Laura explained the situation. Zoe agreed that, whatever the legalities of the matter, Robert’s paternal rights could hardly be separated from Laura’s position in the household, the cottage and the family. Laura could move out, she told Zoe, and make her living with her dinner-party catering, although even that wasn’t certain: if the family were to close ranks against her and Charles Freeman and Harry Singh chose to hinder as they’d once helped her, her clients might rapidly diminish.

  But, more important, there was Adamina herself. Robert was her father, she wouldn’t be in the world without him, his genes were within her. Did Laura have the right to deprive her of a father’s bond? Would he not give her things – quite apart from money, both now and as a future inheritance – that Laura could not?

  Zoe listened with little interruption. ‘Life is messier than legal clauses,’ she said, finally. ‘Why did he hit you, though? Why was he so angry now, after not saying anything for years?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Laura said. ‘He never did anything like this to me before. I think … you see, he did come to see me, or her, when she was one, on her birthday. Came with a mountain of presents. I told him I didn’t need him, and I didn’t want her to need him either.’

  ‘I see,’ Zoe said.

  ‘To tell you the truth, I wish he was … just not around. I mean, part of me still wants him, Zoe. At night. On my own. Oh, God, it’d be so much easier if he wasn’t around.’

  ‘Well, he is.’

  ‘I know.’

  And so Laura was prepared for Robert’s contrition, his offers and claims. She took the money and they agreed that he could see Adamina one Sunday a month.

  Laura sat Adamina down to prepare her for this new part of her life. She’d always known that there’d come a time when she would have to explain, that Adamina would ask questions that required an answer, and maybe in the end it was just as well that the time for such explanations had arrived like this. So she sat Adamina down and told her that Robert, yes, Amy and Tom’s Uncle Robert, was her father, and that although he and Laura were not friends any more, he would like to spend time with her, take her out for the morning, and Laura thought it was a fine idea. She didn’t have a clue what Adamina’s reaction would be.

  Adamina listened, impassive apart from slight frowns, minute gestures that flickered across her face; they seemed less responses to exactly what Laura was saying than outward signs of her mind processing the information.

  ‘When?’ she asked.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Laura told her.

  Adamina’s eyebrows tightened, slowly, then abruptly relaxed. ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘He thought you might like to go swimming.’

  Adamina laughed. ‘I can’t swim, Mummy,’ she said.

  ‘Would you like to learn?’ Laura asked her.

  She thought about it for a while. ‘Yes,’ she said, with a slight lisp.

  Things went well at first. Robert picked Adamina up at the appointed time, and she came back happy. The Sunday mornings stretched to whole days: after the swimming pool Robert took Adamina to lunch in town, then on to a wildlife park or a funfair in the afternoon. But gradually a hostility came back into Robert’s behaviour.

  It wasn’t easy for Laura, handing Adamina over; and Robert showed little inclination to make it easy. One morning he turned up an hour early and demanded Adamina be handed over right away, on the button, where’s her swimming costume and towel and why was Laura fucking him around? The following month he wandered over from the big house two hours late, scornful of Laura’s reproaches and even oblivious to Adamina’s anxiety: she’d been sitting on the step outside waiting for him.

  Robert took Adamina’s hand and told Laura maybe they’d be back at the agreed time and maybe they wouldn’t, he’d see what he felt like. Instead, he returned early, having taken Adamina to the swimming pool and then brought her straight back (Adamina silently nursing her disappointment at missing out on other treats). But whatever hour he brought her home Robert was in a bad mood each time, treating Laura with resentment she found hard to understand and impossible to combat.

  ‘I want to see her next week,’ Robert demanded in his gravelly voice.

  ‘The first Sunday of the month, as usual,’ Laura replied.

  ‘That’s too long.’

  ‘It’s what we agreed.’

  ‘Did she agree it? She’d like to see me more often, wouldn’t you, pet?’

  ‘Don’t put her on the spot, Robert.’

  ‘You don’t give a fuck what she wants.’

  Adamina stood between them, looking from one to the other in bewilderment.

  ‘You go on inside, Mina,’ Laura told her. ‘Your father and I need to discuss this in private.’

  ‘Give Daddy a big kiss.’

  Adamina went in but watched through the upstairs window.


  ‘I bet you’d like me to come in too, wouldn’t you?’ Robert asked her.

  ‘Why do you treat me like this?’ Laura asked him.

  ‘Because you think you’re so fucking superior,’ Robert told her.

  ‘I don’t. That’s so stupid. Of course I don’t.’

  ‘Just the way you say that shows you do,’ he said.

  ‘What do you want from me, Robert?’ she cried.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I want nothing from you, Laura.’

  What made it more complicated was how much Adamina enjoyed her days with her father. She turned out to adore swimming, and Robert was a patient teacher, content to spend hours in the smaller pool with Adamina, in her blue swimsuit and red armbands, kicking and splashing.

  ‘I swam right across the pool without any help, Mummy,’ she told Laura one Sunday afternoon, after Robert had dropped her off.

  ‘Well done, Mina,’ Laura told her. ‘Clever girl.’ She dutifully enthused over anything Adamina reported back, and took care to express nothing negative about Robert.

  After swimming Robert usually took Adamina for a meal at McDonald’s. That was preferable somehow, Laura thought, to his having her to Sunday lunch in the big house. Laura wasn’t sure why it was preferable. It was such a delicate, confusing situation.

  Laura hoped every month through that winter and spring that Robert would become more relaxed, would lose his incomprehensible hostility towards her. He seemed to spend more time in the house nowadays; he may have been antagonistic on Sundays, but when his and Laura’s paths crossed in the company of others Robert was perfectly civil. Maybe the family would absorb his anger, she hoped; maybe his relationship with Adamina would mellow him. Whatever, it was at that time that Robert, in the house, threw a party of his own.

  It was a Saturday when Charles was going to be away on business for the weekend. The expansion of the Freeman Communications Corporation was carrying on apace: Charles had taken over a computer hardware manufacturer in Birmingham and a software company in Coventry; but, no longer able to finance the purchases with money from the Freeman Company, he was securing loans from banks, and spending an increasing amount of time doing so.

  ‘It’s a bad time to borrow, with interest rates rising,’ his accountant suggested.

  ‘Nonsense!’ Charles countered. ‘It’s never a bad time to borrow,’ he laughed. ‘Hey, I like that. Judith! Write that down.’

  Charles was away, and Robert gave everyone else due warning.

  ‘It may get a bit noisy,’ he said.

  ‘Is this an invitation?’ Simon asked.

  ‘I’m not stopping you,’ Robert replied in a non-committal way.

  No one, though, made any alternative plans because they couldn’t imagine Robert having enough friends to cause too much of a disturbance. They did begin to worry around midday when a lorry with the words HOUSE OF TROY emblazoned on its sides rolled up the drive, and men with goatee beards and baggy jeans carried batteries of lights and electric cables, consoles and speakers inside.

  ‘Perhaps we should book into a hotel tonight,’ Alice suggested.

  ‘I’m sure there’ll be no need for that,’ Harry replied. ‘I don’t think they’ll be a rowdy crowd.’ He had heard rattling vans arrive and looked out of the window to see people unloading crate after crate not of beer and liquor but rather of orange juice, Coca-Cola and mineral water.

  ‘I’ve a feeling they’ll be a nicely behaved lot,’ Harry opined complacently. ‘Let’s let the children have a treat and stay up late.’

  It was a hot, dry day – which was just as well, since two hundred cars would end up parked on the hard, baked lawn. Many people arrived on foot as well, strolling along the drive towards the house. The three eldest Singh children mingled with them while Harry and Alice had supper alone together: it was a balmy June evening that reminded Alice of their honeymoon in Goa, and she and Harry felt at peace with each other and with the world.

  ‘It doesn’t get any better than this, does it, Harry?’ Alice said. ‘Does it ever strike you how lucky we are?’

  ‘I know how lucky I am, my love,’ Harry told her. ‘But it can always get better.’

  Their au pair put baby Mollie and the infant Susan to bed, while Harry and Alice sat in the comfortable silence of a couple who no longer had anything new to say to one another, and for whom such a state was a cause not of boredom but rather profound contentment.

  And then, just before nine o’clock, the hazy peace of their house was shattered, when all of a sudden a juddering electronic beat exploded out of industrial speakers.

  It might have been the very same disc that then played without cease for the next nine hours, because what thumped through the walls and into every single room, as well as out into the grounds of the house on the hill, sounded like the same 120-beats-a-minute din all night long.

  Having let his small children roam at will, when they failed to reappear Harry had then to go in search of them. He walked downstairs to the ground floor of their east wing – whose emptiness felt eerie because the noise was already maddening him and the walls were quivering – and then he entered the main part of the house.

  The large drawing-room had been miraculously cleared of its furniture, including the carpet, and refilled with psychedelic posters hanging from the walls, banks of speakers and multi-coloured flashing lights: the room looked like it could never have been used for anything else. Hundreds of people were crammed into it, dancing with epileptic gestures and startled eyes. Most were young, but exactly how old they were Harry couldn’t guess, because he didn’t recognize ever having been quite that age himself.

  The house had been transformed into unfamiliar labyrinths of melting, kaleidoscopic colours. In other rooms people played drums or lay around watching computerized images on a video screen; in one bathroom the bathtub was full of ice (which seemed to be the only thing anyone was eating) and the cold tap in the sink was left running because a constant queue of people were refilling plastic mineral-water bottles.

  Harry Singh stumbled through an unfamiliar world, where speech had been banished but strangers with dilated pupils smiled at him like old friends; one or two tried to hug him and he had to wrench himself free from their sweaty embraces.

  ‘I’m not a violent man,’ Harry told himself, clenching his fists, filled with hatred for these people who were blocking his way to wherever the children were. He had also to fight off the suspicion that this was less a disco than some kind of religious ceremony. He felt as out of place as he had when he followed Alice to her church one Christmas many years ago.

  Harry wandered around the house looking for Amy, Sam and Tom, becoming increasingly disorientated by the remorseless music, thumping so loud it dispersed all coherent thought from his brain, until he’d lost hope of ever seeing them again. At that moment a woman took his hand and led him to a quiet room – which Harry felt almost but not absolutely sure was Charles’ study – and rummaged under a mountain of clothes for where she’d stashed her bag.

  ‘Look at you,’ she said, with an Italian-sounding accent. ‘You look exhausted already. You’ve got to prepare for these things if you want to keep going all night. Hold out your hand.’

  Dazed, Harry did as he was told, and the woman explained as she placed a succession of tablets and capsules on his palm that she was giving him Vitamin E to help his kidneys, blue-green algae for energy, spirulina as a nutritional supplement, ginkgo leaf for peripheral circulation, and guarana, a sacred food from the Amazon.

  ‘Swallow these,’ she told him, handing him her water bottle, ‘and you won’t feel like a flattened hedgehog tomorrow.’

  Harry complied passively.

  ‘And this is a pure White Dove,’ she said. ‘It’s for your anahata, the chakra of the heart.’

  Harry obediently swallowed the white pill. ‘I’m looking for my children,’ he told her, on the verge of tears.

  ‘Really? That’s interesting,’ she replied, and then she tho
ught about it. ‘I think I’m looking for my mother,’ she conjectured. ‘Just remember to drink lots of water. Come on. Let’s return to the sauce,’ she said, or words to that effect: Harry couldn’t be certain, on account of the incessant ringing in his ears.

  Harry made his way back to the drawing-room and resumed his search for the children. With huge relief he glimpsed Amy in a corner, but when he got there she’d vanished; then he saw Sam beside a speaker and rudely pushed frenetically dancing bodies out of his way, but in the time it took to reach him Sam too had disappeared. Harry went round and round the room in useless circles, unwittingly acting out the proof of Dr Griffin’s hypothesis that if a person wants to find someone in a rave, the more desperately they search, the harder it becomes, at an exponential rate, because ravers behave in the arbitrary manner of subatomic particles, disappearing from one spot and materializing in another.

  The only solution is to stay in one place, dancing, and then they’ll come to you. So it would be with Harry: eventually, distraught and exhausted, he came to a bemused standstill in the middle of the drawing-room, crushed by the shuddering weight of sound. Repetitive electronic music seemed to have done what nothing else ever had: sapped the last remnants of Harry Singh’s subterranean will.

  Gradually, however, as he stood there, drained, Harry found his limbs twitching, in automatic imitation of the gyrations of those around him. A strange warmth manifested itself somewhere in his stomach and began to surge slowly up through his body. He felt his heart expand, his mind fizzle like crushed sherbet, and something happened in his ears: to his astonishment Harry realized that the indivisible noise that had battered him seemed to be rearranging itself inside his head. Its inner logic of repeated series of four bars, with four beats in each, was revealing itself to him: the music was making sense. At the same time, it was burning into his brain as it did so. He noticed with surprise that he was tapping his hands against the air to the time of this secret beat that he now heard, and was also aware that his legs were pumping to another, different rhythm from inside that aural maelstrom.