In a Land of Plenty

by Tim Pears

  Then the flavour: bananas scented like a spice; walnuts, woody; tart lemon (why do citrus fruits make us salivate? Is it to protect the palate against the imminent arrival of sour juice?). Serve cooled, cut thinly, spread generously with butter. Winter food. Comfort food. The longer you keep it, the better it tastes. That’s hard to do, though: you have to hide it away, or it disappears from any kitchen.

  After supper was over and washed up and cleared away I wrapped up and went out on the balcony with a brandy. I remembered how I used to have nightmares, when I first took over the kitchen in the big house after I left school. I dreamed things like people finding shrimps or whitebait alive and jumping around their plates, or insects crawling out of vegetables. Or serving up and realizing I’d made enough for three people when there were twenty around the table.

  I haven’t had those anxiety dreams for years now. I have the confidence to know there’s no disaster that can’t be overcome. You know, I once made Jerusalem artichoke soup, before I’d found out you should boil artichokes for ten minutes before frying them. Your father had a number of guests for dinner. Afterwards everyone had to keep excusing themselves to rush to the loo, where they flushed the toilet immediately to cover the sound of breaking wind.

  JANUARY 3RD

  My last day today. The last meal has been cooked. You remember one of those Laurel and Hardy shorts you forced me to watch, when Ollie’s wife gets a huge, heavy frying pan from the kitchen and comes storming through to the sitting-room?

  ‘Are you going to cook something?’ Stanley asks.

  ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I’m going to cook his goose.’ And she’s so short she has to pull up a chair and stand on it in order to bang the pan on Ollie’s head. As he falls backwards unconscious – onto a conveniently situated settee – he flutters his hand waving goodbye, and there’s the sound of birds twittering on the soundtrack.

  Remember? I have to admit, that was funny.

  This has been such a muted experience for me. I’ve enjoyed the work but seen so little of this city; partly because of lack of time if I was going to do a good job, but partly also because you are not here. It’s so curious. I wanted to share it with you. Thoughts, feelings, sights, conversations, experiences of all kinds, good and bad, trivial or profound. I want to tell you about them; but more than that I want you to partake of them – just as I want to know what you think, feel, see.

  Before, I had no need of this. I was content to live my life alone. Experiences were sufficient in themselves.

  The thing is, now, because of you – and here, now, because of your absence – I notice more, feel more keenly, my own life, I suppose. At the same time, what I have seen, thought and felt is diminished without you here to share it.

  Is this love? If so, how strange.

  I fly home tomorrow. I will be with you soon.

  Laura

  That evening, after making love, they lay in each other’s arms.

  ‘Are you tired?’ James asked.

  ‘No, it’s about seven o’clock in the evening in New York. The evening’s just beginning,’ she said, caressing him. ‘The night is young,’ she whispered in his ear.

  They made love again. ‘Are you tired?’ Laura asked James.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘but happy. I missed you so much, Laura. I’m glad you went, though. It made me realize how I feel. I said it on the telephone.’

  ‘I know,’ she murmured.

  ‘I want to be with you. I want to share everything with you.’

  Laura sat up beside him. ‘You’d be prepared to move to New York?’ she asked brightly.

  A spasm of anxiety swam through James’ guts. ‘Are you serious?’ he asked. ‘You did get an offer.’

  ‘No,’ Laura admitted. ‘I’m teasing. No one said a word.’

  James breathed a sigh of relief. ‘You’re terrible,’ he said, ‘you’re a horrible cow,’ grabbing her and rolling her over. Laura fought back.

  ‘You still antagonize me like a superior sister, you harridan,’ James complained, as he pinned her down and tickled her.

  Unfortunately for James, Laura wasn’t ticklish. He was. After a prolonged struggle they’d both submitted once, only to attack again when the other’s guard was lowered, and finally agreed a truce.

  Laura made a pot of tea and brought it back to bed. They sipped in silence for a while, until James said suddenly: ‘Laura, let’s get married.’

  Laura didn’t react, for what was probably a few seconds but seemed like a lifetime; for a heart-stopping trans-Atlantic pause.

  ‘Do people of our generation get married any more?’ she asked.

  ‘We’re not people,’ James said. ‘We’re you and me. We can do what we want. I’ve been alone for so long, and I’ve grown used to it; I’m aware of the freedom I have, Laura. But I’d like to share my life with you; I’d like to pledge myself to you. That’s what I want, I don’t care if it’s old-fashioned.’

  The words came out unrehearsed, following themselves like footsteps towards a precipice. James knew he was being both brave and foolish. Her letter had given him courage, but even so: he should have inched forward, with Laura, negotiating every step; gauging the mutuality of their feelings. Instead he’d blundered on ahead, alone, until he ran out of words and firm ground and turned round to see if she was still in sight. James realized how little he knew Laura – could know her – because he had no idea how she would respond now. It was possible that she would come forward and join him; it was equally possible that she’d say, sorry, James, I have other plans, you’re part of now, you’re no part of later, I love you too but that doesn’t mean for ever, James. There’s no such thing as for ever.

  James couldn’t look at Laura; he looked down at his knees instead. Speak! his mind implored her. Don’t say anything! his mind screamed. Don’t say anything! He slurped some tea. And then he was aware, gradually, that beside him Laura was neither speaking nor silent: she was crying. James’ first thought was that she was crying because she knew what she had to say would hurt him; she didn’t want to hurt him. Or maybe because he had spoiled what existed between them. It was shocking, someone so strong crying beside you. He offered his arm and she leaned into his body and wept openly, profusely, with racking sobs and gulps that made James understand she was crying for much more than he’d feared, her tears falling on both their naked bodies.

  James reached for tissues on the bedside table, and Laura blew her nose.

  ‘I’m crying for my mother, I know it’s crazy,’ she sniffed. ‘And for my father. And myself. See what you’ve started, James.’

  ‘It’s OK, you go ahead,’ he soothed her.

  ‘You think I’m this big sister,’ Laura snuffled, ‘responsible, sure of myself, in control of things. Everyone does, I know. I know it’s true too, but it’s not. I’m an orphan inside. I’ve only ever cried once since Mum died; just before Mina was born.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I had to keep myself aside, growing up with you lot. I wasn’t one of you, I knew I couldn’t be. And I’ve kept myself apart ever since. Oh, James,’ she said, ‘do you know what you’re offering? Do you know what you’re taking on?’

  ‘Probably not,’ he agreed.

  ‘I would like to marry you very much,’ Laura told him.

  Simon’s health group, which met in the drawing-room of the big house once a week, continued through that winter. One of the regular attendants was a forty-year-old anthropologist called Topper. He had horn-rimmed glasses, long hair and a thick beard and wore sandals made from car tyres. Topper had spent recent years in South America on field trips conducting research into the use of natural hallucinogens by natives of the Amazon rain forest, and regaled the group with intoxicating stories of journeys through the spirit world with his own spirit animal, a black jaguar. Now he was staying with his parents back in the town he’d grown up in, in the Northtown suburb near Lewis’s house.

  As chairman of the group, Simon tried not to let Topper take over the floor. Simon himself wa
s seeing Mr Nakamoto at the time, a short, aggressive Shiatsu master who threw Simon around his treatment table with exclamations and grunts that sounded a little too much like pleasure for Simon’s comfort.

  Then one week Topper turned up at the group wearing socks and shoes, with a short-back-and-sides haircut, having swapped his spectacles for contact lenses, shaved off his beard and found work as a computer programmer. He had also, he said, started learning transcendental meditation, and Simon was so impressed by his transformation that he told Topper he wanted to learn.

  ‘Actually, Simon, my name’s John,’ Topper explained.

  ‘Oh, is that like a spiritual acronym?’ Simon asked.

  ‘No, it’s my Christian name,’ he replied.

  And so one evening the following week Simon took a flower and a white handkerchief to an introductory talk given by a man in a suit and a woman in a Laura Ashley dress, and he began to meditate for twenty minutes in the morning and twenty minutes in the evening, using a personal mantra given by his teacher. Simon was bursting to tell people what it was, and find out whether theirs was the same.

  John stopped coming to Simon’s weekly group, but at the beginning of March he made a reappearance there and announced that he was their local candidate in the forthcoming general election, and would they like to make contributions to party funds?

  The Natural Law Party had been founded overnight and submitted candidates in every constituency in the country. The basis of their manifesto was that if the square root of the population engaged in an advanced technique of meditation known as yogic flying, then certain principles of the natural law of the universe would be invoked, resulting in a reduction of crime and unemployment and an increase in health and wealth. This simple promise was contained in a manifesto of mind-boggling complexity, using Vedic science, quantum field theories of modern physics and statistical diagrams conveying the results of over five hundred research studies in two hundred and ten universities and institutes in twenty-seven countries around the world.

  In fact it was already happening, John explained, on a housing estate on the outskirts of Liverpool. It was an outrageous claim – that would be verified by a chief constable and health workers after the election – but Simon and his friends pledged their support.

  The major parties ignored the new one (as would most of the electorate) and resumed their usual gladiatorial struggle, putting most of their efforts into deriding each other. Charles spent more time than ever at the newspaper, much of it writing editorials. In one he bemoaned the Government’s lack of vision and proposed a series of measures for the future that included privatization of the police, the army and the DSS, or the Department of Social Insecurity, as he thought it should be renamed, in order to discourage loafers and scroungers. He also advocated tougher punishments for criminals, especially those guilty of car thefts: the town was suffering a plague of ‘hotting’, in which youths stole cars and drove them onto the estate by the factory in order to perform high-speed stunts for a paying audience – they made Robert wish he was younger. Charles wrote that the opposition’s idea of punishment was to give them their own car, whereas most intelligent people would rather drive them off a cliff; and furthermore, decent people should be allowed to fit their cars with traps that administered electric shocks to car thieves. It was one of his most popular editorials.

  Charles didn’t really understand the notion of media impartiality. He put up the money, so his was the loudest voice. No one quite had the courage to tell him the truth: that the money was running out.

  The Freeman Communications Corporation, instead of realizing profit at the speed necessary to pay back the cost of its expansion, was leaking money in different places. The cable TV company had proved a dead duck; the computer programmes Charles had invested in were incompatible with the systems that had come to prevail in the global market; the radio station wasn’t listened to by anyone. A good share of its advertising revenue came from other FCC businesses, using Charles’ old ploy of moving money around within his various companies to suggest that things were healthier than they really were, a ploy that had worked before since, as he often declared, ‘Confidence is as precious a commodity as gold.’

  The trouble was, confidence alone couldn’t pay off the interest on the loans he’d taken out. He had to take out further loans just to pay his debt burden, and he did so by handing over FCC shares as collateral.

  ‘In a crisis, you have to keep money fluid,’ he told his accountant. ‘It’ll turn out all right, it always does,’ he assured everyone, as he slid deeper into debt. The more he borrowed – and the greater his debt became – so the more vulnerable grew FCC shares; but then he had to release more of them as collateral for further credit in a tottering financial edifice whose foundation was nothing more than the hot air of the man at its centre.

  When Zoe bought a copy of the newspaper her uncle’s views in print enraged her as much as they had at Sunday lunches in the past. She hastily arranged a week of special late-night screenings, in the run-up to the election, of films like Comrades and High Hopes and The Ploughman’s Lunch. Every one was an enthusiastic sell-out (a rare event in those days, since a new multiplex cinema with ten screens had opened on Harry’s land outside the ring road), which news happened to reach Charles via Natalie and Simon, and he found time to telephone Zoe from his office.

  ‘I’m glad to hear you haven’t lost your financial touch,’ he goaded her.

  ‘You’ll be laughing on the other side of your face after polling day,’ Zoe told him.

  ‘I very much doubt that,’ he replied.

  James came to see Paris by Night, because Laura was cooking for some clients outside town that evening, and after a quarter of an hour he walked out and went upstairs, where he found Zoe doing her accounts on the miniature coffee table in her tiny sitting-room.

  Zoe took off her glasses, did a double-take, and said: ‘No, no, don’t say anything. Don’t tell me. I know the face. It’s familiar. I’ve seen you before somewhere, haven’t I?’

  James held his arms out and shrugged sheepishly.

  ‘Zoe, I’m—’

  ‘No, don’t, let me guess. We’ve met before, a long time ago … Hang on, it’s coming to me … It’s on the tip of my tongue … Yes, of course, I know who you are. You’re James Freeman, the noted photographer, loyal friend and conscientious answerer of telephone messages. See, I did recognize you. Of course, you’ve changed, a lot actually, you’re certainly older, but I recognize you all the same. Do I get a prize?’

  Having successfully reduced James to a state of abject apology and fawning pleas for forgiveness for not visiting her for months, Zoe got up and gave James a hug, and made him realize that his cousin’s embrace, the smell of her hippy oils, and the jangle of her bracelets, had provided the one constant reassurance in his life.

  She poured them both a brandy, and he tried to explain what he’d been doing that excused neglecting everybody else. But she interrupted him.

  ‘For God’s sake, James, what do you think the whole family’s been talking about all winter? It’s all right, you’re allowed to fall in love. I knew you would eventually. I never thought of Laura.’

  ‘I don’t know if I did,’ he admitted.

  ‘Is it true you’re getting married?’

  ‘Yes, we are. What do you think?’

  ‘What do I think?’ Zoe bowed her head. ‘Well, sweetheart, I think …’ She raised her head, and looked him in the eye. ‘I think she’s a lucky woman. It’s wonderful, James. I’m very happy for you both.’

  The final screening of that election week took place after the polls closed, and was a double-bill of both parts of 1900 followed by Duck Soup, which didn’t finish until dawn. The capacity audience was imbued with a tremendous optimism, and emerged into the bright, realistic glare of a new day, to be met by the mild smile of the Prime Minister – who still looked like someone who’d wandered from the suburbs into Westminster by mistake – returned to power.


  During that time James and Laura spent many hours discussing – in her car, in James’ flat, walking across the meadow on Sunday afternoons, and at night when he crept into the grounds to her cottage – their wedding and plans thereafter. It was like another game.

  They promised to both speak openly and honestly, to say exactly what they wanted, and only then to make fixed arrangements. The one thing they found they agreed on was to marry soon, early that summer. Everything else, as they might have expected with their contrary tastes, was up for discussion: James wanted a register office ceremony with a minimum of fuss, Laura preferred a church service with a hundred guests; James suggested hiring the largest hall in town for a brief reception followed by one humdinger of a barn dance, while Laura prevaricated; he fancied a honeymoon in Italy, she wanted to follow the East Anglian coast, from Felixstowe to King’s Lynn, sampling dishes in the best fish restaurants.

  ‘Good grief, it’s a honeymoon, not a research trip,’ James pleaded.

  Laura made a list of the various options before them and, although they had to make up their minds soon in order to book places and print invitations, James made ready for convoluted negotiation. In fact when it came to it there was little: once Laura formulated what sort of reception she wanted, she conceded everything else to James, on condition he went along with her on that one element of the venture.

  ‘We come back here for the reception,’ she explained carefully. ‘Not to the cottage: to the house. We have a marquee on the lawn. Games outside, then dancing later. Have guests to stay the night. We won’t rush away, we’ll stay the night in the cottage.’