In a Land of Plenty

by Tim Pears

  Zoe made tea in her flat.

  ‘How’s Dog?’ James asked.

  ‘Who? Dog, oh, he’s all right I suppose. You shouldn’t get the wrong idea you know, James.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Just because you and Laura are starry-eyed lovers, don’t imagine everyone else is. God,’ she said, ‘do I sound bitter? That’s awful. I’m sorry.’

  ‘No,’ James said, ‘you’re right, there’s nothing more sickening than self-obsessed, cooing turtle-doves. Let’s make a deal: you try not to be bitter, I’ll try not to be nauseating.’

  ‘It’s a deal,’ Zoe agreed. She sipped her tea.

  ‘You know, I’ve never really thanked you,’ James said.

  ‘What for?’ Zoe asked.

  ‘Well, for always being here. For being patient when I’ve been an idiot. For being such a friend. You’re a great woman, Zoe.’

  ‘I’m losing patience now.’

  ‘And I know you deserve better than Dog. Have you been in love, Zoe?’ he suddenly asked, with a gauche timing he hadn’t entirely lost.

  ‘James, what a question,’ Zoe responded. ‘Yes, of course I have,’ she told him.

  ‘Who with?’ he persisted.

  ‘Jesus, James, give it a rest. Forget it. Look, finish your tea, Urga starts in three minutes. Don’t miss this one, James. It’s so beautiful.’

  Dusk had gathered by the time James emerged from the cinema. He decided to walk home by a roundabout route via the meadow. Cows and horses were visible in the combination of town and moonlight; James stood for a while imagining himself on a vast Mongolian plain, sharing a boiled egg and an apple with his wife in the darkness, before walking home through the Saturday night, loud and busy streets of the town.

  Considering that it was the last Saturday night of his bachelorhood, James wondered whether he should go straight home so early. He’d decided against a stag party: pub-crawling with boozy mates had never been a part of his life. I could go on a one-man stag night now, he thought, go to Lewis’s nightclub alone as I once used to, in search of a last one-night stand. But he didn’t hesitate or change direction as he considered the possibility: he carried on homeward.

  By the time he got back to the flat James was looking forward simply to a glass of wine with the book he was halfway through: it was a book about jazz, which he was reading so that he could share Laura’s taste for jazz, as if literature could open his ears to music as the music itself couldn’t. And it seemed to be working, he’d told her, it really did, it was beautiful, and she’d raised her eyes to heaven.

  A drink and a book: it’s either love or age, James conceded. Instead of going round the back and up the metal staircase, he let himself in through the door beside the shop: he had been able to take over the erstwhile students’ flat on the first floor; Laura and Adamina were going to move in. James had knocked out the partitions at the top and bottom of the staircase between that and his own flat, and he and Laura had already decorated, though they weren’t going to move her furniture in until after returning from their Italian honeymoon.

  James climbed through the empty flat to his own on the top floor and went straight to the kitchen: there was an uncorked bottle of white wine in the fridge. At least he thought there was. He opened the door and light burst out. The wine wasn’t there. How odd, he thought; but then our daily life consists of hundreds of trivial, shifting calculations of memory, adjustments about food to buy, clothes in the wash, phone calls to make, prints to dry and so on and so forth. The occasional aberration is inevitable, he accepted. Especially with age.

  Deciding to go straight back down to the street and the nearest off-licence, James closed the fridge door, blanking off the light, and headed through the dark flat back to the stairs. Just as he reached them a gravelly voice said: ‘Wait.’

  James’ heart thudded. There was someone in the sitting-room, sitting in the dark.

  James turned on the light and Robert, on the sofa, slowly closed his eyes – as if the light were a signal for him to go to sleep. The wine bottle – of course – lay empty on the floor by his feet, though he’d clearly drunk a lot more than that. After a few moments Robert opened his drink-deadened eyes, blinked, and focused loosely on James.

  ‘How did you get in?’ James demanded. ‘What do you want?’

  Robert smiled in James’ direction, with a grin sloppily askew. ‘How’s our prodigal son?’ he slurred.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ James said. ‘What do you think you’re doing here?’

  ‘Decided to come home now, have you?’ Robert continued. ‘Come home to get the girl? Well, you’re too late for the money.’ He laughed, and then coughed, spluttering, before collecting himself. ‘In case you haven’t heard, there’s nothing left. The old man’s blown it all. There’s nothing left for us.’

  ‘I heard,’ James said flatly. ‘If that’s what you came to tell me, you can go. If there’s nothing else.’

  Robert’s eyes clouded. ‘Yeh, there’s one other thing,’ he said. ‘One other thing, you self-righteous cunt. She’s my daughter, and you’re not having her. I know you and Laura, you’re both the same, you think you can do what you like, but you can’t.’

  ‘Of course Adamina’s your daughter. Nothing’s ever going to change that. Don’t be stupid.’

  ‘I’m not fucking stupid,’ Robert exclaimed. ‘I’m just letting you know, that’s all.’ He pushed himself up unsteadily. ‘I’m just telling you, so you know. You’re not going to get rid of me.’

  Robert staggered past James and out of the flat the way he’d broken in – down the metal staircase at the back. James stood still, listening to the sound of Robert’s uncertain footsteps ringing down the iron stairs. Then he lay a while on the floor smoking, letting his pulse calm down, deciding that he wouldn’t tell Laura about this visit, wishing he was somewhere dancing into a brainless oblivion.

  James dreamed that he came up the metal staircase to his flat in the dark. He could hear someone climbing behind him but every time he turned round there was no one there. He knew it was just the metal steps springing back from his own weight upon them but he couldn’t help stopping and turning round, and he entered the flat with his heart thumping.

  He went straight to the darkroom, took a sheet of printing paper that had been exposed earlier and slid it into the developing tray. It remained white for a long time, and he was about to give up when he saw an image begin to appear. He relaxed, but then the image suddenly shot through all the way to black in an instant, so fast he couldn’t get even a glimpse of it.

  James took another sheet of paper and put it in the developing fluid. This time he knew he had to take it out before it blackened, but then he missed it, it happened so fast: again he was unable to see what the image contained.

  He tried many times, and each time the same thing happened. He tried to dilute the chemicals, to take the sheet out before it even began to show development, to switch the light on, but always the photo took ages to appear and then when it did rushed through to sheer black in a moment.

  In the morning James lay in bed, wondering whether the images had registered somewhere in his brain: he had a vague sense of them, the feeling that he had seen them subliminally, that they were now stored somewhere in his head. He grunted with frustration, and rolled out of bed.

  The wedding service was held in the local church at the bottom of the hill, despite both James’ and Laura’s agnosticism. The vicar, once a giggling young neophyte (at the first wedding James had been to), had become at fifty-five a popular, respected parish priest with a shock of white in his curly hair. He was both a High Anglican and a Nonconformist: he regarded the Virgin birth as a fairy story and thought of bodily resurrection as a metaphor, but his adherence to the rituals of worship was unwavering.

  ‘I’m convinced of the subjective nature of human experience,’ he told Laura and James when they met with him. ‘We each have unique perception: the idea of life after death, for example, has a diff
erent meaning for every one of us. Which is precisely why the more formal, even ornate, our ritual is, the better; the more accessible it becomes to our own interpretations. At the same time, one should add, as affording the possibility of transcendent experience.’

  James wasn’t altogether sure he followed the vicar’s logic, but he did suspect it meant that tradition was sacrosanct and that the form of their wedding service was not negotiable and was about to be dictated by him. In fact, the opposite proved to be the case. The priest elicited their thoughts about God, worship, marriage and family, and James and Laura heard each other say things it hadn’t occurred to them hitherto to share. And then the three of them discussed the service itself, adapting vows and prayers and adding music and readings. The meeting lasted almost three hours.

  ‘It seems to me’, the priest said as he saw them out, ‘that there is the surface of things – which in itself gives us beauty – and beneath it a profound mystery.’

  ‘To be honest, I find the surface pretty mysterious as well,’ James admitted.

  ‘I envy you your work, you know,’ the priest told him. ‘Rendering the invisible visible: a great endeavour.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t presume such ambit ion,’ James laughed.

  ‘But surely that’s the purpose of art, isn’t it?’ the priest asked.

  ‘Maybe it is,’ James conceded, ‘even when it’s unconscious.’

  ‘On the other hand,’ the priest continued, turning to Laura, ‘I wouldn’t want your job for all the tea in China. I find few things in life as nerve-racking as cooking.’

  ‘It’s just training,’ Laura told him, ‘like everything. And I had a good teacher. But you must come round for a meal once we’re settled in the flat.’

  ‘Yes,’ James agreed, ‘you must.’

  ‘I look forward to it,’ the priest said.

  ‘What a nice guy,’ Laura told James as they walked home.

  ‘You’re right. Hey, what did you mean’, he asked, remembering things she’d said, ‘about praying? You’ve never told me that. How can you pray to a God you don’t believe in?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘I just do sometimes.’

  On Saturday, 6 June 1992, the church was half as full as it had been for Harry and Alice’s wedding eight years earlier: there were no business acquaintances or civic dignitaries. Instead a dozen pews on each side of the central aisle contained photographers, footballers, artists and musicians, single mothers and a few of Laura’s favourite clients who’d become friends, all behind family at the front. Pauline and Gloria Roberts sat with two vacant spaces beside them.

  Her Uncle Garfield accompanied Laura up the aisle, followed by Natalie, Amy and Adamina, three bridesmaids. Natalie had tried to persuade Laura to let her give her away.

  ‘I’m your friend,’ she maintained. ‘I’m the one who’s losing you. You hardly ever see your uncle; let him walk behind with a posy of flowers.’

  Simon read prayers. Zoe read ‘He wishes for the cloths of heaven’ by Yeats. They sang Psalm 121, ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills’. Alice read a prayer taken from the Brothers Karamazov: ‘Lord, may I love all thy creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it.’

  Lewis was best man, and produced the rings for the vows, the only change to those in the Prayer Book being that Laura pledged the same as James, omitting to obey and serve him but promising comfort instead.

  ‘Wilt thou have this woman to be thy wedded wife, to live together after God’s ordinance in the holy estate of matrimony? Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honour, and keep her, in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all others, keep thee only unto her, so long as ye both shall live?’

  ‘I will,’ said James.

  ‘Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder,’ the priest declared.

  After straightforward photographs in front of the porch James and Laura left in a car provided by Harry, showered with confetti. Laura threw her bouquet back over her shoulder: by a freak coincidence (or curse, she said) it went straight to Natalie who, just as eight years previously, batted it back over her shoulder like a volleyball – to Simon, who accepted it graciously.

  ‘What are you going to be, a Bride of Christ?’ Natalie whispered to him as the congregation strolled to their own cars to drive up the hill in James’ and Laura’s wake. ‘Or one of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence? By the way,’ she added, ‘if any more of you lot do get married, remember not to invite me next time.’

  ‘Don’t be sulky,’ Lucy chided her, taking her arm. ‘I don’t know why you’re so anti-marriage.’

  Adamina had elected to travel the short distance with Zoe. She loved Zoe’s old Morris Minor, and she was amused by Dog’s thick beard. He didn’t mind her crimping it from behind as he sat placidly in the passenger seat.

  ‘How many fathers have you got?’ she asked him.

  ‘One,’ Dog replied.

  ‘I’ve got two now,’ Adamina told him. ‘When I was little I didn’t have any. What about you, Zoe?’

  ‘I’ve got a father; he lives in Scotland. I haven’t seen him for ages. But it’s a mother I haven’t got, Mina.’

  Adamina sighed. ‘Just be patient, Zoe,’ she advised. ‘One might turn up when you don’t expect it.’

  ‘Thanks, Mina, I’ll remember that.’

  Lewis drove up with his family. He was in the front beside his father; Garfield sat stiff-backed behind the wheel; his hair was salt-and-pepper grey.

  ‘Is it not about time you got married?’ he demanded of Lewis. ‘Or are you planning to mess around for ever with this disco nonsense and your football foolery?’

  ‘Leave him alone, Dad,’ Gloria appealed from behind.

  ‘I’m coming to you, young lady,’ Garfield said over his shoulder.

  Gloria turned to her mother and rolled her eyes. Garfield scowled in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘Don’t encourage her, woman,’ he said, ‘she’s twenty-eight years old, she’s no spring chicken.’

  ‘She’s got a lot of patients,’ said Lewis. Gloria and Pauline groaned.

  ‘That will always be a pathetic joke,’ Garfield pronounced.

  The weather forecasters had been right: it was a glorious day, hot without being humid. Guests divested themselves of jackets as they drank champagne on the lawn before sitting down in a white marquee to a buffet lunch of coronation chicken, rice salads and cold meats, stuffed eggs and nut cutlets, followed by pavlova and summer pudding.

  Coffee was poured and empty glasses refilled for the speeches. Lewis spoke of people’s mingled admiration and pity for James, for his single-minded pursuit over so many years of a deranged endeavour. He said James had little idea how many people in the town knew of and recognized the Camera Man – he’d become a well-known public figure. Lewis made the customary coarse jokes. And he confessed that neither he nor anyone else who knew James had any idea what kind of husband so selfish a man would make, but that they could only hope that Laura knew what she was letting herself in for, having known him all her life.

  Garfield spoke with authority and conviction derived from his years addressing his trade-union members, and after embarrassing Laura with anecdotes from shared family holidays, he went on to sing her praises with such persuasion that every man in the marquee felt a personal sense of loss.

  Laura spoke briefly, giving thanks to the vicar and the bridesmaids and others due them, including Charles, who then proved unable to restrain himself (despite Simon’s earlier strictures that his words were not needed). Charles rapped his knuckles on the table and got to his feet.

  ‘Oh, my goodness,’ Alice hissed to Harry, ‘Dad just cannot resist the limelight.’

  ‘No,’ Harry whispered, ‘it’s not that.’

  Ten days earlier Charles had agreed the sale of the newspaper, to a Birmingham tycoon who already owned five other papers; Charles had written his last editorial. Shares in FCC had reached an almost worthless level and were fluttering around the S
tock Exchange like so much confetti. A few days later Charles’ bankruptcy would be formally declared. Thanks to Harry’s deal, a string of creditors would discover their investment and loans evaporated into thin air: vilification and ignominy awaited him (much of it broadcast in what had been his own newspaper). Charles Freeman was living his last days as the man-in-charge. He stood up and tapped a fork against his champagne glass.

  ‘Friends,’ he boomed, ‘I, sad to say, am the last surviving parent of these two young people. And I simply wish to say that I feel like I’m losing a cook, but gaining a daughter. And regaining a son. And that the people they’ve become, and their union today, fills me with enough pride and happiness for four people.’ He raised his glass. ‘To the bride and groom.’

  ‘To the bride and groom,’ came the reply.

  After cutting the cake, there were a couple of hours before dancing. Languid from the food and booze and heat, adults dozed, played croquet, renewed acquaintance with seldom seen friends or relatives, while children dashed about the house and grounds, hyped up on sugar and emotion.

  Natalie collared Laura. ‘My promise is no longer binding, now you’ve got a man beside you,’ she announced.

  ‘What promise?’ Laura asked.

  ‘The same one I made to Alice: to protect you.’

  ‘But James has only promised to love and comfort, and to honour and keep me. We didn’t say anything about protecting each other.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Natalie, confused. ‘I’m not sure, then.’

  ‘How about we keep the pledge, but on an informal basis?’ Laura wondered.

  Natalie thought about it, then shook her head. ‘No, I don’t think so. You don’t need it, Laura. There are other women in greater need. You know what?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘James is all right. He’s soft. I don’t think he’ll treat you badly.’

  ‘Well, thanks, Nat,’ Laura said. ‘I’ll tell him he’s got your seal of approval. He’ll be chuffed.’

  Natalie scowled. ‘Just because you’re a married woman doesn’t mean you’re safe from being thrown in the pond.’

  James conversed with Jack and Clare, Garfield and Pauline. He tried to mix up the cliques at separate tables, introducing Natalie and Lucy to some footballers; Harry to photographers (he might employ one of them, after all); and his neighbours, who’d taken time off from café and grocery store, to Alice, who took over their children and introduced them to her own. Adamina wasn’t with them: James had had the idea of giving her a camera, as he’d once been given one on such a day, and she was going around taking photos of people.