In a Land of Plenty

by Tim Pears

  ‘I need to pee,’ James told Laura, and he walked across the lawn, and entered the house.

  Is this the last threshold? he wondered. Will I be coming here for Sunday lunch – for Indian Sunday lunches? Or have we simply signed a mature truce, a tired accord, so we can live free of canker and resentment? That’s probably it, although Robert could have come, if only a brief appearance, the graceless bastard. Maybe that’s it, James wondered, maybe all these years I thought it was my father I hated and really it was my brother. I’m resolving an Oedipal complex at the age of thirty-five and now I have to sort out Esau. Or is it me who’s Esau and Robert Jacob? Fuck, I’ve had too much champagne.

  He relieved himself and then snooped around. He looked at Harry and Alice’s quarters in the east wing, their rooms furnished with antique furniture, the children’s bedrooms with telephones and personal computers. Nostalgia induced his footsteps towards his old room, and the nursery, on the third floor of the west wing, but he only reached the second: he stayed a moment on the edge of what was now Robert’s territory – looking up the dusty, dirty stairs, wondering if maybe he was actually up there now. Back on the first floor he met a gaggle of children playing hide-and-seek; Adamina ran round a corner and bumped into him.

  ‘Hide in here,’ James said automatically, opening the door to his old darkroom. He reached for the light, found and pulled it, and the room turned infrared. He saw at a glance it was just as he’d left it, if cobwebbed and mildewy, and closed the door behind him.

  Apart from the darkroom everything upstairs had changed, but on the ground floor almost nothing had. Even the upholstery of the armchairs in the drawing-room seemed familiar. He found the same books on the shelves of his father’s study – still, presumably, unread – the same unplayed piano, and the same portraits on the walls.

  Amid so much the same the new stood out: which were James’ own photographs, beautifully framed, hung here and there. The early ones that Charles had claimed were his by rights, since he financially supported his son’s hobby, were in the corridor through to the kitchen: a set of four similar photos of apparently empty school classrooms, which closer inspection revealed to contain the ghosts of teacher and children.

  In the study, behind Charles’ desk, was the photograph Simon had bought from James’ exhibition: of Charles being driven into work with, framed through the car window, the Wire on the picket line, his face contorted with fury, heaping abuse on Charles, who wore a smile of sublime indifference.

  In the hallway were two other photographs James had taken for the newspaper when he worked there: either Charles had ordered prints at the time, or else he’d had them printed from the photographic archives once he was at the paper. One was of a crowd dancing at a Fun Day concert in the park on the side of the hill, with the house visible up high in the background. James hadn’t noticed at the time that he’d got the house in the shot; he must have blanked it out of his mind. Although that was precisely, one assumed, the reason why Charles had bought and framed it: a photo of both a party and his house.

  The other was from one of the very few assignments James had been given at the town team’s football matches: a player was horizontal some three feet off the ground; for the briefest moment you might think he was levitating before you realized he was frozen in the act of diving from right to left to head the ball. On the left of the frame the goalkeeper made to save. The ball itself, however, was absent, and it was impossible to tell whether it was about to enter, or had just left, the scene. Had a goal been scored or saved? What was clear was the word FREEMAN directly beneath the diving player, on one of the advertising hoardings on the far side of the pitch. That, James recalled, he had been aware of at the time: Keith the printer had brought it still dripping from the darkroom into the office.

  ‘This bloke’s a genius,’ James remembered Keith telling the others. ‘He manages to sign his photos as he takes them.’

  There were even clip-frames of his postcards of the town in the lavatory, hanging where newspaper cartoons of his father had once.

  James went back outside, feeling slightly dazed, and foolish. Natalie passed him on the steps. ‘I think your wife’s looking for you,’ she grinned. ‘In trouble already,’ she tutted. James made a lunge for her but Natalie ducked to one side and trotted into the house, chuckling. She found herself standing at the lavatory door, listening to someone moaning inside.

  ‘What’s up in there?’ Natalie enquired after a while. ‘Are we out of loo paper?’

  The weeping abated into snuffles. Natalie heard there was plenty of toilet paper as the roll was spun round like a wheel in a mouse cage, and what must have been a long strip was torn off, and used to blow someone’s nose. The basin taps ran, then the lavatory was flushed, and the door unlocked and opened.

  ‘Are you all right, Zoe?’ Natalie asked.

  ‘Fine now,’ Zoe replied.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Natalie asked her.

  ‘Nothing,’ Zoe assured her. ‘Hay fever,’ she said. ‘See you outside.’

  They danced for three hours to a ceilidh band in the white marquee. When the music began there were many reluctant, sceptical spectators, but by the time it had finished everyone was dancing – apart from Harry, which was just as well because someone had to take exhausted children to bed.

  Adamina outlasted both her contemporaries and the band: they made way for Lewis and a one-off disco in which he mixed up Chic, Sister Sledge and the Bee Gees with pop House, combining Laura’s taste for the Seventies with James’ for the exuberant new. Adamina danced with James to ‘Rhythm is a Dancer’ and when it finished she stopped and said something to him.

  ‘What?’ he yelled over the first beats of the next disc, and bent down.

  ‘I’m going to bed now,’ she called into his ear, and she kissed him goodnight, went over to Laura and did the same, and walked across the lawn on her own, towards the cottage, miniature camera still in her hand.

  Alice was dancing with Simon but grooving away in a world of her own. Natalie and Lucy were bumping bums with a couple of Arab footballers, who, James trusted, weren’t setting their hopes too high. Charles was flailing around with one of Laura’s clients. Harry’s brother Anil and his wife danced timidly behind a tent pole. Zoe was taking a break at one of the tables; the smell of cannabis drifted. Pauline sat at another table, while Garfield was dancing calypso-style with his daughter. Not that she was: Gloria was an even groovier disco dancer than Alice; she’d had more practice (though rarely with her own brother as DJ). She and her father made a fine if incongruous pair, as did Dog and the vicar, who were close to each other at one side of the dance-floor and appeared to be competing for a prize for the worst sense of rhythm in the marquee. It was all they had in common: Dog didn’t so much dance as wobble, yet managed to do that out of time, while the priest resembled a policeman on traffic duty in a Keystone Cop rush-hour.

  ‘Let’s slip away,’ Laura suggested to James. When they’d almost reached the cottage they turned round and looked back across the lawn to the marquee. With the disco lights flashing it looked like the shell of some fabulous sea creature; or rather a whole family of creatures that they could see through the mouth of the shell.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ Laura said. ‘Harry’s dancing.’

  James peered. ‘I can’t see him.’

  ‘There on the right.’

  ‘Is that Harry? It can’t be. He’s a great mover. It can’t be Harry.’

  ‘It is, I assure you. You enjoy it?’

  ‘Mm. We didn’t miss it, did we?’ He put his arm around her.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘When the astronauts came back from the moon they watched the TV recordings, with all the reactions of people, and Buzz Aldrin said to Neil Armstrong: “We missed it.”’

  ‘You’re crazy, my love.’

  ‘I’ve missed things I’ve recorded. Trying to capture in images the essence of an event, not experiencing it myself. But not this time
.’

  Later James whispered: ‘This time tomorrow we’ll be in Italy.’

  ‘This time tomorrow we’ll be asleep,’ Laura murmured back, snuggling closer to him. ‘Hey,’ she said, prodding him in the side, ‘did you see Simon and your father doing the Basket with Pauline and Clare? They must have thought they were going to fly.’ James could feel the ribs of her laughing lungs vibrate against him.

  ‘Sweet dreams, love,’ she whispered. He could sense her already falling away from him into sleep – into a separate world. As was his own, awaiting him, and that was incontrovertible. Or perhaps tonight, he wondered, we shall meet in our dreams, and that was his last conscious thought.

  James woke abruptly, though not from a dream. He remembered no dream, had no lingering sense of that world whatsoever, even slipping through his fingers; he was wide awake. He and Laura had separated during the night. He looked over her shoulder at the alarm clock: twenty to seven, absurdly early. James closed his eyes: he shifted position, curling up, hoping to wrap sleep around him again, but it was no use, his body was restless. Wedding or no wedding, it was another Sunday morning, and, as usual, the one morning he could sleep in guiltlessly his mind wouldn’t let him.

  James eased out of bed, gathered clothes, crept downstairs, peed, pulled on T-shirt, shorts and plimsolls, opened the fridge and drank a mouth and throatful of grapefruit juice straight from its carton.

  He wrote a note: ‘Woke wide awake and happy. Gone for a run,’ just in case, returned upstairs and put it on the floor outside the bedroom door. He looked in on Adamina: she slept, her mouth slackly open.

  ‘Sleep on,’ he whispered, and went back downstairs and outside.

  There was a tentative glow to the June morning, as if the full glare of the day was being withheld, had to be earned by some unknown supplication of the earth. The aftermath of a party lent an air of pleasant desolation to the garden: guests had been invited to stay, so as not to have to worry about transport home and also to enjoy a communal breakfast, as Laura had requested. Two or three had put up tents around the edges of the lawn and among the fruit trees, others had simply laid sleeping bags on the floor of the marquee and now slept like chrysalises in the white light. James could see Lewis’s dreadlocked hair sticking out of a red sleeping bag.

  James jogged along the drive to the gates. He didn’t particularly like running, because he felt the limitations imposed by his wonky hips: he felt slow and ungainly. Sometimes, though, he desired air in his lungs, sweat, pain and pain transcended, motion; either when the loneliness in his hollow centre needed to be dispelled by force or else, as now, when it brimmed over with happiness and needed release. He jogged down the hill, across the road and into the park.

  There were few cars on the roads; one or two dog-walkers out already; birds; a squirrel scampered chattering away from him. Church bells began to ring, calling the faithful to early communion. Simon had told him that at the local church new bellringers couldn’t be recruited to replace the old, and so tapes were broadcast. James now realized that was one of Simon’s jokes, because the chimes pealing out were so haphazard: it sounded like inadequate apprentices. Or maybe this was a tape the priest used precisely for its awful authenticity. Thinking of the priest, he looked forward to seeing him again.

  Two girls on horses clopped up the avenue by the side of the park, incongruous so near the middle of town, like lazy harbingers of a different – older – age approaching. A young red setter came bounding over, its owner wailing futilely, and James paused to stroke its eager, drooling face. He ran on, and a stitch seized him inside: determined to ignore it, he visualized footballers’ celebrations (confusing the image of the players’ bodies with his own): Hugo Sanchez’s cartwheel, Ian Wright’s robotic stance, Jairzinho’s exultant falling to his knees, making the sign of the cross.

  Natalie had woken early too, not long after James, over in the big house. She too had slipped away from her lover and gone downstairs. Unlike James she rarely had a problem sleeping in on Sunday mornings. She’d danced till Lewis stopped the music, some time between two and three; she had the stiff knees to prove it, as well as a thudding hangover.

  James ran past the hideous college of further education, and a memory came to him of a childhood trip to Oxford – when he’d shrunk into the middle of a punt, hiding from his father’s bombast – and, walking past a castle-like college, his father had announced that this was where their great-uncle had been a brief scholar. ‘Is there any chance one of you ruddy dunces will follow?’ he’d asked plaintively.

  Then his mother had told them that when the college was built a famous scholar considered it so ugly that he altered the course of his daily constitutional in order to avoid it. Yet time and weather had softened its vulgarity, healed its brashness. Would the passing of time do the same to this squat concrete brutality? Would it last long enough to be healed? Time, thought James – thinking rhythmically with his pounding footsteps – time wanders, time seals, time passes, time heals; until he lost himself once more running.

  Natalie had offered overall responsibility for breakfast, and assumed that was what had compelled her from sleep so bloody early – hours before anyone would want to eat. She filled a big mug with mineral water and drank it in one long, gulping flow, then searched for Paracetamol.

  James ran on the natural high his body produced, flew on a second wind, eating up the ground below him; not Hawkeye in the woods, no, I am James Freeman cutting a path through my town.

  ‘You’ve been staring at the world so long,’ Zoe had told him, ‘maybe you’ve fallen in love with it.’ He’d laughed at her. He thought of Laura still sleeping, her warm body, her smell, her flesh that he shared. ‘Love isn’t painless,’ Zoe had said another time.

  He heard a distant gunshot, and wondered if it had carried down from Shutterbuck Woods, full of rabbit warrens. He heard another one. Praying and hunting on a Sunday morning, James thought. And running. Sweat had greased his white body and beads of it flew off his hair; it stung his eyes and slid, salty, in his mouth. His stitch burned back. I’ll run through it, he resolved, and began to try to lose himself in the rhythm of the morning.

  * * *

  Natalie prepared breakfast. Assuming people would want to eat outside, she stacked bowls, plates, knives, forks, spoons and mugs on the kitchen table, along with cereals and jams. Like a television chef demonstrating, she got everything ready within reach: bread by the toaster; croissants on a tray in the oven; coffee in a cafetière and teabags in a pot by the filled kettle; eggs and bacon, sausages, mushrooms and tomatoes, scrambled, separated and sliced, on the sideboard beside frying pans on the stove.

  Such plenty, Natalie thought. What am I doing, living here? she wondered for the hundredth time, before acknowledging, again, that this wealthy family had given her a home with such ease, a refuge from which she had the strength to do the work she did.

  Natalie looked at her watch: ten to eight. She laughed, for no one else would be up for at least another hour. The house was silent. Then she heard a sound. Only it wasn’t occurring now: it was a memory of a sound; it was a sound that had woken her. Was it? She strolled into the back hallway. Dick, that neurotic little dog, was sitting staring up at the back door, his body tensed. Natalie opened the door, keeping Dick back with her foot, and stepped outside. It was just as quiet outside as inside the snoozing house. Something told her she hadn’t been woken to make breakfast; she began running, towards Laura’s cottage; and she heard the blast of a twelve-bore shotgun.

  Natalie banged through Laura’s front door and pumped up the stairs. She saw Robert emerge from Laura’s bedroom. In a daze, he didn’t hear her: he turned right, towards Adamina’s room, and was almost there when Natalie reached the top of the stairs, and then he did hear her and turned round. They stood staring at each other. Robert held the gun loosely, with both hands, pointed at the ground. Natalie’s mind raced: if Robert turned to go to Adamina’s room, she might close the distance – ten to fifte
en feet – between them and jump him. If she made for him now, he would kill her. He might decide to shoot her anyway, and if he made that decision she would have to rush him, no matter if it was suicidal. Her mind had no thought of Laura and James: whatever had happened to them was past.

  They stared at each other for an age. Natalie felt like she was hovering. It occurred to her, fleetingly, that she might speak, rational, conciliatory, sympathetic, talk him down from his lonely psychosis; but that would be another person, not her. She couldn’t do it. They stared at each other, unmoving. And then Robert’s face began to change. Natalie’s nerves shrieked on the verge of action. Then she realized that he was smiling. He raised the gun: Natalie made to throw herself forward, but he carried on lifting the barrel to below his own chin.

  At that moment Adamina emerged sleepily down the hall beyond him, and gazed at the back of her father, standing rigid. Natalie felt her eyeballs bulge with the effort not to look past him, at Adamina. Arms fully extended, Robert pulled the trigger, emptying the second barrel into his own head.

  Natalie ignored the petrified child and the mess of Robert’s body and ran into Laura’s room. And then anyone in the big house who’d slept through the gun blasts was woken by a cry, a cross between a martial arts roar and the scream of an animal in agony.

  James heard sirens wailing as he ran up the hill. His limbs were wearied and his lungs yearning; his T-shirt was soaked with sweat. He jogged through the gates. People were dotted around. Ambulances and police cars were by the cottage, and a knot of people. Startling blue lights were swirling: like a nightmarish vision of the party the night before, shifted from the marquee over to the cottage.