In a Land of Plenty

by Tim Pears

  Zoe gave her name and was directed up thick-carpeted stairs to the first floor; her footsteps were cushioned but her bracelets jangled loudly, her flowery dress felt like a splash against the beige walls, and her patchouli perfume spread through air scented by potpourri. She was greeted by an elegant woman with porcelain skin.

  ‘I’d like to see Mr Singh, please,’ Zoe requested.

  ‘I don’t believe you have an appointment,’ the secretary said. ‘Perhaps you’d like to make one. If you could leave your details with me, I’ll tell Mr Singh the nature of your business and get back to you as soon as possible.’

  ‘Just tell him I’m here,’ Zoe said.

  ‘I’m afraid Mr Singh’s busy all day today,’ the secretary smiled.

  ‘OK,’ Zoe said. ‘Which is his office?’ There were a number of doors off the landing.

  ‘Would you like a seat?’ said the secretary, flustered now.

  ‘Not really,’ Zoe told her, and she strode to a door and opened it: inside, a draughtsman bent over an architect’s drawing-board.

  ‘You can’t possibly do that,’ the secretary told Zoe. ‘Please, either sit down or leave, or else I’ll have to call our security.’

  ‘Shove it,’ Zoe told her nonchalantly. She tried another door: a small kitchen. The secretary had retreated. Or maybe she was still hovering behind Zoe, beseeching restraint, Zoe wasn’t sure and she didn’t care. She tried a third door. There was Harry on the far side of a large desk, gazing at a computer screen. It illuminated him in a sickly blue light.

  Zoe banged the door shut behind her. Harry looked up. It took him a moment to emerge from his hypnotized state.

  ‘Just explain, Harry Singh,’ Zoe demanded before he even had a chance to greet her, ‘how you could do this to me.’

  Harry frowned. ‘You mean selling the cinema, of course,’ he surmised. He shrugged. ‘It’s just business. It’s a good move.’

  ‘What about my cinema?’

  He frowned again. ‘Build a new one,’ he suggested. ‘It’s a good business, I know. I might consider investing myself if you need venture capital. Think of it: a new cinema, entirely modern facilities, to your own design.’

  ‘I live there,’ she exclaimed. ‘It’s my home.’

  ‘Funny: I never imagined you considered that cramped flat anything other than temporary accommodation. You can buy your own place now.’

  ‘Worst of all,’ Zoe continued, ‘you’re helping to carve a new road through the middle of our town. Don’t you give a shit? You’ve got children growing up here, for God’s sake.’

  The door behind her burst open, but Zoe didn’t turn round; she saw Harry wave someone away and then lean back in his chair. His body stiffened and his eyes narrowed.

  ‘I think you know, Zoe, that I’m an easy-going man, but one thing I can’t abide is a holier-than-thou attitude. There is a demand for a new road; I shall play a part in supplying that demand.’ He stood up. ‘We’re not children, Zoe. In fact, to be blunt, you’re a middle-aged, successful businesswoman. And this is business.’

  ‘It is, is it?’ she laughed. ‘I thought you were a believer in nepotism, Harry Singh.’

  ‘I don’t think it applies, precisely, to second cousins-in-law,’ he said.

  Zoe looked incredulous.

  ‘That’s a joke,’ Harry explained. ‘I admit I never have been noted for the quality of my humour.’

  ‘So much for a hundred years of cinema,’ Zoe said off the cuff.

  ‘Your ninety-nine years are up,’ Harry noted. ‘I do see the irony.’

  ‘I’m going to fight this,’ Zoe told him.

  ‘As you wish,’ he accepted. ‘You won’t win. If I were you, I’d put my energies into a new cinema and a new home.’

  ‘I don’t want a new place,’ she exclaimed.

  ‘As you wish, Zoe.’ Harry shrugged.

  The children’s au pair, Shobana, went to pick them up from school: first Mollie at kindergarten, then the boys, and finally the three girls, Amy and Susan, and Adamina, for whose private education Harry was paying.

  One Tuesday Shobana rang Alice from a telephone in the headmistress’s office. ‘Adamina’s disappeared,’ she said.

  ‘She’s probably wandered off somewhere,’ Alice replied. ‘Look in the empty classrooms.’

  ‘We’ve done that,’ Shobana explained. ‘We’ve looked everywhere.’

  ‘You’d better bring the others home,’ Alice told her, ‘and we’ll take it from there.’

  Alice spoke to the headmistress; she rang Zoe, in case Adamina was at the cinema, but there was no sign of her there; then Harry. He went to meet a policeman at the school, where they established that Adamina had attended all her afternoon classes and then vanished before meeting Amy and Susan at the school gates.

  Natalie came home from work. A policewoman was there, questioning the girls, obtaining a photograph of Adamina. Shobana was in tears, sure she’d done something wrong. Simon came through to find out what the fuss was about and found them all in the kitchen.

  ‘Adamina’s been abducted,’ Natalie told him.

  ‘We don’t know that yet,’ Alice rebuked her.

  ‘When are you going to get a search party together?’ Natalie demanded of the policewoman.

  Harry came home. ‘How about someone getting some of these children to bed?’ he suggested, but they were too excited for that. Susan began to sob and Tom told her to stop showing off.

  ‘I don’t like standing here chewing my fingernails,’ Natalie said to Simon. ‘Let’s drive around and look for her.’

  ‘Where would we start?’ he asked.

  ‘It’d be better than stewing here,’ she exclaimed.

  ‘Can I go with them?’ Sam asked.

  ‘And me!’ said Susan.

  ‘Why don’t you blow your nose and take the younger ones upstairs?’ Alice asked Shobana.

  ‘There’s almost always a logical explanation for these things,’ the policewoman tried to calm them.

  ‘Yes, a pervert,’ Natalie replied abruptly.

  Just then they heard the back door open and close, and all froze. A few moments later Adamina appeared in the kitchen doorway, carrying a stuffed-full carrier bag. She assessed the huddle of stalled faces, and turned on her heels.

  ‘I’ll go,’ Alice said quickly, and she followed Adamina to her room. She found her there removing items – crayons, gloves – from the carrier bag.

  ‘Where have you been, Mina?’ Alice asked her firmly. ‘The cinema?’

  Adamina unpacked the rest of the contents of the plastic bag: a photograph album, her passport, a pullover.

  ‘Did you go to the flat to collect these?’ Alice asked.

  Adamina nodded.

  ‘You went on your own, and came back on your own?’

  She nodded again. Alice sat on the bed beside her, sagging with relief.

  ‘You must not do that again. Go off without telling anyone. Ever. Do you understand?’

  Adamina shrugged, and got up and took the jumper over to her chest of drawers. Alice went over and took her hands in her own.

  ‘Listen to me. You must promise me not to do that again,’ she said.

  Adamina nodded peremptorily, and pulled her hands free.

  While James had been in hospital Harry had continued to pay the rent on his empty flat. He knew it was futile, but he also understood that Alice – and everyone else – needed such gestures of hope. It was Alice, though, who now told Harry she’d drive down with Sylvia, her cleaning lady, to clear the flat; the two of them had already cleaned out the cottage.

  They climbed up the two flights of the metal staircase and let themselves in. The flat smelled surprisingly clean and fresh, as if its occupants had been away for the weekend rather than months.

  ‘This should be easier than the cottage was,’ Sylvia said, ‘apart from those iron stairs. I don’t want to be going up and down those too often with my knees.’ She’d already begun unwrapping bin-bags from a tigh
t roll, and entered the small kitchen, where straightaway she set to filling one with half-empty jam jars, cereal packets, and other boxes and cartons.

  ‘Looks like a trip to the bottle bank later on,’ she called out to Alice, having found a box of empty whisky bottles under the sink.

  Sylvia plunged into her task, with no curiosity about the flat, or indeed what it contained that required their efforts to remove or clean: that would have been a waste of time. The kitchen needed attention, and the rest would await her arrival, no doubt. Her daily repeated phrase, putting down a coffee cup, was: ‘Well, Alice, it won’t get done by itself.’

  Alice was prompted by Sylvia to adopt a similar attitude. She scanned the flat as she opened the windows to let the spring air blow through; pulled an old street map of the town covered in red lines off the wall, and scrunched it up; and looked around the bedroom while she stuffed James’ – and Adamina’s – old clothes into bin-bags. On the bedside table under a pile of scuffed paperbacks she found a slim volume of poetry in which was inscribed in faded ink: To my little man, who helped me speak out loud. Alice put it in her pocket.

  They cleared out the junk and stacked bags in a mound by the back door, and broke for a coffee and, in Sylvia’s case, a cigarette: a smoke was her reward for hard work and she couldn’t bear to be interrupted in the middle of one. She made delivery men at the big house wait until she’d stubbed it out before seeing to them.

  ‘What next?’ Alice asked when she’d drained her mug. ‘Shall I fetch the Hoover up?’

  ‘What’s this door here?’ Sylvia wondered, opening it. ‘Look, there’s stairs.’

  ‘Of course,’ Alice realized. ‘The first-floor flat. Laura was going to move in. I don’t know what’s down there.’

  ‘You have a look,’ Sylvia suggested, ‘I’ll get some of those bags out. They won’t shift by themselves.’

  Alice ventured down the stairs. There were cobwebs here, dust on the skirting boards. At the bottom she crossed the small landing, passed a bare kitchen and bathroom; she wasn’t surprised to find it empty. Then she entered the room where Adamina had scrawled and painted on the walls. Alice stared at the six-year-old’s chaotic murals of unidentifiable figures and multicoloured shapes, lines, swirls. They covered the walls, from floor to ceiling: James must have fixed up some kind of scaffolding for her.

  Laid out on the floor were objects and clothes Alice identified as belonging to Laura. She picked her way through them for a closer look at the walls. There was no pattern that she could discern, only shapeless marks made over others. Did they hold any meaning for Adamina? she wondered. Surely not. But then there was one explicable figure, low down on one wall: a body lying with much red felt-tip on and around it, its head disfigured, though whether by Adamina’s lack of draughtsmanship or by injury only someone who knew the story would have been able to tell. Alice was someone who did know the story. And maybe the haywire mosaic around the rest of the walls told more, for one able to read it.

  Alice stepped through to the other room, where all was uncluttered and perfectly clear. Looking at the photographs, she didn’t feel sad, but was rather struck by the strange beauty of this room: neither gallery nor any longer domestic space, but twenty photographs on the walls – in the walls – of a rented flat above a busy road. She saw herself in one, standing behind Laura at the barn dance in the community hall on Laura’s thirtieth birthday. She had no idea James had taken any that evening; but then he carried his camera everywhere, took pictures like blinking, and you didn’t notice. It’s true that black-and-white’s more realistic than colour, she thought, except, look, it doesn’t show what people remark on about me: my one blue and one green eye.

  So what should we do, she wondered, with this private shrine of love and grief?

  A memory came to her: she and Laura were being taken by her big brother James to their great-aunt’s cinema. They were maybe seven, James eleven (she couldn’t imagine letting her children do that now). They walked down the hill to a bus stop at the bottom. Perhaps it was their first such expedition, because Alice could recall – could feel now its memory – a knot of anxiety in her stomach; there were no boundaries, only brittle rules they might ignore or forget, and who knew what might happen? But then the bus arrived and they got on and James paid and they sat down, and that is how the memory burst forth – for that bus ride across town. The groaning rhythm of the bus; the smell of its upholstery and of other passengers; watching the town slide by through the window with Laura and James beside her and feeling both that she was on an adventure with them but also that she was protected by them – her virtual sister and her older brother.

  Alice’s reverie was interrupted by the sound of Sylvia’s heavy footsteps on the metal stairs outside the window (and their echoes on the stairs behind) and her shadow passing across the opposite wall. Sylvia entered the flat above.

  ‘All right down there?’ she called down.

  ‘Fine,’ Alice responded. ‘Only’, she added, ‘we’re going to need to buy plenty of white paint.’

  As she climbed the stairs she thought: maybe one day some future tenants will begin to see those photographs, those faces will peer through fading paint; or they’ll be found, like church frescoes from before the Reformation, by domestic archaeologists of the future.

  ‘This tomb is empty. Seal the tomb,’ Alice heard herself murmur, as she reached the top of the stairs.

  Alice and Sylvia had cleared out the top flat, making two trips to the dump in Alice’s Volvo, another to the animal-sanctuary shop, by the time Sylvia finished work; they’d paint downstairs tomorrow. Alice stayed on, and a couple of hours later Harry came by the flat on his way home from the office. He took off his jacket to help Alice finish cleaning the bathroom, and, watching him, she was surprised by her husband’s energy: despite years as a desk-bound executive, he launched into physical labour with a bodily relish and the apparent efficiency of habit.

  ‘Don’t forget all the work I did, those houses I renovated,’ he told her as he scoured the bath. ‘It’s like riding a bicycle, I suppose: once you’ve done it it stays with you.’

  ‘You can’t ride a bicycle,’ Alice pointed out. ‘Which reminds me of an old university joke: a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Harry responded. ‘Sounds like one of Natalie’s to me.’

  They worked in silence for a while, and then Alice stopped. ‘This makes me sad, Harry,’ she said. ‘Why am I putting myself through this?’

  ‘Someone has to do it,’ he replied.

  ‘It’s always us, though, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘I mean, I volunteered. But we do the clearing up. Why should we have to do it, Harry? I’m just musing. And taking Adamina, too; I mean, I don’t resent it, you know, I take it for granted. I just wonder why it’s always us. Do you know what I’m saying?’

  Harry didn’t stop what he was doing – polishing the taps of the sink with scouring pad and cleaning cream. ‘Because we, my love, are the strong ones,’ he puffed. ‘With our feet on the ground. We’re normal and boring, but we’re strong. We can carry other people. It’s our duty, isn’t it?’

  He stood up. ‘Well, I think that’s just about finished in here. Spick and span. Is it just painting downstairs now? Why don’t I get a decorator in to do that?’

  ‘There’s one other thing,’ Alice told him. ‘Come and look.’

  She led him to James’ darkroom, opened the door, and turned on the light: the walls of the small room were entirely covered with shelves crammed with boxes and folders.

  ‘Negatives,’ Alice explained. ‘And contact sheets. In chronological order, each sheet marked with month and year, and nothing more. As if he’d remember everything that was in them. Thousands. What on earth should we do with them all?’

  Harry pondered. ‘I tell you what,’ he suggested. ‘Let’s ask your father.’

  The next morning Alice brought Charles down to the flat he’d never been invited to
before. While she and Sylvia took paint and plastic sheets, brushes and rollers downstairs, Charles occupied the darkroom. With the aid of a magnifying glass that he found on the workbench he studied contact sheets, replacing each one where he found it. He spent all day in there: by the end of it he had no more than a cursory idea of the full extent of James’ labours, but was already amazed. While down below Alice and Sylvia covered the walls of James’ and Adamina’s mourning, Charles sifted through the work, and explored the life of the son he had never really known. These photographs of what James had seen, had witnessed, became in turn the evidence – each one in part a mirror – of his life.

  It was Charles’ idea to sort and classify the collection and to donate it, whole, to the Centre for Local Studies on the top floor of the public library in the middle of town. He was going to call it the Freeman Archive, but then just in time changed it to the James Freeman Photographic Archive.

  The collection was deposited in the library early on and then most days of the week Charles went in and helped the categorization process. Sometimes James had scrawled information – people, places – on the back of contact sheets, but more often they were bare. Charles went through them slowly, with whatever local experts he could persuade to join him, identifying buildings, streets, shops and as many of the people as possible.

  It was a painstaking process, but Charles became absorbed in it over those months: it became his project; it revived him. He became something of a local expert himself, inevitably, and friends with others. Friends with the humble men who frequented the library: bent over microfiche screens, lost in branches of their family trees; checking facts against oral histories of their streets; or going through back copies of newspapers for news of people long departed.

  Gradually it became clear to Charles that his son’s name would outlive his, and he even came to savour the irony – considering the anonymity of James’ life and the publicity of his own. In truth, though, most of the time he was actually unaware that the photographs were James’; these photographs of people and places in this town, his town, in their lifetime. And then occasionally he pulled one out and it would be of someone in the family, or its orbit, and Charles said to his companion: ‘Ah, I recognize her, yes, don’t worry. I know this one.’