The Pure Land by Spence Alan

Author:Spence, Alan
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Canongate Books Ltd
Published: 2010-08-19T16:00:00+00:00

Market forces were constantly at play, demand for commodities shifting, changing. Glover was alert to the vagaries, looking for signs, straws in the wind. As if overnight, by some strange whim of fashion, there was a great demand for tea in America. Glover moved quickly to seize the moment, expand his operation, scale everything up. His firing shed was torn down and replaced by two huge godowns, great high-ceilinged warehouses, effectively tea-processing factories. The tea business was suddenly an industry, employed a workforce of four hundred, men and women.

It was the start of the season; the raw crop was delivered in bulk from the countryside, had to be fired and dried as quickly as possible, packed in crates ready for dispatch, shipped out directly in clippers loaded to the gunwales with nothing but tea. The work went on, in shifts, day and night, and Glover would turn up at odd hours, himself fired up, exhilarated.

He stopped by one night with Walsh, on his way to the teahouse.

‘Christ, Tom!’ shouted Walsh above the noise of the work. ‘When you do something, you damn well do it!’

‘No other way!’ shouted Glover. ‘Otherwise what’s the point?’

The heat in the place was intense, from hundreds of copper pans filled with red-hot charcoal. Over them the green leaves were dried in huge flat baskets, shaken from side to side, never still; the workers glistened with sweat, the men dressed only in loincloths, the women naked to the waist; flares threw a flickering light, cast shadows upwards, and steam from the leaves hung in the air. The noise too was overwhelming, great wooden crates violently shaken to settle the fired tea that poured into them in a constant unending flow.

‘It’s infernal!’ shouted Walsh, loosening his shirt collar.

‘Aye!’ shouted Glover. ‘Isn’t it?’

Walsh looked at him strangely, warily. ‘You look demonic!’

Glover laughed, recognised what Walsh meant, the mood that was on him. He felt the surge of it, indomitable. His blood was up.

Later, fired even more by a drink or two, he took exception to something Walsh said, about the workforce slaving away.

Glover glared at him, cold. ‘Those folk are glad of a job. I pay them well for what they do. And I don’t think an American is in a position to lecture anyone about slavery!’

Now Walsh was angry. ‘I’ll remind you, sir, that we’re fighting a war to abolish it.’

‘And half of your countrymen are fighting a war to keep it!’

‘Sometimes you go too far.’

‘Impossible!’ said Glover, cuffing him a little too hard to the side of the head, then laughing again, grabbing Maki round the waist. She shrieked and clung to him. He breathed in her scent, intoxicated.

*

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