Blenheim Orchard

by Tim Pears

  ‘Oh, Hector, sweetheart, don’t you go all teeny on me,’ Sheena moaned. ‘Let me enjoy you while you’re still scrumptious.’

  ‘Did you read this?’ Hector asked. ‘Yesterday’s Oxford Times.’

  ‘I just got up.’

  Sheena moved to the sideboard and put the kettle on, while Hector read to her. Plucked a teabag from the tin, cut bread for toast.

  ‘Girl, fifteen, hurt in hammer attack,’ Hector intoned quietly. ‘A teenage schoolgirl and a male friend were attacked with a hammer as they walked near Oxford city centre. The pair were set upon by a gang of white, black and Asian youths as they walked by the underpass near the Westgate Centre last Wednesday.’

  The door opened and the others came in, Blaise carrying the red plastic washing basket filled with airy, folded sheets. Ezra bore a wounded soldier over his shoulder.

  ‘I’m is all right now, Daddy,’ Louie gasped. Ezra let him down, and he ran through to the sitting-room. Blaise took the washing upstairs.

  Hector carried on reading. He spoke softly, and precisely, head bowed. It appeared that he was uttering the words aloud as an aid to his own reading rather than a wish to convey information to others. ‘The fifteen-year-old girl, who was wearing her school uniform, suffered injuries to her hands and head when she tried to intervene to stop the attack on her companion.’

  Ezra kissed Sheena. ‘Morning,’ he said. ‘You get some sleep?’

  ‘Sleep?’ Toast popped up. Sheena put the two slices on a plate and spread butter. ‘Sure.’

  ‘I rang the hospital,’ Ezra said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘To see if the guy’s all right.’

  Sheena turned slowly towards Ezra. A thin line of honey drooled from her knife on to the kitchen surface, a few inches from her plate. ‘Why?’

  ‘He checked out.’

  ‘Good.’ Sheena shook her head. ‘That means he’s okay. It wasn’t as bad as you imagined it to be. Can we forget about him now?’ She spread jam on the second slice.

  ‘What are we doing today?’ Ezra asked.

  Sheena took a bite of toast. ‘Meeting Jill at the office, remember? Make up for not working the last two days.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘I’m washed out after yesterday, Ezra.’ She took another muffled crunch. ‘I’d much rather hang out here with you lot.’

  Louie was readying a convoy of Thomas the Tank Engine, Catwoman and a comic monster from a Shreddies packet for a perilous trek from the skirting board out behind the TV into the interior of the sitting-room.

  Hector didn’t raise his voice, but read on, with a gloomy determination. ‘The man, aged twenty-one, suffered severe swelling and bruising during the Castle Street assault, which took place at around 2.40 p.m. Another girl who had been walking with them ran for help. The injured pair were both treated at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, but were discharged later that day. Their injuries were described as serious.’

  Through in the living area, sitting cross-legged on the big pouffe, Blaise had switched on the TV, and using the remote was hopping between music channels, with the sound mute. She was checking the moves of the dance routines, Ezra guessed. She chewed a pencil. Maybe she was analysing editing technique for her media studies class: all music videos were cut with a rapidity that, to Ezra’s aged eyes, obscured rather than displayed the dance; disguised how bad it was, suggested a slickness that wasn’t there. Music videos seemed to him to be travesties, dance routines defaced by an ersatz choreography of cuts and camera moves, when dance cried out for a cameraman and editor prepared to allow the dance to reveal itself. He made a mental note to rent a DVD of Blood Wedding, sit Blaise down and see what she made of it.

  Or maybe she was just embarrassed for her parents to hear the music she liked. They might like it too.

  ‘The man seen to use the weapon was described as being around twenty, black, of slim build and five feet ten inches tall, clean shaven, and wearing a cream-coloured hooded Nike top, Rockport shoes, and a black baseball cap. The rest of the gang were described as being white and mostly Asian, and in their teens and early twenties.’

  Louie took a break from his godlike manipulation of his toys’ destiny across the carpet, to come back to the kitchen table and drink some milk. He saw what Sheena was eating and said, ‘I want toast.’

  ‘You won’t like this jam, sweetheart,’ Sheena told him.

  ‘I do want it,’ Louie said.

  She held it out towards his mouth. ‘It’s rhubarb,’ she said, as he bit off a greedy piece. Sheena waited. After a second or two she could see the jam’s tartness express itself in her boy’s grimace. She held her hand out in front of his mouth, and Ezra watched Louie regurgitate the claggy morsel into her palm. From nowhere there materialised in Sheena’s other hand a tissue, with which when he was finished she wiped Louie’s mouth. ‘Drink more milk,’ she said, ‘to take the taste away,’ as she used the tissue to wipe the mess off her hand and into the bin.

  Ezra was impressed by his wife’s conjuring efficiency, ever unfazed, unsqueamish with this daily earthy parenting. He made her a second cup of tea. She went through and reclined on the white sofa, her eyelids lazily open, her lips sleepily parted, smiling at her mate and offspring as if slipping peacefully away from them.

  ‘You look like that actress, darling,’ Ezra told her. ‘What’s her name? In that film.’

  Sheena blinked in slow motion and gazed up at him. ‘Are you saying I look like Greta Garbo in Lady of the Camelias?’

  Sheena was psychic. She could read Ezra’s mind. He passed her tea. Blaise, her back to them, thrust her face forward into the hands on her lap. Then, withdrawing it from that posture of incredulity, said as if to the TV, ‘No, Mum. Sorry. He meant Kim Basinger in 8 Mile.’

  Hector wandered through from the kitchen. ‘Actually,’ he ventured, ‘I think Dad was alluding to Anna Karenina. She looked just like Mummy when I read it.’

  Blaise turned round. Her expression suggested she found it beyond comprehension how an intelligent young woman like her came to be surrounded by fools.

  ‘He said film, Hec. Did he say book? No! He said film.’

  Hector looked up, into the vacant air above his head, his tongue pressing against the side of his mouth in a thoughtful way. ‘Yes, true,’ he agreed, standing his ground, gently. ‘But he might have meant book. You know what Daddy’s like.’

  By the time he thought about which actress his wife resembled, Ezra Pepin had forgotten who he did mean. If indeed he’d meant any particular person or film at all. Perhaps he’d just meant that his lovely consumptive spouse looked like an old-fashioned movie star from the silver screen.

  ‘Don’t be silly, you two,’ he said. ‘Your mum’s spot on. I meant that she looks like Greta Garbo.’

  ‘Never heard of her,’ Blaise shrugged. She sucked on her pencil, then took it out of her mouth and tapped it against the tiny jewelled stud in her right nostril, before turning back to her silent music on the TV.

  Sheena smiled, though whether at the validation of her intuitive powers and knowledge of cinema or at the comparison of her face with that of one of the two or three iconic beauties of the twentieth century, Ezra wasn’t sure. Rather than enquire, he kissed her instead; her neck, and ear. Blaise stole a distasteful glance over her shoulder. Louie abandoned his plastic pilgrims and clambered on to the sofa, forcing himself in between his parents.

  Blaise blanked the TV off and turned, frowning. ‘Did you two make out on your first date? If you can remember that far back. It’s about time we were told, don’t you think, Hec?’

  ‘Blaise,’ Ezra said. ‘There are three impressionable people in this room. I should know. I’m one of them.’

  ‘Your Dad?’ Sheena smiled. ‘He was so slow I thought he had to be gay. He gave not the slightest hint of being attracted to me.’

  ‘Are you joking?’ Ezra said.

  ‘He was cute, but he had no idea how to make a move.’

&nb
sp; Blaise chuckled. Louie asked, ‘What move?’

  ‘How can you say that?’ Ezra protested. ‘Don’t say that. Not to them.’

  ‘I kept going round to his flat. One night a storm broke. Pelting it down. I got ready to leave, to bike back to the Cowley Road, and he said, “You don’t want to go out in this. Stay the night.”

  ‘At last, I thought. “We’ve got a lilo,” he said. He stumbled over to a cupboard, yanked it out and started blowing it up. There were about five blokes, his fellow tenants, various graduates and other layabouts slumped on the sofa watching TV, smoking dope and drinking beer. I thought, Well, this is romantic.’

  ‘What was romantic about it?’ Hector asked.

  ‘Get up to speed, squirt!’ Blaise told him, laughing.

  ‘Your father clearly wanted to keep me in the sitting-room at all costs. He tried to blow up the lilo, and the nozzle kept, I don’t know, jumping out of his mouth. And he kind of chased it with his lips and tried to find it again. He had trouble finding it.’

  ‘Don’t tell us,’ said Blaise. ‘You had to do it for him.’

  Sheena nodded. ‘I volunteered. But I also took the opportunity to whisper in his ear that I could hardly sleep in here with everyone watching telly.

  ‘“I’ll turn it off,” he said. “Look at the lazy slugs.”

  ‘“No,” I hissed. “Wouldn’t it be simpler if I slept on your floor?”

  ‘Your Dad nodded very solemnly, like he’d not thought of this, and said he’d go upstairs and put covers on the spare pillow and duvet. And off he stumbled. You have to remember, your Dad’s got a light head. Half a can of lager.’

  Blaise frowned and nodded knowingly.

  Ezra shrugged in a don’t blame me, how was I to know what was going on? way.

  ‘So he went upstairs and he was gone five minutes. Ten minutes. I’d blown up the lilo. The TV was droning on. I dragged the lilo upstairs.’

  ‘What is lilo?’ asked Louie.

  ‘He was asleep?’ Hector conjectured.

  ‘Worse,’ Sheena said. Then she turned to Ezra. And so his children turned to him. ‘You tell them.’ Four kind, expectant, mocking faces. It was the worst kind of show trial: Ezra Pepin left to deliver the final damning evidence for his own prosecution.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Okay.’ He was pretty certain the anecdote had only a hazy connection to truth. ‘It had taken me fifteen minutes of wrestling around to get the duvet inside what I thought was the duvet cover.’

  ‘Yes?’ Sheena prompted. ‘And?’

  A comic story that through familial repetition became fact. The sacrifice demanded by humour! ‘It was only when I moved on to the pillow and found I was putting it in a duvet cover …’

  ‘That you realised you’d put a pillowcase on the duvet?’ Blaise turned to Hector. ‘He’d spent twenty minutes stuffing a duvet into a pillowcase.’

  ‘Poor Dad,’ said Hector, grinning.

  ‘Poor Daddy,’ Louie agreed. ‘Dat id funny,’ he decided, solemnly, and reurned to his caravanserai.

  Sheena and Blaise exchanged expressions of amused sympathy.

  You see what I married? one seemed to ask, shaking her head.

  Yes, but you notice who I have for a father? asked the other, nodding. Who’s given me his genes? At least he didn’t give you any of his genes. Be grateful for that.

  Green-helmeted, Sheena Pepin cycled along Kingston Road. She rode the same men’s racing bike she’d bought from Walton Street Cycles the week she moved to Oxford seventeen years earlier – the only addition, when Blaise was two years old, a tiny child’s saddle on the crossbar. Sheena felt her daughter safer within her embrace than in a child’s seat invisible behind her, and in an accident she’d rather Blaise fell surrounded by her body. Ezra was infuriated by this delusion.

  ‘If a collision occurs,’ he told her, ‘your grip on the handlebars will break, the kid will be thrown loose. I won’t allow it.’

  He was right: a seat above the back wheel, child belted in, was the safest option on a busy road, in amongst the dead jostling metal. Cars were out to get you, silent assassins: stealthy vehicles prowled the streets looking for victims.

  Conscientious parents turned themselves into rickshaw drivers of the Western world, children on trailers and add-ons, distracting mothers and fathers with their yackety-yak, overloading and unbalancing them; Sheena was glad to be relieved of the humility. She walked with the children henceforth, or took a bus. She liked the emblematic value of a saddle on her crossbar, though, and kept it there: for the image it conveyed, of a mother of children who was now cycling to work.

  She passed the cinema, and opposite it that very flat they used to live in. Funny, the parts of stories we tell, she considered, to spin the family myth. It was true, though, Ezra was charming in a diffident way: he’d neither resisted her advances – accepting them with the insouciance of a more confident man – nor made many of his own. She’d had to stay calm. He was not long back from South America when they met. Most days, after a lazy breakfast he wandered over to the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology and spent the day there, or in the Bod, reading and writing. He’d come back, take his turn to cook a stew, and then he’d join his co-habiting fellows in a dopey slump on dead beat furniture, cramping the TV. The smell of cannabis was sweet and safe, though Sheena only ever smoked it once back then: she found herself trapped in a catatonic body with a brain that had forgotten how to think. It was like being in a car whose wheels were locked and went round and round in a slow, hopeless circle; whenever you thought, oh, well, it’ll run out of petrol eventually, you’d look at the fuel gauge and see that it was full, and fear of whoever had refilled it mocked your paralysed being.

  Whenever after Sheena heard the phrase out of body experience, she thought, Sounds like fun to me, because I once had the opposite. She’d only learned to smoke marijuana recently, at the age of thirty-eight, with younger fellow Wasteland campaigners, discovering that without tobacco it had a quite different and benign effect.

  Perhaps Ezra and his flatmates’ intellectual endeavours wore them out and they couldn’t help but sink in the evenings; maybe Sheena wasn’t challenged enough in her junior research fellowship at the lab. But the furthest she could drag Ezra from the TV den was up to his bedroom under the eaves, where she taught him how to make love to her. Here. There. Slower. Faster. Not now. Wait. Don’t wait. Do this. That’s good. Yes. No. No. Yes. Yes.

  Though a little bemused by the revelation of his ineptitude (‘I thought I was satisfactory at least,’ he pleaded. ‘I mean, I didn’t have formal complaints before,’) Ezra took it on the chin. He appeared less threatened than amused by instruction, and applied himself to the demands of pleasuring her.

  Ezra was different from the men Sheena had gone out with before. She’d been drawn to silent men. She’d conceived the idea as a child – years before experience of it – that sex was a kind of naked combat between a woman and a man, in which each tried to lose; to make the other win; and which women were naturally better at. Whether she’d grasped precociously a universal truth, or whether a childish misconception had perverted her later experience, Sheena couldn’t tell; but this was indeed how sex seemed to her, and she was attracted to taciturn non-talkers, to relationships that were straightforward barters of carnality. Men were easier to understand that way. The odd thing about Ezra was that although he talked, and was funny and kind, and shy but convivial, he was also just as self-reliant as her previous boyfriends. He demanded little of her: his struggles were with himself; his energy channelled into the thesis on a remote tribe of Indians; self-worth and self-doubt coexisted deep inside him. She didn’t know whether she’d fallen in love, but one day she realised he’d fitted into her life as if her body and her mind had recognised the shape of him, and gladly enveloped it.

  She’d known right away, Sheena recalled as she rode across St Giles and into the Broad, that Ezra would be a good father. She turned right into Turl Street. Maybe
it was as simple as that: she’d snagged the first man whose paternal capabilities were apparent. Reaching the High, Sheena dismounted from her bike, and at the pelican crossing she pushed it over the road. The office was a walk-up down one of the alleys off the High. Home Holidays 2nd Floor was one of three name plates by the door. They didn’t attract much casual passing trade, nor did they intend to, though a Far Eastern couple had trudged up the lino-covered stairs a few days earlier to ask, ‘We see the buildings, we see the university. Yes, now we like look in homes of people. You book for us, please.’

  Sheena was just in time for inclusion in a Starbucks order. The entire workforce were in position this Saturday afternoon.

  ‘One tea for Sheena, chocolate for Jill,’ said Luigi when he returned, passing round the biodegradable mugs. ‘Frappuccino for Colin. That leaves Stella, raspberry tea coming through, and a plain espresso for me, Luigi.’

  Luigi had heavy brown eyes, a boxer’s nose and crooked lips, and Jill owned what Sheena called a maternal crush on him, unsteady as he brushed past and stepped through to the converted cupboard he shared with Stella. His ripped clothes were particularly scruffy today, Sheena thought.

  ‘You look like a yob,’ she told him.

  ‘She’s English,’ Jill apologised, ‘she knows nothing about style.’

  Luigi smiled indulgently, misaligning for a moment the thin sideboards and goatee inscribed with a razor blade on his olive skin.

  ‘Is only incredible, Jill,’ he said quietly, ‘that you do.’

  ‘Aaaaah!’ Stella squawked. ‘You bloody creep, Luigi. Get your head out of people’s bottoms, mate, and into this website.’

  Stella was taking a money-earning interlude during her world tour; it was her job to open the post, answer the phone, process emails.

  The three young flexitimers tended to stroll into the office around midday, and then worked Saturdays, often Sundays too. The weekend as a distinct category of the week was irrelevant to them, anachronistic as Sheena’s grandmother’s insistence on Friday for eating fish, Monday for washing.