Blenheim Orchard

by Tim Pears

  ‘I say, that makes sense, Sheena,’ Simon agreed. ‘Next week we’ll leave them there while we pop down to the Nag’s Head for a quick one.’

  ‘A quick one?’ Sheena smirked. ‘I suppose there’s a pretty barmaid there, am I right? I won’t have you leading my poor husband astray, Simon Carlyle.’ Laughing that ugly guttural laugh Simon would continue to provoke in her over the years to come.

  Anyhow, there you had it already: legends of family and of friendship entwined from the start. By the following spring, instead of Saturday child duty the three men were slipping out of bawling houses early on a Friday morning to play tennis together, a regime they’d practised – along with a fourth partner whose identity had changed periodically – ever since.

  Ed and Blaise were best friends for years, really only cooling off this last winter. Which, Minty admitted to no one, she wouldn’t say she was sorry about. Although Ed adored Blaise, it had irked Minty to see the girl lead her son by the nose; not out of some precocious feminine allure but, even worse, greater strength of personality – or vehemence, as she would rather put it, real strength being more profound for being hidden. It relieved Minty to see Ed pull back; realising he didn’t need to be pulled across the terrain of his own life by someone else.

  Of course – you might as well say it, Minty thought to herself, driving down Woodstock Road – it was hardly Blaise’s fault if she reminded Minty too much of her mother. The odd thing about their interfamilial relationship – recently tangled further by Jack and Hector’s intense boyish camaraderie – the really absurd thing was that amongst the various shifting ties between them it had come to be universally assumed that the strongest bond was that between herself and Sheena. How this had been reached, Minty understood, was cumulative. Being each the chief organiser of their households, so arrangements, messages, reminders came through them, imposing daily the foundations of a friendship that actually, if you looked for it up above the surface, out in the open, barely existed at all.

  Except that that wasn’t true, was it, because like ties of blood those of friendship were bound in experience – shared births and child-raising, shared holidays, shared meals and argument and drunkenness – knotty moments that held awkward truths about each other, and brought with them tolerance. And loyalty. And … she thought, turning right into Bainton Road, and … nothing.

  Simon Carlyle first saw Minty Flippence the night he met some friends at Catweazle club, and a thin, dark waif stumbled to the open mike and with a cracked and trembling voice broke his heart.

  He pursued and seduced her, and for ever after one of the many things Simon Carlyle admired about his tough, generous, laconic, stylish, spiky wit of a wife was that she didn’t give a damn what people thought of her, as long as they liked her poetry. Minty was cool, steely and sardonic, but poetry made her anxious. She got agitated writing it, which stopped her writing it, which made her nervous and depressed. Submitting poems for publication rendered her wretched and she spent weeks in a state of misery waiting for the rejection slips.

  As for reading her poetry in public, it transformed the carefree young graduate student into a highly-strung, haunted creature for days leading up to performance. The trouble was that Minty hated the spotlight but she needed the attention. Or vice versa, Simon never could work it out: Minty shrank from the attention but she needed the spotlight, so she joined one poetry session at the Prince of Wales on Walton Street and organised another, St Clements Poetry Group, which met once a week at the Elm Tree on Cowley Road.

  The night before a reading Minty couldn’t sleep, on the day itself she couldn’t eat, and as the hour approached she lost control of one after another of her bodily functions. By the time she got on stage she had a tension migraine and stress toothache, and the poems on the sheets of paper in her hand trembled from all the caffeine she’d drunk. So she downed three vodkas to steady her nerves, which caused her to slur the words. While the thick reek of cigarettes she’d been churning through for days tarred her throat and made the words crackle and break as they issued from her mouth, lending every confessional, declarative, rhetorical line a compelling authenticity.

  During the year of her engagement to Simon Carlyle, Minty Flippence worked alternately on her academic thesis on English Medieval Latin Lyrics and on her own self-absorbing epic poem, switching from one to the other in a disciplined fashion: when she felt inspired she wrote more cantos about the aridity of contemporary life; when not, she went to the Bodleian Library. Her own poetry demanded intuitive concentration. The thesis required a mole’s blind obedience to hope for what could have survived the centuries. It wasn’t long before one activity began to inhibit and thwart the other: before she’d even put pen to blank white paper she knew her personal outpourings could not measure up to what others had written before, while the search for fragments of charred remains from long-ruined monasteries took place in a world of ghosts: Minty would emerge from the Bodleian like a pallid, ashen version of her fulsome self.

  Before Minty knew it, she was not working alternately on her doctorate and her epic, switching from one to the other, not working just as hard on each of them. Then, out of the blue, six months after the Carlyles were married and living in Simon’s family home on Bainton Road, a small press in North Wales thanked Minty for the collection of extracts she’d sent out a couple of years previously, and offered to print them. It was the breakthrough she’d dreamed of, a life-changing moment. Seeing the book from final revisions through proof stage to publication took up the following year, during which she didn’t even attempt to produce new work, and then came the suspense of waiting for the reviews. She also became pregnant with their first child. If she’d been nervous before, that was nothing compared to this nauseating period of daily purchase of newspapers and magazines, of tuning in to distant radio programmes, of phone calls and conversations with people who might have heard a rumour of a round-up of debut collections that may be about to appear in …

  As the weeks and then the months went by and it became clear that her pamphlet, The Desert Wanderers, wasn’t going to get a review, and wouldn’t sell many more than the thirty copies she’d sold herself to friends, relatives and fellow poets, Minty retreated behind a bitter resentment of the injustice of the literary life. As if she’d ever asked for this gift and burden.

  Eventually, when she’d stopped looking, six months after publication a small magazine in Northumberland ran a short review by some nobody no one had ever heard of describing Minty’s book as an impressive and promising debut from an intriguing new voice, identifying the influence of Elizabeth Bishop no less than Sylvia Plath, and expressing reservations only about one single canto, which seemed out of kilter with the rest.

  ‘Out of kilter?’ Minty demanded of Simon and anyone else she showed the review to. ‘Does she think I didn’t mean to use a different metre? That that might be the point? I mean, why give poems to an idiot if she knows nothing about poetry?’

  The first reading of Minty’s that Ezra and Sheena went to was also her last. She never felt more vulnerable than when she read, and hated friends hearing her, but couldn’t stop herself inviting every acquaintance she knew. Ezra and Sheena joined Simon Carlyle to huddle into the packed room at the back of the Elm Tree one winter Wednesday evening. They remained fixed to their rickety stools as one poet after another rose from the crush around them, barrelled his or her way to the front and read for ten minutes or more.

  Ezra and Sheena listened to their friend as she blushed, perspired, mumbled and stuttered through half a dozen terse, unhappy cantos of what she called her ongoing work-in-progress: the forensic dissection of the feelings of a woman subtly unlike the poet herself. The confession of slights and hurts addressed to a ‘you’ who seemed to Ezra to be different people: here a father, there a mother; a husband, an unknown man. A resentful yearning to close the gap between the actual and the possible.

  Lingering to sympathise with her afterwards they found Minty not suicidal, as
they’d feared, but gleefully herself again. The sociophobe on stage became the wit in the saloon. From that night she stopped taking part in readings altogether, because there were only so many times you could read the same cantos to the same people. Soon she was more relaxed than she had been in years.

  Poor Minty, they sometimes referred to her, the Carlyles’ friends. She’d become aware of that. And who could blame them? Her ambition and frustration, her need, had been so unconcealed all these years how could they not impute to Minty disappointment at her failure? Not feel in their pity at least a little of the pain of peeling herself open to the world in confessional poetry, frank, naked, honest – of relinquishing every sovereign individual’s last bastion, his or her interior life – only for the world to say, ‘Actually, no thanks. Not interested.’

  But it was just where they were wrong. Because what she’d learned over the years was not that success and failure are the same imposters, exactly, but that they’re beside the point. Wasn’t it Joseph Brodsky who wrote that if art teaches us anything it’s that the human condition is private? It was about as difficult a notion as Minty thought she’d ever read, because didn’t we also dream, above all, of finding another – a Platonic partner or a multitude – with whom we might share the very essence of our being?

  Minty finished unpacking. She lit a Camel and watched Simon who was at this moment this Sunday evening jerking and gasping, bent over a wine bottle held between his knees, struggling to extract the cork like some deranged dentist. Minty left the room; Simon may not even have been aware of her presence, even with the cigarette smoke. As unobservant as he was obstinate. Over the years he’d been given modern corkscrews at Christmas of increasingly sophisticated engineering. Leverage; hydraulics; suction. Simon was offended by their effortlessness. They collected in a drawer, items in a neglected archive, except that Minty used them, of course. He preferred the simple handle you wrapped your fingers round, took a breath and set yourself, and then gave the bloody thing a good heave; the exertion a price to pay for the pleasure to come; or part of the pleasure, perhaps. It was beyond her.

  The sudden sound of the piano halted Minty on the stairs. Ed had plunged without ceremony into the middle of the allegro of, she guessed, a Chopin concerto; notes tumbled from the sitting-room, spun into the hallway. They danced like scintillae around the edges of her vision.

  Ed stopped abruptly as he’d begun. Then started again in the same place, repeating the passage – as he’d probably do for an hour now: he’d be seized by the compulsion to attack a section, with an emotion that looked like anger, as if the thought of the music had jumped into his head, challenging him to solve some riddle hidden deep within it. And there would follow a duel upon the keyboard, Ed fighting the music over and over, until he forced it to reveal its secret to him. And then, victory won, Ed would set off into a startling improvised departure from the concerto, in which you could hear faint derisive echoes of Chopin.

  Minty stood now on the stairs, smoking down her cigarette and listening to her son’s pursuit, between the tones and semitones, of an invisible, elusive quarry. She knew – perhaps she’d always known – that she herself was like that novice who sent a sheaf of poems to W.H. Auden. Auden told him he appeared to have the most important qualities for a poet: persistence, a good ear, a good eye, curiosity and a greed for language; all he lacked was talent. Not that this would stop her writing, Minty assured herself. No, she was in for the long haul; she’d always write. It was just ironic she had a son whose talent was undeniable. Minty headed up the stairs, Ed at fourteen hunting along the keyboard with his mind more concentrated in the moment than she had ever written a single line.

  ‘Minty!’

  She heard Simon’s voice calling upstairs as, after a long shower, she gathered one leg of a pair of black tights in her fingers.

  ‘Minty!’

  She drew them on, before walking to the top of the stairs. Simon was in the hallway looking up at her, wrapped in an apron, cradling a mixing bowl against his soft tummy with his left arm. His right arm supported the extravagant gesture of his hand as he exclaimed, ‘Minty. I’ve looked everywhere for the mace.’

  ‘Mace?’ Minty asked. ‘Couldn’t you use a rolling pin?’

  ‘Ground mace,’ Simon said impatiently. ‘I need a pinch. Where the hell have you put it?’

  ‘It’s in the usual place, sport,’ she told him in her tarry voice. ‘Cupboard to the left of the sink.’

  ‘I’ve looked there.’

  ‘Look again.’

  Minty returned to their bedroom. She clipped her black bra behind her. Seventeen years married and he still yelled. Through the house. Marching towards the stairwell, shouting up or down. The boys yelled back like soldiers.

  ‘Breakfast!’ ‘Coming!’

  ‘We’re leaving!’ ‘Just a sec!’

  She must have asked him a hundred times not to yell. He still did.

  At her mother-in-law’s old dressing-table Minty applied bright-red lipstick. Black mascara. She studied the creases that even in repose now were there at the sides of her eyes; little threads of time. They didn’t bother her, though the white hairs did: she’d been dying her hair for five years, and she now ran her fingers through it with gel. Short, thick, lustrous hair: scraping it away from her face gave Minty a masculine elegance that appealed to her.

  Weird, perverse it was, that Sheena could only be sporadically bothered to unpluck those white hairs of hers. In her long, jet-black mane they stood out. It wasn’t just a question of vanity, Minty considered: they looked like typographical errors.

  How strangely we aged. Now, which dress should she wear?

  ‘Minty!’

  Good lord, not again. She waited. Heard the racket of drums and cymbals from the kitchen. No more yells, he must have found his pan or colander. He was a complete clown in the kitchen, Simon, recently lured there by a glamorous television chef. ‘The ideal woman,’ he called her. ‘Apart from you, Minty.’ His panic-stricken performances around the kitchen he offered as homages to his mentor from a humble admirer. Offered to the family and to guests, too, and increasingly successful, if owing more to the richness of the recipes than to Simon’s culinary instincts.

  Not, Minty conceded, that she’d complain about this middle-aged development. She suspected that Simon would do ever more cooking as time went by. If she’d kept a record in her diary there’d be a direct correlation, she was sure, between Simon’s rise in the kitchen and the decline of their sex life. Their lacklustre fucks, petering out. It seemed entirely conceivable that they’d never have sex again. In his late forties, Simon had the pink and swollen complexion of the bibulous Englishman. It amused Minty to picture him playing tennis with Ezra and the others: Simon’s flesh was a loose mass about him. His ponderous bollocks hung below his stubby penis like something gamey, some butcher’s sac, left to keep there a while.

  Minty had reached a point a year or two ago when she could no longer pretend desire for him, and Simon had persisted only briefly, forlorn alcoholic assaults that were like some throwback of time and class, before letting go entirely. He seemed relieved.

  It was hard to believe she’d ever found his foul tongue, his stream of scabrous comment on the world, charming, but it had been, once, when it issued from the mouth of a dashing young architect. People indulged him now, didn’t they? They made allowances. Though not Sheena Pepin; no, some women still enjoyed it. He made Minty think, as she lit another cigarette, of an aged putto.

  How could she want him, though, a defeated man – her rejection another defeat? Simon barely scraped a living, was given one or two small commissions a year by friends, and friends of people they knew. He relied on family money, in trust funds, stock and share portfolios, ISAs, TESSAs, PEPs, that Simon watched anxiously, their various savings inadequately caged birds. Rage fermented inside him. He didn’t explode. Or throw things. Or hit anyone. He only yelled, his rage expressed in impatience with objects lost, sons late. And he sulked
. Could spend hours in one of the loungers in the garden nursing a bourbon, brooding into the gathering dark, furious, thrown.

  Minty wouldn’t give up on him, though; she was going to stick with him. Persist, wouldn’t she? Ezra Pepin, on the other hand, who’ll be here soon. For example. Less than ten years younger than Simon – a few months younger than Minty herself – but a different generation. No, not that exactly, rather in a different relation to his physical self. Like a subtly altered breed. Approaching at forty not his ruin but his prime. Because Ezra was one of those men, Minty thought, he was a man improving with age, the bland handsomeness of youth having given way to character that was increasingly apparent in the lines of his face, his rumpled hair, the well-cut suits he had made by that Italian guy on Walton Street, his broad shoulders.

  They’d be here soon. Minty stubbed out her cigarette, returned her gaze to the mirror, fingered her hair back once more from the sides of her face. Yes, she was pretty fortunate, she allowed. She still had, what? A kind of gothic undergraduate glamour, she thought, and laughed at the absurd self-delusion. And the laughter, even as it betrayed so many more lines around her eyes, made her look humorous and chic and fun. And then, quite suddenly, there happened that shift, that awful lurch in perspective she sometimes got, a revulsion with herself. The sick feeling that it was a stranger looking back at her. No, not that, exactly. The opposite, in fact: that she was staring at someone she knew too well, knew deep into her rotten bones. A nauseating familiarity. Wincing, she turned away.

  ‘Minty!’

  She checked her watch. Seven-thirty-five. The short black agnès b dress, her best one.

  ‘Coming!’ she yelled back. How, though, did Sheena not appreciate him? That Minty couldn’t understand. In all these years of friendship she’d not been able to work it out. How could that woman so obviously, so carelessly, take Ezra for granted? How could she be comfortable emotionally, morally, pushing him out of the door each morning to go to work in some bottled-water company, finding ways to increase the efficiency and the sales and the profit of bottles of drinking water in a country where good God-given water fell from the sky for months on end? When what he needed was the opposite, poor brave and halting man, to be pushed the other way, back into his study to pursue his research. How could she hear those stories Ezra told, the delicacy and precision, and not do everything in her power to have that thesis – and many other books – written and published?