Blenheim Orchard

by Tim Pears

  To live in the present was uncivilised, perhaps. Perhaps memory was civilisation. In its decline, Ezra mused, did every civilisation again reach this point? A collective, willed amnesia. A drift from history, out on to open seas. How wonderful it would be, he thought, if he, Ezra Pepin, could forget. Perhaps the new project would let him. Perhaps this was what was being offered by Klaus Kuuzik.

  Eventually the members of the Pepin clan emerged, groggy in the sunlight besieging the house, as if from a fairy-tale sleep.

  ‘How come the rest of my family can doze at the weekend,’ Ezra moaned, ‘when I wake up even earlier than during the week?’

  ‘It’s a leftover, Daddy, from your Catholic upbringing,’ Hector suggested.

  ‘I wasn’t brought up a Catholic, Hector.’

  ‘Catholic, Protestant,’ said Blaise. ‘Whatever.’

  ‘Okay, Peanut,’ Ezra explained, once Louie was fed and now, in the bathroom, washed and dressed and teeth brushed. ‘Let’s Daddy and you go to town.’

  ‘Don’t want to.’

  ‘I need to pick up a couple of maps Blackwell’s have got in for me. See, Sheena?’ he called out. ‘I’m on to it. Tell you what,

  Louie, we can take a football and play in the Parks on our way home.’

  ‘Want to play with my trains.’

  ‘Come on, darling. Let’s get in there before the crowd. It’s after ten already.’

  ‘Want to play with my trains,’ Louie said, and walked out of the bathroom and into his bedroom.

  Ezra followed his son, who was already crouched on the tiger rug taking sections of Brio out of the red plastic box in which Sheena or Ezra put them back practically every night. He coupled and extended the wooden track with whatever piece came to hand.

  ‘Peanut,’ Ezra said. ‘Mummy and Blaise are going shopping now. I can’t leave you here. You have to come with me.’

  ‘Lou stay here,’ Louie told the rug.

  Ezra looked down, at his three-year-old boy improvising a railway line with a viaduct, a tunnel, bridges over easily imaginable rivers. It was obvious Louie was fitting one to the next automatically, in a sort of stubborn trance. His disobedient autonomy.

  ‘I tell you what,’ Ezra said, his joints cracking as he knelt beside Louie on the floor. ‘I’ll see if Mummy can pick up the maps. Shall I play trains with you? And you play football with me in a bit, out in the garden?’

  It was immediately clear that Ezra had done the right, the good parent, thing: Louie’s bent, frowning face rose, transformed by a smile it was barely large enough to contain. ‘Yes!’ he said.

  Ezra had mixed a green salad in the white pasta bowl and placed it in the centre of the kitchen table, surrounded by cheeses and savoury pastries, dips and bread, when Blaise came home, giggling through the back door, accompanied by a woman with dark hair cut close around her head in a style that reminded Ezra of some glamorous TV character whom he couldn’t quite identify. He didn’t think he’d met this friend of Blaise’s before, until he realised that it was her mother. His wife. Sheena.

  ‘That is incredible,’ he said.

  ‘There’s no need to gape, Daddy,’ Blaise admonished him.

  ‘I’m stunned,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, but do you like it?’ Sheena asked.

  ‘It makes you look ten years younger, darling,’ Ezra said. Sheena had not changed her hairstyle, so far as he was aware, in all the years of their marriage. When she went to the hairdresser, he assumed she always said, Same again, please. ‘I love it,’ Ezra managed.

  ‘Fashion show before lunch!’ Blaise demanded. ‘Wait till you see her clothes.’

  Hector arrived home in time to join Ezra and Louie on the white sofa. Blaise and Sheena kneed and shoved the pink sofa back, and spread out clothes from bags that said White Stuff, Cult Clothing, Fat Face. Sheena removed her white T-shirt and blue jeans and stood there, a bewildered mannequin in bra and knickers, awaiting her daughter’s instruction.

  ‘Put those trousers on, with the slinky top,’ Blaise ordered. Sheena obeyed. Thin cotton slacks hung loose to the floor; they made her look a little heavy, thought Ezra, but more comfortable in the heat than thick denim.

  ‘Give us a twirl,’ Ezra requested, and he and the boys applauded.

  ‘Now show them with the other top,’ Blaise decided. It was tight, short-sleeved, in ribbed layers, alternating ones of which were see-through. It made the most of Sheena’s athletic arms and shoulders, her straight back. This sudden departure from her floppy T-shirts and faded jeans, along with the shock of the radical haircut, made Sheena look like a long-lost close relative of herself.

  ‘You look fantastic, darling,’ Ezra said.

  Sheena smiled. ‘I wasn’t sure.’

  ‘No, it’s perfect, Mum,’ Blaise assured her.

  ‘My new fashion consultant!’ Sheena said, in a ditzy tone of voice.

  ‘They look like your kind of clothes, Blaise,’ Ezra said.

  ‘Excuse me?’ she howled.

  Hector laughed knowingly; whether at his father or sister, or even his mother, wasn’t clear.

  ‘Well, don’t they?’ Ezra frowned. ‘That cool, sort of casual, put-together messy look?’

  ‘Dad!’ Blaise exclaimed.

  ‘Thanks a lot,’ said Sheena. ‘Messy. Thank you.’

  ‘I meant sexy, darling. You know.’

  ‘It was months ago,’ Blaise said. ‘I never wear grunge chic now. Anyway, wait. There’s more.’

  When the fashion parade was over, when Ezra had witnessed Sheena transformed, in a morning’s shopping with her fourteen-year-old adviser, into a younger and more modern woman than the wife he’d woken up next to at the beginning of the day, he asked whether or not Blaise hadn’t been allowed to get something for herself.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh, go on, sweetie,’ Sheena said.

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ Blaise said, picking up a tiny plastic bag and taking it from the room. The others went through to start lunch. Sheena put on a CD she’d bought, thick with samba rhythm. Blaise re-entered the kitchen weaving to the beat, wearing a synthetic gold bikini.

  ‘Mum chose it,’ Blaise said.

  ‘All set for the carnival,’ Sheena approved, pulling Louie from his seat to join her on the kitchen dance floor, as Blaise gyrated round in a top that less covered than drew attention to her firm, emerging breasts, and a thong bottom. Her puppy fat had become a plumpness defined by adult curves, Ezra saw, joining the dance himself with a clumsy reluctance. Blaise possessed at one and the same time the sweet blunt body of a child and the enticing, declarative flesh of a woman. As if the whole of her body had undergone a sexual transubstantiation separate from its specific, zonal development. Ezra felt a despairing rent inside, torn between pride in his daughter’s body and dismay at its inevitable plunder. The women had chosen for each other. Sheena had been altered superficially by their shopping trip, but it was negligible compared to Blaise’s transformation from within.

  They were eating fruit and yoghurt and no one had spoken for some minutes when Hector said, ‘Mum?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘What, Hector?’

  Hector looked at Sheena, and then at Ezra. Then, gazing in the direction of the open doorway, he said, ‘I don’t want to go, really.’

  Ezra hesitated, turned to Sheena.

  ‘That’s okay, Hector,’ she said. ‘It’s fine to be a little anxious. I think we all are.’

  ‘But I want to stay here.’

  ‘But you can’t stay, Hector, you know that. So you might as well not worry about it. We’re all in this together, you see? We can lean on each other.’

  ‘What is it, darling?’ Ezra asked him. ‘Why don’t you want to go?’

  ‘I just explained, Ezra,’ Sheena said. ‘It doesn’t matter. Let’s not rehash our worries.’

  ‘Oh, I get it,’ said Blaise, as if solving a riddle bef
ore anyone else did. ‘You really don’t know,’ she asked Ezra and Sheena, ‘do you?’

  ‘Know what?’ Ezra asked.

  ‘It’s so obvious,’ Blaise said, shaking her head. ‘I can’t believe you don’t know.’

  ‘Well, let us in on the secret, honey,’ said Sheena.

  Blaise shrugged. ‘He’s gay.’

  ‘What?’ Sheena winced.

  ‘He doesn’t want to leave Jack.’

  Hector let out a hyena kind of snorting laugh: angry, dismissive, outraged, embarrassed, all at once. It felt like he needed to say something, but couldn’t take the risk of stopping this hiccuping snarl to do so, for fear of what else might happen. In the meantime his face reddened in front of their eyes, blood suffusing the capillaries beneath his skin and colouring it like crimson light.

  Ezra leaned over to Hector and touched his arm. ‘Don’t take any notice,’ he said, shaking his head.

  Hector stood up and walked from the room, with as much slow dignity as he could muster.

  ‘Number one,’ Sheena told Blaise, ‘it doesn’t matter if Hector’s gay. And number two, he isn’t.’

  ‘Did I say there’s anything wrong with it?’ Blaise asked innocently.

  ‘None of us wants to leave our friends,’ Ezra said.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Sheena, getting up from the table and carrying her plate and glass to the sink. She opened the cupboard underneath and scraped remnants of pear and pineapple into the compost bin.

  ‘Just cos he doesn’t know he’s gay yet,’ Blaise said. ‘I mean, of course he knows at some level. Boys can realise it when they’re six or seven but still not have admitted it when they’re fifteen.’

  Sheena laughed. ‘Blaise, honey,’ she said. ‘As far as fashion goes, you’re my new guru. But just wait a while longer before you become a sex expert, okay? I’ve got to run, everyone. I’ll see you later.’

  They watched Sheena walk straight out of the kitchen door, grabbing her handbag off the side, and wheel her bike away along the side of the house.

  ‘Mummy did say run,’ Louie frowned. ‘Mummy not run. Mummy do ride her bike.’ He pottered off towards the sitting-room.

  While Ezra rewrapped bits of cheese in their Tesco plastic, Blaise loaded the dishwasher. She did so slowly, as if she was a domestic robot, gradually losing battery power. Eventually, holding a dessert spoon in each hand, from which banana yoghurt splodged on to the terracotta floor tiles, Blaise said, ‘I may not want to go either.’

  ‘Darling.’

  ‘I mean, you do know that, don’t you, Daddy?’

  Ezra took care to wrap each morsel in the same plastic it came in. ‘Why wouldn’t you want to, Blaise? Because of Akhmed?’

  ‘Of course not,’ she said, smiling to herself. ‘Lots of reasons.’

  Ezra opened the fridge door to return the wrapped portions to cool hygiene and the light’s hideous clarity. ‘We’ll be back in two years, don’t forget.’

  ‘Two years?’ Blaise said, in a tone of voice that suggested there was no point in Ezra trying to pull the wool over her eyes, that she was fourteen; she understood time now. ‘I’ll be old by then.’

  Ezra smiled. ‘Is time so precious, already?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course it is.’

  ‘What is time?’ Ezra shut the fridge. ‘It’s the unfolding of the essence of the universe.’

  ‘Oh, Daddy,’ Blaise said, impatiently. ‘All I’m saying is: just supposing.’

  That early evening, Sheena lay in a hot oily bath with her eyes closed. Ezra lowered the toilet lid and sat down on it. Nursing a cognac, he told Sheena of the rumblings of doubt and dissent inside the family. He made a little more of Louie’s rebellion that morning than there was; identified a connection to Brazil where perhaps, he knew, there was none; tried to explain his acquiescence as the only thing possible to avert fury and tears – though on that point Sheena wasn’t fooled.

  ‘Ezra,’ she said, ‘I wish you would just put your foot down. It’s not fair to children not to give them boundaries. You know that.’

  He analysed Hector’s reluctance to leave, using Blaise’s accusation, or revelation, of their son’s possible sexual orientation to identify this point in Hector’s life as the most emotionally complicated and confusing, when he more than any of the rest of them needed stability, a secure berth.

  Sheena lay still, eyes closed, breathing in the scent of lavender. Every now and again she shoved her backside along the bottom of the bath to agitate the hot water, and feel it wash across her. ‘As we’ve explained, to each other and to him,’ she said, ‘for precisely all these reasons, this is the best possible time for Hec to live in a sexually liberated society.’

  Sheena liked to soak in water so hot Ezra could use the same bath half an hour after she’d left it. Her face had coloured; perspiration glazed her countenance. She looked feverish.

  Ezra rehashed his conversation with Blaise, which had carried on in a strange, niggly fashion. He didn’t tell Sheena that Blaise had said, ‘Akhmed’s brother believes that gay people should be stoned.’ She’d waited for her father’s reaction to this provocation.

  ‘I’m sure he doesn’t,’ Ezra had replied, calmly. ‘That would be barbaric, don’t you think?’

  ‘Not to death, Daddy,’ Blaise had said. ‘Unless they’d, you know, done it.’

  ‘Anyway,’ she’d also said, and Ezra did repeat this to Sheena, ‘Akhmed says if I don’t want to go, I could move into their house.’

  The first thing that came to Ezra’s mind had been the image of Blaise in her gold bikini. ‘I’m really not sure his father would be happy with that, darling,’ he’d said.

  ‘Ezra,’ Sheena interrupted his recollection. ‘I thought we’d gone over this. The family’s like a car, and we’re driving it. You and me. That’s our job. The kids are in the back seat. One day they’ll grow up and leave home, and get their own car if they want.’

  ‘Yes, darling, but –’

  ‘Or they can get a motorbike if they prefer,’ Sheena said brightly. She had nothing against introspection: it was indulgence that annoyed her. It seemed like Ezra ignored how hard it was to bring up children. Any halfway happy family, Sheena considered, was a rare enough achievement. It didn’t help to confuse things. ‘And they can ride it on their own,’ she said. ‘Or have a passenger riding pillion. Hey!’ Her hand shot out of the water, spraying Ezra across the floor. ‘They could have someone in a sidecar. You don’t see those around any more, do you, Ez? I remember whole families in them, when I was a child. Dad on the motorbike, Mum and one or two kids in the sidecar. So reckless, and romantic.’

  ‘Sheena,’ Ezra said sternly. ‘Our children have anxieties. They have a right to them. Surely we owe it to them to address those anxieties.’

  ‘Ezra Pepin,’ Sheena laughed, causing the bathwater to sway, and her breasts to rise and slackly fall. ‘Who do you think for the last fourteen years has been doing the anxiety addressing around here? What a cheek. Oh, and how about a mobile home? Or a caravan. They could have a caravan if they want. God, I hope not. What would that say?’ Sheena raised her wet hands to her head and stroked her thick hair back from her face. ‘Families as vehicles, though: nice poetic metaphor, isn’t it? I think I’ll tell Minty. She might like to use it. What do you think?’

  Before Ezra could answer, Sheena pulled herself to her feet. The water fell from her body into the steaming bath. ‘Pass the towel, Ezra,’ she asked. She stood undissembling, beads of water collecting across her skin, a middle-aged Venus.

  Ezra grasped the white towel from the floor, and held it open for her. The door swung open. Their youngest child burst in, scanned the scene, and said, ‘Lou want bubbles!’

  Cold water cascaded, and bubbles bloomed. Ezra knelt down, checked depth and temperature, and turned off the taps. Louie climbed in and wiped white foam on his father’s face for a moustache, and a beard. Enjoying himself, he spread out, dabbing bubbles on Ezra’s nose, and hair, and ears. E
zra could hear them hiss and whisper as they dissolved upon him.

  Hector came in and changed into his pyjamas. Then he dropped the trousers, sat on the lavatory and read out loud from the paper.

  ‘A teenager has been sent to prison for three and a half years for smashing a glass into the face of a pilot in a jealous rage,’ he intoned softly.

  Louie splashed his plastic ducks and other aquatic animals in the water. ‘Where is that dolphin?’ he asked, face scrunched in bemusement, hands outspread.

  ‘I have no idea,’ Ezra admitted. ‘Where is that pesky fish?’

  Louie looked aghast at his father’s stupidity. ‘That not a fish,’ he said. ‘That is a dolphin.’ His hand shot up out of the bubbles, clutching the animal. ‘Here it is!’ he exclaimed. ‘It was hiding!’

  ‘Dean Harper, 19, had met Miss Carter earlier in the evening of October the 4th, last year,’ Hector read, his voice soft yet insistent, ‘and they had gone on to the George Street night spot. Harper walked across the dance floor and smashed a beer glass into Mr Nassim’s face, causing serious cuts to his nose and jawline which may leave him scarred for life, Oxford Crown Court was told on Friday’

  Perhaps Sheena was right, Ezra considered: she reckoned that Hector suffered some learning disorder that meant he needed to vocalise the written word in order to comprehend it. Louie had hold of his penis like a rubbery toy, to be stretched and sprung and elongated. An unbearable sight. Ezra pulled out the bath plug.

  After Ezra had towelled Louie dry and put cream on his sore places, behind his left ear and right knee, and the boys had brushed their teeth, Hector went back downstairs while Ezra read Louie two books in bed. The boy then had a last drink of water, turned off his light, kissed his father and snuggled under his duvet.

  On the way out of Louie’s room Ezra noticed Blaise’s light on, and pushed the door open. She was sitting up in bed. ‘Tired?’ he asked.

  Blaise nodded. ‘A bit.’

  ‘What are you reading?’

  Blaise lifted towards her the large book that had been resting against her knees, and let her legs stretch flat. Aftermath. A book of photographs, which Blaise had studied for a school project.