Blenheim Orchard

by Tim Pears

  ‘The fresh water was lost in the salt water of the Mediterranean. So then the serious project began: a pipeline, Ezra, eighty kilometres long. Annual capacity, what, seventy-five, a hundred million cubic metres? More than enough for the whole island – yes, the Turks can give water to the Greeks. Let there be peace in Cyprus. This is a good thing, no? A wonderful thing. But let’s look at the map again.’

  Klaus laid one knife vertically from the southern coast of Turkey down to the northern tip of Cyprus. ‘Construction of the pipeline’s nearly ready to begin. And look.’ He took another knife, and laid it from the Cyprus napkin at a south-eastern incline towards a pepper shore. ‘Now here is a surprise: we’re almost halfway to Israel,’ said Klaus.

  Every object on the table, Ezra observed, was necessary, and appropriate, to Klaus’s model. Each remaining knife, spoon, plate had its own preordained role to play: every prop Klaus needed was at hand, and nothing was left unused. Some people were like that, weren’t they? They don’t need to exert will: life adapts itself to their requirements.

  Over iced passion-fruit parfait, with raspberries and a red wine and basil sauce, Klaus Kuuzik said, ‘Whether the pipeline will work out, we can’t be sure: supplying water to northern Cyprus was a political plan, which failed to take into account economic realities. Supplying Israel with water is an economic scheme, which fails to take into account political realities. Neither idea is based on ethical principles, needless to say.’

  Ezra sipped the plummy pale-red Californian dessert wine Klaus had ordered, coating his tongue with its alcohol sweetness.

  ‘In the long term, pipes and tankers will move water around the region,’ said Klaus. ‘DeutscheWasser will be a prime supplier. Sure. But perhaps what we can do, Ezra, with Isis Water, is to begin the flow now, today, with our bottles.’ Klaus paused, though his gaze remained unwavering. It felt to Ezra as though Klaus was trying to communicate how vital Ezra was to what they might begin. ‘To provide drinking water, let us say,’ he resumed, ‘so that no child in the occupied territories need ever go thirsty. This aim. For example. You see?’

  ‘I’m not,’ Ezra hesitated, ‘entirely sure I do.’

  ‘Here is a great cancer,’ Kuuzik said, pointing at that region of the tablecloth. ‘With secondary tumours, you might say, spreading from it. What if we can do something to redress the injustice?’

  ‘A water bottle,’ said Buchannan. ‘A hand grenade filled with life.’

  Ezra stared at the Canadian, manipulating a toothpick with his fingers.

  ‘I can see you’re sceptical, Ezra,’ Kuuzik said. ‘You’re right, you should be.’

  Pepin realised his expression had given him away, but there wasn’t much he could do about that. Now that he was aware of it he reckoned he’d probably been frowning, wrinkling his nose and chewing the inside of his cheek all at once. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I mean, you’re crusaders, right? You really are.’

  ‘Without swords,’ Klaus said, laughing. ‘Of course,’ he continued, ‘we’re civilised men. We believe in democratisation and human rights. In reform of the United Nations. In UN armies involved in peacekeeping operations. Of course.’

  ‘Christ was nothing if not a pacifist,’ said Buchannan.

  ‘The practicalities need to be worked out,’ Kuuzik resumed. ‘That’s what our team will be working on from now on. For the moment we’re talking without walls. But this is certain: we can do something, Ezra.’

  Coffee arrived, black espressos in tiny white china mugs and saucers that looked like they’d been filched from a child’s tea set. Kuuzik stirred his sugar and said, ‘Islamism – you know what it is? Yes, of course it’s nihilistic, it’s utopian. “You love life, we love death.” But you know what it really is? It’s history itself, the force of history, grunting, “Do not think you can leave me behind.” But it’s history’s last murderous breath. It cannot compete with the gifts our future offers, so long as they are shared openly. You know, Ezra, Robert Browning wrote something like, “The present is the instant in which the future crumbles into the past.” ’

  Buchannan shook his head. ‘The view of a pessimist. What would an optimist say?’

  ‘May I?’ Ezra interjected. ‘How about this: The present is the point at which the past is devoured by the future.’

  To which the other two men raised their coffee mugs with their huge fingers, and saluted him.

  After they’d got back to the office, Ezra Pepin’s stewed brain and body stumbled through the afternoon like a car sliding along an icy road. He wasn’t in control, but kept telling himself that he shouldn’t fight it, but keep the wheels pointing into the skid.

  He’d been copy-typing at his computer for several minutes without being aware that he was doing so. Perusing the screen, Ezra couldn’t find a single mistake. From which moment error entered, and now he watched his fingers become clumsy senseless tools, hitting the wrong keys, repeating letters, missing others out. A deep fatigue dragged at him. He felt as if all the aged cells of his body were spongey with alcohol. At the same time his skull felt desiccated, his brain in urgent need of fluid. He managed to stumble to the toilets and slump in a cubicle for a dreamless half-hour.

  Ezra left a message on the answerphone at home to say he’d work late, and not bother coming home before going out again, he reminded Sheena, to meet Minty Carlyle at the Phoenix. He’d grab a burger from Pepper’s before the film.

  They saw the coach pull into the parking bay outside the Taylorian Institute, on the other side of St Giles.

  ‘Come on,’ said Blaise.

  Akhmed scurried after her, through the traffic. Spilling out of the coach were kids a year or two younger than themselves. Girls who’d begun to spurt into adolescence, huddling close to one another, as if intuiting signs of hidden threat in the vicinity; boys comparatively diminutive and juvenile, horsing around. Blaise and Akhmed followed them at a short distance, up the steps, across the courtyard of the Ashmolean. There was a slight breeze. A flagpole cable squealed with tension.

  The trick was to look like they were just catching up with their party; stick too close and a teacher might question them. Once inside the foyer of the museum, the group received its orders, and Blaise drifted away.

  Akhmed followed. When she slowed down, so did he, and when she paused in front of the headless Aphrodite, he stood beside her. She moved on, and stopped again. A Roman woman minus lower arms and also her nose, like a leper. There was a torso of a boy, Eros Soranzo the sign said; he had no head, or arms, or even genitals. The goddess Athena was missing an arm. The statues stood solid and upright, torsos proud. Blaise imagined them as sculptures of disabled people in ancient Greece.

  A large statue of Artemis had no head or arms, but the pleats of her stone robe hung from the nipples of perfect breasts. The torso of an Amazon warrior lacked an arm, hacked off in combat.

  ‘Why don’t they make copies of the missing bits?’ Akhmed said. ‘And stick them on? So we can see what they’re meant to look like.’

  ‘They’re not missing,’ Blaise said. Each statue proclaimed, Yes, look at me. I’m fine as I am. I made Emperor, said one. I was a god, said another. We function. We thrive, without an arm. A leg or two.

  Akhmed padded after her through the dim chambers of ancient Egypt.

  ‘I like these,’ he said at Blaise’s shoulder, as she studied a glass cabinet full of clay and wooden models of servants. Shawabtis: deposited in the tombs of the wealthy dead, to do their menial labour for them in the next world. ‘If I should die suddenly,’ Akhmed said. ‘You never know. You can bury some of these with me.’

  Blaise didn’t seem to hear him.

  ‘You’ll have to be quick about it,’ he said. ‘When one of our lot dies, we get them buried as soon as possible.’

  ‘Isn’t it incredible, all this?’ Blaise pondered, gesturing around the room, and beyond. ‘The plunder, of the British Empire.’

  Akhmed made a dismissive snort through his nose. ‘Egypt wasn�
��t in the Empire.’ He shook his head. ‘Never.’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ Blaise said. Akhmed claimed to do badly at school, but he seemed to retain every useless item of information he’d ever been given.

  ‘See, the thing is, Blaise,’ he said, ‘really, you want to get your facts right first.’

  She changed the subject. ‘Have you got your family organised?’ she said. ‘All mine are coming.’

  ‘I told you I have, didn’t I?’ Akhmed said. ‘Mum’s already making special trips over to Cowley Road for spices and stuff.’

  Blaise wandered up a wide staircase. As long as you had a pencil and sketchbook in your hand, no one bothered you. Akhmed trailed behind her into English Delftware: cabinet after cabinet of odd crockery.

  ‘Like a charity shop, isn’t it, all this junk?’ Akhmed said, scratching his neck. In Russian Art he asked, ‘Can’t we go to the café yet?’

  Blaise turned round. ‘If I want someone to bug me,’ she said, ‘I’ve already got a younger brother.’

  Akhmed frowned, and bent his head to the floor.

  ‘Look, why don’t you just go round on your own for a bit?’ Blaise suggested. ‘We’ll meet later.’

  Akhmed nodded with his head away to one side. ‘See them things,’ he said, indicating a squat white box by the wall. ‘They’re humidifiers. They take out the oxygen.’ He paused. ‘Dehumidifiers, maybe. That’s why people feel sleepy in museums.’ He yawned, to demonstrate his point.

  ‘What about the invigilators?’ Blaise asked. ‘How come they’re all wide awake?’ She’d said it for the sake of argument, and suspected she was on shaky ground: the woman in the corner of this room had one elbow propped on a small table and leaned her head on her hand. She looked like she might drop off at any moment. The white box droned in a sinister way.

  ‘They’re old,’ Akhmed said. ‘They don’t need to sleep as much as we do.’

  ‘I’ll meet you in the Chinese room,’ Blaise said. ‘By the big wooden Buddha.’

  ‘All right,’ Akhmed agreed, with a sigh. ‘Half an hour?’

  ‘Make it an hour,’ Blaise said, and walked out of the room. She strolled through the galleries of European paintings. Akhmed was right: the invigilators were old. The women were silver-haired and matronly. Each sat alone in her allotted gallery. The men appeared genial, avuncular, sitting vacant, unoccupied. They all looked like people left behind. Forgotten. Of course, Blaise figured: they’re widows, and widowers.

  Perhaps, like her, they appreciated the emptiness. She walked straight through rooms that other visitors occupied to tarry in vacant ones, sitting on a bench if there was one and pretending to gaze at whatever was in front of her, sketchbook on her lap. It was the hushed ambience of the museum Blaise liked. The echo of a door closing somewhere far off. A lock being turned, with a lingering finality. The footsteps of a class of schoolchildren, pattering across the wooden floors of interconnecting galleries. Silence. Voices carried from distant rooms, the museum’s sepulchral ghosts.

  Today she’d been thinking of going to the squat, but then Akhmed had collared her at break and said, ‘You’re planning one of your expeditions, aren’t you? I can tell.’ She certainly wasn’t going to take him there, her secret place. She was too slow thinking, that was the trouble. She just said, ‘Yeh, okay, come with me. I’m going to the Ashmolean.’

  Really, though, she wasn’t sorry she hadn’t gone. She’d dropped in a couple of days ago. Zack acted like first he was happy to see her, then he wasn’t, then he was again. He was awkward. Reluctant, Blaise thought, to obey his own instincts. Akhmed wasn’t, really: he’d kiss her again if she’d let him.

  A family of Austrians or Germans flushed Blaise out of Dutch and Flemish Still-Lifes on the third floor. As she descended the stairs she felt a particular painting pull her towards it. Her favourite in the museum. It was in the large gallery, Italian Renaissance Art, and Blaise placed herself before it. It was a portrait by someone called Tiziano Vecellio, who the sign said was known as Titian. Whether to his friends, or his patrons, or just in England – the weird way we called Firenze Florence, or Roma Rome – it didn’t say. The three-quarter-length portrait was of a man called Giacomo Doria, who was a Genoese merchant. He was dressed in black, a robe of some kind, and stood – the painting was only of his upper half – in front and to one side of a marble pillar, against a dim brown background. There was a crest, his family or guild or whatever, in the top left-hand corner of the painting.

  Giacomo Doria seemed to be holding something in his right hand, but if so it was very dark, indistinguishable from his cloak – it might have been material gathered in his fingers. His left hand hung by his thumb from his belt, with a languid arrogance. He had a long black beard, a sharp nose, dark eyes. He looked more like an Afghan than an Italian, Blaise thought; a mujahedin. His black hair was thinning at the front – Titian had scratched scribbles of paint across the dome of his head – but he didn’t look old. Maybe into his thirties, she estimated. Or was his black hair dyed?

  It was a strange picture. She didn’t think he was a handsome man, yet he was impressive. It was his eyes that worried her. They looked at whoever stood before them unblinking, as they had done for centuries. The longer Blaise looked into them, the more she saw. There was suspicion in those eyes – of the artist, perhaps – aggression, even paranoia. As she gazed back at them it became apparent to Blaise that they revealed someone slightly unhinged. She wondered whether Titian had been a little afraid of this man he was being paid to paint, and painted his fear. What was he afraid of? She peered into the man’s eyes. Giacomo Doria was practically alive, his breathing calm and measured, two feet in front of her. He stared back at her; he was watching Blaise. He knew her; her weaknesses, her secrets.

  Titian’s fear, Blaise surmised, was of the man’s mental instability. An insanity of … what? Ambition, maybe. Power? A disturbance. Giacomo Doria’s eyes were those of a bird of prey. The painting revealed a ruthlessness that was neither heralded nor proclaimed. It was subtly, clearly evident.

  The sign said that Titian died in 1576, so Giacomo had been dead for some 400 years. But Blaise would not have been surprised if he stepped out of the painting. And if his first words were to command Blaise to do his bidding, there was little doubt that she would obey.

  When a voice addressed her, it was as if she was physically struck with it.

  ‘There you are.’

  Blaise flinched.

  ‘I was waiting ages. Where were you? I’ve been looking all over.’

  Blaise turned slowly to look at him.

  ‘I thought you’d gone without me,’ Akhmed said.

  Respiro was about the family of a free-spirited, insane woman in a fishing community on the island of Lampedusa. It was shot with bleached-out colours in a sun-blasted summer. There was an incredible image of scores of swimmers treading water together, shot from below, so that the human community looked like a single organism, its limbs rippling like fronds. Otherwise, the film failed to engage Ezra, and as if the filmmakers had bleached the screen the better to accommodate those dreaming spectators who wished to transpose their own images upon it, his mind kept drifting to summers of his own childhood.

  Ezra’s parents laboured years for him to come along and then they devoted themselves to his happiness, barely noticing that no more children followed him into their home. His father was an engineer who’d forged a career out of calibrating machinery for the manufacture of metal boxes, containers, bins. His mother a primary-school teacher. They possessed undoubted fondness for each other, but a capacity for affection seemed to find its fullest expression in their collaboration as parents. They doted on him.

  Ezra was oddly tall: his parents were both short – still was, in Clive Pepin’s case; even shorter now, the old man. By the time he reached double figures Ezra, a stringy boy, was already up around their height, so that, he fancied, their little trio resembled a circus family when, each summer, they embarked on camping
holidays in Devon and Cornwall.

  ‘Into the rain,’ Dad joked as they headed west. ‘Wipers ahoy.’

  ‘Get away with you,’ Mum admonished. ‘The forecast is bright. It’s your dad that’s gloomy, Ezra.’

  His father winked at Ezra in the rearview mirror. The film on the screen dissolved. The soundtrack faded. He pictured now the three of them playing cricket on a beach. On a hundred windy beaches. Pacing out a wicket on the hard sand, planting three stumps securely, resting the bails in their shallow cradles. A single stump at the other end for the bowler, his father, aiming a tennis ball underarm.

  Ezra was in bat. He always was: when his parents’ turns came his mother, an incompetent athlete, swung too early or too late at his deliveries; he clean bowled her every time. And his father threw up catches. So that Ezra would promptly return to the crease, and his father bowled kindly and his mother was positioned mid-wicket: she covered the whole on side, father the offside. What was left unmanned was the area behind the wicket, and any sensible choreographer of their straitened manpower – they rarely collaborated with a strange family – would have decreed that if the ball passed behind the wicket, play be automatically suspended, with the batsman obliged to fetch the ball he’d missed.

  Not the Pepins. So indulged was the boy, and so selfishly accepting of his indulgence, that not only did he claim runs off byes, he also slyly nicked the ball behind: Ezra totted up countless runs while his willing mother chased after a tennis ball scurrying off along the windblown beach.

  Peroni beers were half-price in the Phoenix bar to bearers of tickets to the Italian movie, and Ezra guzzled straight from the chilled bottle, as he listened to Minty. The alcohol from lunch had gradually dissipated from his body in the hours since, but left him with a tremendous thirst.

  ‘I was halfway through a library book last week,’ Minty was telling him. ‘A volume of poetry by a Welsh woman published in the seventies, when it occurred to me I’d read it before. I looked on my bookshelves, and sure enough, sport, there it was. I had my own copy. A first edition.’ She laughed at herself. ‘My own damn copy!’