by Tim Pears
‘Minty,’ Ezra said, shaking his head, just managing to stop himself from saying, Poor Minty. ‘You must have read more than you can cope with.’
‘Probably,’ she smiled. ‘My brain’s full up.’
‘It’s not good for us to live too much in our heads,’ he said.
‘That’s a bit strange coming from you, Ez,’ Minty responded, raising her eyebrows. ‘Isn’t that where intellectuals like us are supposed to live?’
‘And for what?’ Ezra demanded. ‘For our own happiness? For the good of mankind?’
He wanted to tell her what he wasn’t yet allowed to; about the scheme being dreamed up at Isis Water. About how a man such as himself could have an impact. For good this time.
The café window had a multi-coloured phoenix painted on the glass. To one side of the bar there was a box full of back issues of Sight and Sound. One or two students, waiting for a date or without one, read copies. Minty lit a Camel. She inhaled, then lifted her neck slowly, and blew a plume of smoke into the air above her. When she lowered her head and looked at Ezra, he sensed a wistfulness in her eyes that was at odds with the aggressive tone of voice in which words emerged from her tight mouth. ‘You think we should act on our impulses?’ she asked.
‘I suppose I do,’ Ezra pondered. ‘But what’s important is not the impulse, the spontaneity, but the reason. To act on a well-thought-out plan, that’s the thing.’
Minty smiled at him, with what may have been approval but was more likely irony. She exhaled again, but before she could say anything Ezra said, getting to his feet, ‘You ready for another glass of wine? I’m getting a fresh beer.’
Ezra’s bicycle ferried his unbalanced body in an unstraight line home. The lights were out, the house silent. Ezra closed doors and ascended stairs with the exaggerated stealth of a drunk. Removed his clothes item by awkward item; performed ablutions in an echo chamber of an ensuite bathroom. He climbed into bed in slow motion.
Sheena was turned away to her side of the bed, her body curled into itself. The inertness of his wife asleep never failed to unsettle Ezra: he always needed to confirm her breath; her ribs’ slight rise and fall. Then he was able to lie back, gaze at the ceiling. Close his eyes.
It was only now that for the first time that day Ezra acknowledged, lying beside Sheena, that he’d again failed to tell Klaus Kuuzik of his family’s plan to go to Brazil, even though their flight was scheduled for little more than a month away, and the letting agency had a family lined up to rent the house. On the brink of sleep his concentration focused through the fug of booze and tiredness. What was he thinking of? What was he hoping for? Such a prospect Klaus had held before him. Sheena sometimes inveighed against environmental despoliation with words along the lines of, ‘What I hate about these people is they believe, they ask us to believe, that technology will solve the problems caused by technology.’
Wasn’t it the same with trade? Maybe it really was possible to solve problems of inequality and injustice. Missionary for noble capitalism: a strange role indeed. But Ezra couldn’t fill it, could he? Because powerful evangelist as he was, a man who might well change the world, Klaus Kuuzik could not be allowed to threaten the architecture of one family’s hard-won harmony. Ezra knew that he could not take Sheena’s decisions for her, not without the risk of losing everything most precious. With which irreconcilable anxiety he slid into sleep.
Ezra Pepin was woken in the darkness, by what he didn’t know at first. He lay with his senses alert: ah, yes, it was a sound. A sound coming from Sheena. What is it? Is she ill? It’s not a cough. It’s a shudder. Is she retching? Yes, she’s trying to be sick. Or trying not to be sick. No. Wait.
A glance, and the luminous dials of the alarm clock told Ezra it was one-twenty-five. He raised himself up on his elbow, and leaned over Sheena. ‘What is it, darling?’ he whispered, touching her shoulder. ‘What’s the matter? Are you all right?’
With each sob, Sheena’s upper body stuttered and shook beneath the cotton sheet, as if the plaintive motor of her unhappiness was trying to start up into a full-blown wail. Ezra waited, let her cry the worst of it out, letting her know he was there with one hand on her shoulder and the other on her thigh, through the sheet. The sides of her ribs juddered against his chest. Her bottom rocked into his groin. He felt his prick engorging. An image leapt to mind of him and Sheena in Tantric union, with her sobbing providing the single erotic movement.
Ezra shifted away. He felt under Sheena’s pillow and found a couple of half-used tissues, which he offered her. Sheena took them, wiped her eyes, blew her nose. Her sobbing slowed to an occasional pathetic catch of breath. She sniffed, and swallowed.
‘What’s wrong, darling?’ Ezra asked.
‘Blaise,’ Sheena said.
‘What happened?’
Sheena felt round to the wall and switched her reading light on. She turned over to face her husband. Her eyes were livid and swollen from crying. They gave her a certain simian look; they reminded him of the monkeys at Cotswold Wildlife Park.
‘We had a fight,’ Sheena said. ‘It was unbearable, Ezra, the things she said.’
Speaking brought back the sobbing. Ezra stroked her arm. ‘There, there,’ he soothed.
‘There was no reasoning with her,’ Sheena said.
‘It’s okay, darling,’ Ezra comforted her.
‘Oh, Ezra,’ Sheena sniffled. ‘She came in here as I was getting ready for bed. Cool as a cucumber, said …’ Sheena broke off as she started sobbing again, but managed to resume, talking and crying together. ‘She looked at me calm as you like and said, “By the way, you ought to know, Mum, I’m not going to Brazil. You can’t force me.”’
‘That was it?’ Ezra asked.
‘She said she wouldn’t go to Brazil unless we took everything we owned and gave it to shanty-town dwellers when we got there.’
Ezra bit his lip to keep himself from pointing out quite how much Blaise was her mother’s daughter.
‘I don’t understand,’ Sheena muttered. ‘We were best friends.’
‘I know, darling.’
‘We’ve always been best friends, Blaise and me.’ In a trembling voice, Sheena said, ‘She called me a hypocrite, Ezra. But in that light-hearted way of hers. “Oh, Mummy, don’t be a tedious hypocrite.” ’
‘That’s not so bad, is it?’ Ezra asked.
‘Yes, but then I lost it.’ Sheena’s facial muscles made a great effort. ‘I yelled. I said things.’ She sniffed. ‘I shouldn’t have.’
Sheena began crying again, and Ezra opened his shoulders, inviting her to sink into his embrace. A part of him went out to his partner, to her maternal pain. A small part too went out of their bedroom door and spooled along the corridor towards Blaise; though that could wait for later. And a large part of him, he had to admit, just felt dumbly content, a hulk of a man comforting his crying wife in the early hours of the night while the rest of the world was sleeping. It was a duty a man was happy to fulfil.
So that it was only slowly, as Sheena sobbed against his chest, that the significance of what she’d said sank in. My God. Of course: they couldn’t go now. And as it did, Ezra felt the relief wash his brain, as if there were a chemical peculiar to that emotion whose entire supply had just been released, with enough left over to lighten his blood and warm his heart. Of course they couldn’t force Blaise to go. So they’d remain in Oxford. He’d stay at Isis Water. And he’d not had a thing to do with it. It was all between Sheena and Blaise. He could not be blamed.
Sheena had almost cried herself out. Ezra found more tissues and she blew her nose; took deep breaths. Ezra was wondering how to phrase his next line. We don’t have to go to Brazil? We can go another time? It doesn’t matter, darling? We’ll review it in a couple of years?
When, however, Sheena spoke first, it was as if in response to whatever precise formulation Ezra would come up with; it was in response to his intention.
‘Don’t worry, Ezra,’ she said bravely. ‘Don’t yo
u worry, sweetheart. We’re going, and that’s the end of it. Blaise says she doesn’t want to come with us. Well, fine. If she really wants to stay behind, we’ll just have to let her.’
Part Three
14
Picnic on Port Meadow
Into August
How many articles, essays, books had been written, Ezra Pepin wondered, about children and their rooms? The modern phenomenon of growing up with your own self-enclosed space. In the days following the row between mother and daughter all his children, it seemed to Ezra, and not just Blaise, retreated into their separate bedrooms.
Sheena had installed a broadband connection, a necessary service for prospective tenants, according to the lettings agency, and she also let Hector have an old word processor that had been replaced by an upgrade at Home Holidays: glued to the chair in front of it, Hector became an eleven-year-old screenager eavesdropping on newsgroups; sweeping cyberspace for threats to his safety; lurking in chat rooms for precocious conspiracy theorists. He’d be hacking within months, Ezra suspected; MI6 would swoop on their house and make Hector’s nightmares come true.
Louie, too, disappeared inside his citadel: beneath the single high bunk bed the boy had a wooden fort, manned by plastic knights in armour. Louie orchestrated extravagant sieges of the fort, by time-crossed armies who marched across the Tartar steppe of the floorboards: battalions comprising Vikings and cowboys, footballers, Snow White, Buzz Lightyear and a troll. They travelled in jeeps, on horseback, by train. And their infantry were augmented by rhinos and dinosaurs. Robots and dragons. Paying homage to both the mercenary tradition and an older custom of terrifying enemies with fearsome beasts, post-modern regiments besieged the solemn paladins.
The boys emerged at intervals, reentering the congregation of family life. Blaise, however, remained in a sulky quarantine. She asked for food to be left outside her door. They heard her quietly speaking in there sometimes, but whether this was into her mobile, or murmuring to herself like an anchoress, her parents couldn’t tell. She developed a cat burglar’s ability to make herself invisible, slipping in and out of the house without being seen: people heard the front door close behind her, or her bedroom door click shut on her return. Occasionally Blaise did her holiday homework in the living-room, but spoke to no one. Sitting at the table, chewing a biro, with her earphones on, Blaise nodded her head. Agreeing with the beat of the music. All of a sudden she’d close her books and return upstairs.
Was it a good or a bad thing his daughter had her own room? Ezra wondered. Did such space allow her to develop herself, or condemn her to cultivate her own loneliness? Possibly, he thought, she was leaving the arena for her parents to sort out the problem; the boys too, all three of them tactfully intuiting that Ezra and Sheena required the communal areas downstairs for necessary adult negotiation.
Most of the conversations they had, in those ensuing days, took place in the evenings, outside, as had the earlier duologues in which the two of them had planned their adventure. They’d talked it up and now, Ezra reckoned, they had to talk it down. But it wouldn’t be easy.
‘She can carry on at Cherwell and do her GCSEs there,’ Sheena decided.
‘What, and stay here on her own?’
‘Of course not. We can hardly rent this place out with Blaise in it, can we?’
‘“To let: modern five-bedroom house,”’ said Ezra. ‘“Close to city centre. Comes with off-street parking and its own resident teenager. One thousand pounds per calendar month.” ’
‘Don’t be stupid, Ezra,’ said Sheena. ‘We’ll be asking twice that.’
They took less care with the accoutrements, as if playing a sequel to their earlier performance but with shabby props. One evening at the beginning of August neither of them remembered to put the white wine in the fridge, and drank it warm. While Ezra no longer relished a single cigarette: he’d no sooner put one out than start rolling another, with tobacco-reeking fingers.
‘So where’s she going to stay?’ he asked.
‘With friends.’
‘Any friends in particular? I mean, I haven’t noticed many hanging out here recently.’
‘Oh, come on, Ezra, teenagers don’t like their mates seeing inside their houses. Of course she has friends.’
‘There’s Akhmed.’
‘Yes. Well.’
‘You want to come back and find our daughter behind a veil?’
‘Oh, Ezra, that is so ridiculous.’
‘Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. I don’t know. I just don’t see it’s such a good idea to leave –’
‘A headstrong young woman.’
‘Our little girl, Sheena.’
‘Look!’ Sheena got up out of her garden chair. ‘You don’t seem willing to acknowledge how difficult it is to have my daughter treat me the way Blaise has.’
‘We can’t abandon her.’
‘Of course not, but don’t you see?’ Sheena stepped towards and loomed over Ezra; her hands danced, adding emphasis to what she said; they seemed to want to grab her husband by the scruff of the neck and shake him. ‘Don’t you see? The whole point is it would be good for her. It’s what she needs. Outside our smothering embrace, our poor girl can grow up.’
Sheena turned away and stepped to the edge of the decking. Looking out across the lawn and into the clear night, where stars were just beginning to become apparent in the still-blue sky, Sheena said in a quiet voice, ‘It’d be the best thing we could do for her.’
And although the words that Sheena spoke then and in those days expressed her determination to see their plan through, there was already some note in her voice of defeat, a certain undertone, that acknowledged Blaise’s refusal to accompany them as a desertion that had breached their voyage below the waterline; a tone which promised eventual acceptance that the trip could not reasonably be made.
Or was that, Ezra conceded, lighting another rollie, simply wishful thinking?
On Friday 8 August, Ezra put the boys to bed and came downstairs. He could hear murmured voices coming from the sitting-room. Sheena and Blaise sat close together and facing one another on the big white sofa, their arms and legs entwined like lovers, looking into each other’s eyes as they confided who knew what? Ezra observed them from the doorway. He saw a dropped gaze, a stroking hand, a head-tilted tolerant smile: the nuanced choreography of mutual contrition, of Blaise’s apology, of Sheena’s forgiveness. Reconciliation. The sight delighted and unnerved him. It was as if they’d formed a single, twin-headed female creature, communicating with itself.
Sheena spotted him and said, ‘Ez, come here.’
He sat on the coffee table, knees touching their sofa, as both Sheena and Blaise, holding some arm or leg of the other, turned bovine smiles at him, inviting him through glazed eyes to salute the manner of their repentance.
‘Ez, guess what,’ said Sheena.
‘What?’
‘Blaise says Akhmed’s parents have invited us to join them at a picnic on Sunday.’
‘Really?’ he asked Blaise.
‘On Port Meadow,’ she nodded.
The two women gazed at Ezra. He sensed that they were looking for their reflection, in the mirror of his response to them. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘That’s very nice. Who’s going to cook? I mean, what should we take?’
‘They say we can bring dessert, Daddy,’ Blaise said, smiling sweetly.
Ezra returned upstairs. He retreated into his room, too, during those days, partly to give Sheena time and space to come to what he saw as the only rational conclusion on her own, and partly to contemplate what Klaus Kuuzik and Carl Buchannan had discussed with him.
Sheena had presented the Brazilian escapade as a way for Ezra, on the verge of turning forty, on the brink of middle age, to reclaim his potential. The plan, having briefly seduced him, was then impossible to back out of. And here was a new boss who’d appeared in the company, perceived Ezra’s worth and plucked him from the ranks of middle management, with the prospect of extraordinary de
eds.
Now Ezra began to tidy his desk. To put back in their boxes the research material he’d been processing the past days, as if boxing it back up would stir his resolve or intention in the intricate negotiations to come; could add its measure to the minutely shifting, subterranean forces at work in the marriage of a man and a woman.
If all went well, Ezra thought, he’d put away these papers for good: in a year or two he’d carry them down to the back of the car and take them to the dump, and shed once and for all his fake academic persona, the pretence of what he neither wanted to nor could become. What a clarifying trip that’ll be, to Redbridge waste-disposal site. He reconstructed a couple of flat-pack cardboard boxes, and began to stuff them with papers.
A whisper. ‘Dad.’
Ezra jumped.
‘Blaise. I didn’t hear you.’
She was standing in the doorway, dressed in her Snoopy pyjamas. She came in and knelt beside Ezra’s desk chair, leaning on the thin armrest. He put his hand on her back, and stroked it.
‘Dad?’
‘What?’
Blaise rested her head on his thigh. He stroked her hair. Then she lifted her head. ‘Do you and Mum talk about everything?’
Blaise had brushed her teeth.
Her breath smelled of strawberries.
‘Yes. I mean, no, of course not everything.’
Her eyes flickered. ‘Do you tell each other what you do?’
‘What do you mean? Do you mean are we honest?’
‘I suppose.’
His daughter was studying him now. He’d better tell the truth. But that was okay, there was no reason not to. ‘Yes,’ Ezra said. ‘We’d never do anything to hurt each other, or you children.’
Blaise gave no indication as to whether or not she believed him. She nodded at the folders on his desk. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked.
