by Tim Pears
His unwanted arousal further complicated what Ezra knew he had to do, which was already going to be difficult for someone softhearted – as witness his indisciplined child-rearing, he conceded – but it had to be done. With his rebellious body standing in the way.
‘Minty,’ he said, freeing his hand from hers. ‘You know how fond I am of you. We know how fond we are of each other. But what happened at the weekend we have to keep as a secret moment, a special birthday memory between us, don’t we? We both put our families first. Neither of us wants either Simon or Sheena hurt. The children, God forbid.’
Ezra took a nervous sip of ginger beer, and began to roll a cigarette; he was surprised to discover his fingers were trembling. He racked his brains trying to remember the rest of the speech he’d prepared – he knew that wasn’t all of it – as he watched his insolent fingers struggle to roll the thin paper over the screw of tobacco. The concentration necessary to this task had a welcome side-effect; blood returned to his fingers. When, finally, he accomplished a smooth, narrow cigarette, had licked and sealed it, lit it, exhaled, and removed a wisp of tobacco from his lower lip, only then did Ezra look at Minty: he suspected at once that she had probably spent every waking moment since their farewell on Woodstock Road, in the back of the temporary taxi at 11 a.m. the day before, in an empathogenic glow of fantasies of transformation. Of her, of their, lives. It struck Ezra then that although he’d had no inkling, the truth was that not only had Minty been in love with him for years, but the fact that they would eventually consummate this longing, and that he would one day – this day – realise, had been working its way backwards, bleeding somehow retrospectively into his consciousness. So that, if he were honest, he did know; he had known all along. That she loved him, was waiting for him, and when the moment came he would seize and surrender to it.
Minty sat limp and immobile beside him. She looked as if she was gazing through the open doorway to the bar beyond, stunned by some outrageous spectacle among the drab customers there. She’d shut down, unable to cope immediately with the mental and emotional blow he’d just delivered.
Ezra understood that this was not to proceed as he’d hoped. That Minty was not going to respond with a similar noble speech of her own. Outside the pub they were not going to hug each other, embrace their mutual commitment to friendship, family and sly memories. A forlorn hope: she had been hoping for something quite else.
The remainder of his speech was necessary, right now. It was more or less ready. He’d imagined when he composed it that morning, after suggesting lunch during Minty’s third phone call, that it might be hard for him to deliver because he’d be choked up himself with sympathy for his broken-hearted friend. It was to Ezra Pepin’s surprise, then, when it came to him that he should jettison the speech: there was only one reasonable course of action open to him. The cruelty of it gave him a cool tremor of pleasure. After his words if he were to spout them there would be no clarity here: no, Minty would argue, weep, beseech.
Ezra reckoned he had a brief moment more, while Minty remained in this petrified state, for action. Grabbing his tobacco, papers and lighter from the table, he got up and walked out of the pub.
And the remarkable thing was that that evening, while Louie was in the bath, Ezra sat on the toilet to pee and Sheena turned from where she was kneeling, bubble bath foam on her hands, and said, ‘Oh, what were you doing with Minty at lunchtime?’
‘Minty?’ Ezra asked, standing and pulling his trousers up to cover the sudden lurch of his stomach.
‘Yes, Luigi came into work and said he saw you.’
‘Luigi?’
‘Remember they all met at Jill’s barbecue the other week?’
‘Oh, right,’ Ezra said. He lowered the toilet lid and sat back down. ‘It was to do with work,’ he began.
‘Minty?’
‘A report needs writing, but not in the usual bland style? They want it poeticised, romanticised, to appeal to some Balkan clients. You know how poor Minty’s so dissatisfied, what with the failure of her poetry.’
‘Failure, yes,’ Sheena concurred. ‘Dissatisfaction, I didn’t think so. I thought she was perfectly happily growing into the role of a north Oxford lady of leisure.’
‘You may be right, Sheena. Because I thought I might do her a favour, I offered her a stab at it, for a decent fee, because getting paid for something you do is an important basis for self-esteem –’
‘I so agree.’
‘And she turned it down.’
Sheena twisted round to face him. ‘You are kidding.’
‘Didn’t say as much. She said she had no practice at such work, and she didn’t want to screw up, specially for a friend. For me. Which may have a modicum of truth.’
‘More likely she considered it beneath her.’
Ezra frowned. ‘You think?’
‘It offended her artistic integrity.’
‘Well,’ Ezra pondered. It was breathtaking how easy this mendacity was proving to be; it took little effort. ‘That does make a certain sort of sense.’
‘Yes, it does.’
Sheena turned back to the bath, to Louie and his animals and bubbles, her spine stiff with indignation on behalf of her husband, no less than pride at her own insight. Then she turned back towards Ezra. ‘That was very nice of you, Ez,’ she said, with complete sincerity, shaking her head and then nodding. ‘That was very thoughtful of you. It really was.’
Ezra leaned forward off the toilet seat and knelt on the floor beside Sheena. Winking at Louie, he dabbed some foam on Sheena’s nose and some on his own, rubbed noses together – which made Louie chuckle with delight – and then he kissed her, overcome with relief and love for Sheena, his unsuspecting, innocent wife. During their marriage, out in the wide world around them the divorce rate, as everyone knew, had doubled; half of all children experienced their parents’ divorce before the age of sixteen. Ezra felt, as he kissed Sheena, suddenly ageless; could feel himself both young and old with her and she with him, imagined their old age the reward for loyalty, the compensation for occasional incommunication, their children long gone, their libidos spent and habits worn and rubbed together, companionable as two trees growing old and gnarled and intertwined.
Ezra broke from Sheena, leaned into the bath, dabbed foam on Peanut Louie’s eager nose and on his own, and bent towards their laughing boy.
And now here he was in the office the next day with Minty weeping into the phone. ‘But how can you be so strong, darling?’ she sobbed. ‘So heartless, and brave and strong?’
‘We have to be, Minty,’ he said, slowly, appraising every word before releasing it. He considered telling her she was probably suffering from a chemical comedown, the Tuesday blues, but refrained. He was lucky he never seemed to get them himself. ‘We both have to be strong,’ he said. ‘You know we do.’ He should be patient with her, and calm. He wanted to yell down the line, though he couldn’t think what to shout.
Ezra looked outside. The day was still growing dim, a slow fade towards a premature night. A depression from the Bay of Biscay was apparently moving east north east. All the lights in the office were already on, which made it seem even darker than it was, at three o’clock on a summer afternoon.
‘But I want you, Ezra,’ Minty croaked, trying hard to breathe seductively between her sobs.
Through the triple glazing Ezra thought he heard a low growl of thunder, though perhaps it was something in the building. A flatulent rumble through the heating ducts. Large equipment being shifted somewhere downstairs. It was hard to make out clearly, when you were on the phone; when you had someone crying in your ear.
It was 5 p.m. Ezra couldn’t wait to get home, to share the news of his salary increase with Sheena. The two of them may have maintained a principled disregard for wealth and its trappings – a shared intuitive recoil from acquaintances’ displays of extravagance – but this was different, an unsought gift, and recognition, if of a particular, limited kind, of Ezra’s value in the wo
rld. That value would be expressed in practicalities: they’d no longer need to worry about the mortgage, the children’s university education, a new car. His salary would purchase, and thereby prove, its own meaning.
Ezra noted with curiosity, however, that he also wanted to put off telling Sheena. Until he’d shared this news with her neither it nor, it felt, his actual future would become entirely real. He wanted to hold it off a moment longer, to remain on this anticipatory brink of real life.
At the end of Hythe Bridge Street, instead of following the road round towards Worcester College Ezra strolled up George Street. Past the Old Fire Station, the cinema, the themed pubs, the theatre. When he reached Cornmarket he stopped and stood there, on the corner outside Debenhams. People swarmed past him, countless people moving fast, criss-crossing, making the constant subtle adjustments of migrating birds. People flocking. The resentment of morning’s sleepy trudge and rush to work had gone, this was the tired relief of citizens returned to liberty, keen to get home before the storm. The spectacle was immensely soothing.
All over the centre of the city people were leaving: beneath a purple-black sky, this exodus, this flocking home, flight paths crisscrossing, people fleeing in outward radiation. Ezra Pepin stood on the corner opposite Waterstone’s, not once jostled, awestruck by the crowd. By the faces of countless men and women. The energy, the willpower, invested in every trajectory, each journey from waking to sleeping upon which each individual was embarked that day. By the thought that, flip forward a hundred years, they would all be gone, each and every one, replaced in their entirety by a different cast. Another parade of bodies, of extraordinary will, of animate being made purposeful.
It was dusk near as damn it in the gloom. Ezra realised, walking along St John’s Street, that he was stooping beneath the low black cloud that had spread across the sky above him. Other people were running, scampering away. They stopped: out of breath, they trembled with keys, then vanished, falling through the front doors of houses. Ezra ambled. Lights had been switched on, yet curtains not yet drawn, not while there was still a smudgy light outside, as if to do so would be to cause affront to the dying day.
Before the rain fell, Ezra sensed an extraordinary thing. In Wellington Square he jumped the low wall of the garden and cut straight over the tree-encircled lawn, grass already brown and worn where workers from the university offices would take their lunchtime sandwiches, students sprawl, winos slumber. It was empty now, and treading across the grass Ezra sensed a pull from the earth below him. Not gravity so much as a yearning. A thirst, exerting a pressure that he could feel. Waves, corrugations in the air between the earth and the gloomy sky, that shook the pressure loose.
As he entered Little Clarendon Street great single drops, globules, of water splattered on the ground, bursting into dark splodges on the grey pavement. A pattering percussion, the tuning up, the developing orchestration of a storm. Streetlights came on: were they responding autonomously to the unsummery murk, or to the initiative of a city council engineer?
As Ezra walked along Walton Street the huge cloud above ripped itself open. Rain plunged down. The weight of heavy water falling on his hair, his head, his shoulders, was staggering; it would be enough, he thought, to pummel a frail person to the ground. It was monstrous and vivifying. A man a few yards ahead had his umbrella dented by the force of the water and got as drenched as Ezra, who didn’t bother to stop himself laughing in the downpour. The man didn’t look back but promptly scurried off, resentful of the storm and this stranger’s laughter both.
A few cars with their headlights on crawled through the cinematic rain, and everything – people, cars, buildings – looked as they might have looked fifty years ago. Shimmering reflections in windows and puddles. Shiny metal. An illusion of spick and span clean. The odd person stooped over, hooded, fifties stoics in their sopping clothes, doing what needed to be done with neither false heroics nor self-indulgence.
Ezra ducked into a doorway across from the cinema. He knew full well as he did so it was that of The Raj Cuisine.
‘Come in, Ezra. Come in,’ Abdul drawled. ‘You are wet. Please. This way.’ He barked something in Bengali at the younger of two waiters, who doubled in his bow-tie as a magician and produced from nowhere a paper tablecloth which he folded and laid on a seat at the table in the corner. Ezra removed his drenched jacket.
‘You will have something to warm,’ Abdul suggested. ‘A whisky?’
‘What a lovely idea. Thank you.’
Ezra hadn’t been to the Raj Cuisine in years but he felt like he’d stepped back in time because, incredibly, it hadn’t been altered. The same red plush upholstery, the same flock wallpaper, nicotined ceiling, large framed paintings – garish copies of Mogul miniatures of elephants, semi-clothed girls, mustachioed warriors with jewel-encrusted turbans. There were only eight tables, plus the one at which he was sitting at the back, spread with copies of two or three of that day’s newspapers, where people who came to collect takeaways sat unless the restaurant was full.
Beside the table was a tiny corner bar, behind whose counter Abdul stood. He appeared taller in there. Perhaps there was a platform.
‘After they leave,’ Abdul said, nodding towards the one table occupied at this early hour, ‘we might as well close restaurant. Nobody out in storm like this, Ezra.’
The four young men tucked into their curries and lagers. Ezra fancied he could tell, it being apparent in the particular knowing over-emphasis of almost everything any of them said, that they’d chosen this restaurant on account of its retro ambience. It was ironic to come here – not to mention cheap – and a relief from the demandingly imaginative fusions on offer elsewhere.
‘Thank you,’ said Ezra, lifting the whisky that Abdul had one of his waiters bring around to him on a small tray, even though if he and Ezra had reached towards each other he could have passed it easily over. Ezra took a long sip and felt the liquor slide burning down his throat. ‘A most welcome remedy to rain,’ he said, nodding his head with appreciation in the most anodyne way; like one of those dogs who used to nod on a car windowsill. You didn’t see them any more. Not in Oxford, anyway. Maybe they were still nodding out of car windows in the country town he came from.
‘Will you have some food?’ Abdul asked. ‘Even without your wife?’
‘No thanks, Abdul. I was just passing when I got caught by the downpour. I thought it would be nicer to say hello to you than to stand under the cinema awning.’ Ezra sipped his drink.
‘So, Ezra, I hear the trip, big trip to South America, is off.’ As Abdul spoke he fidgeted with glasses and bottles around him, a fridge on the floor behind, with implements unseen beneath the counter. On the surface was a single spike, on which the students’ order was skewered. Ezra could remember observing it during busy evenings, he and Sheena trying to work out the dextrous logic by which Abdul and his waiters took the orders on and off the spike. ‘I hear,’ Abdul added, ‘from my son.’
There was reproach in the words. I should have heard from you, my friend. My fellow patriarch. But he was here now.
‘Well, we’ve postponed it, yes,’ Ezra agreed gravely. ‘It wasn’t the right time, for all sorts of reasons.’
‘Of course,’ Abdul said. ‘The women they don’t want to go. That how it is.’
‘The women? You mean Sheena?’
‘Abdul here five years building business. Then I am ready, I send for my wife. My wife not want to leave village, Ezra. With two children in Bangladesh. She didn’t want to.’
‘It must have been a frightening prospect for her,’ Ezra said.
‘It like this.’ Abdul grinned. ‘Abdul have to put foot down.’ Ezra pictured him doing so, with his childsize foot, beside his large rustic wife. ‘I order her to come, I tell her family, she must come or I divorce her. It’s like that.’
Ezra tried hard to think of something to say. ‘I can’t imagine that particular threat cutting much ice with my wife,’ he managed.
�
�Thing iz, Ezra,’ Abdul intoned. ‘Thing iz, man not in command.’
‘No, but actually, you see,’ Ezra said hurriedly, angry with Abdul for not listening to him; for just grinning as he spoke. It was very simple: why, he’d put his foot down too, he’d just done it in such a way that Sheena didn’t realise he had. Wasn’t that actually more powerful, in a way? He’d needed neither brute force nor the weight of tradition, but rather an understanding of the subtleties of human relationships. ‘Forget what I just said. It was the other way round. I was the one.’
‘I am sorry you could not go to Brazil, Ezra,’ Abdul continued blithely. ‘It’s good for man to build new life. New place.’
Ezra wished his trousers were not quite so sopping. They stuck to his skin. He feared the damp would have seeped by now through the paper tablecloth beneath his backside to the upholstery below. ‘Don’t be sorry for me, Abdul, I can assure you that –’
‘Sometimes I think it much easier, being Muslim. Even you don’t need to believe all what imam say. In our house, Ezra, we have Qur’an, Bible and Torah.’
‘Really?’ Ezra tried to remember whether they had a copy of even one of these books at home in Blenheim Orchard. Did the Pepins actually own a bible?
‘For the children.’
Ezra sipped the last of his whisky. ‘Your children are a credit to you. It was good to meet them the other day.’
‘Most of them, yes. Akhmed I don’t know. What he do at school? He like anything? Abdul don’t know. The boy doesn’t tell his father.’
‘I know what you mean.’
‘Sometime I think he’s simple.’
‘Surely not.’
‘The others are too clever.’ Abdul smiled, all the while fiddling with cutlery, more beer bottles for the students, a bottle of wine for a couple who had come rushing in out of the rain. Like his waiter, this constant activity while he spoke gave Abdul the air of an illusionist, speaking to distract his audience from the cups and balls, the white rabbit, about to be conjured up.
