Blenheim Orchard

by Tim Pears

  Ezra closed the door. Here we are, he thought. This is who we are.

  20

  The Raj Cuisine

  September 2004

  The following summer, the unsettled weather was a dire contrast to the heatwave of 2003. Showers and depressed temperatures in June gave way to strong winds and heavy rain in July. August was a month of cold and thunder. Only in September did a weak sun manage to divulge a little warmth into the shortening days. One Sunday evening in a house on Bainton Road, Minty Carlyle carried a lemon meringue pie she’d made through to the dining-room where Simon was telling a story, which had already taken up most of the meal, to the guests he’d invited: Simon and Ian and Dan’s new tennis partner and his wife.

  ‘Actually, we’re not married,’ the woman had said, as Simon attempted to effect introductions when they arrived. ‘We’re partners.’

  ‘Of course,’ Simon had said. ‘We’re all partners now. Business partners, tennis partners, therapy partners. Marriage may be over, but we can’t stop partnering.’

  They’d chuckled in the hallway, as Simon took their coats, though it wasn’t funny, but even so Simon, encouraged, hung the man’s coat on an imaginary nail on the wall and turned away: the coat fainted to the floor, Simon hammed a dramatic double take, and the men broke up with laughter.

  ‘He does that at the tennis court,’ the man told the woman, with apparent admiration. ‘Hangs his tracksuit top on a nonexistent hook. Cracks me up every time.’

  ‘Did I tell you, Minty?’ Simon asked. ‘Bill’s a bloody good player. A lot better than Ezra, actually.’ He turned to their guests. ‘Always thought he was a better player than the rest of us. Bloody annoying.’

  ‘When we all know you were,’ the man said, jabbing his finger towards Simon’s chest, and the two of them chuckled again.

  Simon told more of the story. Minty cut the lemon meringue. The woman asked, ‘So what happened to the parents? How did they … ?’

  ‘Oh, they separated within, what, days, Minty?’ Simon replied.

  ‘Hours.’

  ‘The children live with the mother?’ the woman asked.

  ‘The older boy, Hector, lives with his father, actually. Yes, yes, a bit odd.’

  ‘I mean, parents separating is one thing,’ the woman said. ‘It happens. But the children? That’s really breaking up a family.’

  ‘It’s what Hector chose, apparently. He’s a quirky little chap,’ Simon said. ‘Broke Sheena’s heart, I’m told.’

  ‘They still live here?’ the man asked.

  Simon shook his head. ‘Sold the house round the corner in Blenheim Orchard. Sheena bought a bigger one on Chalfont Road. Threw herself into the business. Very successful. Full-time nanny for Louie, who’s starting at the Squirrel soon. Blaise is a day girl at the High School. She’s a remarkable woman, Sheena. Isn’t she, Minty? There was something about her in today’s paper, actually. Did you see it? I’ll find it for you.’

  Simon dashed into the sitting-room. Minty served portions of the pie to her guests. ‘Cream or custard?’ she offered. What were their names again? Joan or June, and he was Bob, wasn’t he? Or did Simon call him Bert? How they’d enjoyed the story, and were willing to slurp every last drop that Simon could milk from it. The man shook his head sadly at each salacious exaggeration of Blaise’s adventure that Simon provided; he took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes and said, ‘How can you tell nowadays? Look at them. How can you tell how old they are?’ The woman seemed more intent on perceiving the story as a detective mystery, one that with sufficient concentration she might solve.

  Simon returned with the business section of the Sunday paper, opened and folded. ‘There you go,’ he said, handing the newspaper to the woman. ‘Not a very good picture of Sheena, I’m afraid. She looks a lot younger than that in real life. A brief article but it gives you an idea of how well she’s doing, right? Franchising their idea here, there and everywhere.’

  The woman nodded, and passed the newspaper to her husband. ‘And the father?’ she asked. ‘Ezra. Where’s he, Simon?’

  ‘He moved back into his father’s house in Dorset.’

  ‘Wiltshire,’ Minty corrected him.

  ‘Exactly. Moved back in with his old man. Who promptly died, earlier this year. Or maybe the end of last. Yes, leaving Ezra with the house. What he does there I have no idea. Not a lot, right?’

  This question was lobbed in Minty’s general direction. She chose to ignore it. The man, Bill or Bob, slung the paper on to the window seat behind him. ‘What’s wrong with the man having custody?’ he asked no one in particular, though Minty heard a trace of petulance in his voice that suggested echoes of other conversations that might have taken place between him and his partner. Maybe he’d had an earlier marriage.

  The woman turned to Minty and said, ‘Men. When they could wriggle out of paying childcare they forgot their kids. Now they’re forced to pay up, they want to see them all the time.’

  ‘All I’m saying is,’ the man said, ‘if you have to have single parents, men can do it just as well as women. That’s all I’m saying. But what intrigues me,’ he added, ‘is the question of how premeditated it was. A girl of that age? It’s worrying. Don’t forget our Ruby is just turned twelve. I mean, did she plan it?’

  ‘That’s the sort of question you’d have to ask her,’ Simon said.

  ‘Who’s to say you’d get a straight answer?’ June or Jane said.

  ‘Teenage girls are furiously manipulative. She might well not have known herself.’

  ‘That,’ Simon said. He swallowed a mouthful of pie. ‘Is a very good point. Equally: was it premeditated on Kuuzik’s part? What happened has got out, round the company; people were there, after all, and even if Ezra slipped quietly out of the hotel, people still asked why he left early. There have been, apparently.’ Simon forked and then fed himself another slice of the lemon meringue. He chewed, and swallowed half a mouthful, and said, ‘Rumours.’

  Simon paused, and ate again, leaving the last word of his sentence dangling like a worm for Rob and Jean, with their greedy faces, to ogle. How Simon was relishing this, telling these strangers the lurid domestic saga of their supposed best friends; he liked this role, Minty reckoned, even more than that of a buffoon.

  ‘Rumours?’ the man asked. ‘Of what?’

  ‘That he’d done it before.’

  ‘Kuuzik? With girls?’ asked the woman. ‘Really?’

  ‘That’s the hearsay, apparently. The reason that his company have shifted him from continent to continent. I’ve not heard of any proof. But who knows?’

  ‘The ones who get away with it,’ the woman said, and then she seemed to mime a spasm of panic. ‘It makes me shudder,’ she told Minty.

  ‘If the Pepins had pressed charges,’ Simon continued, ‘something might have come out. Maybe he was on police files in Germany.’

  ‘Or Canada,’ the woman said, nodding intelligently.

  ‘But the girl, Simon,’ said the man. ‘She sounds like she was smart enough. She must have known what an impossible position seducing his boss would put her father in. What was she thinking?’

  Simon sat back, frowning, easing into a sort of professorial posture, as if this were the moment he’d been waiting for, when he would deliver the words they might really find it worth listening hard to. ‘I rather lean towards the idea,’ he said, ‘of the child as the nemesis of her parent. Because Ezra, her father, was a terribly conflicted chap, you see. He did this job he hated. He was a failed academic. He didn’t really know how to give his wife what she wanted. Sheena was, I’m quite sure still is, an extraordinary woman. She pretty much cut ties with her old friends, apart from her business partner, Jill, who keeps us informed. We hardly ever see her, do we, darling? I mean it’s sad, but understandable.’

  Minty said nothing. She had seen Sheena, just the day before, walking home from town. Minty had come up from behind, and slowed her pace so as not to catch them up. Sheena and Blaise strolled ahead
of her along the wide pavement on St Giles, shopping bags swinging, arm in arm in girlish concord.

  ‘You’d want to start afresh,’ the woman said.

  ‘Quite,’ Simon nodded. ‘Remind me to tell you about the protest over there at Frenchay Glade, used to be called the Wasteland, that she got me involved in. Anyway, Ezra, he wasn’t really there, somehow, do you know what I mean?’

  They ate their dessert, the Carlyles and their guests. The woman picked at hers, breaking off tiny morsels with the corner of her fork, occasionally depositing one on her tongue, but leaving even more pie on her plate than her hostess did. Minty found that it irked her.

  ‘I wonder,’ the woman said. ‘I’m thinking, assuming we’ve pieced it together correctly, that there were hours between them leaving the party and Ezra watching her come out of Kuuzik’s hotel room. Maybe they did walk around a while. Or talk in his room. Maybe Blaise was hoping all this time that her father would stop her. It was a kind of challenge. To see how much he loved her.’

  ‘I suspect that’s exactly what Ezra thinks,’ Simon affirmed. ‘And must blame himself for. Why did he keep putting off going to Kuuzik’s room, through those hours of the night?’

  Each of the guests refused Minty’s offer of a cigarette, though both insisted they didn’t mind if she smoked. Minty put the lighter and unopened pack together on the table beside her place.

  ‘A man could blame himself for the rest of his life,’ the man said.

  ‘That would be plain silly,’ said the woman.

  ‘But listen,’ the man said. ‘It just occurred to me. How about, if the girl had a political intention? The project in the Middle East. It was cancelled, was it?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Simon said. ‘Are you joking, Bill? I’m surprised it doesn’t ring any bells. Now that everything’s shifting there. DeutscheWasser just got some huge subsidised water contract as part of this European initiative.’

  Minty removed the plates from the table, took orders, and returned with a pot of coffee and one of camomile tea. Hers, she’d decided, was a non-speaking part in this odd little play. She would fulfil the obligations of a bit-part player, let Simon act his leading role, performed with such careful relish. He’d told the story a number of times over this past year, but she didn’t think he’d had such eager listeners as these two, helping him string it out to fill the entire evening. Avid strangers who would soon go home. She could be patient, and see the evening through.

  ‘Do you mind if I ask,’ the man said. ‘I mean, okay, it’s a bad business. But why exactly did they split up? Was it her? She kicked him out? Or did they both realise at the same time their relationship was untenable, or what?’

  ‘I believe it was mutual, Bill,’ Simon frowned. ‘What happened with Blaise and Kuuzik was the event, the object, that breached their marriage.’

  They sipped their coffees and herbal teas in silence. Minty restrained herself. For the first time that evening she wanted suddenly, forcefully, to join in. Because they didn’t split, for Christ’s sake, it was so lazy to say that. ‘They broke up,’ we say. ‘It’s sad. They separated. What a shame.’ Respectful of the mystery of other people’s relationships we spout this decorous crap, because we’re too lazy to nail the truth. Ezra left her. They didn’t split. He couldn’t and wouldn’t take it any more, the accommodation he’d made with this woman. For fourteen years. The thing with Blaise was both final straw and revelation: Sheena had no heart. Yes, Ezra had failed to protect their child: a grievous error that had been confessed and might be forgiven. He’d have to live with it. Sheena, however, didn’t want to protect her daughter, was happy to let Blaise bring, at fourteen, calamity upon herself. Wasn’t that a kind of horror? How could Ezra share his life with her any longer?

  ‘Excuse me,’ Minty said, grasping her cigarettes and lighter as she rose. ‘I’ll just be a moment.’

  As she walked through the kitchen towards the back door Minty heard Jenny ask, ‘And the children, Simon. Those two poor boys. How do they … ?’

  Minty lit her cigarette and wandered out on to the lawn. The middle of September, and the evening air was cool enough to make her tremble. She held one bare arm across her midriff, clutching the elbow of her other arm.

  It must be about ten-thirty by now, Minty reckoned. Soon they’ll go, Bill and Jenny, and with any luck Simon will have spent in this evening’s performance whatever satisfaction he wished to obtain from having known the Pepins, and will let it rest.

  She sucked smoke deep into her lungs and held it there, daring it, urging it, to hurt her. Just last week she’d told Ezra on the phone he had only to say the word and she’d join him, move down there to the cottage, taking Jack with her. Jack and Hector could see out what remained of their childhood with a twin brother, almost, which might make up for being semi-estranged from their own, what with Ed and his scholarship, on which he’d left last week.

  What was Ezra doing? Odd jobs, he’d told her, and she could hear the smile in his voice. And he was writing again, he’d added, although he wouldn’t tell her what. Ezra, though, would not commit himself, and the days succeeded one another, and she seemed to live and breathe through them. She recalled the party Ezra took her to last year, on her fortieth birthday. It was the happiest day of her life. Really? Happier than your first son’s birth? Yes, almost. Kissing Ezra, at last. Admit it. She remembered sitting on a metal girder and asking Ezra why he’d never just done it, gone back there to that village in the rainforest, for however many months it might take to do the research with which he could complete his unfinished thesis. And Ezra saying, ‘No, Minty. I can’t, don’t you see? They’ll be gone. Altered. Dead, probably. The day I left I knew I could never go back. Because I was the first contact. Me. I gave them mirrors, tools, the idea of another way of living. I was the virus.’

  ‘But it would have happened eventually,’ she’d protested, and he’d only laughed; at the inanity of her remark, presumably.

  And suddenly Minty Carlyle, standing on the lawn outside her house on Bainton Road, smoking a cigarette while her husband entertained their guests inside, at once Minty understood, with a brittle clarity, that Ezra Pepin neither loved her nor would ever invite her to live with him. She looked up at the dark sky above her, imagined somewhere beyond the clotted clouds a ripe moon, and as if it was from the moon that revelation had fallen she called out to it, ‘Yes, all right, you fool, you bloody, bloody fool. But miracles happen here on this earth, don’t they?’

  Abdul Azam stood in his tiny kiosk in the Raj Cuisine, its eight tables full this evening with a mixture of customers. Young and old. Couples, students, professionals. One of his waiters spiked the carbon of their orders on the counter, en route to the kitchen with the top copy. In his own good time, at his own reliable pace, Abdul poured the drinks that had been asked for, wrote prices beside the dishes requested. He was the eye and the mind, the still point surrounded by urgent provision and convivial din, at the centre of his restaurant.

  Abdul’s youngest son, Akhmed, had just left. Abdul had sent him home to get a decent night’s sleep for school tomorrow, had had to order the boy out of the door, and that was a good sign, one of many lately. It was Akhmed himself who’d volunteered to help cover while Jamal, Abdul’s number-one waiter, was back in Bangladesh. Akhmed said he wanted to see with his own eyes what it was exactly his father did; how the business was run, from day to day, and from moment to moment. Abdul’s elder sons had never shown the slightest interest, nor his daughters come to that – for which Abdul was grateful. He wanted more for his children than to run a small restaurant, putting on a smile so often for the customers that after twenty, thirty, years you couldn’t get it off again, it was there for ever, it was you, you were good old Abdul at the Raj Cuisine, and everybody came to see you.

  No, he didn’t want that for his sons, that’s not why he came to this godforsaken country. That’s not why he entered his house after midnight seven days a week, while all his family were sleeping, and g
ot up a few hours later to slip out of the house each morning to go back and clean up the restaurant – why pay other people to do what you could do yourself? – maybe, if he was lucky, being sleepily greeted by the first child up as they blinked their way to the bathroom.

  Except that actually that wasn’t entirely true, was it? Be honest, Abdul Azam, he told himself. Your children have inherited your capacity for labour. Ishtiaq was often up before you, off on his paper round, and Zenab was in the kitchen setting the bread to rise for her mother, and Yusuf, my goodness, would be beetling across town on his bicycle for prayers at the mosque before school!

  Akhmed was the lazy one. He never lifted a finger without being told to, not even for himself, it was a miracle he could be roused to carry his own weight from one room to another. He hadn’t even bothered to retain the Bangla he was born with: from the day he started school he spoke English even at home, despite his mother’s incomprehension, and nothing Abdul did or threatened to do would budge the little slouchabout. If he forbade him from speaking English, Akhmed merely shrugged and clamped his mouth tight shut.

  ‘Thing is, Akhmed,’ Abdul had told him this evening, as the boy was finally ready to leave. ‘Thing is this: if you don’t want to work hard, don’t bother. That what I’m saying. Don’t waste my time.’

  ‘No, Dad,’ Akhmed replied. ‘I won’t.’

  ‘I just don’t want to waste our time. It’s like that.’

  The fact was, the business with that no-good English girl by whom the boy was smitten seemed to have given Akhmed a good shake. Having his heart broken bucked him up, made him realise it was no good relying on others, because you had no say in where they might lead you. If you wanted to make something of your life, you had to do it yourself.

  What was odd, though, was just how pleased Abdul found himself by his son involving himself all of a sudden, of his own free will, in the business. It wasn’t what Abdul thought he wanted, but now that it was happening it gladdened his heart, actually, it really did. He must beware, Abdul told himself, of building false hope on such flimsy foundations. Akhmed may be the least academic of the children – he’d barely got good enough GCSEs to stay on at Cherwell – but still he might change his mind once he’d taken A levels. He was only sixteen – which in this country, at this time, was still young, still fresh and unformed.