Blenheim Orchard Read online

  ‘He’s in the class above Ed and Blaise.’

  ‘He didn’t look any older than her,’ Ezra shrugged.

  ‘His father owns that restaurant on Walton Street,’ said Minty. ‘The Raj Cuisine.’

  ‘You’re kidding,’ said Sheena. ‘That was our favourite, Ezra, wasn’t it?’

  ‘An item,’ Ezra frowned. ‘She’s not mentioned him.’

  ‘She’s thirteen, Ez,’ Sheena said.

  ‘Welcome to the world of teenagers’ anxious parents.’

  ‘Do put a sock in it, Simon,’ Ezra objected. ‘Two boys. You know it’s different for us.’

  ‘True enough,’ Simon admitted. ‘“The sooner a boy loses his virginity, the better for all the women he’s going to sleep with,” as Colette – wasn’t it, Minty? – put it.’

  ‘Oh, please,’ said Sheena. ‘That is so sexist, and offensive in every way. So, what, have you had poor Ed deflowered, or whatever it might be called for boys?’

  ‘You must be joking!’ Minty said, chuckling on the sofa into which she’d shrunk, so that her knees were higher than her behind and her skirt sliding by degrees down her black tights. Poor Minty, thought Ezra, with her dark hair cut short and gelled back, with her bright-red lipstick on full lips. Her long nose, her large brown eyes. Always trying so hard. He was glad she wasn’t his kind of woman: it kept their friendship relaxed. She had good legs, though, he had to admit, tucked up under her like that, shifting position. He had to make an effort to keep his gaze from wandering to her calves, her knees, her thighs. He was grateful she had no breasts; that she was just a bit too bony for his taste. And no wonder, the way after praising it to the skies – a clever ruse – Minty left half her food uneaten on the plate, before stepping outside for a cigarette. As if smoking filled her stomach, not her rib-engirdled lungs.

  ‘Ed? You have to be kidding,’ Minty laughed. ‘Ed is such an innocent. I suspect he’ll be like one of those actors who play schoolboys into their twenties. It’s genetic, of course. Simon was like that when we met.’

  ‘Did you take his virginity, Minty?’ Sheena asked. ‘I don’t believe we knew that.’

  ‘I say, that’s not really true, is it?’ Simon objected.

  ‘His father had already hauled him off to some brothel on a trip to Paris. Hadn’t he, sport?’

  ‘Marvellous bloody thing to do,’ Simon said in his unbroken voice. ‘The madam dealt with me herself. Fifty if she was a day.’ Simon sighed. ‘Gave me the most tender and beautiful experience of my life.’ He shook his head with nostalgia. Then, as abruptly as if he’d received radio controlled orders to change the subject, Simon said, ‘I say, did either of you see the news just now? They’ve almost got him.’

  Sheena frowned at Simon. ‘Yes?’ she wondered. After a few seconds without explication she asked, ‘Who got who?’

  ‘The Yanks,’ Simon said. ‘Saddam. A secret military unit: Grey Fox. Part of their Intelligence Support Activity. Manhunters.’

  ‘Assassins,’ Minty murmured.

  ‘Deep penetration agents,’ Simon said. ‘Part of the Pentagon’s black world of undercover operations.’ His wine-flushed face grew more roseate as he spoke. Beads of perspiration appeared on his forehead. ‘Their signal interception aircraft flying in low passes over the Sunni Triangle, scanning the airwaves for Ba’athist communications. Unmanned drones. Photo reconnaissance aircraft.’

  Minty shook her head. ‘War games,’ she said.

  ‘The war’s over,’ Sheena pointed out.

  ‘Because Bush put on a uniform?’ Minty responded sharply. ‘Stood on an aircraft carrier, and declared victory?’

  ‘The Yanks are right,’ Simon said. ‘Once they’ve got Saddam, the violence will die down, and disappear. Grey Fox will find him one night.’ Simon narrowed his eyes. ‘Early one morning. They’ll blow the doors on some dusty compound. Men in chunky camouflage gear – carrying their automatic weapons in that odd way they do, pointed at the ground – will pour in.’

  Minty was shaking her head. She took a breath, like someone about to dive underwater. Before she could begin, Sheena said, ‘You know, he’s talked like this around the fire at the Wasteland. You could see our young comrades, they have no idea how to take him. Who is this ageing warrior? You can watch them trying to work out what they think.’

  ‘I thought you’d be there last night, actually, Sheena,’ Simon said. ‘That Mole character, too.’

  ‘I was,’ Sheena stated. ‘I didn’t see you either, Simon. Must have been after you left.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘Ezra,’ said Minty. ‘You haven’t said anything in ages. You’ve been gazing glumly at that wall over there.’

  ‘Have I?’ Ezra said, blinking. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No. Don’t be. I mean, are you okay? It’s not like you, that’s all. Are you depressed about something?’

  ‘Depressed? Of course not. You don’t, do you? As you get older. Life kind of evens itself out, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Well, you shouldn’t be, you know,’ Simon said, his voice deepening in tone. ‘I mean, you’re a hero, old chap, honestly, you are. I was just thinking about you the other day. You’ve done that shitty job to support your family, you’ve gone to that ugly place every day to give your children this.’ He opened wide his arms, indicated with his eyes and nods of his head the house around them; all it contained, and all it conveyed.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Sheena said. ‘If he hadn’t got that promotion last year, I’ll have you know, and if Jill and I didn’t leave more than we probably need to for reinvestment, I’d already earn more than he does. And next year I certainly will.’

  ‘Yes, you’ve been looking after kids, Sheena, and you’ve been building up your business,’ Simon nodded. ‘But still, what Ezra’s been doing is actually, in my opinion, heroic. I don’t think it’s generally acknowledged, that’s all I’m saying, and maybe it is a burden shared by you and other women now, but this supporting your family doing work you don’t value or enjoy, for year upon year.’

  ‘What about you?’ Ezra demanded.

  ‘Me? No, no,’ Simon objected, modestly. ‘I’m not a real man. Because I happen to love what I do, you see, there’s something fraudulent about that. I meet clients, I draw, I discuss problems that happen to fascinate me with engineers and builders. And the money appears as if by magic to pay for Ed’s piano tuition, to support Minty’s writing, to pay for whatever we want, really. I’m just very lucky. No, Ezra, you’re the real man, you’re the hero.’

  ‘Very true,’ Minty nodded. ‘He’s right, sport. You are. You shouldn’t be depressed.’

  ‘I’m not depressed.’

  ‘What do you call it, then?’ Sheena asked. ‘You’ve made a great sacrifice, apparently. What do you call the price you pay?’

  ‘Look, it’s not me,’ Ezra objected. He realised that his body had lowered itself into the sofa in an after-dinner slump. Pressing his fists into the cushions, he raised himself up. ‘Of course, my experience is one thing. It’s not important. It’s important to me, personally, but I’m fine. Don’t worry about me. How can anybody not be depressed?’ Ezra spread his arms in a sweep that made it clear he meant something, somewhere in the world beyond their four walls. ‘Sure, your boys should catch him, Simon. You honestly think it will end then?’

  ‘Whether it ends this month or next year, that’s not the point,’ Minty claimed. ‘The point is, it was illegal.’

  Sheena raised her eyebrows. She’d managed to change the subject once, and here it was back on the agenda. The one political subject in all the years of their friendship that Minty got excited about.

  ‘We’ve been over this,’ Simon said, with an air of tired forbearance. ‘Resolution 1411 clearly states –’

  ‘And the other point,’ Minty interrupted, ‘is that Blair lied. I mean, he kept saying, “Believe me. I have access to secret intelligence whose sources I cannot divulge. Trust me.”’

  ‘Of course you can’t put informer
s at risk,’ Sheena said.

  ‘The only intelligence I had was from reading a newspaper,’ Minty continued. ‘I don’t believe Iraq had links to al-Qa’ida. Or weapons of mass destruction, deployable in forty-five days, never mind minutes.’

  ‘The search is not over,’ Simon said. ‘There are more sites to be investigated. The Iraq Survey Group are –’

  ‘Are you pretending,’ Sheena said, ‘to be more naive than you really are?’

  Minty blinked. ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘“He lied to us.” He’s not our Daddy, Minty, he’s a politician.’

  Minty clutched a disposable lighter in the fist of her right hand, Ezra noticed. She was alternately squeezing and relaxing her grip. ‘He knew Britain was going to war, since his visit to George Bush’s ranch last year.’

  ‘So?’ Sheena asked. ‘Yes. Okay.’

  ‘Doesn’t that bother you?’

  ‘Does it bother the people of Iraq? No. They’ve been liberated from abject fear and cruelty, from the rule of an evil dictator.’

  ‘A sovereign nation invaded,’ Minty said. She clenched her body as she spoke: her shoulders swallowed her neck; elbows hugged the sides of her torso. ‘Against the wishes of the vast majority of countries of the world. Undermining a consensus that’s taken generations to build up.’

  ‘Yes, and I’m proud of that,’ Sheena said. ‘We’re in the vanguard of humanitarian progress.’

  ‘“We”?’ Minty echoed. ‘What is this “we”? I mean, I hate the use of this “we”. Our Prime Minister, our troops, our weapons. No thank you.’

  ‘No, of course, sorry, I forgot,’ Sheena said, mock-apologetic sarcasm colouring her voice. ‘Not in My Name, right? Of course not.’

  Sheena referred, as all four of them knew, to the anti-war demo before Christmas, a march through town from Cowley Road to Broad Street, a photo of which featuring Minty Carlyle holding one pole of a banner had appeared in the Oxford Mail. Words could be like insects thrown into the air between them. Two couples, old friends, who knew each other too well; for whom it was difficult to discuss great events without boring each other with familiar views, or else veering into over-personal aggression.

  Minty looked at her hands. She was scraping the wheel of the lighter over its flint. She turned abruptly to Ezra. ‘Why don’t you say anything?’ she asked. There was anger in her voice. As if they had some pact to support each other in such a dispute. ‘You’ve gone silent again.’

  Ezra leaned forward, took his glass and drained it of the last of his wine. What could you say when your past implicated you? When you had interfered, how could you discuss another interference? There was only one way: by pretending you were innocent as anyone else in such a sitting room, such a conversation, as this. You never know, you might even fool yourself. Dan, a member of their tennis quartet, a solicitor, had once told him that most guilty accused genuinely convince themselves of their innocence by the time their case comes to court.

  ‘When they,’ Ezra said. ‘When “we,” ’ he corrected himself, for amusement’s sake, ‘were bombing Baghdad, I thought about those human shields. You know? Those peaceniks who went and camped by dams. Archaeological sites. Museums. I just thought, it’s all wrong. It’s the wrong way round. It should be the advocates of war, the ones prepared to accept a little collateral damage, who should have gone over there. And lived with families in residential neighbourhoods. Hung out in the marketplace. You know?’

  It dawned on Ezra too late that what he’d just said could be taken by Sheena as a direct – and, if perceived as being prompted by Minty, disloyal – challenge to her. He hadn’t meant that at all. He risked an anxious glance in her direction. Sheena wore a very particular expression: a dilation of panic in her eyes. Ezra recognised it with relief. It expressed a momentary floundering, when her certainty was questioned, a greying of the black and white rendering of the world that she required.

  ‘That’s a wonderful point, Ezra, old fellow,’ said Simon. His complexion that had become more florid over the years reddened further through the course of an evening, as if the red wine were working its way direct to capillaries in the skin of his face. ‘Which has absolutely nothing to do with anything.’

  They all laughed.

  ‘You’re right about the “we”, though, Minty,’ Sheena conceded. ‘We, us, have nothing to do with it. We are so powerless. We really are.’ She got up and fetched a bottle of sambuca and four small glasses. Ezra went to the bottom of the stairs and, directing his attention upwards, listened. Silence. When Blaise and Hector were small, Ezra and Sheena’s nights had been littered with booby-traps: cries, kicks, shrieks. They could detonate their parents out of deep sleep two or three times each. Louie was a good sleeper, by far the best of the three.

  Simon turned the lights down even lower at the dimmer switch. Minty came back inside from a visit to the garden, the stale reek of a cigarette on her breath.

  ‘What about our children?’ Ezra wondered, once they’d resumed their positions. ‘I mean, really, Blaise surreptitiously meeting some strange boy at the end of our street. Waiting for our girl to walk to him. Was he supposed to turn before she reached him? Was she supposed to stride haughtily past him, or walk obediently in his wake? You know what I mean? They have to discover everything for themselves. Have to work it all out with no help from us. We can hardly blame peer pressure for being such a powerful influence on them. It fills a vacuum.’

  ‘It is kind of pathetic,’ Minty agreed.

  ‘There’s no structure,’ Sheena said. ‘And we’re surprised when they stumble into drugs and alcohol and STDs. When all they want is to consume. To fill the emptiness.’

  The quartet were silent. It was late. Ezra thought about his week ahead, the meeting tomorrow he ought to prepare for. It was time for the Carlyles to go home. He took a sip of liqueur, and swallowed it.

  ‘Did I ever tell you two,’ he asked, ‘about this one time with the Achia? I’d returned to the village from a trek downriver to the Mission, restocked with supplies: rudimentary medicine, sweets, basic tools. They were all I had to offer. Within moments of getting back I was surrounded by children, as usual. I learnt their language painfully slowly, and the children had more patience with me than the adults. They were also my informants, sharing gossip as they sucked on the sweets that I gave them. Anyway, that day I’d been back an hour or so when Tokoti, a boy of ten or eleven, told me, with a certain amount of envy, “They are getting ready to cut Wekoni.”

  ‘“Wekoni will be cut?”’ I asked him.

  ‘“They will cut him. He asked his father to be cut.” ’

  ‘Cut?’ Simon asked with a grimace. ‘Good God. How cut?’

  ‘Listen,’ Minty admonished. ‘We might find out, even.’

  ‘Now, Wekoni,’ Ezra continued, ‘was an older brother of Kabuchi; he was then aged twelve or thirteen. He was entering puberty and growing lustful for the girls and the women of the village, but until he had been cut he remained a boy. Sex was out of the question.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Simon, nodding, and raising an eyebrow at Sheena. ‘It gets interesting.’

  ‘His father, Pakani, ordered Wekoni from the village. His mother, Tikangi, held on to him, weeping, imploring her son to stay. The boy seemed unnerved, his body boneless, easily pulled by her. So Pakani strode over and struck his wife.’

  ‘Bastard,’ said Sheena. ‘And don’t give me any of your cultural relativism,’ she said defiantly, to no one in particular. ‘A wife beater is a wife beater.’

  ‘Tikangi fell,’ Ezra continued, ‘and let go of her son, who stumbled off after his godfather –’

  ‘The man,’ Minty interrupted, ‘who would have lifted him from the ferns where he’d fallen as a newborn baby.’

  ‘Right,’ Ezra nodded. ‘Have I told you that story? Well remembered, Minty. Thank you. Impressive.’

  ‘I was listening.’

  ‘His godfather, Chimuni, stood waiting for Wekoni at the edge of the clearing. His mot
her’s lamentations rang in his ears, “Don’t go, my son. My son, stay with me.” Which clashed with his father’s harsh injunction, “Go. Leave us, boy. Leave us and go.” ’

  ‘They sound like actors,’ said Simon.

  ‘Well, they were. I mean, great acting is not pretending to be someone else. It’s being someone else. Look at Mark Rylance. Or Ben Kingsley. Such performers are rare, that’s why they’re so powerful. Those two Achia were superb. Anyway, Chimuni took Wekoni into the forest to spend the night: an act of great courage for both man and boy, because at night jaguars prowl, and so do the spirits of the dead. And on the eve of his initiation a boy is particularly vulnerable. It’ll be the first time that he’s ever spent a night outside the camp.

  ‘After a sleepless night in a tree Chimuni and Wekoni returned, but only to a clearing a little distance from the village. Here they spent that day and then another wordless night. Neither of them ate anything. They sipped only a little water brought by Wekoni’s godmother.’

  A dislocation now occurred in Ezra Pepin’s perception: he spoke, but also saw himself speaking. The sight gratified him. His father’s generation had had a war to fight or at least live through; he had this experience to draw on, authentic, exotic and brutal, that he may not have been able to finish writing about but by God at least he’d lived it and he could talk of it to his friends, and be rewarded by their receptive faces. His own minuscule amount of knowledge, or even wisdom, earned in the jungles of Paraguay.

  ‘At noon on the third day,’ Ezra continued, ‘Chimuni brought Wekoni back into the village. His father, Pakani, was standing outside their hut. People were pretending to ignore proceedings, but everyone was up and about the camp. No one wanted to miss a thing. At his son’s approach Pakani knelt down in front of his hut. Without a word Chimuni raised his heavy bow and struck Pakani on the back of the head, at the hairline.’

  ‘Just deserts,’ said Sheena.

  Ezra ignored his wife’s comment, but a glance in her direction recorded a yawn. Well, Ezra thought: it’s after eleven, she’s had late nights, and what’s more Sheena was bound to have heard this story before. A price you pay for enduring marriage. Sheena was entitled to a discreet yawn.