Blenheim Orchard Read online

  ‘Pakani barely flinched,’ he continued, ‘as blood spurted from the gash on his head.’

  ‘Why the father?’ Simon asked, tiredly.

  ‘The scar would ennoble him,’ Ezra explained. ‘Though it would also show that Pakani, the great hunter, was from this moment on – and he was in his mid thirties, I suppose – an old hunter.

  ‘Chimuni turned and led the meek boy back to their clearing. And now various men emerged and followed. In the clearing they knelt on all fours, forming a kind of bench or table, upon which the boy lay on his back.

  ‘Taking up a bamboo knife, Chimuni cut into the boy’s torso. He cut thin lines, in a pattern that was symbolic of Wekoni’s double – the animal which he had been named after by his mother. Wekoni’s was the spider monkey, and Chimuni carved a number of crude images emblematic of it; a bundle of lines resembling its skeleton.’

  The sitting-room was almost dark. Minty must have dimmed the lights further the last time she came back in from a smoke, and it had had the effect of making people lower their voices. They were speaking in virtual whispers. Ezra was feeling almost reassured. He felt, at this moment, almost at ease with himself. They were amazing things he, Ezra Pepin, had once seen, after all. Almost the first outsider, the first European, certainly, to have encountered this tribe. But it was now getting late for a Sunday evening, and that was why Simon was trying desperately, his jawline trembling, to stifle a yawn. Simon, in fact, his eyes glazing over, looked as if he was slipping into a quiet antechamber of sleep.

  ‘Wekoni gritted his teeth,’ Ezra continued, speaking a little faster, ‘and undertook the rite without a murmur. He knew that when they’d healed, the cicatrices would beautify him, make him attractive to and worthy of women.’

  ‘Yikes,’ said Minty.

  At least Minty was fully awake and attentive. Ezra was grateful for that. He had the weird feeling that something was trying to break into his brain, some thought, some insight or memory. But he would not let it. ‘A few years later,’ he continued, ‘when Wekoni was ready for marriage, he would be cut again. On the back this time, gouged with a stone that would leave long, wide, ridged scars. For now the boy gritted his teeth. When Chimuni had finished, Wekoni was covered in blood. Chimuni was covered in blood. Blood trickled over the patient bent bodies of the men beneath.’

  Simon slowly shook his sleepy head. Sheena leaned forward and began to hook the small liqueur glasses off the coffee table with her fingers.

  ‘My God,’ said Minty. ‘Well, you’re right, Ezra. We really don’t have anything like that for our young people, do we?’ She was gazing at him with wide, admiring eyes. ‘You’re so right.’

  A connection occurred in Ezra’s brain, and understanding flowed through. It filled his head with rage. At himself. At Minty, too, a shameful hatred, because she was trying so hard, God bless her, shaking her head in wonderment. Trying just too damned hard. As he understood with merciless certainty that he’d told this story, to these same three people – his wife and their two best friends – on another Sunday evening more recent and futile than he could bear to contemplate.

  5

  A New Water Bottle

  Monday 23 June

  Isis Water’s headquarters in Station Square was a huge and perfect rectangle, built of sandstone and glass, with a flat roof. When it rained, excess water drained off at the sides through the mouths of gargoyles carved in the likeness of Rowan Atkinson and Richard Branson, Olive Gibbs and Richard Dawkins. The roof was so perfectly level, however, that a fine shallow slick remained on the surface.

  Oxford had been designated the epicentre of England’s Diamond Region of science and innovation enterprises: the city’s universities offered new businesses precious intellectual synergies. ‘Simple problems have complex solutions,’ Ezra Pepin, Assistant Head of Operations, would tell clients. ‘Complex problems have simple solutions.’

  The Oxford Transport Survey was designed to discourage commuters and shoppers from coming into town in their cars, and encourage them to use other means instead. Speed-reducing humps appeared like blisters on the tarmac, traffic lights multiplied; there was a reduction of car parks in the centre of town and an increase in park-and-ride buses, with special lanes for buses and bicycles. The scheme was an apparent success: drivers were deterred, the roads became emptier. The speed of what little traffic there now was increased, with the result that cars flew back into the city centre in greater numbers than ever before, until the traffic backed up once more along all the arterial routes into town in exhaustive, growling, bad-tempered jams.

  Other than the scheme’s failure, however, it proved to be a great success. New research showed that quiet, civilised towns lost their mercantile energy and declined towards financial entropy – the city of dreaming spires had been in danger of falling asleep – and traffic jams were identified as one method of adding dynamism to an urban environment. Station Square was redesigned for the Millennium, as Oxford’s commercial showpiece, not as a pedestrian precinct, as had been expected, but around a vast intersection of cars, lorries, buses and bikes.

  With traffic gridlocked outside Isis Water for hours at a time, petrol fumes turned the shallow puddle on the flat roof into chemical rainbows. Airborne pollutants settled on the building, and more rain fell as if into a child’s bubble bath, the roof fussing and frothing.

  At a microscopic level – its molecules’ partially negative oxygen and hydrogen atoms – the water was seething, an arousal of incessant vibration, susceptible to the insidious invitation of gravity. ‘Come down,’ whispered the centre of the earth. ‘Come to me.’

  Rainwater seeped through the roof of the headquarters of Isis Water. It infiltrated the resinous, rendered surface, confounded and short-circuited electrical mechanisms, and dropped to the sealed lead below. Gradually, undeterred, black and viscous with tar it drooled down from the ceiling, forming tiny puddles on the floor of the boardroom.

  Algal blooms flourished on the ceiling of the Chief Executive’s office. Acid rain dripped on to his teak desk, and burned through the veneer.

  ‘Whose idea was it,’ Klaus Kuuzik, the new CEO, asked Ezra Pepin during the last storm of that spring, which had coincided with his first day at work, ‘to site the offices of the senior people in the company up on the most vulnerable floor of the building?’

  The roof, designed for multiple use – al fresco lunches, sports, outdoor meetings – was certainly popular. It was used all the time: by men in overalls and waterproofs retarring the surface, replacing blown fuses, drying out the substructure, soaking up puddles with industrial sponges, and sweeping water off to the sides with wide metal brooms.

  For the moment, at least, the summer had come, the sun risen without impediment on a blue-sky Monday morning, and the roof was drying out.

  Sheena loosened the white towel around her body and let it swoon to the carpet. Ezra opened a drowsy eye. He watched her peer between her breasts in order to fasten her black sports bra, then twist it halfway around her, put her arms through the shoulder straps, pull it up and secure her bosom. It was Monday morning and he didn’t want to get out of bed again, ever: after a lazy weekend spent ignoring it, he’d found himself awake at 3 a.m. worrying about this morning’s meeting. He guessed he’d got back to sleep about five minutes before the alarm went off.

  Sheena stepped into a pair of high-cut black panties and pulled them over her crotch. Ezra wasn’t sure he could move the rest of his lifeless body, but he felt the tip of his penis tingle, and swell. Muscular legs were eased into a pair of tight leggings. As Sheena pulled them up her thighs, they tightened along her calves; Lycra yielded and stretched across her bottom, her belly.

  ‘Watching you get dressed,’ Ezra murmured, ‘makes me want to take your clothes off.’

  He reached over and scooped her waist and pulled Sheena to him. She fell backwards on the bed and he leaned over and kissed her, wriggling the rest of his limbs across her as he did so.

  ‘Let’s
make love,’ he said.

  ‘It’s late.’

  Ezra Pepin fondled his wife. ‘Let me ravish you, woman.’

  Sheena laughed. ‘Look at the time, Ezra.’ She let him grope and snog her a moment more. Then Ezra leaned back and rolled aside, allowing Sheena up.

  ‘Later,’ she whispered, and left the room.

  ‘Later!’

  Ezra lay on the bed, his full penis the yearning centre of his mineral being. He wondered whether he had time enough to bring himself off. He looked at his watch: he should have left the house five minutes ago.

  Ezra swung out of bed and stumbled to the en suite. As he brushed his teeth his heart retrieved supplies from zones of engorgement and returned them to the main arteries. He rubbed shaving oil into his skin. It was difficult to imagine other men masturbating. There was something sad about other people doing it. But they were, weren’t they? At any moment there were hundreds of men and women around town, all over the city, jerking off. Set aside from the hubbub, the traffic, stilled, silent and gasping, solitary men and women in bedrooms and bathrooms in countless houses, whacking off. It was a wonder that there wasn’t some fierce imperceptible tremble, a flutter, in the background of the urban roar.

  Ezra Pepin cycled to work along the canal towpath, in his shirtsleeves at eight-fifteen, glad the sun was drying out the potholes that sprayed mud on the trousers of any middle manager foolish enough to commute to his office this way. He bicycled past the Wasteland, from whose depths he could hear the grind and roar of heavy machinery churning up the ground. On under Aristotle Bridge, past Lucy’s Ironworks and the backs of the two-up, two-down, quarter-of-a-million-pound, flood-prone pea-pods of Jericho. From the low boats strung along the canal came the sweet smell of wood smoke. Poplar, was it? As if living that bit less protected from nature’s whims made the boaties wary of giving full assent to summer just yet.

  Young drunks heading home that way late at night would sometimes be struck by comic inspiration, and unfasten the canal boats’ moorings. If they managed not to betray themselves chortling at their originality they could release half a dozen long boats, which would drift south through the night with their snoozing occupants, who’d wake to find themselves in a log jam down by Upper Fisher Row.

  Ezra forked right at the lock and cycled through Rewley Park estate, reaching Isis Water round the back of the building, where he locked his bike to one of the hoop racks.

  ‘Okay, fellows,’ Ezra Pepin addressed them. ‘Are you kitted out? Chrissie, you have the prototypes?’

  ‘On the trolley, Ez.’

  ‘Rodge, you have your figures?’

  ‘All here in my head.’

  ‘Gideon, images?’

  ‘On disc, Ez.’

  ‘Our designer’s here, right?’

  ‘He’s relaxing with a herbal on the mezzanine.’

  ‘Good, good,’ Ezra smiled. ‘Now, all I want to say to you is this: you’re the best we’ve got. Do yourselves proud. And let’s enjoy ourselves. I don’t want us to have any regrets. Are we up for this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are we ready, team?’

  ‘We’re ready.’

  ‘Let’s go.’

  The men and women wore dark suits, and white or light-blue shirts. There was a faint sour trace of coffee in the atmosphere that the air conditioning had not quite removed. The men wore ties whose colours ranged through the red section of the spectrum: rusty, or wine-coloured; roseate or crimson. Except for the Chief Executive, Klaus Kuuzik, who wasn’t wearing a tie at all, but sat awaiting the presentation, the top button of his shirt undone.

  ‘A little background, ladies and gentlemen,’ Ezra said, to the seven members of the Board and the four other Heads of Department brought in to the meeting. ‘Here we have our instant classic Isis Spa Water bottle. Ivy green. Glass. Instantly recognisable by seventy three point five per cent of AB consumers.’

  ‘It’s that kind of product recognition that will remain our benchmark,’ said red-haired Roger Slocock, of Marketing.

  ‘Last year,’ Chrissie Barwell took over, ‘we supplemented the Spa with Isis Mineral Water, in cobalt-blue, thank you, Gideon, and Isis Spring Water – both sparkling and still – in clear glass.’

  ‘Sales have been more than encouraging,’ Gideon Juffkin said.

  ‘We now have over a dozen boreholes across the Chilterns,’ Chrissie resumed. ‘Feeding plants set up to supply minutely filtrated and oxonated water in quantities far in excess of our current needs. We’re ready, in short, to enter the mass market, without forfeiting one iota of our reputation for quality, class and style.’

  ‘May I introduce Kevin Banfield?’ said Ezra Pepin. ‘The acclaimed futuristic designer. We commissioned Kevin to invent an asymmetrical plastic bottle devised specifically to evoke the fluidity of water.’

  Kevin Banfield sat quite still in a Paul Smith suit and polo-neck pullover, silver-haired, with a goatee beard. When he spoke he did so precisely, his thin lips barely moving.

  ‘I’m inspired by nature at its most elemental,’ he said. ‘Fire, water, air. By fossils. Bones. Bleached and seaworn wood. Ideal forms that nature with its arsenal of creative weaponry contrives. I’ve been called an organic essentialist. Also: an organic minimalist. But this is 2003. What inspires me as much as nature are new materials, processes, technologies – in this case injection moulding – that allow industrially created yet truly biomimetic forms.’

  Chrissie and Roger passed around copies of Kevin Banfield’s prototype Isis Spring Water plastic bottle.

  ‘I’ve tried to realise the Isis vision,’ Banfield continued, ‘by capturing the liquescence and the optical purity of Spring Water, inside a three-dimensional form that reflects the joy and the sensual beauty of nature itself.’

  ‘The ripple-effect packaging,’ Roger Slocock pointed out, ‘refracts both the light and the colour of its surroundings.’

  ‘And here,’ Chrissie Barwell continued, ‘are Kevin’s blue Mineral Water, and his green Spa Water, versions.’

  ‘We’re impressed and delighted,’ Ezra said, ‘by the way that Kevin has innovatively expanded on the aesthetic attributes of our original, while managing to adhere to the rigorous practical realities of the blow-moulding production process.’

  ‘My hand-picked team of sales operatives,’ Gideon Juffkin took over, ‘are on standby, ready to fan out from Oxford with suitcases of these prototypes. South along the Thames Valley, north across the Cotswolds. Into the West. Wales. Scotland. Across the country, and beyond.’

  The boardroom table was an accumulation of geometric shapes of Canadian maple, which could be taken apart and put back together in a wide variety of patterns. Ezra had heard it said that Klaus Kuuzik began meetings by having his executives push and pull the rectangles and trapezoids, the semi-circles and squares, into a specified shape. This morning they were seated around the outside of a wide horseshoe.

  As Gideon Juffkin spoke, Chrissie dimmed the lights and Roger switched on the projector. ‘These fabulous plastic bottles,’ Gideon continued, ‘will take us into new trade sectors.’ Bright computer-generated images of stacks and shelves of Kevin Banfield’s bottles in various settings dissolved one into another under Gideon’s voiceover. ‘We’re talking not just supermarkets and off-licences, but on-premise outlets: the impulse sector, sandwich bars, major multiples.’ Ezra admired Gideon’s convincing illustrations; they seemed to present a foregone conclusion, were pictures called back from a triumphant future. ‘Petrol station forecourt shops,’ Gideon continued. ‘Grocery independents. High street vendors, style bars, retail outlets of every kind. There’s no doubt in our mind: this is where Isis Water moves to the top of the UK bottled-water sales table.’

  ‘Which is precisely where we all want to be,’ the Chairman’s voice broadcast as the lights came up, before he led the Board’s round of applause.

  ‘An exemplary presentation,’ Ezra heard accountant Alan Blozenfeld mutter to the Head of Operations,
Jim Gould.

  Then Klaus Kuuzik asked, ‘And what about the water?’

  Remaining murmurs of approval, and the echoes of handclaps, died away. The room became quiet. Ezra swallowed, and opened his mouth to speak. It was his place, as team leader, to answer this question. The only trouble was that his mouth was empty. His brain was blank. It was most odd: he felt calm, relaxed, ready to explain in outline and in detail, using clarity, statistics and wit, anything and everything Mr Kuuzik and the Board members and the Heads of Department might want to know about the water. It was just that he had nothing to say.

  The light in the room seemed to change, to become brighter; perhaps the sun was coming out from behind a cloud. Eleven people looped around the oxbow table were watching him, waiting for Ezra to say something in reply to the Chief Executive’s simple question. What about the water? Ezra didn’t mind. His tongue wouldn’t work, that was all. It occurred to him how similar this interrogational moment was to those in the Viva he’d have to take when he finally finished his PhD. Yet how different. Then he would have to defend the complexity of his work; here he had only to justify its simplicity. Its ability to make money. A hero? Was that what Simon had called him? What nonsense. All he had to do was to perform. Well, he surely would. In just a moment or two, something would come to him. In the meantime, Ezra felt tranquil, at peace with himself and the world around him. His calm was pierced by the sound of a human voice.

  ‘Our job, Mr Kuuzik,’ he heard Chrissie Barwell say, ‘is to give our client not what she wants, no, but what she didn’t know she wanted. Only when she receives it does she realise, Yes! This is the one thing I have always desired.’

  Ezra nodded, and spoke. ‘What Chrissie is saying,’ he elaborated, ‘is that we might recall the recent example of children’s milk sold in schools in this country. It cost thirty pence a glass. When the same volume was put into plastic bottles, and the price was doubled, kids bought four times as much milk as before.’