Blenheim Orchard Page 16

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s easy to have principles when you can afford them.’

  Ezra shook his head and squeezed his daughter’s hand. At that moment a yawn overcame him. Mouth agape, eyes closed, he bobbed up and then down with it as if on the swell of a wave. ‘Sorry, darling, I’m a bit exhausted. Look, let’s you and me agree to do our best.’

  ‘Listen, Daddy,’ Blaise said, just as another yawn assailed her father.

  ‘I’m off to bed before I fall asleep on yours,’ he murmured. ‘Give me a birthday hug.’ He leaned towards her, Blaise leaned forward from the pillows, and they embraced. She smelled of oranges. He could feel her ribs close to her spine with one hand, the bones of her shoulder with the other.

  ‘Daddy,’ her voice said behind him.

  ‘What, darling?’ he asked, as they pulled apart.

  ‘Can’t you say something to Grandpa? I mean, you don’t even like After Eights.’

  ‘Blaise, I’ve told him about a hundred times. Your Grandpa doesn’t listen. Or he doesn’t remember, as he insists. I think we’re stuck with that custom.’

  Downstairs, Sheena was still at the computer in the sitting-room. ‘Don’t look!’ she exclaimed as Ezra approached.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he demanded. ‘The women in my house are all hiding things from me.’

  ‘Keep away,’ Sheena commanded, covering the screen with her arms. ‘You’ll find out in a minute.’

  ‘Find out what?’

  ‘It’s a surprise. I’ve got something to tell you. Now go away.’

  ‘I’m going,’ Ezra obeyed, backing away towards the hall. ‘Look, I’m in reverse.’

  ‘Five minutes, then I’ll tell you everything,’ Sheena promised.

  ‘I’m going to take my shower.’

  There was a great temptation, Ezra found when he was tired, to prolong the evening. To put off the one thing you needed – sleep – and luxuriate instead in the languorous sensuality with which fatigue imbued, in this case, a shower. Eyes closed, allowing his consciousness to sink and dip towards sleep, while hot water thrummed on his shoulders and coursed over his body. The sensation of water became unspecified. It wasn’t just this element falling on that part: water, warmth, skin merged into a tactile melt. It was trippy. It reminded him of how after a party, high on whatever, he loved the aftermath almost as much as the night itself; the next day’s voluptuous calm.

  Ezra brushed his teeth, smeared some moisturising cream into the lines on his face and swayed from en suite into bedroom just as Sheena entered by the main door. They met between the end of the bed and the built-in wardrobe, and remembering that sex too could be great when you were exhausted, as long as you could stay awake, Ezra swam into Sheena’s path and embraced her.

  ‘I’ve got to have a shower myself,’ Sheena said. ‘I won’t be a minute.’

  ‘Don’t torment me,’ Ezra said, squeezing a buttock through her leggings. ‘You don’t need a shower. I don’t mind.’

  ‘I do, Ezra,’ Sheena said, pulling free from him.

  ‘I even like it, darling, your sweat and your …’

  But she’d disappeared into the bathroom.

  Ezra sat down on the end of the bed. He had a white towel wrapped around his waist. How wonderful it is, he thought, surrendering to the impulse to let go, to fall back on to the bed, his legs still dangling over the end. How wonderful it is to have central heating, and then for summer to arrive, and never have to wear pyjamas again.

  Lips he saw first. Full, crimson painted lips, pouting then pulling back to reveal heavily applied mascara and powder. On a man’s face. Pouting at him, winking, running his tongue around his lips, flicking it in and out, lewd, crudely suggestive. But wait, the face was also presenting itself to a mirror to be made up. A pout for the application of lipstick; a long wink to coat the eyelashes.

  It was himself, Ezra understood, at whom he was staring. He didn’t look quite like how he thought he looked in real life – his features were broader – but of course it wasn’t so easy to tell beneath the face paint.

  He also realised that he was being turned on. Was he turning himself on? It seemed kind of ludicrous, yet something was undeniably happening. The face in the mirror, too, was becoming increasingly animated; it expressed a commensurate, a symmetrical, arousal, was less gesturing now than writhing. Ezra wondered whether the face really was a mirror image, unreal, real only in glass. He longed for it to be not a reflection but a person, for in this dream he wanted, needed desperately to have contact with human flesh, even his own. Yet something was happening. There was contact, wasn’t there?

  Ezra Pepin woke up. He opened his eyes and leaned forward, to find that some kind of monster covered with wet black hair was consuming him. This startling moment of horror gave way to the realisation that Sheena was kneeling on the carpet at the foot of the bed and fellating his erect penis.

  Ezra lay back again on the white duvet and closed his eyes. The image of a weird sea monster bobbing aboard him had shocked his brain awake: he urged it to return to the drowsy margins of sleep; to the delicious and troubling confusion of his dream. But it was impossible. Dreams could never be re-entered. So he tried to empty his mind, and let it fill with awareness of the sensation engendered by the sea monster, no, no, not that image, empty your mind of that image. Let your mind’s eye be fed by sexual stimulae alone. Let what colours, shapes, textures fold and unfold there as they will. Give yourself over. Let Sheena sink you into a drowsy, subliminal bliss.

  It wouldn’t work. Despite the fact that Sheena toiled hard for him, bobbing up and down, the acute liquidity of arousal began to fade. She couldn’t do it on her own. Unless Ezra did something pretty soon his erection would start to diminish. He summoned up images one after another, an array of women, from movie stars doing his bidding to girls at the office in pornographic scenarios to the children’s schoolfriends’ mothers naked, to find one that might snag, a rapid succession, from early girlfriends to his first crush, an older girl in primary school. Deborah Mitchell was her name. She was much older than seven-year-old Ezra Pepin; she was a majestic and beautiful nine- or ten-year-old. Impossibly mature and out of reach, except for the day she ambushed him. Amused or irritated, presumably, by the little kid who trailed her home along the short cut through the abandoned warehouses. Deborah appeared out of nowhere and grabbed him. Restrained, he went limp in her embrace.

  ‘Fight,’ Deborah said. ‘Fight back.’ But Ezra had been too awed by her presence enveloping him to obey her command. So she tickled him, and that forced a reaction, and they tussled. She held him to her but she also tickled him to make him struggle to get away, to make him squirm in her grasp; he began to understand that she, her body, seemed to be acting as if he was tickling her, which he wasn’t, she was squirming of her own free will, she was rubbing herself against him in a mysterious way. With a kind of inexplicable inefficiency.

  They struggled on in this way for a long, dispiriting time, until Ezra found it unbearable the way he wasn’t there any more, the regal girl was alone with herself and there was only his useless body left. He wriggled it loose and ran away.

  But what if Deborah Mitchell had known about fellatio already and was prepared to inflict it upon a boy stalking her, upon his juvenile erection? What an initiation that would have been; my God, what a thrill. The thought of it throbbed intense feeling back into his penis. Ezra Pepin at thirty-nine lay on his marital bed while his wife applied commendable effort to his pleasure, but he was really seven-year-old Ezra being beautifully, rhythmically interfered with by an older woman, the delectable and expert ten-year-old Deborah Mitchell, the princess, the Helen, of St Peter’s Primary School in Devizes, bringing him off with a worldly, naive, intuitive precocity.

  Because the truth was, Ezra reflected as he lay gasping and spent and Sheena scurried to and from the bathroom with tissue paper to wipe semen from the duvet cover; the truth was that Sheena wasn’t very good at it. It was either that o
r there was something odd about his penis, because she assured Ezra she’d performed the act for men before him who’d been incontrovertibly grateful.

  ‘Men love having their cocks sucked,’ Sheena had informed him in that matter-of-fact way of hers. She’d done it to other men and they apparently enjoyed it, had given Sheena the self-assurance of a competent craftswoman. Maybe Ezra had less sensation in his penis than other men; or more; or in different areas of it than them. Maybe the precise location of erogenous zones was far more subtle than was generally held; more shifting, perhaps. He didn’t think so. He found it easy enough to give himself a hand-job, and Sheena, now that he thought about it – now that he recalled – was perfectly fine at that too. But fellatio required a more sensual, warm rhythm of lips and tongue, a subtle receptivity to the minutiae of response. Like the swimmer she was, Sheena could plough grimly up and down the shaft of his lonely manhood for as many lengths as it took; a woman in one of those Tantric paintings of lovers in conjugal union but with their minds on higher things. Sheena, Ezra thought, could give a blow-job while compiling a shopping list.

  Of course he’d tried to guide her, he remembered, as he sat up and wondered where Sheena had disappeared to. ‘A little slower, that’s it, that’s nice. A little higher up, yes, no, don’t come off, further down now, good, good, no, that’s where you were before, and you’re speeding up again …’

  Sheena had become irritated, tried too hard, bad-temperedly. Ezra lost erections. There’s not much a woman can do with a limp prick in her mouth. Because the problem is, Ezra thought, as Sheena reappeared in the bedroom wrapped in her white cotton dressing-gown with two mugs of herbal tea, that although you needed to tell your partner how to please you, discussing the mechanics of the act while committing it were two activities not always easy to reconcile.

  And so he, they, had given up. Ezra claimed not to enjoy fellatio; even if he didn’t believe it, he didn’t mind admitting to his wife that he was weird. ‘People are, darling. Sure. Me too.’ And Sheena didn’t exactly demand with grievous threats he let her give it to him. They got by. They made it, like just now, when whatever it was that possessed her to assault his sleeping body, she’d got into a groove and persisted with it, and he’d come up with the necessary additional ingredient.

  ‘Come on, Ezra,’ Sheena said, ‘get into bed. I want to tell you this thing. Come on.’

  Ezra crabbed backwards, rucked the duvet up under his arse and over his legs.

  ‘Here,’ Sheena said, passing him a mug of mint tea. ‘Listen. It came to me. Today. Just now. At supper.’

  ‘What came to you?’

  ‘A revelation. Of something so obvious.’

  ‘A revelation of what?’

  ‘That’s what I’m going to tell you. Listen.’

  Ezra leaned obediently back into his white pillows against the beech headboard. He could feel a stickiness where his penis nestled against his thigh. He blew on the herbal tea, and sipped it patiently. There was an aching weight, a pressure, upon his eyes, and he wondered why he was so stupid as not to have been sound asleep for at least the last three hours.

  ‘I was watching you,’ Sheena said. ‘You and the children. And it just struck me all at once. My husband is thirty-nine years old. He works in a crappy job in a stupid company which he joined yesterday, except that yesterday turned into twelve years. Look at him. He’s exhausted. And this is the man I was drawn to? The young academic just back from the Amazon –’

  ‘Actually, south of the Amazon –’

  ‘Who when he presented his first informal lecture drew over fifty colleagues and undergrads to that seminar room in the Anthropology Department.’

  ‘Was it really fifty?’

  ‘Turned out they were still interested in aboriginal tribes. The next lecture they had to relocate – people were coming from different disciplines.’

  ‘Surely not, darling.’

  ‘Don’t you remember? The buzz. One line in the Gazette and word of mouth. Something special was expected from that man. Who had interest in publishing his thesis when he’d hardly started writing it from two, three presses?’

  Ezra nodded. ‘Four. The chap at Columbia.’

  ‘What happened to that young man?’

  ‘I suppose –’

  ‘I’ll tell you what happened, Ezra. Nothing. That’s what. You’re still there. Waiting, biding your time. That’s what’s so crazy. All these years. That’s what I realised.

  ‘No, don’t say anything. And don’t yawn. Listen. We had an agreement, you’d pay the rent, well, the mortgage, okay, bad timing but whose fault was that? No one’s. Neither of us had much of a clue then. We had no interest in interest rates. And the agreement was it was meant to be temporary. But the years went by and I let them just slip past, and it’s a bit like … I don’t know, like your dad’s birthday presents. After-dinner mints for young children; it’s so stupid, but no one told him, or he didn’t get the message, and three times a year another one comes.’

  ‘How does that compare?’

  ‘I’m trying to tell you, don’t you see? We’ve let the years go by. No, I did. A sideline business with Jill, another child. And you? You just carried on in your quiet way, your – as Simon put it – heroic way. I’m so stupid I never saw what other people obviously did – this poor fellow supporting his silly wife and her regular output of mouths to feed. I can see the statue: Ezra Pepin mounted on his bicycle. Heroic mode. Monumental.’

  ‘Very funny.’

  ‘It’s not funny, Ezra. I’ve been sleeping. I’ve woken up.’

  ‘Fine. But, Sheena –’

  ‘No, wait, Ezra. I asked you not to interrupt me because this is important and I’ve nearly got there.’

  Sheena’s wide eyes. Her emphatic gestures, her vehement enthusiasm, made it hard for her to follow, to catch, the fleeing news she wished to give Ezra. And if it occurred to him that she was not addressing him alone, that he was a mirror in which to address herself; and that somehow she reminded him of no one so much as little Deborah Mitchell all those years, all those minutes, ago, trying so hard and awkwardly to please herself with him, then it was not because he thought Sheena was acting. No. Of that he was certain. Whatever it was she was trying to communicate, and was hopefully about to because Ezra didn’t think that he could possibly keep himself awake for much longer, whatever else it was, it was sincere. Sheena meant what she said.

  ‘Oh, look, Ezra,’ she said. ‘There’s so much to say, and you look so tired, so I’ll tell you what it’s all about. We move to Brazil.’

  Sheena smiled. She beamed at her husband. ‘Well?’ she asked.

  Ezra didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t sure whether he still possessed the power of speech. Where the hell did that come from? It was like when he visited his dad and they’d be standing outside the front of the cottage, and a low-flying fighter jet boomed over from the Downs behind the back of the house. It stopped your heart: you couldn’t help but duck. ‘Move to Brazil.’ What on earth? It came out of nowhere. Ezra was flummoxed. One thing that had never once occurred to him, in fifteen years together, was the possibility of his wife having some kind of mental breakdown. Move to Brazil? Her eyes shone with insane conviction. Though he noticed, now, a certain tremor, a flickering uncertainty around her lips.

  ‘Well,’ he attempted. ‘It’s an incredible –’

  ‘The point is,’ she interrupted, ‘we go for two years. This is the plan. The business is up and running: Jill can steer it, I already asked her, we’ve got a good team, and I can input from Brazil. I can still make executive decisions.’

  ‘From Brazil?’

  ‘And something too you know we, I mean the Friends of the Wasteland, made a link with the Landless Rural Workers Movement of São Paulo? Exchanged information and ideas for actions and moral support. We twinned, on the net. We’ve lost our Wasteland but they’re still fighting, squatting unused land, I could help them, you know I need to be involved in something, Ezra, b
ut it’s like you said the other night with the Carlyles, in England there’s nothing at stake, a bit of grass here, a house there, it’s civilised and dreary, thank God, really, let’s be honest, but there’s no passion.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ Ezra said. ‘Slow down, darling. I hear what you’re saying, but what about the children?’

  ‘That’s the beauty of doing it now! It’s like we can redeem your long postponement, because Blaise can do her GCSEs there. Not actually her GCSEs, we’ve always hated that specialisation at sixteen, heading for A levels, haven’t we? She can work towards the international baccalaureate.’

  ‘In Brazil.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ve looked it up. And when we get back she can enrol at one of the private schools in Oxford that do the baccalaureate.’

  ‘Are you joking?’

  ‘I’ve got the whole thing planned. Don’t you think it would be a wonderful education in itself for Hector? I mean doesn’t it make you cringe to see the way he’s becoming a drippy, thin-lipped Englishman?’

  ‘Hector?’ Ezra wondered, pursing his own thin lips. ‘Oh, I don’t know.’

  ‘That crap Simon was saying about arranging your son’s sexual initiation. Please! But maybe in a more general way you should. If we could give our son the opportunity of salsa, capoeira, carnival just as he enters his teenage years. Loosen up those English hips.’

  ‘Hey, wait a minute.’

  ‘Yes, you too! You and me could do salsa classes together.’

  No wonder Sheena had a manic look in her eyes, Ezra realised: her pupils were dilated.

  ‘And Louie: you’re always telling me his football skills are precocious: how about two years for Louie playing on the beach? I watch the World Cup, don’t forget. I know how the Brazilians play. You told me yourself: English boys don’t love the ball. You see? The timing. You see?’

  ‘Okay. Wow. You really are working this through.’ Already tired, Ezra felt himself being drained by Sheena’s zeal.