Blenheim Orchard Read online

  ‘And the best thing is, Ezra, the whole point is, you can throw that bloody job back in their faces, you can walk out of that ugly prison for ever, and go back to the natives you’ve always wanted to, so you can finish your thesis. We’ll be right there! Well, I mean a long way away, of course, we won’t come with you, unless you want us to visit. Who knows, maybe your tribe’s having to deal with land issues? Maybe I could even help them.’

  The unease Ezra had been sensing began to reveal itself, its physical existence, now. Each word Sheena spoke with her sincere enthusiasm seemed to correspond to, awaken, a spidery word insect in the pit of Ezra’s stomach, which began crawling around there, disturbing buried anxiety, stirring up acid. That’s what it was. Fear.

  ‘Darling.’ He managed to move his tongue. ‘It’s a magnificent idea. But the Achia I lived with were a thousand miles from Rio, as the crow flies, I’m not sure you realise the distances –’

  ‘Not Rio, Ezra. São Paulo. There’s a superb American school there, and Rio?’ She shook her head solemnly. ‘It’s extremely unsafe nowadays.’

  ‘Rio, São Paulo, okay, eight hundred miles across the Paraguayan border. But you can’t just fly in and out –’

  ‘Oh, please, Ezra,’ Sheena admonished, her face a frown of frustration. ‘I should have known you’d pour cold water on this.’

  ‘Hey, darling, no way. Not at all. I’m completely excited by it, I’m just trying not to get carried away, that’s all. I’m playing devil’s advocate. For example: I can’t quite see the money. Take away my salary.’

  ‘We rent this house out. The rent covers the mortgage, with a good deal left over, about enough to rent a house in Brazil. My money pays our expenses, school fees, flights. Don’t worry, Ezra. I’ve done the sums.’

  Ezra had to keep calm. He had to play for time. He felt like he was slipping, as if the acid in his stomach was eating into his foundations. But he had to keep smiling, that was the most important thing, he had to keep focused on right now, to make Sheena believe he was knocked out, blown away, enthralled by her plan. And the odd thing was that despite his bowels churning and his exhausted mind becoming aware of a looming darkness around it, he knew he could manage. Experience had prepared him for just such a crisis. He’d been acting his whole damned life! Was he going to stop now, when he most needed to continue? Hardly!

  ‘You’re incredible,’ he told Sheena, returning her bright gaze with an appreciative adoration of his own.

  ‘And what can we possibly lose?’ she continued. ‘If the whole thing falls apart we jump on a plane and come home, carrying the experience with us. If nothing else, Ezra, we’ll have got you out of that stupid job, right?’

  ‘You’re just amazing, darling,’ Ezra smiled. Yes, he was acting, every fibre of his being was bent on duplicity. What a sorrowful contrast with his wife, incapable of the slightest guile. One-dimensional? Yes, maybe, that’s right in a way, but there was everything in that one dimension, a noble human being. Sheena had more substance than any two or three mercurial women he could think of. And maybe she was right! Maybe this ridiculous idea was a good one! What the hell? It was true: it didn’t matter if it didn’t work out, they had a house, her business, they weren’t going to starve, so why not take a chance? He was almost forty years old, for Christ’s sake. Didn’t Ezra Pepin deserve the opportunity to throw it away?

  ‘It’s fucking absurd,’ Sheena said, the rare curse spitting from her mouth. ‘I feel guilty, Ezra. I don’t have to feel this. Why should I? Enough.’

  ‘Enough,’ he agreed. ‘No more. Come here.’ Ezra shifted across, leaned above Sheena, and kissed her. Her lips, her mouth accepted his with a melting readiness, her blood-filled expressive flesh merging with his.

  ‘I can’t believe,’ Sheena said quietly, when they broke apart, ‘how selfish I’ve been.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Ezra murmured, grazing her jawbone, her ear, her neck with kisses.

  ‘No, I know it’s not just me. You as well, I know, you wanted children too and there’s a price to pay. But isn’t this making up for it? Isn’t this the best idea you ever heard? Am I not one clever woman, sweetheart?’

  Clever, yes. Clever was the least of it. Ezra’s fingers confirmed how aroused Sheena was, how ready her body was to accomodate his; her flesh impressed by her mind’s guileless machinations. She really was incredible: he might have been acting when he said it, but actually now he thought about it Ezra realised that he also meant it. It was true. Sheena was amazing. And maybe, he managed to at least suggest to himself, she was turned on too by the prospect of his potential. He was so different after all from the young man she’d met: he couldn’t return to the Achia, of course, but there had to be somewhere he could go, something he could muster in a continent of options, and then it wouldn’t be too late to become the middle-aged man he could be. A maverick academic – an authority on the universal awkwardness of adolescence, let’s say – admired in a world that he, a lower-middle-class boy from Wiltshire, had once crept into, and then slunk away from.

  Maybe this was the man that was turning Sheena on, a courteous intellectual, a man of dignity, integrity, stature; a man such as this could command her respect. For the first time in he had no idea how long Ezra Pepin made love to his woman with assurance and conviction. He wasn’t acting. It was Sheena the whole time whom he brought to a gorgeous, shuddering fulfilment. And it was he and no one else who revived, and seemed to levitate from his bodily exhaustion as if shedding a skin, Ezra Pepin, sinewy, leonine, present in his desire and in his intention.

  Part Two

  8

  The Allotments

  Wednesday 25 June and the Days Following

  Is there any greater pleasure to be found in this life, Ezra Pepin wondered, than in contemplation of a scheme designed to reap its architects future happiness? A time such as this we’ll look back on all our lives.

  The calendar would move on into July, the world turn, great events close by and far off take place. Ezra had little more than a blurred impression of the differentiation or succession of days. Apart, that is, from the first one, the day after Blaise’s birthday, and Sheena’s proposition. On another bright morning, Ezra cycled out of Blenheim Orchard with the air of a man freewheeling from his home towards fresh destiny. The tarmac along Kingston Road was pocked and scarred from trenches dug for gas, electric, water. Broadband, highband, cable. His bike was jiggled, his bones were shaken, and he didn’t mind. He took the traffic-calming ramps along Walton Street with the verve of some veteran skateboarder. What a beautiful impediment they were!

  Ezra Pepin’s good humour might have dissipated from here on if he’d let it, but he was able that sunny morning to stall and manoeuvre, ignore beeped horns, scoot his bicycle between the jam-packed cars looping round to Hythe Bridge Street with the aloof insouciance of a man soon to escape this snarling confinement.

  Having locked up his bike Ezra strolled across the wide plaza in front of Isis Water and in through the glass doors to the spacious reception area. Looming above it, all the way to the roof of the building, was a dizzying cavernous vestibule. Hanging there a transparent Perspex cube the size of a lorry container, swaying like a censer in some great cathedral of commerce.

  An artist lived inside the cube. Ezra could see her now, performing stretching exercises like an astronaut. She was halfway through a six-week installation. All the furniture in her floating room was made of Perspex. Clothes, kitchen hardware, electrical equipment, were formed as far as possible from transparent material. The artist slept, cooked, ate, bathed, urinated and defecated on twenty-four-hour public display. Her fruit-peelings, vegetable and other food leftovers, and personal excreta, accumulated in a Perspex bowl: visitors could watch the waste being broken down over the period of the installation, turning before their eyes from raw sewerage to friable compost.

  Garbage, the piece was called, and Ezra reckoned it an insipid follow-up to Isis Water’s previous cultural sponsorship campai
gn, which Operations had run in collaboration with Marketing: images on the theme of Thirst had been commissioned from young artists and photographers. The results were reproduced on large billboards that appeared illegally in set-aside fields beside the motorways of England. Before they could be removed by county council officials, however, the images were attacked by vandals and spray-painted by hip-hop graffiti artists; figures were defaced, pictures slashed and scarred. Or subtly doodled over. Paint was hurled across the boards. Slogans materialised. The words Isis Water appeared for the first time, like a curse.

  Who was targeting the company? Why? The desecration seemed both specific – isis water underground – and arbitrary: drink the rain. Threads of grainy night footage began to appear on the internet, of masked persons unknown assaulting the billboards. Footage that began to work its way on to terrestrial television news. Footage which, at the culmination of the campaign, was exhibited in major art galleries in New York and Beijing.

  My God, thought Ezra Pepin, won’t it be a little sad to leave this nonsense behind? To find again some authenticity in what he did. What kind of work was it, to move from one ephemeral, stimulating project to another? Schemes of such variety and disconnection.

  Today was the start of something different, and he walked across the ground floor smiling and nodding to everyone he passed. He’d like to stop and shake each man’s hand, swap quick kisses on the cheeks of the women; ask them how they were, what they dreamed of, how they dealt with their confinement. He saw himself as a role model, impatiently wished that he could tell them of his and Sheena’s plans.

  As he approached his desk Ezra felt a sudden urge to break into a run, to place his hands upon its veneered surface and vault over to the other side. When he’d walked around to his chair he wondered why on earth he’d not obeyed the insubordinate impulse, chuckling as he logged on to his computer.

  ‘What’s the joke?’ Chrissie demanded.

  ‘Whatever it is,’ he replied, ‘it’s on us.’

  ‘You’re right, Ezra. Jim just told me they want us to prepare costings not just for production of the bottles, but for a new bottling plant as well.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘I didn’t ask,’ Chrissie frowned. ‘Yeh, who are they?’

  Ezra shrugged. ‘The Germans, I guess. Where?’

  ‘Turkey.’

  Blaise heeled the four-pronged fork into soft black soil.

  ‘Easy,’ Zack murmured. ‘We don’t want to spike one. That’s it. As far as you can, then lever up as big a clod as possible.’

  Blaise leaned her weight on the fork: a clump of soil all around the stalk rose, then began to break and crumble back into the earth, unmasking a score of new potatoes like white eggs. Blaise knelt beside Zack and felt in the soil for more – she was reminded of rustling in bran tubs for hidden gifts – off which she rubbed what little black soil still clung to the potatoes’ diaphanous skins. It was incredible to her if, as he claimed, Zack had planted what were now rotten seed potatoes, at the root of each plant, less than three months earlier. It seemed more likely that some tortoiselike animal had lumbered across Port Meadow and lain them here. Either way, she conceded, they were miraculous.

  ‘You change the world by doing this, do you?’ she asked. ‘By growing these, and then eating them?’

  ‘Wait till you taste my Maris Bard,’ Zack smiled. ‘We’ll boil them back at the squat, and we’ll eat them on their own, with nothing but a little butter and mint.’

  The lines in Zack’s big hands were etched with black soil, as if the earth had fingerprinted him.

  ‘So I’ll change as well,’ Blaise said. ‘And that’ll change the world.’

  Zack stood up. ‘There’s a Palestinian family round the corner from us. I was going to take them some. You can come too, if you like.’ He handed Blaise the fork. ‘Here. We’ve still got broad beans to pick after this lot.’

  Ezra checked his emails, engaged with those concerned with the prototypes, dealt with others. Then he noticed that the screen held the information that he had a store of 317 emails. For the first time that morning he felt weighed down. The backlog was clogging the bowels of his system. He went through them, putting a tick beside those he recognised as once imperative to retain. After every twenty-five he clicked on Next: in each batch there were more that were clearly redundant, and by the end he was confronting vital emails a year old that he couldn’t remember ever reading.

  Ezra clicked Delete, the screen swooned out of sight, a brief abracadabra shimmy, and returned with only 163 emails left. He was decisive and it was easy. He felt less burdened but there was still ballast in the basket, so he ploughed through the rest, ticking aggressively, and deleted a further 142. Only twenty-one left. These were recent, significant emails – all of which he’d replied to. His eyes were sharp, his brain focused, the mouse was a knife, and Ezra Pepin sliced a tick beside all but one of them and cut loose from the moorings. You have one email. You have no obligations. You are a free man.

  Almost. The last surviving email was one forwarded to him from Jim Gould: the Chief Executive’s request for a bit of forward thinking. Ezra opened a new document, titled it Do We Have the Bottle for the Future?, fetched himself a coffee from the mezzanine, and started typing.

  Water is the most precious commodity on our planet.

  Owing to a deepening sense of the inter connectedness of life on earth, people are beginning to appreciate this, even in those parts of the world where there is no shortage of water.

  Yes, Ezra thought, that’s a good beginning. I’m not sure where it came from. Or where it’s going. But let’s find out.

  The bottled-water industry in the UK has grown in fifteen years from one selling exclusive, largely imported mineral water to one selling over a thousand million litres of mostly UK-sourced spring and table water per annum. Sales have risen in both volume and value by an average of between 10 and 15 per cent year on year.

  It would be easy to explain this extraordinary growth by saying that we have created a demand and met it. A triumph of marketing. But something more is happening, surely, when test after test has shown that tap water is a thousand times cheaper, just as bacterially clean and generally indistinguishable in taste from all bottled waters. Except for those noted and sold for their mineral content – which most consumers in tests actually declare to be unappealing.

  No, our industry is surely one that has responded to a profound thirst of the public.

  Ezra Pepin enjoyed writing reports, but it was a painstaking process: harking back to his essay-writing days, he’d marshal the research material before designing the structure of the piece. Then he’d write something that so dissatisfied him he could barely reread it himself, never mind show it to anyone else, and would rewrite endlessly, shuffling between computer edits and printouts he took to quiet corners of the building to pore over with a red pen and scissors.

  ‘Like some prevaricating bloody novelist,’ Jim Gould would complain, hovering over him as one failed deadline followed another.

  ‘You’re such a perfectionist,’ Chrissie said. If only, Ezra thought, grateful for the illusion. It was more that his mind was naturally turbid: he was obliged to sift, and filter, and distil, to achieve any kind of clarity.

  Today, however, was different: he wrote, and as he wrote he thought, I may hardly have to change a word. And why should I?

  What is that thirst, exactly? Of course it’s easy to come up with glib answers: convenience; lifestyle choice; the prestige of conspicuous consumption; health.

  But what lies behind these words? If we and consumers talk often of the purity of water, what are we really saying?

  What we’re saying is that in a post-religious age the sanctity of life, of each sovereign individual, is heightened. The loss of life in war, famine, catastrophe appears to us ever more horrific; while each person’s own life, the only one we’re ever going to have, becomes ever more precious. We want to enjoy it, with all our faculties intact, fo
r as long as possible.

  Drinking pure water is an expression, and also a perfect symbol, of this evolutionary process of self-awareness.

  While Ezra watched his two dextrous forefingers scuttle to and fro across the keyboard, Sheena Pepin willed her footsteps across Aristotle Lane allotments. The bright sky made her photophobic eyes ache, which was why she kept her gaze on the ground as she walked. How had she forgotten her sunglasses again? When, nearing the corner where Mole’s bender was hidden, she did look around, there seemed to be no one there. But then she realised that the silhouette over here, and the motionless sentinel over there, were not scarecrows but people. Looking in her direction, perhaps, watching her; it was impossible to tell. She peered back, her eyes screwed up, and in time the outlined figures bent again to their labours.

  Stamping down brambles, Sheena trod through the thicket and into the clearing, her heart beating faster now, coming to tell him it was over, than on any previous visit. What she was about to have to do might be difficult, but it was necessary. The trip to Brazil, the idea for which had come to her with such originality and force, demanded this act. On top of which, making love with Ezra the night before had been their best in years – who knew what that augured for the future?

  The clearing, when she reached it, was empty. The only sign of Mole’s presence was an unreal flatness to the grass. The clearing seemed too small for the bender and a space in front in which to squat and cook and take one’s ease; a mean allotment for a man. Had he been evicted? Or had he moved on of his own accord, eternal drifter? The men she’d chosen intermittently were all the kind to up and leave, weren’t they?

  If there was some disappointment in not seeing Mole, the relief was greater. There might be a certain thrill of power, that was true, but still it’s never easy telling someone you don’t want to see them any more, however casual or brief a liaison. Thank goodness, really, the calculation appeared likely, in balance, to have been mutual. Sheena was not obliged to come. Mole was so impenetrable – so unexplored – that she had been forced to make every advance: it would have been easy enough for her to let it fade through neglect. The fact that Mole had already left was reward for her courage.