Blenheim Orchard Page 19

  ‘A nicotine-free baby but a crotchety one,’ Sheena would joke.

  Over the ensuing years, once he’d established, for both Sheena’s benefit and his own, that he was free of the habit, Ezra would scrounge the occasional party cigarette – an old flame whose acrid kiss he relished, then once more abandoned.

  Now, however, he broke a fundamental rule and bought himself a small pouch of Golden Virginia, green Rizlas, a disposable lighter.

  ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ he said, ‘but I guess I’m just so excited.’

  ‘No, it’s fine, Ez,’ Sheena laughed, indulgent and confident that this was a temporary prop in the drama of their evening performances. ‘I only wish you’d bought matches. Really. Throwaway lighters. What an obscene technological breakthrough that one was.’

  ‘You’re right, darling. It really was.’

  ‘Imagine a pyramid of all the lighters that have been thrown away. Being incinerated. Metal and plastic burning. The black smoke. I mean, how did they ever come into fashion? I’ll tell you how. Because we’re a gutless people, that’s how, we’re always hedging our bets. Always saying, “Yes, actually I’m about to give up, maybe.” Have the courage to smoke, for God’s sake, or the balls to quit. One or the other. Am I right?’

  ‘Yes, Sheena,’ Ezra agreed, lighting up a perfectly shaped cigarette, rolled with a facility that pleased him. ‘You’re bloody well right.’

  He popped a green olive into his mouth, stoned it with his tongue and teeth and spat the pip towards the flowerbed. He took a gulp of cold white Riesling, cleaned his mouth and then imbibed it with a swift swallow which as he closed his eyes he could feel followed by a giddying wave of inebriation through his brain.

  ‘You know what this is like, darling?’ Ezra asked. ‘It’s like waking up. I feel like Rip van Winkle.’

  ‘Me too,’ Sheena smiled. ‘Sleeping Beauty.’

  ‘Woken with a kiss.’ Ezra inhaled from his cigarette; exhaled. ‘When you’re stuck in a rut,’ he said, ‘you might as well be asleep. There’s no change from one day to another, one year to the next.’

  ‘Apart from the children growing, Ez.’

  ‘You know what I’m reminded of? The times I found myself in the jungle all alone. Very, very rarely. Because you know I was clumsy, they never took me hunting, so I’d hang out in the village. Just as well, of course, because I saw aspects of life few other anthropologists had seen. But every now and again I forced myself to walk off into the dense forest. Right out of sight of the village, far enough to risk becoming disorientated, and losing my bearings. And I was terrified. The jungle seethed with lurking threat: there was a jaguar behind every tree, a snake crawling just ahead of me.

  My heart was juddering against my ribs.’ Ezra stubbed out his cigarette. ‘I never felt so bloody alive in all my life.’

  Sheena leaned forward from her chair towards him. ‘Give me that kiss, Prince Charming.’

  ‘The wake-up one?’

  ‘No, the one to help me sleep at night.’

  Some evenings they pursued each other upstairs without clearing away, and made love, urgent co-conspirators of change, in flight from the forces of mediocrity that would stifle and deny them. And Sheena, as she chuckled to carnality’s liberating rhythm, congratulated herself on having orchestrated that flight.

  While outside on the marble slab, amid dying candles, sat bowls of sauce and tubs of dip, and unfinished glasses of wine, paraphernalia of some hallucinatory rite, which night insects devoured, and by morning were drowned in.

  Blaise joined her parents once or twice, and seemed happy to turn their duet of anticipation into a trio, if as a minor instrument, content to listen while she waited for a cue. She was preoccupied, and her parents assumed it to be with Akhmed, who was there in the house one afternoon soon after the strawberry-picking expedition. As the members of the family came home, each was introduced to him. He was a slight, fresh-faced boy who didn’t look to Ezra as if he’d fully entered puberty. He didn’t say a word but nodded, and shook hands. And from then on he was there often, hovering. Eating food Blaise took him from the fridge. Helping with her revision – ‘He took the same subjects last year,’ she explained. Ezra would glimpse Akhmed drifting upstairs, gliding along a corridor, a silent presence in his house who acknowledged him with a polite and possibly condescending nod; a bow, almost. Akhmed looked to Ezra juvenile, unready, unprepared, for sex, which innocence only worried him all the more.

  ‘What’s wrong with Akhmed?’ he asked Sheena in bed one night. ‘He doesn’t say anything.’

  ‘Ezra, he’s very shy, obviously. And use the back of your mouth, not your throat.’

  ‘I haven’t heard a word issue from his lips. And he won’t look at me.’

  ‘What were you like at that age? A witty conversationalist? A gifted raconteur? It’s difficult for boys. His voice is still a little unbroken.’

  ‘However would one know?’

  ‘That’s why he’s so quiet. I think he’s rather sweet.’

  ‘I damn well hope so,’ Ezra worried, ‘considering the amount of time he spends in our daughter’s bedroom.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Ez.’

  ‘I can’t help worrying. I’m her father. I’m supposed to worry.’

  ‘They’re not doing anything, believe me.’

  ‘How would you know?’

  ‘She’d tell me.’

  ‘She would?’ Ezra frowned. Could this be true? Blaise hardly told him anything any more. Was their father-daughter bond almost broken, or would it be regained after this adolescent phase? He was prepared one day to give her away, with due ceremony. ‘Don’t you think we need some house rules?’ he demanded.

  ‘Of course. That’s why we’ve got them already.’

  ‘We have?’

  ‘I’ve told Blaise, One: no one stays the night. Two: if she wants to have sex, she’s got to speak to me about birth control first.’

  ‘Sex. Birth control. For God’s sake, Sheena.’

  ‘Three: if she gets pregnant, tell me immediately. Those are the rules.’

  Ezra stared at Sheena. ‘I’m glad we discussed them fully,’ he said. ‘They sound draconian yet woefully inadequate.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I’m supposed to be reassured.’ Ezra shook his head. ‘She’s fourteen,’ he said. ‘Barely.’

  ‘Fourteen is not so young for sex. Not these days.’

  ‘Not so young? Are you serious? It’s two years under the legal age of consent, for one thing.’

  ‘And about ten years under the age you want your daughter to enjoy her body, I suppose. What is it with men?’ Sheena wondered, turning on to her back, as if addressing a third person up above them who’d slipped into the room without Ezra noticing. ‘This hang-up about their daughters’ sexuality?’

  ‘It’s not a hang-up,’ Ezra said. ‘It’s a taboo. There are good reasons for its existence.’

  ‘Look at Blaise, Ezra. Have you actually seen her recently? She’s sexually mature. Girls are at that age, more than ever nowadays. In many cultures she’d have been sexually active for years by now.’

  Ezra hiccuped an indignant laugh. ‘I’m probably aware of that more than most, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘She’s not a child. She’s a woman. It’s your problem. Deal with it.’

  Ezra found the conversation creepily uncomfortable. He wanted neither to discuss nor to ponder the subject. And why did Sheena use the word sex or sexual or sexuality in her every sentence, rubbing Ezra’s nose in it, relishing their daughter’s ripeness?

  ‘She’s going to lose her virginity sooner or later. I mean, ask yourself: what’s the best way for that to happen?’

  ‘I don’t wish to ask that.’

  ‘With some much older pervert, maybe?’

  ‘Sheena –’

  ‘The fact is, maybe she could do worse than a nice, quiet, steady boy, as ignorant as her, who she can teach as she learns as they go along.’

 
Ezra was silent.

  Sheena addressed her invisible companion again. ‘I just don’t know where this distaste for female sexuality that men seem to have comes from.’

  ‘Don’t give me your crass generalisations, Sheena.’

  ‘She’s a healthy girl, our Blaise. She’ll have appetites, Ezra, desires.’

  ‘Of course!’

  Sheena yawned. Then she leaned towards Ezra and planted a perfunctory kiss upon his lips. ‘I am eggshausted,’ she said. ‘Now, if this conversation has run its course, I’d like to try and get some sleep.’ She rolled over, patted her pillows, dropped towards them and exhaled with a loud sigh. Ezra switched off his bedside light. Sheena rolled back halfway towards him, so that her mouth once more addressed the ceiling in the dark.

  ‘Did you even know when she started her periods?’ Sheena demanded. He heard what was almost a giggle, a light-hearted derision, in her voice.

  ‘Yes,’ Ezra murmured.

  ‘It must be almost two years now.’ Sheena rolled back.

  Ezra listened to her breathing, sensed a pacification of her movement that suggested she was intent on her path to sleep now, and would disturb him no more. Yes, he thought: he did know when Blaise had begun to menstruate. It was him she came to. ‘Look, Daddy,’ she said, tears in her eyes. She led him to the bathroom, and to spots of blood on the floor. ‘It’s coming from inside me,’ she said.

  ‘But Blaise,’ he said, ‘you know what that is, don’t you?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Blaise murmured, her expression despairing, mournful.

  ‘But it’s wonderful, darling,’ Ezra told her, and Blaise’s gaze had flickered towards him and then away, and she summoned a brave smile to her face. That very evening Blaise came and sat on his lap before going up to bed, as she had a thousand times before, and she told him that Sheena had taken her to Boots in Summertown. She was equipped, she said, with a smile that suggested she’d done more than simply come to terms with her new condition; it was more coy and self-satisfied than that, the smile of one admitted by her mother to an ancient sisterhood.

  As he hugged the child nestled in his embrace, Ezra attempted to refute the information his body was feeding him. Beyond intellectual understanding, beneath consciousness, knowledge entered him that he would have liked to turn back. It came to him from the warm body in his lap. It reached him in a direct connection from his daughter’s womb, through her genitalia and on through his, into his body, his nervous system, his brain. The knowledge that there should be no more of such physical intimacy. That blood drew a line between the relationship they’d had and a reserve, a discretion that they would henceforth obey.

  Ezra squeezed his daughter then – two years ago – kissed her cheek and said, ‘Go on up to bed, darling.’ He’d watched her go that evening, and now he could feel again the pain of that swift and necessary bereavement. And now this, the prospect of his girl’s virginity given to a gormless boy. Except, Ezra recalled with an impatient eruption of hope, they might get to Brazil before it happened.

  The unsettled weather lifted. Patchy mist and fog in the mornings gave way to sunshine and warmth again. And a Sunday evening soon came along when they were due to leave Blaise in charge and go over to the Carlyles’.

  The day before, Sheena had come home from work with a Blackwell’s bag from which she slid on to the sitting-room coffee table a Portuguese-English dictionary and a Teach Yourself Portuguese CD.

  ‘Of course you won’t need it, Ez,’ she said approvingly. ‘But we will.’

  ‘Me?’ he laughed.

  ‘Maybe you might want to brush up a little, though.’

  ‘Brush up?’

  ‘I guess we’ll be relying on you to get us settled in the first week or two, but I’m sure we’ll pick it up soon.’

  ‘Week or two?’

  ‘Dad!’ Blaise yelled across from the kitchen. ‘Help! There’s an echo in the house.’

  ‘Anyone want a cup of tea?’ Sheena offered, leaving Ezra to try and recollect whether all those years ago he could possibly have led Sheena to believe he could speak Portuguese. Surely not. He was always reasonably modest, wasn’t he? He’d learned a little Spanish before going to Paraguay; and he’d acquired some rudiments of the Achia’s language while with them, that was true; but they wouldn’t be much help to the Pepin family starting out in São Paulo. Did Sheena think that his tribe were in Brazil? Wait a minute. Did she imagine that they would put the children in the International School and all be speaking fluent Portuguese in a month? The truth was they’d mix with other visitors, of course. They’d live there as ex-pats. Drawn into the colony of English-speaking peoples.

  Perhaps it was that jab of idiocy that disconcerted Ezra and made him say to Sheena, as they got ready to go round to Simon and Minty’s on Sunday evening, ‘Let’s tell them.’

  ‘Who? What? Already?’

  ‘Yes. Why not? We’re going, aren’t we?’

  ‘Of course we are, Ez.’

  ‘No turning back, darling?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So let’s tell our friends already.’

  ‘Okay. Yes. Let’s.’

  The phone rang. Ezra strolled out to the landing, and saw downstairs Blaise lunge for the cordless handset and reach it before Hector. She said hello, then responded to the other person’s voice by trotting upstairs to her room, at the same time twisting her head, raising her shoulders and bending her back, so as to bury the phone in her protective embrace like a baby. She passed by her father, ignoring him. He returned to the bedroom.

  ‘Who was that?’ Sheena asked.

  ‘One of Blaise’s friends.’

  ‘What friends? They never come round. Does she have any more?’

  A recent image recalled itself to Ezra’s mind: he was cycling through Wellington Square and, glancing to his right to the lawn in its centre, he’d spotted Blaise in amongst a group of half a dozen friends. They were chatting away, not to each other but on mobile phones. To the friends who hadn’t made it to this little gathering; ghosts who augmented it with their busy absence.

  But that was months ago, he conceded. A year, maybe.

  ‘Must have been Akhmed,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, my God. How could I forget? His father rang today, while you and Louie were at the park.’

  ‘Mr Raj Cuisine?’

  ‘Abdul Azam. He wants to see you. I said he could come round tomorrow before supper; he said six would suit him.’

  ‘Why does he want to see me?’

  ‘Good question!’ Sheena spat. ‘I mean obviously about Akhmed and Blaise, but why you? I’m the girl’s mother!’

  ‘Hey, don’t shout at me, darling, I didn’t say a thing.’

  ‘He spoke to me, introduced himself as Akhmed’s father, and said, “Could I speak to Mr Pepin?” I mean, excuse me, Ezra, but what century is this?’

  ‘If the last one was the American,’ Ezra said, doing up the buttons of a blue cotton shirt. ‘I guess this’ll be the Chinese.’

  ‘You know what I mean, Ez.’

  ‘Or the Indian.’

  ‘You men are just so …’

  ‘Just so what? Hey, I’d be quite happy for you to deal with it, if that’s what you want. I can work late at the office – you talk to him.’

  ‘You’re missing the point, Ezra Pepin. It’s one of principle.’

  ‘That means I have to see him, does it?’

  ‘Of course. Are you ready?’

  ‘Almost.’

  ‘We’re late, Ez.’

  ‘I’m coming.’ He buckled his sandals, and stood up, frowning. ‘I wonder what he wants?’ he said.

  9

  An Announcement

  Sunday 6 July

  Minty Carlyle headed home with the car boot full of plastic-bagged provisions from the Sainsbury’s in Kidlington. How refreshing it was, she thought to herself as she drove down Woodstock Road, braking for the speed camera then cruising on past Squitchey Lane, to have clichés skewered, and shown up
for the rubbish they are. This morning she’d come with gratitude upon lines by Ivy Compton-Burnett, to the effect that time has too much credit: it’s not a great healer, it’s an indifferent and perfunctory one, and often it doesn’t heal at all.

  Yes, and sometimes it only muffles the cries of the wounded, or it covers the wound with its thin tissue, to fester and rupture and break through in the future. Because you simply couldn’t tell the consequences of a particular cause; you could only wait for the rupture and hunt the cause down with hindsight. Then it was easy, Minty thought. You didn’t have to be a student of Freud or Klein to work it out. Like the way her widowed mother had withheld affection. For example. Unimpressed by her daughter’s achievements, unamused by her conversation, undesiring of her bodily presence. The girl’s response a childhood-long, a lifelong, vain courtship of her mother; the pained withdrawals of a rejected suitor. One of whose legacies, it was pretty obvious, was a refusal to give up on anything or anyone.

  ‘Your determination is tectonic,’ Simon told her when, years into their marriage, he perceived the extent of his partner’s will. ‘It’s glacial,’ he said, impressed and unsettled, and grateful that her ambitions were modest ones.

  Another truism ripe for the compost heap: you can choose your friends but not your family. Oh, sure, fundamentally it was so but ever less so, it seemed to Minty, as families cracked and scattered; while friends you found yourself attached to for ever, by all sorts of sinews and threads.

  Take the Pepins. Their best friends, after all. Simon and Ezra had met – along with Ian Flegg – one winter at a Saturday dads’ club, in a church hall on New Inn Hall Street. They got talking as their firstborns toddled between tricycle and slide, watching in that selfdenigratory, deflective way which seemed to come naturally to men: of course, this is not me, mate, or us, is it, we know that, we’re just temporary guardians of these little beauties; let us share with each other such acknowledgement.

  Over one dinner back then, with their infants asleep, she and Sheena had joked what a wonder it was how rarely Blaise and Ed were brought home from that danger zone with neither cut nor bruise nor broken bone.

  ‘It’s because, Minty, they’re so bloody unobservant,’ Sheena explained, the men cowering but amused, ‘I swear they forget they’re there to babysit at all. The kids move into self-protective mode. When they’re on their own – studies prove this – children have fewer accidents than when supervised by adults.’