Blenheim Orchard Read online

  ‘I’d advise you to keep an eye on her, Mr Pepin. There’s a Family Support Network in Oxford. They offer counselling. Individual. Group.’ She sighed. ‘It can help families through a difficult patch.’

  Ezra accepted the leaflet the policewoman passed to him, and saw her fingers move towards the door. ‘I’ll call them,’ he said.

  The policewoman’s hand faltered, and less reached than came to weary rest on the door handle. ‘No, you won’t,’ she said.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘You people never do.’

  Ezra lifted his gaze, and met the woman’s frank stare. ‘You people?’ he asked.

  ‘Middle class. Professional.’

  ‘Not so professional.’

  ‘Educated. Your children slip off the rails, you let them, you know they’ll reclaim their advantage in due course.’

  ‘I don’t know. I mean, I hope so.’

  ‘Oh, you worry about their grades, and CVs, when they make mistakes in full view of the world. Then, what?’

  Ezra had the feeling he was hearing a speech its maker had been rehearsing for years. What parental inadequacy had she perceived in him, to bring it out of her here, now?

  She turned the door handle. Ezra followed her into the room. It smelled of sweat and dust and stale smoke.

  ‘Your father’s here,’ the policewoman said.

  The figure in the chair remained as still as she had been all the while, but stiffened, sinews tensing.

  ‘He’s come to take you home.’

  Ezra stepped out from behind the policewoman, and began to nod his head gravely, although his daughter could not yet see him. He had to stop himself from rushing over, hugging her. Who knew what game the police could play? After what seemed like a long time there was a twitch of movement around Blaise’s knees; her plaited brown hair fluttered; she raised her head slowly, and turned towards her father. There was a puffiness around her red-rimmed eyes.

  ‘I’m here, Blaise,’ Ezra intoned. ‘Let’s go.’

  Neither of them spoke as they left the police station, crossed the road, walked up St Aldates. Ezra hailed a taxi. It veered to the kerb. They climbed in; sat side by side. There was only one thing Ezra wanted to do, and that was to wrap his arms around his daughter and hug her tight to him. But he hesitated: there was a distance between them, and he sensed it was Blaise’s privilege no less than her obligation to bridge it.

  It wasn’t just the horror of what he’d heard her falsely accused of. Blaise’s birth, the first of their children, had been the mystic event of Ezra Pepin’s life. He’d been lifted bodily from a terminus at the end of evolution: placed instead within its abundant procession. Watching Blaise grow up was a daily reiteration of this genetic truth. She presented her father with both himself reproduced beyond his lifespan and an improvement upon him. The boys, coming after, were remarkable events in themselves, simply. Ezra was glad the children had arrived in that order, that it was a female, a yin to his yang in nature’s reproductive division, who’d delivered revelation.

  At this moment, however, as they sat in the taxi with a sliver of space between his left arm and her right, Ezra understood he’d been deceiving himself. It was no more than a commonplace, the bond between father and daughter: the man responds primarily to the child’s reiteration not of himself but of his mate; and if he sees himself in her as well what is that but narcissism?

  Ezra gazed at Christ Church College, through the open gate to the great quad. The traffic was barely moving. Ezra didn’t mind. He stole discreet glances at Blaise: there was a residue of camouflage paint on her face, flakes of it dried in her hair. He figured he’d accomplished a noble deed, rescuing his daughter from a police procedural labyrinth. He tried to picture a bloody scene among the trees at the Wasteland, but he could only visualise Blaise as a potential victim of violence, not its perpetrator; the scene fragmented in his mind, echoing the chaos which he assumed had caused Blaise to be arrested for something she had nothing to do with.

  Blaise’s view, out of the window on her side, was of the shops beyond Pembroke Street. The taxi shuffled forward behind a convoy of buses, the sun glaring off their windows: each of them stopped across from the Town Hall to disgorge a horde of park-and-ride shoppers, whom Blaise observed marching along the pavement, striding towards the centre. They looked like they’d woken from hibernation with a tremendous hunger, and come rushing into the city.

  Blaise thought of the Wasteland. Once an industrial tip, it was closed forty years ago and covered with a layer of topsoil. Nature reclaimed it. The seeds of trees, shrubs, weeds found their own wind- or bird-dropped way there. Roots grew, fingering in amongst brick, glass bottles, rusting tubular metal. Plants anchored themselves, with their subliminal persistence, in layers of rubble and mud. The surface of the Wasteland sank and buckled.

  The Pepins picked blackberries there every autumn, a family ritual, followed by evenings of steaming jam jars and bubbling pans as one or other of her parents made bramble jelly that would last all year. The Wasteland was Louie’s jungle, Hector’s Sherwood Forest. Blaise recalled the dusk five years earlier that Sheena and Minty took her and Ed to listen to a nightingale on the far side, by the railway line.

  She looked back at the shoppers. They were all in a hurry. It was amazing how many of their faces were set in expressions of great determination. Whatever it was they wanted was vital; nothing and no one was going to get in their way. The taxi crawled around the corner past Queen Street and Cornmarket. What if the streets were empty? Blaise wondered. The shops still and silent. Lights blinking off. People gone. Buildings ageing, decaying, crumbling. How long would this urban growth take to become a wasteland? Coltsfoot breaking through the tarmac. Ivy throttling the ruins.

  Her father’s voice interrupted her thoughts. ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘What happened, Blaise? It’s not true, is it? That you hit a security guard. What really happened?’

  Blaise kept her attention on a line of tired, sated consumers, waiting for a bus to take them and their shopping bags back home.

  ‘What went on there?’ Ezra asked.

  People are greedy, Blaise knew that. We all are, in one way or another. The difference was in what you were greedy for. Why they gobbled up whatever scraps were thrown at them, that’s what was so sad.

  ‘Blaise? You didn’t talk to the police, darling. You can talk to me.’

  Blaise turned to her father. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to answer, it was just that there was something swelling in her throat, and if she opened her mouth it would come shaking out of her. Eyes shut, she swallowed it back down.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I didn’t mean to, Daddy,’ Blaise said, snuffling and taking deep breaths in between. ‘I didn’t mean to.’ She shook her head, mumbled something to the window. She was sniffing hungrily, as if drawing sustenance from a fragrance in the air.

  Ezra put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Come here,’ he said, pulling her to him. ‘It’s okay. Come here.’

  Blaise’s warm breath smelled sweet, as if she’d been eating satsumas. She let her father hug her, turning towards and into his embrace. It occurred to Ezra, as he felt his chin, on top of her head, forced up a little, that she was taller than the last time he’d hugged her. At some point where their bodies almost touched, not quite his skin to her skin but through clothing somewhere, he could feel her pulse. Her body began to relax into his. He concentrated his attention upon the soft, reassuring beat of Blaise’s heart; it felt more intimate to him than his own.

  ‘I just tried to stop him, Daddy,’ she said, trembling. ‘He was dragging Bobby across the ground by his hair, Bobby was screaming.’

  ‘There, there, darling,’ Ezra whispered.

  ‘I had this spanner,’ Blaise stuttered. ‘I just wanted to hit his body. But then he turned …’

  ‘It’s all right.’ Ezra hugged his daughter. ‘I’m here.’

  So that’s what happened, Ezra thought. An accident. In which case,
he reckoned, some of the blame should be laid at his door. Or rather on his small lawn; not to mention St Barnabas Church of England Primary School playing field; or the wide inviting vistas of University Parks. Yes, a definite measure of culpability resided in the patient hours of a doting father tossing a tennis ball to his daughter; in the endless retrieval of wild misses and glancing mishits with bat, stick, racket. Encouraging her eye for a ball, the hunter’s acuity, augmenting it with efficient pectorals and flexible elbows. Make contact with firm forearm. Add that last-second injection of velocity with a flick of the wrist.

  Blaise’s sobbing subsided, in her father’s embrace. In a freak accident she’d hit at the man’s body with a spanner, but it had struck him in the face. Blaise didn’t swing like a girl – not like the girls of Ezra’s generation – she swung from the shoulder, she put her back into the swing, and she swung up from her feet planted on and springing off the earth. What puppy fat she had left was less a hindrance than, in movement, graceful weight. When Blaise hit a rounders ball she bounced up off the planet to do so: she hit the ball with the whole of her chunky body, she gave it all she had, and for that Ezra had to take some of the blame. He drew a clean white handkerchief from his pocket. ‘Use this, darling.’

  Blaise took the handkerchief and blew her nose.

  The taxi stopped at red lights halfway down the high street. Blaise opened the door and jumped out. A cyclist was gliding down the nearside of the vehicles: the door, swung open, abruptly blocked his path and he mounted the pavement, swerving between pedestrians who’d just crossed the road, his brakes squealing. People flinched and staggered. Blaise ran through them, along the short precinct between St Mary’s Church and All Soul’s, towards the Radcliffe Camera.

  Ezra stared after her.

  ‘You want to keep an eye on her, mate.’

  Ezra watched Blaise put distance between himself and her. He had about two seconds in which to choose to stuff a note into the taxi driver’s maw and dash after her. Instead he slumped back in his seat, telling himself that neither he nor Blaise wanted him to chase her. You had, he believed, to respect what people told or showed you they wanted. You had to trust your children.

  ‘Turn the car round, please,’ Ezra asked him. ‘Take me to the police station.’

  Bicycling back along Oxpens to work the light was clear, and the air still. Crisis had come and, though hardly resolved, moved on like a brief phenomenon of the weather. A memory came back to Ezra Pepin. From when Blaise was two years old and needed a daily expedition out of their rented flat on Walton Street into open air, and what Ezra would always remember as the time of the Dustbinlid Hunt.

  As he cycled, Ezra recalled how all through one windy autumn he became a man possessed by a simple quest: where do the lids of black bins go? They get blown off. Or the dustmen don’t bother to put them back: you come home on dustbin day and the lid’s on the ground. Another time it’s some yards away, blown up against the neighbours’ fence. Put it back but that’s not good enough, is it, as well you know: one day it’ll be gone for good. But where?

  Ezra strolled the terraced streets of Jericho with his toddler in her buggy. Everywhere they looked they saw topless black plastic bins. Looking after a child, your mind has hours in which to spin fanciful webs: Ezra attuned himself to the shifting atmospheric pressure, the microcosmic climate, in Jericho’s grid of streets. Mini anticyclones and depressions. Westerlies driven in from subtropical highs up on Walton Street; trade winds sweeping towards the canal; a warm sirocco blown up Richmond Road between the synagogue and the Lebanese restaurant.

  Airflow patterns along the terraces and avenues. Fluctuating pressure gradients. Where were dustbin lids blown? As Ezra pushed Blaise’s buggy he conjured arcane forces, purposeful tornadoes stealing them, a kleptomania of nature. Or scurrilous squalls, argumentative gales, buffeting each other at T-junctions and cross-sections, with innocent dustbin lids caught in the cross-flow and whisked away.

  Walking your child around the neighbourhood: there was only so much, after all, for a redundant anthropologist to see. There was only a universe. One day they searched the graveyard behind Lucy’s Ironworks and had to go back there for days for Blaise to watch the alchemical men welding and smelting through the huge grubby windows. They went down to the canal where in the absence of black shields floating on the mucky water they threw stale bread to smug mallards. And they invariably went via Walton Lane, so that Blaise could hiccup with laughter as they bubbled along the cobbles.

  Father and daughter took circuitous routes to the playground in the corner of St Barnabas School’s playing field, thick with leaves from the plane trees and sycamores. There, Blaise tottered and stumbled. Whenever she – or any other of the sprites in their jumpsuits and wellies – started to fall over, they seemed to then accelerate towards the ground. As if the earth were greedy for infants.

  They poked around the garages behind St Barnabas Church. They peered into the courtyard of the almshouses on Great Clarendon Street. They peeked through gates left open in case some deranged pensioner, under cover of gusting weather, was hoarding them in his backyard.

  Until one November morning came when the air had the jitters. Crisp packets, chocolate wrappers, swirled about them. An empty Coke can skittered across tarmac. Ezra and Blaise were just crossing Walton Street, at the corner by the health centre, when they glimpsed a dustbin lid being blown around at the bottom of Cranham Street! Blaise chuckled, as Ezra ran the pushchair down the pavement. The black lid whirled and spun so that their view of it alternated, between full circular display and the mere edge of it flung like a frisbee and merging here with the council flats behind, and then reappearing there, a hovering ellipsoid.

  Blaise jiggled in the pushchair, and Ezra drew breath from his folly. Chasing after a dustbin lid, he could see admitting to Sheena, was not quite sufficient justification for spilling their daughter on to concrete. He paused to secure her in the straps, and clicked the fastenings. A big mistake. When he looked up the lid was nowhere to be seen. Crossing Cranham Terrace, and then Allam Street, he scampered down to the bottom and, breathing hard, looked this way and that along Canal Street. Nothing. He felt strangely alone, standing at the junction. Then a sheet of newspaper careered around the corner, veering south, and they were up and running again, Blaise screeching, Ezra’s lungs gusting with fresh hope. He was sure now they would come to some hitherto hidden cul-de-sac, some as yet unrevealed yard, at the end of which there’d be a blizzard of lids, swirling and circling in the wind like ravens.

  There was none. Ezra trotted, walked, wound down, with no further sighting of their lid or any other. Blaise grew restless. Ezra persisted into the boatyard. Blaise moaned for the swings. So he relented, he gave up, and let the mystery remain one. A magic trick, an urban phenomenon still unexplained. Where do dustbin lids fly to?

  Minty Carlyle fulfilled a provisional arrangement to collect Louie from his childminder. Her son Jack was Hector’s best friend, and came back from school to the Pepins’ house. Minty phoned Ezra and told him that Blaise was safely home. He assumed, as he cycled swiftly home himself that early evening along the road whose name changed every half mile – Walton Street, Kingston Road, Hayfield Road, indicating the area’s continual piecemeal development – that since she hadn’t gone with Blaise to the police station Sheena would still be involved in the action at the Wasteland. As he crossed Farndon Road, where Hayfield became Bainton Road, a glance to his left snatched a glimpse of a good-sized crowd, and their murmur, too, which within moments was lost in the air behind him. A minute later he glided into Blenheim Orchard.

  Ezra pushed his bike past the Saab and the Golf – parked in their allotted spaces in front of the house – and down the paving-slab path at the side. He put it in the shed, and entered home through the kitchen door. The table bore the aftermath of a half-eaten meal – pizza crust, the naked white flesh of fish fingers. Boiled broccoli florets. Abandoned carrot. Empty chairs were pushed back untidily
. The only sound above the hum of the fridge was the digital squeaking of a computer game: Ezra looked through to the openplan living-room, where Hector and Jack lay side by side on the carpet, leaning on their elbows like sunbathers, playing chess on the flatscreen TV.

  Hector had bought the game with his pocket money the weekend before, and as soon as he’d scanned the moves had taken his father through them with the authority of a grand master.

  ‘The rooks only shoot their laser cannons in straight lines,’ he explained, miming the trajectory to help his ageing pop understand this modern operation. ‘But the queen’ (a superheroine in shiny chainmail), ‘she can do flying kicks in every direction. See?’

  Ezra watched Jack and Hector: a pair of docile gawks at the mayhem their fretful fingers concocted. Bishops flourished daggers from beneath their cassocks and hurled them in arrowed diagonals at infantry pawns, who bleeped to death. Knights approached an opponent and vanished, then reappeared again in a surprising position, from where they struck with scimitars.

  It was impossible to tell whether or not the boys were actually enjoying themselves. It appeared to Ezra as if the game were an irksome nuisance, which, having entered, they could only escape from by seeing through to the end, an action-packed contest that made Ezra mourn the tedium of real chess. Originating in India – or was it China? – fifteen hundred years ago, each slow game, played between two minds deep in concentration, invoked a history of civilisation. And in a generation it was simply slipping away, becoming a relic, a curio. Chess sets sifting down the chain through charity shops, car boot sales, internet selling, to a last resting place in the dusty corners of eccentric museums.

  Ezra shook his head at the memory of how much he’d loved chess as a boy, of how many hours of his life he’d wasted in the exasperating depths of its polyphonic repetitions. An only child with few friends, his mother had taught him; he was able, at about the age Hector was now, to beat her easily, and from then on found one or two other oddbods amongst his acquaintances with whom to collaborate in mental combat.