Blenheim Orchard Read online

  Colin was an Oxford history dropout, and he was in charge of the database for Home Holidays. He often arrived at the office as Sheena was leaving, to work through the night and be glued to the screen when she came back in the next morning. In truth it was a bit cramped in here now, and she and Jill huddled together at Jill’s desk to go through their research on Cheltenham.

  In Blenheim Orchard Ezra lay sprawled on the sofa in the sitting-room, plodding his way through sections of the Saturday paper. Politics. Sport. Culture. Money. You really had to dedicate the best part of a day. TV. Property. Travel. Ezra soaked it up, the vital ephemera connecting a citizen to the world around him. After the slump during the war in Iraq, travel companies report that holiday sales have picked up, but that families prepared to be flexible in their choice of destination can still discover late bargains. The new Leader of the Commons, Peter Hain, is reprimanded by the Prime Minister and the Chancellor for suggesting that the wealthy should pay more income tax. A male babysitter in Scotland is jailed for abusing a boy and trading images of him with other paedophiles over the internet. The disestablishment of the Ba’athist party in Iraq has made redundant the vast majority of civil servants, judges, engineers and others, who’d joined the party out of expediency. Electricity, clean water, cooking gas and fuel for cars and machinery remain scarce. Disbanding the military has put hundreds of thousands of angry young men on the streets.

  Articles dissolved in the dry dust of Ezra’s insomniac’s brain, leaving behind a residue of discontent. When he ought, he castigated himself, to be preparing for the meeting on Monday.

  Sheena rarely read a newspaper; watched or listened to the news. She possessed trenchant opinions on political issues, but it was a mystery how she formed them. Through titbits of information gleaned from conversation with fellow Friends of the Wasteland, perhaps. Her outlook on the world, though, was constant, unflinching. Not principles, exactly, more a matter of character applied to current affairs, and it was lucid as ideology. Ezra envied Sheena her outlook that allowed for little nuance, none of the wishy-washy tolerance that sentenced him to see all sides, to take none. Although he never said as much to her, he harboured the suspicion that it might have had a physical cause: Sheena had been told by a homeopath she visited that her intestines were too long, cramped into the space inside her.

  ‘You have the colon of a much taller person,’ Ezra told her. ‘You’d be much better off with a semi-colon,’ he joked, but he appreciated that it was no laughing matter to struggle practically every day of your life with indigestion, cramps, constipation. The daily procession of matter inching its arduous way along the winding, twisting, passages inside you. Peristalsis sluggishly shunting food. Such a person, Ezra figured, would have little patience with subtleties of argument that only coagulated action. They’d met when he was reeling from his experience in the jungle, and he’d fallen in love with her certainty, the way she strode forward through life. Somehow – he didn’t know how – he’d helped her see what she wanted. It wasn’t science: she derived no satisfaction from lab research, which was something she’d drifted into as a kind of feeble sop to her parents in the general direction of medicine; no, what Sheena had wanted, then, was a family.

  Ezra set aside a finished section of the paper, already yellowed by the sun glaring through the window. His eyes ached, and he closed them. After some minutes he fancied that the sofa was suspended above the floor. He began to float into sleep.

  A voice startled him.

  Ezra opened his eyes. Blaise was standing between the sofas, gazing down at the scattered debris of newsprint.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  Blaise frowned. ‘I said I don’t read the papers any more, Daddy.’

  ‘You don’t?’

  ‘They make me sad. Their editors don’t send the reporters out to tell us what’s happening in the world, they send them out to find bad news.’

  ‘Really?’

  Blaise nodded. ‘We did it in media studies.’

  Ezra wondered whether he’d been asleep a minute or an hour. His body felt light; his eyes were sore. ‘Is that wrong?’ he asked, squinting towards her.

  ‘If the reporters say they can’t find bad news, the editor says, “Look harder. I don’t want you back here unless you’ve got some.”’

  Blaise stopped talking and gazed into the middle distance. She ran her tongue around her lips. She looked older than her thirteen years should have allowed her to; someone who’d heard too much already of famine and war. ‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘I don’t understand it, Daddy. All the things that are wrong and no one does anything.’ She shrugged. ‘Maybe I’m just not clever enough. I mean, I know I’m not as clever as Hector.’

  ‘No, no, Blaise, don’t be stupid,’ Ezra assured her. ‘Intelligence is about a lot more than just IQ, you know.’

  ‘It’s not fair but it’s all right,’ she said. ‘Just because he’s my younger brother. I mean, however much philosophers try to interpret the world, it’s not enough, is it? Mum’s right, isn’t she? The point is to change it.’

  Ezra raised his head from the cushion, and nodded. ‘Your mum and Marx both.’

  ‘Are we supposed to make the world a better place,’ Blaise asked, ‘or just enjoy ourselves?’

  She sat down on the pink sofa across from Ezra and then, before he could give her any answer, as if remembering something she should have done earlier, Blaise took her mobile out of her pocket: Ezra watched her observing her thumb articulate messages, like an autonomous digit separate from her. No one does anything? Ezra wondered. Isn’t quite enough done, though, really? Isn’t there more than enough intervention?

  ‘What’s funny, Daddy?’

  ‘Nothing, darling.’

  Blaise returned to her texting. When he was her age Ezra read voraciously, drawn to tales of remote, mysterious regions. Odd pockets of Europe, beyond the mountains, in countries of steep-wooded ravines, whose people remained untouched by great events, and lived by customs the restless scrabble of progress had rendered anachronistic. The Khazars of the eastern steppe. Albanians with their blood feuds. Lapps. Woodsmen of the Black Forest. Tribes there and further afield who possessed a magical, a fetishistic energy, retaining nature’s secrets – secrets of man’s nature – forgotten in the industrialising rush. As a boy Ezra was fascinated, drawn to the exotic, the naked, the strange.

  He spent his pocket money on historical atlases, pored over maps of Europe that showed boundaries shifting with every turn of the page, in the endless quarrelling of history, its squabbles and devastations. The migration of nations. The periodic formation and dissolution of empires, in whose margins tribes established themselves for a few generations, then vanished. The Scythians, fierce warriors, who left magnificent gold ornaments, and buried horses, in the graves of their chieftains. Illyria. The March of Verona. The Teutonic Knights. Wallachia. Bessarabia. He browsed in second-hand shops for books containing picture and description of peoples of the world. The multiplicity of custom precluded all certainty about our own, and Ezra found that insight as liberating as it was unsettling.

  Did he expect Blaise to see the world in that way? Today? It was no longer possible for her generation. Once hidden tribes were now indigenous people. They were cheap labour who trekked from their remote villages to free-trade zones, for cash wages. Consumers of products in the globalised marketplace. Their identity changed to the flavour, the inflection, in their particular take on hip-hop; in their physiognomies that might lend originality to an advertising campaign; in the bright paintings of eye-catching naivety. It happened to every tribe that modern man made contact with, studied, befriended.

  Ezra looked across at Blaise, sprawled on the pink sofa. She was retreating from him just as fast as she could, hiding from her father behind a pierced belly button and a studded nostril, the micro tattoo of an Oriental snake on her hip. Behind baggy blue jeans flared and frayed, bright fishnet, hair spiked and patchily, tuftily, coloured. A kaleidoscope of fashion,
or anti-fashion. One or the other.

  ‘What do you call yourself again?’ he asked.

  ‘Blaise is a grunger,’ explained an invisible voice. Father and sister both started. Hector was perched on the windowsill.

  ‘Don’t be dumb, boffin boy,’ Blaise said.

  ‘When did you come in?’ Ezra asked him.

  ‘She’s a mosher, Dad,’ Hector said, slipping off the sill and dawdling over.

  Screwing up her face, Blaise appealed to some invisible presence between her father and her brother. ‘Do I look like someone who likes nu-metal?’

  ‘What are you, then? She is, Dad.’

  ‘You know nothing, you little hippie pre-teen,’ Blaise declared, jumping up and grabbing Hector, who let himself roll on to the sofa and be tickled by his mock irate sister. Ezra couldn’t tell whether the pleasure Hector took from this punishment was purely masochistic, or if there was a claim of superiority in riling his sister to such response. When she was satisfied with her victory, Blaise rose and marched towards the kitchen. ‘I’m going to do some cooking,’ she said.

  Ezra accorded his children what he reckoned to be their rightful autonomy, allowing them without intrusion their own interior world. Yet it irked him, somehow, the way that Blaise had begun to remove herself physically, to concrete arenas, retreating behind the clatter and racket of skateboards, the pounding resentment of rap, the indistinctly mumbled argot of urban tribes.

  Actually, hip-hop grew on him each time he clapped the earphones of Blaise’s Walkman to his head when he found it lying around, and used it to help him polish shoes or do the washing-up. Though he was just as likely to find jazz on her mini-disc, or heavy metal, or funky techno, so eclectic were his daughter’s tastes. He recalled how doctrinaire were the fine gradations marking the boundaries of musical sectarianism when he was a lad. He even found himself eavesdropping on the same punk bands that he, at thirteen, fourteen, had fiercely championed. The Ramones, The Clash, Stiff Little Fingers would pound Ezra’s ears with a raucous nostalgia.

  Blaise measured out two hundred millilitres of condensed milk in the glass jug; she weighed four hundred and fifty grams of granulated sugar on her mother’s retro scales; fifty grams of butter, twenty five of cocoa.

  ‘It’s chemistry,’ Sheena had told her. ‘Cooks have reached conclusions by trial and error. There’s a history.’ It was her one vital lesson in the kitchen. ‘If you don’t follow the recipe, when things fall apart don’t blame anyone but yourself.’

  Blaise added four teaspoons of water and two tablespoons of runny honey to the mixture in the saucepan, and began to stir it with a wooden spoon. The low gas flame was invisible in the sunlight, its hiss audible only if she leaned close to it, but the sugar dissolved and the chocolate and the butter melted. The forms in which each substance existed obeyed the heat, melting from solid separateness into one sweet liquidity.

  In between checking the recipe every two minutes to reassure herself there was nothing unexpected awaiting, Blaise grabbed her father’s measuring tape from the dresser in the hallway in order to select a cake tin as close to eighteen centimetres square as she could find. She greased it with a dab of butter, which she spread around the tin with the waxed paper the butter had been wrapped in, as she’d seen her mother do.

  The mixture heated up slowly. It wouldn’t reach boiling point until fourteen degrees hotter than water. A few bubbles at the side indicated its simmering. The cloying smell made Blaise’s mouth water. She wouldn’t repeat the mistake she once had, though, of testing a little at this stage off the wooden spoon: her tongue was scalded. She’d not regained her sense of taste for days.

  The brown mixture boiled, not frenetically like water but slowly, bubbles easing up through the surface, which became covered with tiny eruptions. Blaise watched for many minutes. It was hypnotic. It roiled and seethed in a way that indicated a transformation going on inside its conjoining molecules, whose echo Blaise seemed to sense fermenting inside her.

  Blaise poured a small plastic bowl of water from the cold tap. It was too warm, so she added a couple of ice cubes, then dropped a little of the mixture off the wooden spoon into it. When she dipped her fingers in the bowl and tried to pick it up the morsel broke up, so she tried again, and again, another smidgin every thirty seconds or so because a particular moment was about to come and she wasn’t sure how long it would last.

  After a dozen tries, a gobbet in the water bowl suddenly adhered to itself, a tiny ball. Blaise turned off the heat. The mixture continued to seethe: it had been created and was now alive, and it didn’t need the heat but carried on bubbling away. Tilting the saucepan by its handle with her left hand, Blaise began to beat the mixture with a wooden spoon. This part of the performance was a chore. It helped to concentrate on technique: you couldn’t just whirl the spoon around the pan, or zigzag it through the creamy liquid; you had to assist in the blending process, whisking the mixture by lifting spoonfuls, and folding it back on itself. The task was a laborious one, but if you concentrated, after a while you could lose yourself in it. Beating the mixture, in the way she copied Sheena doing, felt to Blaise as if she was folding a story back into itself, increasing the complexity of the storytelling, though this was a narrative told at a molecular level, not with words but chemical elements. The rearrangement of a subatomic alphabet.

  The strain of the repetitive motion told in her wrist, and in her lower arm. A discomfort which intensified, into two specific spots deep in the bundles of nerve and ligament which burned and hurt. Blaise resolved not to stop what she was doing, though, even for a second. She carried on whisking with a steady action. The pain grew even hotter, but instead of pretending it wasn’t there she focused on it and it became smaller as well, refining itself into a pair of intense but tiny needle points: withstanding her suffering altered the meaning of the sensation, from pain to one of self-mastering triumph.

  In due course Blaise felt the material beneath her spoon undergoing another transformation: the smooth liquid was thickening; it was also altering its substance in another way, becoming granular.

  Over in the sitting-room area the smell of fudge treacled the invisible air. Hector was unable, eventually, to resist it. ‘I suppose I’d better go and help Blaise clean the bowl,’ he told his father.

  Blaise was pouring the fudge from the saucepan into the greased tin when Hector strolled into the kitchen. He watched the mixture spread, finding its level. He moved a little closer as Blaise used the wooden spoon to slide as much as she could from the pan.

  ‘Shall I give you a hand?’ Hector asked.

  Blaise would put the tin in the fridge to cool, and when the fudge had set she’d cut it into squares. She could hardly wait, though; she’d planned to put the pieces into a plastic box in time for when Sheena got home, but looking at it now, brown and sweet and buttery, she thought she might just abduct the tin to her room and eat all the fudge herself, spoon by hot, sickly spoonful.

  ‘Oh, Hec,’ she replied, ‘do you think you could possibly scrape the pan?’

  He shrugged. ‘Well, if you want me to, I don’t mind.’

  Hector gazed at the sugary chocolate stuck to the bottom and sides of the satisfyingly large saucepan. Blaise took the tin over to the fridge.

  ‘I hope it’s not too hard, like last time,’ Hector said. ‘It was like toffee. I almost cracked a tooth.’

  ‘Make sure you clean everything and clear away,’ Blaise told him.

  Hector took a dessert spoon from the cutlery drawer. ‘You should never overcook fudge,’ he murmured, and began to scrape.

  Blaise’s footsteps up the stairs dissolved into Louie’s scampering down. He ran to the window and, standing on tiptoe, said, ‘Daddy! Daddy! Look!’

  Ezra tumbled off the sofa and ambled over. A thin man was cycling along Wellington Drive. He was bent forward and pedalling furiously, but his progress was slow and precarious, for he carried under his right arm a stiff length of rolled-up carpet. He looked like a sc
rawny looter, Ezra thought, who’d stolen someone’s old rug. He appeared almost acrobatic in a faltering way.

  Ezra spotted a muddied spade sticking out of a pannier, just as Louie asked, ‘What dat man id doing?’

  ‘I reckon he’s taking that carpet to his allotment, Peanut,’ Ezra guessed.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s an old carpet, he’s going to use it for mulching.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He’ll put it on the ground to stop weeds growing where he wants to grow vegetables.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We can’t eat weeds.’

  ‘Why not?’

  When the boy got into Why? mode you had to pause him, point his brain towards an obstacle. ‘I’ll let you try some weeds for tea and you can see for yourself.’

  That seemed to do the trick: Louie pondered. They gazed out together, at the bright and empty street. Then from Nelson Avenue came an elderly lady on a rickety, black sit-up-and-beg bicycle. As they watched her pass Louie said, ‘Daddy, why dat lady not got carpet?’

  ‘Damn good question, Peanut,’ Ezra said. ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know.’

  ‘I will do drawing, Daddy,’ Louie said, with sudden zeal. ‘I will do a cowboy on a horse.’

  ‘Good idea.’

  ‘I will show it to you.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Staring at the ceiling, Ezra could hear Hector practising his guitar. Blaise was around at the weekend more often than she used to be. ‘We’re going to the Village,’ she used to inform him on a Saturday morning, catching the bus with a couple of friends to trawl through the mall outside Bicester, partaking of England’s passagiatta round the shops.

  How pleasant it was when all the children were at home in the sagging middle of a weekend day: each doing their own thing for a while, then getting itchy for company and a change of scene; they’d visit each other, or come down like Louie now, who carried paper and crayons and without a word to his father proceeded to kneel on the floorboards and draw.