Blenheim Orchard Read online

  With his eyes closed Ezra pictured the slow, migratory flow of his children around the house in the tedium of a Saturday afternoon. There was Monday’s meeting to be prepared for, a decent bottle of wine to be bought for Sunday night, and Hector needed a new pair of swimming trunks for the morning. But there on the sofa Ezra lay through the afternoon, a paterfamilias visited by his children for no other reason than to reaffirm each other’s existence.

  Eight years earlier Sheena Pepin had herded her family home from an enervating summer fortnight in drought-stricken Provence like some bedraggled platoon retreating. The children were bad-tempered, the drive was a slow haul back up through France in an overheating car, and there was a long delay at the docks before they could board the ferry back across the Channel to Poole.

  Sheena’s friend Jill McTear’s package holiday to Greece, meanwhile, had been cancelled when the operator went bust. Finding themselves at home for two weeks with no obligations, no one aware of their presence, Jill and her husband and two daughters pretended their house was a villa they’d rented in a strange city. They toured Oxford in an open-top bus, spent a morning in the Ashmolean, another in the Pitt Rivers. They took in the exhibition of Willy Ronis photographs at MOMA, saw A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Wadham College Garden and Free Willy 2 at the MGM in Magdalen Street. They played LaserQuest at Gloucester Green, went swimming at the leisure centre in Abingdon, and gambled away a fortune of pound coins at the dogs in Blackbird Leys. Tarried in Freud’s on Walton Street to write postcards. Wish you were here. Actually, you are. Walked around with craned necks and a copy of John Blackwood’s book, studying the secret gargoyles of Oxford.

  ‘It’s true,’ Sheena responded. ‘We never do these things. We’re too busy.’

  The only person the McTears told that they were home was their babysitter, so that Jill and Ted were able to go out to eat at Gees, Al-Shami, Aziz on Cowley Road. Jack Gibbons played Gershwin in Holywell Music Room. They revitalised their relationship with the city, and at night they slept in their own beds. The fortnight ended too soon on the most relaxed and enjoyable holiday the McTear family had ever had, and thus was born in the two women’s kitchen conversations – each looking to get into some new, part-time line of work, both Jill’s younger girl and Hector starting playgroup – the idea of a travel company that would offer itineraries for people in the Oxford area to have a holiday without the cost or discomfort or stress of check-in deadlines and flight delays, sickness and sunburn, lost luggage, the misunderstandings that arise from foreigners’ inadequate English, hard beds, soft beds, hostile insects and bad drivers.

  The selling point of Home Holidays, what made it more than a xenophobic gimmick, or an indulgent hobby – an increasingly profitable business, indeed – was that it was an ethical enterprise, one that afforded its clients a sense of virtue and relief: their vacations were kind to the planet. No aeroplane fuel fouled the benighted atmosphere; no gallons of petroleum burned out on the autobahns of Europe – or even motorways to the English coast.

  Stay Home. Stay Calm. Respect the Earth.

  Home Holidays

  Sheena threw herself into the business. For twelve months she and Jill performed research: they visited medieval churches with extant doom paintings, followed the journey sewerage takes out of the city, produced maps of picnic spots in wildflower meadows and cycle routes around town. With their husbands suddenly babysitting every evening Jill and Sheena checked out live music, at Catweazle and the Bullingdon as well as the Sheldonian, and they started up their company with a simple brochure.

  Tell Your Friends You’ve Gone Away

  Then Stay.

  Home Holidays

  Home Holidays was supposed to be halfway between a hobby and a business for two women with young children, but Sheena found that she not only enjoyed meetings with the bank manager, a PR consultant, prospective advertising clients; she was also very good at them. Efficient, straightforward, authoritative. The business grew and after two years working out of Jill’s spare bedroom they rented the same inaccessible office in the centre of town in which they were now, seven years later, reviewing the data for their eighth town or city: Cheltenham.

  ‘We’re looking at reenactment of the Regency atmosphere,’ Sheena conjectured. ‘It was a spa and a summer resort. Its inhabitants would stay to be pampered, wouldn’t they?’.

  ‘The population was less than seventy two thousand as recently as 1960,’ Jill noted.

  Sheena pondered as she spun slowly round in her chair. ‘We need to emphasise the post-modern mix of flavours that money buys.’

  Jill pored over their notes. ‘Over fifty per cent of wards in Cheltenham have a greater than average proportion of pensioners living alone, compared to the rest of England.’

  For Sheena, Jill was an ideal business partner, a large, affable woman with whom she’d been friends since they met in a health visitor’s clinic at a doctors’ surgery on Beaumont Street, two tired women with tiny first-born babies.

  There was no doubt, Ezra reckoned, that Sheena was drawn to stolid, diffident people, as they were drawn to her, and she and Jill developed the company with a gradual but insistent annual increase in turnover.

  ‘Jill does the paperwork,’ Ezra once explained to Simon and Minty Carlyle, ‘Sheena makes the decisions,’ which wasn’t true at all, he admitted – in response to Sheena’s outrage at the imputation of both bossiness and laziness – ‘except fundamentally.’ In fact Sheena worked hard, and Jill laid out the pros and cons of where to publicise or with which entertainments agency to sign a contract, but Jill needed Sheena to rubberstamp the most trivial decisions with the imprimatur of her assertiveness, and her instinct for how the company should grow.

  ‘Latvia,’ Hector broadcast from the blue glow of the computer screen. ‘Albania, Daddy. I don’t like it. You’re surrounding us.’

  ‘Get off that thing, damn you, boy,’ Ezra ordered from the floor, where he was constructing a train track with Louie. ‘We pay BT by the minute. It’s costing your mother and I a fortune.’

  ‘That’s why it’s so slow. You should get broadband, Daddy. Belarus,’ Hector sighed.

  ‘You heard your father,’ said Blaise, coming into the room. ‘Log off, Hec.’

  Hector peered at the screen. ‘Guess who’s expecting a call,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you use your mobile?’

  ‘Mind your own business,’ Blaise said. ‘Daddy. Lou. Anyone want a piece of fudge?’

  The Pepin family moved house in 1998, after the Blenheim Orchard estate was built on a trapezium-shaped plot north east of the Wasteland between the canal and Woodstock Road. Hemmed in between houses on one side and hedges on another, behind the sports pavilion of the college which owned it, the site was, when opened up, much bigger than Ezra Pepin – who’d cycled by each week on his way to tennis in Summertown – could have imagined. Especially after the neglected, unpruned fruit trees, their twisted branches grown in amongst each other like the hair of some tribe of wild women, had been cut down. A hundred apple, pear and damson trees were cleared, but their existence commemorated for ever in the name of the estate they’d made way for.

  Ezra was promoted across to Operations at the same time as it became clear to Sheena that, barring catastrophe, Home Holidays and homeholidays.com would soon pay for a higher mortgage. The Pepins visited the show home at Blenheim Orchard. It had a Victorian revival exterior, high spec finish interior, classic and contemporary in perfect harmony, and it looked pleased with itself, a sprightly younger sibling of the old houses across Woodstock Road. Ezra and Sheena put a deposit on one of the five-bedroomed town houses, with two parking spaces each, on Wellington Drive. It was only later, on the day they moved in, that they realised each room in the show home had been stocked with three-quarter-size furniture. But the move meant a room for each of the two children, a spare bedroom, and a study for Ezra.

  ‘You’ll finish your thesis once and for all,’ Sheena promised.

  It was about a we
ek later that Sheena announced her third, entirely unplanned, pregnancy, the product of a night they took a chance on dates and cycles: Louie duly joined the family, and before he knew it Ezra’s office was back in the spare room.

  While his children played and squabbled around him on this first hot day of 2003 Ezra recalled the Pepins’ last family holiday abroad, that sweltering fortnight in Provence in which they shared gîtes with other families of Sheena’s tribe. Blaise and Hector had trotted off each morning to join their cousins, and somehow Ezra and Sheena found themselves alone together for large chunks of each day for the first time since before Blaise was born. It was too hot to move, they spent afternoon siestas and nights sweating, uncovered, sleepless, and Sheena turned on as Ezra had never known her. Heat and fatigue seemed to remove them from their bodies, which they watched with interest crawl towards each other. They wanted to make love all the time, more than they ever had, even when they’d first got together; almost as much as they wanted to sleep: after sex they slid into sticky unconsciousness.

  In between bouts of sleep they answered the craving of their bodies with more sex, greedy flesh slipping and slithering against sweating flesh. How great their last real holiday had been, Ezra remembered. Back home, Sheena started the company, and they’d not been abroad again.

  ‘Macedonia,’ Hector said. ‘A new office opened in Skopje. Wonder how they get on with the one in Thessalonika, Daddy?’

  ‘Hector,’ Ezra implored. ‘Please.’

  Hector gazed at his father, then rose from the chair and drifted away. Blaise leaned forward, steered the mouse and clicked to get offline. As she did so the telephone rang. Hector plucked the cordless receiver off the table.

  ‘Pepin residence,’ he intoned solemnly. ‘Hector Pepin here. How may we help you? Certainly, Akhmed, she’s right …’

  Blaise took the receiver off her brother. ‘It’s me,’ she said, and listened. She collected a few strands of hair in her fingers. ‘I’m not sure,’ she murmured. ‘I’m studying.’ She fed the hair she’d gathered into her mouth, and chewed it as she listened some more. Then she opened her mouth and let her hair fall out. A few strands remained, stuck to her lips with saliva. She blew them away. ‘I suppose so,’ she said. Then Blaise looked up. Her eyes registered that her father and both her brothers were idly watching. ‘Hang on,’ she said into the receiver. Holding it to her chest, she exited the room and trotted upstairs.

  Hector picked his way across the toy-strewn floor. Standing above his father, he gazed out of the window.

  ‘Turkey, Daddy. Ismit. Now that you’re part of this corporation.’

  ‘I’ve explained,’ Ezra said. ‘Isis Water has been taken over by a large German company, called DeutscheWasser. We’re only owned by them. We’re still a separate little outfit in Oxford.’

  ‘It’s not just bottles, Daddy. You provide tap water now. Waste water. Pipes. Sewerage plants. You’re huge. You’re spreading to the edge of Europe. Beyond.’

  ‘I am not Isis Water, Hector. I’m a lowly nobody in Operations. You know that.’

  Hector frowned. Unconvinced. ‘You’re going global, Daddy.’

  Ezra gazed at his son. So serious, always had been. Ezra had already accumulated more tickling, wrestling, rough and tumble hours on the carpet with Peanut Louie than he had in eleven years with Hector. His older boy had the curiosity of a pessimist who needs to know exactly what it is that’s likely to spring upon him. He’d got a bee in his bonnet and already he knew more about the structure of the sprawling company that employed his father than Ezra did. The sun through the window behind Hector haloed his fine-boned, delicate face. His hostage to adolescence, as Sheena called it.

  ‘What’s your point?’ Ezra asked him.

  ‘I worry they’ll send you overseas,’ Hector said, frowning. ‘To one of those places. Far away.’

  Ezra smiled. ‘Don’t worry, my darling. Your father has no exportable skills whatsoever.’

  Blaise’s voice came through from the hall. ‘I’m going out,’ she yelled. ‘See you later.’

  ‘When?’ Ezra called back.

  ‘Whenever. It’s Saturday, remember?’

  With that Blaise clearly considered the exchange over: Ezra heard the front door close. He stood up and walked through to the kitchen, where he pulled the three-quarters-full black bag from the swing-bin. He twirled plaits out of opposite sides and tied them together, and carried the bag through the house. He walked out of the front door, between the cars and round to the dustbin under its lean-to. Only having dropped the bag in and replaced the lid, the whole process accomplished with swift efficiency, did Ezra Pepin look up. There at the end of Wellington Drive he saw Blaise walk the last few yards towards a boy of similar age. Dark skinned. Asian. Sleek black hair. The boy made no move towards Blaise, but waited for her on the pavement. As she reached him he turned with her, and they began to round the corner into Churchill Avenue side by side. And for just a moment before they disappeared Ezra saw, or thought he saw, his hand join hers.

  4

  Swimming

  Sunday 22 June

  There was silence in the kitchen. Padding feet could be heard descending the stairs. Sheena slouched in, dressed in Ezra’s white cotton towelling dressing-gown, eyes closed, groping like a blind woman. ‘Morning,’ she greeted people. ‘Thanks for the bathroom-door slam, Louie. On a blinking Sunday.’

  Louie grinned. ‘Dat wad funny.’

  ‘No, that wasn’t funny,’ Ezra admonished him.

  Unable yet to summon the strength to raise her eyelids, Sheena emptied the remains of a bottle of orange juice into a glass by touch alone. ‘You know what I hate?’ she asked. ‘That the council won’t take plastic in our recycling box.’ She held the empty bottle out towards the swing-bin, as if a servant might pop up to take it from her. But she must have been focusing what energy she had, because all of a sudden her hand jerked from the wrist and the bottle spun, glanced off the top of the bin and fell to the tiles with a hopeful, hollow clatter. ‘I hate we have to put plastic in the bin.’

  ‘Or try to, anyway,’ said Ezra. ‘Stay there. I’ll do you some toast.’

  Even if she hadn’t attended another campfire vigil at the Wasteland the night before, Sheena Pepin would have woken slowly. Emerging from sleep, she required a period of decompression before entering the atmospheric pressure of her day. Breakfast had to be taken in stages, her metabolism and digestion eased into action. She took a sip of orange to prime the pump. ‘Where’s Blaise?’ she asked.

  Louie shrugged. ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘Asleep,’ said Ezra. He placed a plate of toast with jam in front of Sheena, and a large mug of tea.

  ‘Where’s Hector?’

  Before either of the others could betray him, Hector gave himself away with a twitch and rustle of newspaper.

  ‘What on earth do you think you’re doing up there?’ Sheena demanded.

  Hector kept his reader’s head bowed. ‘Nothing,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Did you know he was up there?’ she asked Ezra. ‘Those cupboards are not designed to take your weight, for God’s sake, Hector. Don’t act like an idiot, because you’re certainly not.’

  Hector up in the shadows began turning red in stages. The boy blushed one zone at a time. It began with his neck and rose, creeping up over his chin and along his jaw.

  ‘If that corner cupboard falls off the wall,’ Sheena told him, ‘not only will you be injured, but there’ll also be one heck of a mess.’

  A crimson rash spread across Hector’s skin, suffusing his cheeks, reddening his forehead, making his pale ears glow in the gloom.

  ‘I can’t believe you knew he was up there, Ezra.’

  Hector did his best to keep a low profile, to drift beneath the parental radar. But he was drawn to the tops of things. He climbed chests of drawers and wardrobes and hid his days there reading, or watching what went on below from up above the lights. When he was younger he’d monkey around rooms from one pi
ece of furniture to another without touching the ground: take hours reconnoitring the sitting room, planning his route with the pernicketiness of a mountaineer, adjusting an elaborate circuit with a shift of an armchair an inch this way or that for a precise increase of difficulty.

  ‘In dangerous situations, Daddy,’ Hector would explain, ‘what we climbers do is eliminate risk.’

  Ezra admired his son’s shy, scientific eccentricity. Hector now clambered down first to the work surface – Sheena was quite right, Ezra admitted: Hector looked far too big for such a stunt – then to the floor, and took his silent place at the table. There he spread pieces of toast with careful layers: one with marmalade and tomato ketchup, the other with Marmite, peanut butter and honey. Ezra tried not to watch Hector chomp his disgusting breakfast, doing so in a dutiful manner that gave no hint of pleasure. Sheena chewed hers with drowsy jaws. Louie crunched a dry Weetabix. Ezra drank his second mug of tea – already, after cereal, less pleasant-tasting than the first one of the day.

  By the time Blaise appeared, the others were rising. Her lips were puffy, her eyes swollen, with sleep.

  ‘Want to eat, better hurry,’ Sheena said.

  Blaise surveyed the wreckage of breakfast strewn across the table: soiled crockery and cutlery, small puddles of sugar-brown milk, bloody globules of raspberry jam, crust-crumb shrapnel.

  ‘Gross.’ Blaise made for the fridge. ‘I’ll just have juice.’ She was wearing Sheena’s white bathrobe, having recently outgrown her own, a pink one with a picture of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on the pocket.

  ‘Mummy did dink juice,’ Louie chuckled. Blaise continued to the fridge, where she saw confirmed her brother’s blab. ‘Mummy did do dat.’

  ‘Mum?’ Blaise demanded, aghast.

  ‘First come, first served, sweetheart,’ Sheena shrugged, getting up from her seat. ‘Second rule of family life.’

  ‘You know that’s all I have.’

  Louie turned to Ezra with a serious frown and said, ‘Blaise do like cereal some times.’