Blenheim Orchard Read online

  ‘Most days that’s all I have. You know that, Mum.’ Blaise made for the door.

  ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart,’ Sheena said, doing the same.

  The kitchen was cramped with table, chairs and bodies, obstacles to Blaise’s attempt to overtake her mother and reach the door first.

  ‘Come on, Bee,’ Sheena said. ‘Give me a hug.’

  ‘No,’ Blaise said, heading for a gap that Sheena was closing rapidly.

  ‘Go on. I said I’m sorry.’

  They met in the doorway. Blaise’s options were to accept Sheena’s apology or try to wrestle her out of the way. She chose the latter, to Ezra’s dismay, and the two of them grasped at each other in combat holds. Only for what he saw to reorder itself, in a blink of his eye, the image or his perception of it clarifying as mother and daughter, in their matching white bathrobes, embraced. And then they ambled upstairs together. ‘Just don’t think I’m going swimming, that’s all,’ he could hear Blaise say, in a good-natured tone of voice.

  Silence fell. Ezra met the gaze of his two sons. What could he tell them? He shrugged in a way which he trusted to convey both the insoluble mystery of female behaviour and the boys’ need for tolerance. Patience. ‘Impossible to explain,’ he said. ‘A different juju.’

  ‘Juju,’ Louie laughed. ‘Dat id funny.’

  ‘Yes, that is funny,’ Ezra agreed. ‘Now you two get on upstairs, battle it out for the bathroom.’

  Louie looked up at Hector. ‘Chase me!’ he said.

  Hector peered down at his brother. ‘One,’ he said. ‘Two.’

  Louie ran chuckling for the stairs.

  ‘Dad?’ Hector said. ‘Mum said what the second rule of family life is. What’s the first?’

  Ezra fed two dirty bowls to the dishwasher. He frowned. ‘What do you reckon?’ he asked.

  Hector screwed up his eyes, and scratched his ear. ‘Mum and Dad are always right?’

  Ezra clicked a finger at him. ‘Spot on, soldier,’ he said. ‘Very funny.’

  Hector nodded gravely, and turned to the door. ‘Three!’ he yelled. ‘Coming!’ And ran from the room.

  They rode in convoy along Oakthorpe Road, and over Banbury Road at the crossing and down through the car park, Ezra first with Louie in the child seat behind him, then Hector, and Sheena bringing up the rear. At Ferry Sports Centre Hector led the way into the Men’s changing room.

  ‘Come on, you two,’ Hector exhorted. ‘Let’s beat Mummy.’ He yanked T-shirt, shorts and pants off in a cartoonish flurry of skinny limbs; pulled on swimming trunks. ‘Oh, hurry up, Dad,’ he moaned, as his father sat on the bench and began untying his shoe laces.

  ‘You go ahead,’ Ezra said.

  Hector shovelled his clobber into a locker and pattered off, scratched goggles swinging from his hand.

  Louie extricated himself from his clothes item by item, then folded each one neatly. He pulled his diminutive trunks up to his paunchy torso. By the time he and his father entered the green shimmering light of the cavernous swimming hall, Sheena was already ploughing her lonely furrow, an early one of the forty Olympian lengths of the main pool that she would complete. Hector, two or three lanes away from her, conducted an energetically ineffective backstroke, his goggles lending him a lunatic seriousness.

  The high ceiling of the hall amplified the yells and splashes of the swimmers, an echoey resonance that gave a sense of excited anticipation. Ezra and Louie walked hand in hand across the wet, slippery tiles to the learner pool. Some people liked to plunge into chilly water. Let them, if that’s what they wanted: Ezra was happy to return to the womb, to loll in warm liquid while Louie splashed around, to feel his joints yield and his limbs stretch. Watching the other top-heavy dads, ludicrous in their near-nakedness, failed experiments of nature. A tattooed father from the Cutteslowe estate; a couple of north Oxford professionals; a visiting academic or two from distant cloisters of the earth. Ezra found himself surrounded by a multicultural apology for manhood with narrow shoulders, thin legs, gross bellies which could only be excused, surely, if they were food stores, like camels’, ready to sustain their carriers on some long swim, some cross-Channel loll to come.

  Toddlers in one-piece swimsuits, lined with compartments holding precious white ingots of polystyrene, floated like jellyfish. Five-year-olds with orange armbands splashed a turbulent doggy-paddle with which they made no discernible progress, while others who’d been granted the secret of buoyancy slithered through the water like eels.

  Ezra towed Louie around the pool. ‘Kick, Louie! Kick your feet.’ He watched the women too, their shapes as unlikely as the men’s. This fat young matriarch, that one coming in now with splendid legs, alarming low bosom. There a skinny waif in a bikini whose children had left no trace of their occupancy, except for stretch marks etched on her flat abdomen. Here a woman gracefully lowering her chunky body into the pool. Ezra was surprised by the urge to bite them. He floated in the too-warm water and imagined gliding from one to another and sinking his teeth into some sweet part of their anatomy – until a part of his anatomy made its presence felt, and he looked away. At the barefoot young lifesavers in their yellow polo shirts and red shorts, observing like umpires from their high chairs.

  Ezra caught occasional glimpses of regular swimmers walking from the changing room to the cold, big pool. Some of those women were sleek, healthy animals. Were they more or less sexy than these tired mothers? They churned up and down in the cold, chlorinated water; after a certain number of lengths they climbed out and strode back across the tiles. Regimented exercise, joyless, a frigid kind of thing to do. No wonder Sheena, just emerging over there, wearing the white bathing cap, practised it. It was weird, really: him, this lazy sensualist, and her, marching back towards the changing rooms. No, Ezra preferred to float here with the other indolent Dads, in this water, warm as the Mediterranean he and his family no longer swam in.

  Sheena and Hector were out and showered, dressed and halfway home by the time Ezra coaxed Louie from the pool, their fingers wrinkled, only by reminding him of the sweets machine out in the corridor. In the shower room they peeled off their trunks and stood naked at the urinal, father and son, thirty-nine and three, the warm water having loosened Ezra’s muscles and ducts, and peed together. Louie bent his knees, leaned back and craned forward, so that he could watch himself grasping his little penis with both hands, and direct the proud flow before him.

  ‘Come on, boychick,’ Ezra said. ‘Ready for the shower?’

  ‘Look at this.’ Jed Wilson urged Blaise over. ‘This is what it said.’ He had the tousled hair and pinched eyes of someone who’d only just, this Sunday noon, awoken.

  Blaise studied a newspaper photograph of the outside of the house in which she now stood, torn from the Property section of the Oxford Times. In case she was blind, Jed read out for her the words below. ‘Sunnymead. Large property located in this most sought-after area of Oxford.’

  Bobby Sewell sat on the floor. He’d phoned to invite Blaise round. ‘My little saviour,’ he called her. Using the corkscrew of a Swiss army knife he was opening the bottle of her father’s wine which Blaise had brought. ‘In this most conveniently situated side road,’ he added to Jed’s description of their abode, using a strangled voice he imagined appropriate for estate agent speak. ‘In this most attractive avenue.’

  ‘With outline planning consent for demolition,’ Jed continued, ‘and the construction of three luxury town houses.’ He turned to Blaise. ‘You know, like, mate, what the fuck is that?’

  ‘It’s fill-in development,’ said a third man, quietly, whom Blaise had not met before.

  ‘We call it in-fill, Zack,’ said Bobby. To Blaise he said, ‘It was decent of the estate agents to draw our attention to it.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what it is,’ Jed said. ‘It’s vandalism, that’s what it is. There’s nothing wrong with this house. It’s a beauty.’

  ‘Bit new for my taste,’ Bobby said.

  ‘New?’ Blaise asked. ‘
How old is it?’

  After a pause, in which neither of the other two answered, Zack said, ‘1922. It’s written above the front door.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Jed. ‘Have a look around. It’s bigger than you’d think.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Bobby, proudly.

  Blaise explored the empty rooms alone. The upstairs had a strong smell, more powerful than any house she’d been in before, as if a family’s furniture, clothes, belongings neutralised a building’s personality, which had now been liberated and could express itself, for the first time in eighty years. This one smelled mustily organic, she thought. Of dried or drying plants.

  There were four bedrooms, three of which the men had commandeered, the unbrushed wooden floors scattered with a debris of clothes, sleeping bags, thin foam mattresses. What exactly was she doing here, Blaise wondered. What did she want from Jed or Bobby? Why hadn’t she gone swimming with the rest of her family? She enjoyed swimming. The musty smell of the house was not, she decided, unpleasant. Old wood, and tobacco. A suggestion of greenhouses. Bonfires. The house was fixed in autumn. What had happened to her friends? They were cordial enough at school; didn’t she want to see them at the weekend? Well, apart from Akhmed, her mobile wasn’t exactly stacked up with requests for her company.

  Blaise went back downstairs. What did she think, or hope, that Jed or Bobby might want from her? Bobby was in what was probably the sitting-room, at the front of the house. There was a picture rail running around the dirty white walls; she could see where paintings had once hung. Bobby had a pot of purple paint, and was daubing a sentence around the room. So far the large, uneven letters spelled out, FORESTS PRECEED CIVILIZATIONS, DESERTS FOLL…

  Blaise went through to the back room, where Jed and Zack drank red wine from mugs.

  ‘What do you reckon?’ Jed asked. ‘Not bad, eh?’

  ‘How long do you think you’ll be able to stay?’ Blaise wondered.

  Jed shrugged. ‘We’ve got a couple more mates hitching down from up north tomorrow.’

  Blaise sat cross-legged on the hard floor. She glanced towards Zack, to find him studying her. His face was unshaven around a blond moustache. He looked down, at the scuffed knees of his jeans. ‘Are you the girl who got arrested?’ he asked, before glancing back up at her.

  Blaise nodded. She wondered what they’d told him; what he thought.

  ‘She’s one spunky kid,’ Jed said. ‘Bobby was in trouble.’

  ‘I hope it helped the cause,’ Zack said softly. His long, thin limbs were folded at the joints like tent stretchers.

  ‘Don’t start,’ Jed said curtly.

  Suddenly, Blaise wanted to tell this Zack she wasn’t sure how proud she was of what she’d done. That since it happened she kept seeing the man’s bloodied face, and hearing his disbelieving groan. But Jed and Bobby thought, just like Sheena, that she’d done something wonderful, and it was easier to take shelter in their good opinion than to brave a cheerless search for her own.

  ‘All I’m saying,’ Zack murmured, ‘is people need somewhere to live.’

  Bobby came into the room, his dreads flecked with purple paint, just as Jed said, ‘Yeh, well, maybe they should do what we’re doing.’

  ‘He’s not starting again, is he?’ Bobby asked. He had the paintbrush in his hand, and as he passed through towards the kitchen he leaned deftly towards Zack and splodged his nose bright purple. Zack ducked away too late. Without a word he lifted his T-shirt, and wiped the paint off his nose with it, as best he could without a mirror. Blaise saw the thin skin of his belly creased into narrow folds. A line of brown hairs rose from his jeans to his belly button.

  Bobby washed the brush in the kitchen sink.

  ‘Running water,’ Jed told Blaise. ‘What more could we ask for?’

  She turned to Zack. ‘Do you do anything?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeh,’ said Jed. ‘He’s got an allotment.’

  Bobby came back, wiping his wet hands on his unwashed combat trousers. ‘He’s going to spend the summer growing vegetables, aren’t you, Zackie?’

  ‘Who for?’ Blaise asked.

  ‘Tell her, Zack,’ Jed demanded. ‘We all want to know: who for?’

  ‘I just believe you have to start with yourself,’ Zack said quietly.

  ‘There’s your answer,’ Jed laughed. ‘That’s how to change the world. Start with yourself.’

  ‘Fiddle while the earth burns,’ said Bobby, lighting a cigarette and coughing with laughter. ‘Any of that wine left for the workers?’

  Zack sat with his head bowed, his shoulders hunched. Blaise realised that she was laughing, too.

  ‘Zack’s going to lead the vegetables in the revolution!’ Jed announced. Bobby high-fived him.

  Blaise chuckled. It occurred to her that they were making fun of Zack for being apolitical, just as kids at school made fun of her for her political involvement. But then she heard herself say quietly, as if against her own will, yet still loud enough for everyone to hear, ‘Zack’s Zucchinis!’

  And Bobby, gulping her father’s wine, turned to high-five Blaise, too.

  At seven-thirty that evening Simon and Minty Carlyle strolled around the side of the Pepins’ house, tapped on the glass pane of the kitchen door and let themselves in. Sheena was testing a dish for flavour.

  ‘Hello there,’ they cooed. ‘Hi.’

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Come in,’ Ezra sang. He was opening a bottle of Chianti: the corkscrew’s wings lifted like ears at the approach of thirsty guests. ‘Come in.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Sheena, ‘running a bit late here.’ She stepped aside from the stove to greet Simon and Minty holding her arms out to the sides, a spatula in one hand and a pepper pot in the other.

  ‘You look like a seventeenth-century painting,’ Simon told her. ‘Allegory of Gluttony. Be far better nude, of course.’

  ‘Oh, get away, you!’ Sheena told him in mock indignation.

  The two couples exchanged kisses to each pair of cheeks. Minty pressed for a little more than the others, putting one arm around first Ezra’s back, then Sheena’s, and pushing her upper body against theirs in a meaningful semblance of an embrace. It said, Of course if we didn’t see each other practically every day, at yours, at ours, at school, you blokes on the tennis court each Friday morning there doesn’t happen to be the last stand of the Friends of the Wasteland, then we’d enjoy a great big bear hug because we’re so close. In the meantime here’s an indication, at least, of the fullness of that friendship.

  ‘Take a look at this wine,’ Ezra invited Simon. ‘Adrian had, what, a dozen bin-end bottles? I bought six. Less than a fiver each, it’s laughable.’

  ‘Good, is it? “Castello di Fonterutoli”.’

  ‘The Mazzei family. Reckoned to be the best Chianti vineyards.’

  ‘“2000.” Good year, was it?’

  ‘That I’m not sure, Simon. The best year, wasn’t it? Or was that 2001?’

  ‘One or the other, surely,’ Simon frowned. ‘I wouldn’t like to stake my reputation on which.’

  ‘Of course, I may be thinking of France.’

  Either Sheena or Minty might have recalled a little more about the vintage of recent Italian wines, but each of them knew better by now than to interrupt. Whether Ezra believed he and Simon were modest connoisseurs, or whether he was merely burlesquing the role, Sheena was never quite certain. She meant to ask him after guests had gone, and always forgot.

  Soon they were seated around the table and tucking in to pasta.

  ‘Oh, Sheena,’ Minty exclaimed, ‘what is it? You have to tell us.’

  Sheena’s mouth was full. ‘It’s fresh fusilli,’ Ezra said.

  ‘Literally, little spindles,’ said Simon.

  ‘From that place in the covered market,’ Ezra continued.

  ‘Well, sure, sport. I didn’t mean the pasta.’

  ‘Tuna,’ Sheena said.

  ‘No, but there’s something else, isn’t there?’

  ‘Lemon.�
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  ‘Of course there’s lemon, Ezra, we can all taste the lemon. But what is it? Oh, it’s delicious, Sheena.’

  ‘Yes, yes, indeed,’ Simon felt obliged to mumble.

  ‘Pine nuts, obviously. Garlic. Parsley.’

  ‘Right, Minty.’

  ‘Anchovies?’ Ezra enquired.

  ‘Anchovy?’ Sheena demanded. ‘Are you serious? You think there’s anchovy in here?’ Her mouth had assumed the shape of a smile, but Ezra suspected this was misleading. ‘I’ve been cooking meals for you for fifteen years and you think this tastes of anchovy?’

  ‘Ah. Capers,’ said Minty, rolling one against the roof of her mouth with her tongue.

  ‘Yes,’ Sheena smiled.

  ‘I got it!’ Minty declared.

  ‘But what else?’

  ‘More? Great. Don’t tell us! Let me guess again.’

  After salad, and fruit, they took coffee and the chocolates the Carlyles had brought through to the sitting-room area, Ezra following Simon’s dishevelled figure, trying hard to shift focus from Simon’s bald spot shining out, under the halogen lights, from his lanky grey hair. A spray of fine dandruff was scattered across the shoulders of his blue silk shirt.

  ‘But you have to admit,’ Simon was telling him, in his high-pitched voice, which made him sound like a much younger man. ‘I mean, not wishing to blow my own trumpet or anything, but there can’t be too many domestic architects who’ve taken part in protest at a housing development.’

  ‘Blaise upstairs?’ Minty asked Sheena.

  ‘She ate with Hector and Louie,’ Sheena nodded. ‘She’s torn between joining the grown-ups and the tedium of our conversation.’

  ‘Hey, I didn’t tell you, darling,’ Ezra cut across. ‘Blaise had this call yesterday.’ He told her – and their friends – about the boy with whom Blaise may or may not have held hands.

  ‘Well, that was probably Akhmed, wasn’t it?’ Minty asked.

  Ezra and Sheena stared blankly at her.

  ‘I’m sure Ed told me.’ Minty arched an eyebrow. ‘Aren’t they a bit of an item?’

  ‘An item?’ Ezra demanded. ‘Who is he?’