Blenheim Orchard

by Tim Pears

  ‘Their health improved considerably,’ said Gideon.

  ‘A healthy consumer is a happy consumer,’ said Chrissie.

  ‘And all of us, when we consume, are children,’ Roger Slocock said.

  ‘What we should never forget,’ Ezra finalised, ‘is this: that our customers don’t buy the water. They buy the bottle.’

  At which everyone looked again at the artefacts Kevin Banfield had created, and the room filled once more with applause.

  The trolley was wheeled smoothly out of the boardroom. Along the carpeted corridor of the sixth floor ambled the four members of the team; shoulders back, they entered the lift in silence, and ignored each other, avoided the gaze that would give them away, until the lift had slid into motion and passed the floor below. Gideon Juffkin started hammering the aluminium panelling with his fists. Ezra closed his eyes and dropped his head back on his neck, relishing the adrenaline alive in him. Chrissie let out a long shriek, and Roger growled, ‘We are beautiful,’ and they cared not who might have stopped and stared as the lift descended through four more storeys to the ground.

  When they got back to Operations, Ezra said, ‘Let’s postmortem this before you chaps disappear.’ But no one cold sit still around his desk, so they walked out across the open-plan floor towards the stairs.

  ‘We own this building!’ said Gideon.

  ‘We’re the Four Musketeers,’ said Roger Slocock.

  ‘I’m D’Artagnan,’ said Chrissie Barwell.

  ‘I’m the old one, I guess,’ said Ezra. ‘Who was that? Athos?’

  ‘Hey, Ez, don’t you know?’ said Chrissie, punching his shoulder. ‘Old is the new young.’

  Ezra laughed. ‘You can mock, girl,’ he said. ‘But as long as my quick IQ speeds remain better than yours, may your jibes turn to ashes in your mouth.’

  ‘Yeh, Chris,’ said Roger. ‘Leave da boss alone.’

  ‘Come on,’ Ezra said. ‘Let’s have lunch together.’ He led his team to the canteen, feeling a little like a popular teacher, which really was somewhat ironic.

  Sheena Boycott had met Ezra Pepin not long after his return from the South American rainforest at the age of twenty-four with his notes and his records of consanguinuity, marriage taboos, trade relations; of hunting rituals, shamanistic practice, intoxicants. His task was contained, all he had to do was collate the material he’d gathered and write it up, and although Sheena had the sense that something of his experience in Paraguay haunted him, he wouldn’t admit to it.

  Anthropology, Ezra explained to his girlfriend, had taken fifty years to become an established and respected academic discipline. Then it started breaking apart. Study of the Other as an objective act was implicitly flawed: power relations between academic and primitive; anthropology as a continuance of colonialism; the subjective nature of observation which purported to be objective. These and other objections began to rupture the surface of the subject, Ezra explained drily, as if to assure Sheena he was giving her information about his academic discipline, and certainly not about himself. He’d always been intrigued, he said, by different cultures’ attitudes to childhood and youth. When an opportunity to visit a Jesuit mission in a remote region of South America landed in his lap, he made his one and only trip abroad for fieldwork.

  ‘Mopping up the last of the primitives, are we, Pepin?’ his supervisor, so Ezra told Sheena, had mocked him. He spent a year with a small tribe who’d had no contact with the outside world. When he came back he told his colleagues in Cultural Anthropology next to nothing of what he’d found, other than the working title of his PhD – Rebel Energy Quelled: teenage ritual as a strategy of tradition among the Achia of Paraguay.

  ‘You’ll be the first to read it,’ he’d say to anyone who asked.

  Sheena moved into the flat on Walton Street. One after another of Ezra’s fellow tenants moved out, the last shortly after Sheena confirmed she was pregnant. Ezra laboured at his thesis. His grant was running out, but he was able to pick up a little teaching. Sheena worked extra shifts as a lab assistant. The rent on the flat was cheap, and she even managed to put some money by.

  All Sheena or Ezra would remember of the months following their daughter’s birth was sprawling in bed or lounging in the sitting-room, the three of them. It was like being put under house arrest, Ezra reckoned, except that you’d passed the sentence yourself. Imprisonment with company you’d chosen. Blaise seemed to him the exemplar of what a one-month, a three-month, a six-month-old baby should be. Evolution had finally reached its goal. A ridiculous delusion, created by evolution, of course, he knew that. Which in this case just happened to be true.

  Ezra began teaching undergraduates, and came home grouchy. Preoccupied, despondent.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Sheena asked.

  ‘How can I teach what I don’t know?’ he wondered.

  ‘Teach what you do know.’

  ‘But what I don’t know is much greater than what I do know,’ Ezra worried. ‘I fear it always will be.’

  ‘But then no one would ever teach anything, would they, and then where would we be?’ Sheena demanded.

  ‘We’d be, I don’t know, cave dwellers? Maybe we’d still be amphibians. I’m not against teaching, obviously. I’d just rather not do it myself.’

  ‘Would you rather other people who know less than you do did the teaching? Where’s the logic, Ezra?’

  Ezra found he felt better getting his hands dirty; doing odd jobs. He discovered some measure of calm in combining thinking and doing. The chief drawback was that he had no skills. There was even more he didn’t know about physical work than what he didn’t know about his own academic discipline, so he could only find the most menial labour, for minimal pay. But at least he felt fine about taking it.

  ‘I’m not pretending,’ he told Sheena. ‘I’m an unskilled manual worker. I don’t claim to be anything else. You know, by the way, that shamans in tribal cultures often do manual work?’

  So he helped a chap along Kingston Road with a Transit move furniture when he needed a hand; he assisted a gardener clearing undergrowth and mowing lawns; and he painted the flats and houses of acquaintances who didn’t want to do it themselves but couldn’t afford a professional decorator. The paint left over from these jobs Ezra brought home and stacked in the brick outhouse across the yard from the flat. Half-filled tins of gloss with which he painted the doors of the flat different colours. Emulsion that periodically he’d mix in a large bucket – remnants of magnolia and apple-green, lilac and sunset-pink, stirred to a lugubrious beige – and redecorate a room. Instead of spring cleaning, he spring painted.

  ‘Wait a minute, Ezra,’ Sheena said. ‘Are you saying you think you’re some kind of shaman?’

  ‘No, Sheena. I mean that in tribal culture shamans are the individuals with the freedom of time and thought to engage in spiritual, or artistic, activity; they represent intellectual life, the whole stratum of those who work with their minds, who transform not matter but perception. Artists, teachers, academics.’

  ‘Ezra, you’re weird. And that colour is dire.’

  They’d gone into parenthood with high ideals, inspired by Ezra’s accounts of tribal societies where children spent their first years attached to the mother or father or member of the extended family. But Ezra’s only relative was his father, while members of Sheena’s tribe swooped down from Yorkshire in small swarms to coo briefly at the kid, then sit back to be fed and entertained before leaving.

  Blaise, Sheena suspected, was one of the more demanding babies born in the Western world in 1989. It was as if she’d eavesdropped from the womb on Ezra’s promises. At night she cried to be fed every two hours. For months Sheena was unable to use the toilet without Blaise hanging in an awkward sling at her side. She discovered that there was no one she’d rather be with than her slowly growing baby sprawled in the bouncer chair gurgling up at her, kicking her little frog legs. For about ten minutes. After that, Sheena admitted to Ezra, it was impossible to spend time alo
ng with a baby without infantilising yourself. He explained that tribal parents ignored their babies much of the time, they just got on with what they had to do with limpets on their backs.

  From that moment on Sheena threw herself into local campaigns. Handing out leaflets and reaping signatures on petitions for the Rainforest Action Group; taking part in Earth First?’s occupation of Timbmet timber yard, up on Cumnor Hill, in protest at the importation of timber from tropical rainforests, with Blaise in a buggy and the six-month-old Hector in a sling. Sheena’s activism began as much as somewhere to go with her children as a response to political conviction.

  Ezra published in time three essays, derived from his thesis in progress, in academic journals, but his reputation in the university faded, from that of a scholar of intriguing promise to a familiar case of prevarication. Sheena got odd jobs too, and, with child-welfare benefits, they scraped along in a more or less contented hand to mouth.

  Hector had arrived just as Blaise was starting at a crèche in Warnborough Road, and the Pepins bought their first house, a two-up, two-down artisan’s Victorian terraced cottage, the smallest house on Kingston Road, an hour or two before the property boom reached its peak and started slipping backwards. Sheena saw the job advert in the Oxford Times for Graduates who don’t want to teach? Become free-thinking executives of the future, in the company who’d just bought out Walton Well Water, Oxford’s family-owned mineral-water company. She told Ezra he ought to apply, and she helped him prepare for the job interview.

  ‘What,’ Sheena asked, ‘are you hoping for from this employment, Mr Pepin?’

  ‘Er, wages?’

  ‘Wrong, Ezra.’

  ‘Friendship?’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘Paid holidays for the first time in my life?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You look straight at the most senior person there, and say, “I want your job.” ’

  This Monday lunchtime, eleven years later, Sheena decided to consume alone her hummus-and-avocado-salad ciabatta, apple, and carrot juice. She left work and walked along Merton Lane, took the path beside Merton College and sat on the warm grass out in Christ Church Meadow. She thought of that joke every so often.

  ‘I want your job.’ The humour was in the idea of Ezra possessing such ambition. They never discussed his work at home. It was an unwritten rule of their marriage – she understood the work must be unbearably dull; it was a badge of honour between them. They’d soon stopped referring to Isis Water at all, as each year it kept Ezra from his true path in life and increased the guilt that silted silently in Sheena’s stomach. Ignoring it was the only practical solution.

  But Simon had brought up Ezra’s sacrifice last night after dinner, in that blithe way of his, and today Sheena found herself unable to ignore it. Incredible, she thought, looking back: how come Ezra didn’t volunteer to be the full-time childminder when Blaise was a baby? Did she ever ask him to be a hero? No, that’s not what she wanted. Why on earth didn’t he let Sheena go out to work, when it turned out she both enjoyed and was good at running her own business? The sun was hot on her neck, so Sheena wriggled around so that she was facing the other way. Only to find the sun stabbing at her eyes. She put her carrot juice down on the grass, and shielded her eyes with her hand. The plastic bottle tipped over, spilling orange liquid into the earth before she could grab it upright.

  What Sheena felt was more than irritation. Yes, her feelings seemed to have changed. The silt was stirring. The guilt was giving way to something else. It felt like anger. Could that be true? If so, was it not authentic emotion welling up from deep inside? Which honesty compelled her to allow to rise?

  What an impossible situation she was in: unless she could help Ezra out of this rut, that also loaded her with a burden she in no way deserved. What did he want, really? Surely between them they could work out what Ezra wanted, and needed, to fulfil him.

  On Monday afternoon Jim Gould asked Ezra Pepin to join him for a little privacy in one of the think-tanks off the open-plan office floor. He brought along a tray with two cups of tea, and accoutrements: tiny sealed tubs of semi-skimmed milk, sachets of brown and of white sugar, plastic twizzlers, napkins. Minuscule packets of bite-sized biscuits. A reassuring profligacy.

  ‘Excellent presentation.’ Jim frowned, swirling the teabag around the cup with his twizzler, impatient for the tea to brew.

  ‘Thanks,’ Ezra nodded. The energy of the morning had dissipated. He felt tired again. ‘It’s easy when the product’s good.’

  ‘It helps.’

  ‘There’s no need to bullshit.’

  Jim pointed the twizzler at Ezra, as if to wag it in admonishment. ‘You’re a one-off, Ezra,’ he said. ‘Now, listen. Tell me. Who owns Isis Water?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Ezra asked. ‘DeutscheWasser just bought us.’

  ‘Of course. And that’s it?’ Jim put the white twizzler in his mouth, left it between his lips like a toothpick, and broke open a tub of milk.

  ‘There’s more?’

  ‘DeutscheWasser’s a subsidiary of VBD.’

  ‘I see. VBD? Okay.’

  ‘Which is owned by the American Hamahachi Hollywood Corporation.’

  ‘Really? I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Which is part of the Bundesgeld empire of Berlin. Sugar?’

  ‘I see,’ said Ezra. ‘How come you know all this, Jim?’

  Jim shook his head. He lifted the tray off the table and poured the packets of accessories, used and unused, into a wastepaper bin off to one side. He clapped his hands to clear them of crumbs of biscuit and sugar. ‘None of it need concern us, Ezra,’ he said. ‘You understand? This is what I want you to know: that there is nothing sinister about what I’m telling you. DeutscheWasser have made clear: they do not intend to change a thing in the working practice of what is a thriving company.’

  ‘Right. The only evidence of any change in ownership that we’re aware of is that Mr Kuuzik has been made Chief Executive.’

  ‘Exactly, Ezra. And it’s Mr Kuuzik who’s asked me to have someone in Operations do a little blue-sky thinking. Take time out to contemplate the future of bottled water.’

  ‘The future? Is that all?’

  ‘Sure,’ Jim said, unsmiling. ‘The industry in general. Isis Water in particular, obviously. Naturally, I thought of you. No desperate hurry. At your own pace. But quietly.’

  ‘Quietly?’

  ‘Keep your thoughts to yourself, I would.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘I’ll leave it with you, Ezra.’ Jim took a gulp of tea, snapped the lid on to the cup, dropped it into the bin as he stood up, and walked away.

  Blaise flushed the toilet, and washed and dried her hands. She opened the bathroom door, stepped out, and closed it quietly behind her. She stood in dimly lit gloom. There was a hole, she realised, a slash, in the net curtain hanging in the small window at the far end of the landing. A bladed beam of sunlight cut through what the light revealed to be a subaquatic atmosphere, slow and turgid, in which thick motes of dust floated like krill. Blaise watched them. Their movement suggested that they possessed an enigmatic amount of autonomy. The thin blade of sunlight reached all the way through the ocean air to a dreary rug; illuminated with precision a threadbare patch. A criss-cross of brown backing cord.

  There were three doors along the landing. Were Akhmed or his mother tracking her movements above them? Blaise looked down the stairs: the ground floor of the house was subdivided into a front room and a back room; the hallway ran from the front door to the half-size kitchen pegged on, with a bathroom above, to the rear of the house. Akhmed and his mother were down there, in those snug rooms.

  There must be three rooms upstairs, Blaise worked out, in the same space as the two rooms below. She took a deep breath. With one step she reached the first door, turned the handle, pushed it gradually open. Its hinges creaked with separate, teasing squeaks. It might have been a device calibrated to warn an occupant of an intruder – there was so
meone inside the room! Don’t be a fool, she told herself. Don’t be an idiot. It’s four o’clock in the afternoon.

  The hinge squeaks were not as loud as the sound of Blaise’s heartbeat, anyhow, which pounded in her ears and surely out of them, like the beat from cheap headphones, into the open air.

  Blaise peered inside. There was an empty bed along the wall opposite; cupboards above; boxes underneath. She extended her neck around the door. Running along the next wall, head to toe with the first bed, was another. She stretched in a little further. There was a third bed against the wall behind the door. A man lay in it, his head on the pillow. His mouth was open. And so, Blaise realised, were his eyes. She gaped in horrified silence. Her loud heart had stopped pounding altogether: it hovered, between one beat and the next, as the man stared at her, with sly, half-open eyes. He had a black beard, made of tight curls of hair. The whites of his eyes were flecked with brown.

  She had done wrong, and she had been found out. Now, rigid with fright, she awaited her dire punishment. The prospect filled her with dread. Although the dread, she sensed, promised pleasure, too, in taking what she deserved.

  The silence was breached by a sound issuing from the man’s mouth. For a second Blaise assumed it was speech, an accusatory utterance. Except it gurgled too much for words in any language, and it came from deep in his throat. After a few seconds of further silence it came again, as the man inhaled, and she realised with an air-gulping breath of her own that he was snoring. Trembling, Blaise began to retreat from the room, pulling the door quietly closed.

  Akhmed had walked out of school in step with her. They’d crossed Banbury Road, and walked along Beechcroft Road.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ he asked. He was already going out of his way, heading in the direction of Blaise’s home.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said.

  ‘Yeh,’ he said. ‘Let’s do nothing. I’m not bothered.’

  He didn’t look at Blaise when he spoke to her, or when she spoke to him, but in between she could sense his eyes upon her.