Blenheim Orchard

by Tim Pears

  They scrabbled and dropped to the ground. Planting their feet on the surface of the green spinning earth the men stood up straight, and breathless, and recomposed themselves, looking not at each other but out across the white, inviting grids arrayed before them on the vast lawn.

  Ezra climbed over, and landed beside the others. ‘They’ve marked the courts out for us,’ he observed. ‘Maybe we’ll have less of your dodgy line calls this week, Ian.’

  ‘The chalk never lies,’ said Simon, in a bumptious tone that suggested it often did.

  ‘I love the smell of lime chalk in the morning,’ said Dan, breathing deeply, as they broke into their usual pairs, Ezra with Simon, and knocked up from the back, belting balls at each other that were soon trawled by the net.

  ‘Give me a volley,’ Ian called across to Simon as he jogged forward.

  ‘Try a serve?’ Ezra shouted a moment later, batting some balls to Dan. Their voices were fresh, hopeful, sonorous in the empty morning.

  ‘Rough or smooth?’ Simon offered.

  The men grunted and lunged, scampered to and fro. Games went against serve. Simon’s service action was that of a madcap English inventor who’d spent years perfecting it in his garden shed, only to watch it fall to pieces in the open air. He tossed the ball towards his shoulder, then crouched down to swipe it. It looked like he was swatting a fly, straight into the net. One time in ten the ball shot over, back-spin grabbed it by its scruff and drove it into the ground, and an unplayable ace sped past the receiver. For his ground shots, instead of stepping aside in preparation for hitting a tennis ball, opening his body for a wide sweet swing, Simon stepped into the flight-path, and had to dig the ball out of his body with the racket, producing soft lobs his opponents generally failed to put away.

  ‘It’s tennis, Jim,’ Ezra cursed, when for once Ian smashed one past him. ‘It’s tennis, Jim, but not as we know it.’

  Simon was well partnered: Ezra scurried after every lost cause, his shirt awash with sweat. ‘Out!’ he called, early and loud, just before a shot of Dan’s landed on the line. Overruled, Ezra was left to rail at the injustice of the straight white lines; at puffs of chalk conspiracies.

  The men assured themselves they could play metronomic, transatlantic tennis if they wanted to, echoing shots back and forth for hour after tedious hour. Any club member all in white could do that. No, the four of them were mavericks, cursing loudly when a shot failed to match the magnificence of which they were capable.

  Early commuters cutting through from Middle Way to Woodstock Road, dog walkers letting their pets off the leash for a loop around the tennis courts, would stand stock-still and peer at the players from a distance, as if given just a little more information they’d be able to make sense of what they were seeing. The inexplicable trajectory of the ball; the ambition of these untutored eccentrics. As if the Corinthian ideal were insufficient. It wasn’t enough to be a sporting loser, Ezra conceded, a happy amateur, you had to be useless, too, you had to carry the handicap of being stubbornly self-taught, of never acquiring the most basic technique, so that every single ball towards you was a fresh challenge, each shot the first you’ve ever played, you’re forever improvising, and the only thing that saves you is your English schoolboy’s eye for a ball, aided by the occasional shameless fluke of physics. All of which explained why tennis was an ideal sport, inspired and clumsy as life itself.

  In the second set play improved: Dan found his range, Simon made fewer errors, Ian got his eye in, and Ezra entered the zone: he anticipated his opponents’ perfect passing shots and, stepping forward, interrupted them, to thump solid volleys from the sweet spot in the middle of his racket. He hit groundstrokes with the ball still on the rise, sending it back unexpected as a rabbit punch. The match was tied at one set all.

  The men gathered to swig from their water bottles and to confer. ‘It’s ten-past eight,’ Simon puffed.

  ‘How’s your back?’ Ezra asked.

  ‘Holding up.’

  ‘Plenty of time for a decider,’ Dan gasped, lighting a cigarette.

  ‘Let me call Carol,’ Ian decided, groping in his rucksack.

  ‘I can manage another set,’ Ezra agreed. ‘Work can wait for us, can’t it?’

  ‘There’s no way,’ said Simon, ‘I’m stopping with those two fellows on the up.’

  In the third set the standard reverted to that of the first, then plummeted further. Ian found himself unable to achieve any power: however fiercely he wielded his racket the ball floated over the net. It was a tactical masterstroke: Ezra and Simon pounced on these gifts, and blasted them wide and long. Simon grew more agitated, so that he was soon trying to hit balls directly in front of him, while Ezra’s game simply unravelled.

  ‘Eat that!’ he yelled, making winners that turned in front of his eyes into wild losers. At 2-5, 0-30 he hit a firm, swinging deep serve and followed it in. Ian managed a feeble return, a gentle chip at which Ezra took a lungeing, hopeless swipe. In slow motion, the ball drifted gently beyond his reach.

  ‘Fuck!’ Ezra yelled in the bright morning. He hurled his racket at the back fence, where with a loud crack the guaranteed-for-life titanium frame fractured like bone.

  ‘Game over, chaps,’ said Simon.

  Ezra joined the others gathering their stuff, bearing his broken racket sheepishly. ‘You big girl,’ Dan cursed him.

  ‘You just robbed yourselves of the possibility,’ Ian said, ‘of one of the great comebacks in the modern era.’

  They strolled across the grass, knowing they were late for work, asserting their seniority, their independence, their sense of perspective in these hectic times, and they clambered tiredly back over the fence, and set off in various directions for bikes and cars and the working day awaiting.

  Ezra Pepin had a shower at home and got to work at nine thirty. Walking from the bike rack he realised how much he was still sweating in the heat and thought he might need another shower in the basement gym. But then he entered the air-conditioned building and soon felt more at ease.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Chrissie demanded, when he reached the Operations area. ‘I emailed you. I tried your home. I tried your mobile.’

  ‘Switched off. Sorry.’

  ‘The CEO’s looking for you.’

  ‘I thought he was in Berlin this week.’

  ‘He’s back, apparently.’

  Gideon Juffkin came over. ‘He says you’re the first person he wants to see,’ he frowned.

  ‘Be gone,’ Ezra replied.

  ‘Ezra!’ said Jim Gould. ‘Where have you been? How do you think this looks for us? Gideon: buzz through to the Chief Executive’s PA. Tell him Ezra’s here and available.

  ‘Jim,’ Ezra said. ‘What does he want?’

  ‘He didn’t tell me.’ Gould said. He glanced over his shoulder.

  The three of them stood in an anxious crescent around Ezra’s desk, watching him in jittery silence. Well, to hell with them, Ezra decided, as he climbed the wide stairs at a leisurely pace. He’d been summoned by the new boss: he was damned if he was going to panic about it. Their obsequiousness was demeaning; it was pathetic – although, he reminded himself, they weren’t leaving Isis Water and going off to Brazil in a couple of months’ time. He was a fortunate man.

  The Chief Executive of Isis Water was standing by the window when his male secretary ushered Ezra Pepin into his office. He turned abruptly and strode over, arm extended.

  ‘Mr Pepin,’ he said.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Kuuzik.’

  ‘It’s time you called me Klaus,’ he smiled. ‘And I will call you Ezra, if I may?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Kuuzik was a couple of inches shorter than Ezra, with cropped brown hair, a tanned complexion and pale blue eyes. He wore a thin grey cotton suit which fitted him so well that Ezra’s own bespoke threads might as well have been off the peg from some Cornmarket store.

  ‘Come, let us sit down, Ezra. Tell me, your people couldn’t find you.’ He hel
d his arms out to the sides. ‘They didn’t know where you were.’

  Had his new boss just begun to tell him off? Ezra wondered. That was one thing he didn’t need, especially since it was highly unlikely he’d see him again in the next couple of months, and certainly not ever afterwards.

  ‘They knew where I was,’ Ezra said. ‘Friday morning. They were covering for me, Klaus. I was playing tennis.’

  ‘Tennis?’ Kuuzik’s face broke into a smile. ‘I think it’s a good idea to exercise before work. I think it’s essential.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Every day.’

  ‘You play tennis?’

  Kuuzik lowered his head into his rising shoulders, in a gesture of modesty. ‘I play many sports,’ he said. ‘My trainer keeps me from getting bored. But please. Would you like a tea, coffee?’

  ‘Coffee, yes.’

  ‘Espresso? Cappuccino?’

  ‘Cappuccino would be good.’

  Kuuzik went to the door and asked his secretary to bring the drinks. ‘Of course, this will be Italian cappuccino, Ezra. I cannot understand how you can serve in England this huge mug of filter coffee and brown foam and call it cappuccino. Cappuccino is an espresso with ein bischen of frothy milk added.’

  ‘It is?’

  ‘Yes. You will see.’ Kuuzik ushered Ezra towards one of a pair of awkward, angular chairs designed, perhaps, to keep tired executives awake. When he sat down, however, the chair received him with such a comfortable embrace that he suffered a kind of corporeal astonishment. ‘But first, Ezra,’ Kuuzik said, ‘I want you to tell me. How did you know?’

  ‘Know what, Klaus?’

  ‘Don’t be reticent. You must have done a good deal of research. Did you find someone who used to work with me?’

  ‘You’re referring to the paper I wrote?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Ezra took a deep breath. ‘I did no research at all, Klaus. That’s the truth. I thought I would risk the opportunity to look beyond the constraints within which we customarily labour and speculate. It was self-indulgent, I know.’

  ‘But what you said about making the world a better place?’

  ‘I don’t know why I said that.’ Ezra shrugged apologetically. ‘It came out.’

  Kuuzik frowned, then let his face relax into a smile. He gazed at Ezra, wondering, perhaps, whether or not to believe him.

  ‘You didn’t speak to someone from Leipzig?’

  ‘Leipzig?’ Ezra asked.

  Kuuzik smiled, as if he still wasn’t sure, Ezra’s apparent ignorance being too unlikely. ‘The Graduate School of Management,’ he said.

  Klaus Kuuzik spoke with the accent of one who’d rehearsed his second language in different countries, in a quiet, constrained voice. Ezra leaned towards him. He discerned the aroma of Kuuzik’s aftershave: it was a subtle musky scent he’d not been aware of before.

  Kuuzik raised his arms and his shoulders a little; enough to suggest he’d come to a decision; to reveal something, perhaps. But before he could say anything his secretary entered.

  ‘Ah, coffee, Bernhard.’

  When Ezra sipped his he said, ‘You’re right, Klaus, what our machines call cappuccino is an abomination.’

  ‘Mine is a macchiato. Literally it means the hot milk is stained with coffee.’ Kuuzik leaned back in his seat and smiled. He kept steady eye contact, when he was both speaking and listening. It demanded the same from Ezra. Usually, he found such intensity draining: someone looking in your eyes, gazing into you. With Kuuzik, however, he felt energy coming the other way. He also thought that the other man’s eyes were not strictly blue, as he’d first imagined, but, when you really studied them, almost green.

  ‘How old are you, Ezra? You are thirty-seven, thirty-eight?’

  ‘Thirty-nine,’ Ezra smiled.

  ‘I am a year younger. I suspect a man doesn’t really know what it is to be a man until he’s forty.’

  ‘I don’t mind the sound of that,’ Ezra admitted. He found his focus of attention narrowing, gradually, towards Kuuzik’s eyes. They were neither blue nor green, he saw now, but both. Aquamarine. He was reminded briefly of the sea off a Dalmatian island he and Sheena had swum in, on their backpacking honeymoon: Kuuzik’s eyes were the colour of ocean you could see the bottom of, as if light were reflecting back up through them, from some inner source.

  ‘Yes, but then we don’t have long, I believe. Forty to what? Sixty? And soon we are not so much of a man any more. That is why we have to achieve a great deal in those years.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘I know it. Ezra, your paper is intriguing. I have been told also about your other work. I am impressed with what I hear of your input into children’s sales.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Ezra. There was a sudden warmth in the room. In the air around Ezra’s face. He suspected he was blushing. For the first time in years. ‘I assisted the marketing guys a little.’

  ‘Yes, I like this flexibility. Sales, marketing. Operations, policy. Overlapping areas. But the children, it was an impressive project. You have children?’

  ‘Three,’ Ezra nodded.

  ‘Me, too,’ Klaus said. ‘Three girls. You have daughters?’

  ‘One.’

  ‘We’ll have to institute Bring Your Daughter to Work Day. We did it once a year in Vancouver.’

  ‘I’d have to work hard to persuade our Blaise to come in.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, Ezra, we make it fun for her. So tell me, what was your involvement in the campaign?’

  ‘Well, let me see.’ Ezra cast his mind back. ‘Children under ten, we discovered, drink more than three billion litres a year of soft drinks. Which they buy. They drink less than two per cent of that amount of water. Most of it from the tap, for free. It’s an insanity, which we began to redress. The marketing guys targeted the parents: What do you want to put in the kids’ lunch box – fizzy pop or natural spring water? Make the healthy choice’.

  ‘Sensible enough.’

  ‘What we did was to work directly with children, to generate authentic word of mouth. We worked our way into primary schools in target areas. Found out who were regarded as the coolest individuals amongst the senior year, the ten- and eleven-year-olds, and gave them bottles for free.’

  ‘That was it?’

  ‘That was it.’

  ‘What was the effect?’

  ‘Unquantifiable. But as you will know, our sales of Dinosaur Water far outstripped our competitors’ similar items.’

  ‘Good news, Ezra, for children’s health. They’re driven to school, watch TV, eat junk food, so they get fat. Skinny celebrities say, Look like us. So they starve themselves. They can’t find a middle path. How can they?’

  ‘All we’re constrained by, after all,’ Ezra said, ‘is a small matter of the need to make a profit.’

  Kuuzik gazed at the far wall of his office. There was a very large abstract painting, the shape of CinemaScope. It could almost, it struck Ezra, be a portrait of the colour of Kuuzik’s eyes.

  He turned back to Ezra. ‘The money will follow,’ he said. ‘It’s not difficult to make money. People who can’t make money shouldn’t be in business. They are not needed.’

  Kuuzik’s eyes, Ezra considered, had something remote about them. It was as if although he was fully engaged with what the two of them were discussing, he really was, maybe he was also thinking of other things. The eyes of a man who wants something more.

  ‘Consider this, please, Ezra,’ Kuuzik was saying. ‘Coca-Cola sold worldwide because it was American. Because the whole world aspired to be American. Not because Coke is in some way universal. Now the backlash has begun, of course. They won’t recover. We all want to find a universal selling point. Global appeal. Let us say, for a bottled water, sold all over the world. Do you think that’s possible?’

  ‘I don’t see how it can be,’ Ezra said. ‘But I should admit that my background, in anthropology, means that I’m naturally attracted to what is specific in a
culture. Cultural diversity is what interests me.’

  Kuuzik’s attention upon Ezra was strangely unwavering. He listened to every word Ezra spoke, and every word he spoke drew Ezra’s attention towards him. He made Ezra feel as if Kuuzik was discovering more than a colleague; he’d recognised a friend. They leaned close as they talked, in what had become an intimate but excited whisper. The smell of Kuuzik’s breath had a resinous edge to it, sappy, alpine.

  ‘It might be possible,’ Ezra said, ‘to have a universal product, but one whose identity changes from one region to another.’

  Klaus nodded gratefully, suggesting that this was exactly what he’d been hoping to hear. He drew closer, as if the room might be bugged. ‘I’m putting together a team,’ he said quietly. ‘I want to move fast. This is why I’m looking for men and women in their prime and ready to do something, how shall we say, extraordinary. I want you in my team, Ezra Pepin.’

  Ezra tried to recall whether anyone had spoken to him in this way in years. Ever. His mother, but she didn’t count. His history teacher at Devizes Comprehensive, Mr Ash: his face ballooned in Ezra’s mind’s eye, circular behind black-rimmed glasses, Ash took groups of five or six boys in his Volkswagen camper van on eye-opening weekend field trips to Avebury, Stonehenge, the Cerne Abbas Giant, that were for Ezra Pepin full of wonder at the lost people who’d built these monuments. The teacher restraining himself – so far as Ezra knew – from anything more than hands lingering on a boy’s shoulders. Kneading them gently. At Oxford? No, apart from Ash’s lonely encouragement no one had spoken to him as Kuuzik did now, and made energy emanate from the pit of Ezra’s stomach, the embers of something kindling, some hope that had almost gone out.

  ‘The truth is,’ said Kuuzik, ‘that I got the short straw. Not officially, of course. To come here was for me a promotion. But England? I understand how Julius Caesar felt. Sent to the outpost of the empire, no? So what I want is for us to show the cynics in Berlin something a little special. More than special. If I have the right people we can do anything. We can change the world, Ezra, yes?’