Twenty-Six Metres

I had been in Norfolk for thirty-eight minutes and I was already standing on somebody else’s kitchen chair.

The sign was the problem. Cleo had wired it to the churchyard gate at an angle that made TARRANT & SUNDARAM — THIS WAY, YOU IDIOTS look like it was sliding off the end of the world, and I had unwound one twist of the wire and then stopped, because past the sign, up the rise, was the tree.

Twenty-two metres. Crown spread about twenty-six, and the whole eastern flank of it sheared flat by two hundred years of wind off the North Sea, so that it stood on Chapel Rise like something leaning permanently away from a conversation it didn’t want to have. Holm oak. Evergreen, so nobody in the village had ever seen it bare and nobody had ever seen what I was seeing now, which was nine — no, thirteen — dead limbs in the upper crown and a fork at about six metres that I did not like at all.

I was on fourteen when the voice came from behind me.

“You’re counting.”

I did not turn around. That was a decision, and I made it, and it took about as long as a wave takes to decide where it’s going.

Five years. Five years, and I knew him from two words and the space around them, the way you know a room in the dark by the sound it makes when you walk into it.

“I’m straightening a sign,” I said.

“You’ve got one hand on the sign and your face pointed at Chapel Rise.” A step on the gravel. Another. He stopped a good four feet back, which I noticed, and filed, and refused to think about. “You were counting. You do it with your chin. Slight tip, left to right.”

“That’s a horrible thing to know about someone.”

“It’s a tree, Greer. What’s wrong with it?”

And there it was — no hello, no you look well, no five-year throat-clearing. Straight to the thing on the hill, because to him the tree was the interesting object in the field of view and I was the person who would know about it, and those two facts arrived in him at the same time and in that order. I had forgotten that. I had spent five years remembering the wrong things about him and not one of them was this.

I turned around.

He had got older, which was an idiotic thing to be surprised by and I was surprised by it anyway. There was grey coming in at the sides now, and lines at the outside of his eyes that hadn’t been there at thirty-two, and he was wearing a work shirt with the sleeves rolled past the elbow in the middle of September on a hill with a wind coming off the water, because of course he was. Both forearms still scarred from oyster shell, little white commas of it, the whole map of a job I’d once been able to read like a page.

“Hello, Elias.”

“Hello.” He put his hands in his pockets. “You’re early.”

“So are you. By four days, according to your sister.”

“Site work.” He tipped his head a fraction, at the creek below us, where the water had gone and left four hundred metres of blue-grey mud shining like something poured and cooling. “Access, mostly. Where eighty-four people put their cars and how they get off the marsh before the top of the tide. Cleo’s assigned me the tide.”

“Can you be assigned a tide?”

“You can be blamed for one.” He almost smiled. “What’s wrong with the tree?”

“I’ve been looking at it for four minutes from a kitchen chair, so nothing, officially.” I climbed down off the chair, which took a second and was not graceful, and he did not offer me a hand, and I was so relieved and so annoyed by the relief that I said the next thing before I had cleared it with anybody. “Why did you come to my father’s funeral and not speak to me?”

The wind came up the rise and moved the whole eastern side of the holm oak at once, a dry rattling roar of it, like rain on a roof.

“I did speak,” he said. “To your mum.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

“No.” He looked at the mud. “It isn’t.”

“You drove four hours.” I had not planned to have this conversation on a Sunday afternoon standing next to a wheelbarrow, and I found I couldn’t stop having it. “You stood at the back of the crematorium in a suit I’ve never seen you wear, by the door, next to the man who does the parking. I saw you when we came out. I had my mother on one arm and a man from my father’s sailing club on the other and I turned my head and you were there, and then we did the tea and the sandwiches and the thing where everybody tells you he was a lovely man, and you were gone. You didn’t say one word to me. Four hours up and four hours back and not one word.”

“Yes.”

“Is that the whole of it? Yes?”

“It’s accurate.” He said it without any defence in it at all, which took the ground out from under me, because I had spent three years constructing a version of this in which he was defensive. “You want more than accurate.”

“I want a reason, Elias.”

“I know.” He took his hands out of his pockets, and for one second I thought he was going to give me one, and I understood how much I wanted it, which was more than I had allowed myself to know at any point in the last thirty-eight minutes or the last five years. “There’s one. It isn’t a good conversation to have standing up.”

“Then we’ll sit down.”

“Not today.” And that was it. That was the whole of him, right there in three words on a gravel path: a locked door with a light on behind it, and the certainty that he would stand in front of it all week being perfectly pleasant.

I turned back to the gate and put my hand on the wire.

“It’s the fork,” I said, because I would rather talk about structural failure than about myself, and because it was true. “Six metres up, where the two big stems go their separate ways. See how tight the angle is? That’s not a joint. That’s two things growing past each other with a seam of bark trapped in the middle, and the seam gets a bit wider every year, and one February it’s a hinge.”

“How long’s it had that?”

“Two hundred years, probably. That’s not the question.”

“What’s the question?”

“Whether it’s got another Saturday in it with eighty-four people underneath.”

Behind us, from the direction of the lane, somebody started running in wellingtons, which is a specific and terrible sound.

“Don’t you dare have a conversation without me.”

Cleo came up the path at a flat sprint with a clipboard held over her head like a woman fording a river, her hair coming out of its clip on one side, wearing a fleece I recognised from 2015. She hit me at a speed that took us both back half a step into the gate, and hugged me hard enough to make the wire sing, and said into my shoulder, “You’re early, you absolute legend, I’ve got you a room with a bird on the door,” and then held me out at arm’s length and looked at me properly for about two seconds.

Two seconds is long enough. Two seconds is a survey.

“Right,” she said. “Both of you. Clipboard.”

“Cleo—“

“No, I’ve thought about this for six weeks and I’ve had one gin, so it’s fully formed.” She flipped a page. Her handwriting is appalling. There were two columns. “This wedding is two problems and I’ve got two people. Greer. You’re the tree. That means the tree itself, whether we can all stand under it, what we do if we can’t, and the whole of Chapel Rise from the gate up. Jean Pettifer needs a piece of paper with letters after somebody’s name on it and I have exactly one friend with letters after her name.”

“You’ve got about nine.”

“I’ve got one who climbs.” She turned to her brother without pausing. “Elias. You’re the tide. That’s the track, the parking, the water, the generator, when the quay goes under and when it comes back, and getting eighty-four people from a field to a hill and back to a granary without anybody’s mother in a wheelchair going in the creek.”

“Saturday’s a big one,” Elias said. “Full moon Friday. It’ll be up over the quay around noon.”

“See, this is why you’re the tide.” Cleo lowered the clipboard and looked between the two of us, and something went across her face very fast, and was put away again, and I have thought about that half-second a great deal since. “Right. The other thing. You can’t do your bit without his bit and he can’t do his without yours, because it’s one hill with one track and one door, and if you two work it out separately I will end up with a marquee in a salt creek. So you’re together on it. All week. Sorry.”

“That’s fine,” I said.

I said it immediately. I said it at a speed that would have embarrassed me in front of a stranger and I said it in front of the two people on earth most qualified to hear it, and Cleo’s pen stopped for a quarter of a second on the clipboard, and Elias looked out at the mud, and nobody said anything at all.

“Great,” said Cleo. “Brilliant. Absolutely no notes.”

“When do you need the tree signed off?”

“Thursday? Wednesday. Thursday.” She pulled a face. “Jean wants it Wednesday. Jean can want.”

“Then I want to be in it tomorrow morning at half seven,” I said, “with someone on the ground who’s held a rope before, and I’d like six hours and nobody talking to me for the first two.”

“Elias’s held a rope before.”

“I know,” I said.

And there it was again, that thing where a sentence walks out of your mouth carrying more luggage than you packed it with. I heard it land. I heard exactly how much of the last seven years was in it — of course I knew, I had watched him do it, I had held the other end of it, I had once sat on a sea wall at Deepdale for forty minutes in the rain watching him and his father shout at each other about a winch — and I could not take one syllable of it back, so I picked up the kitchen chair instead and started down the path with it.

“Half seven,” Elias said behind me.

“Half seven.”

“Greer.”

I stopped. I did not turn round. Below us the creek was beginning to fill, a thin bright thread of it coming in fast over the mud, the way it does here, faster than you’d ever credit if you hadn’t stood and watched it.

“Your dad’s funeral,” he said. “You asked for a reason. There is one, and it’s not a good one, and I’m not going to pretend I don’t have it. I just need to not do it on a path.”

“All right.”

“All right,” he said.

I carried the chair down the hill and put it back in Bea Nudd’s kitchen and stood in her scullery for a minute with my hands on the edge of the sink, listening to the sound the wind makes in a hedge on this coast, which is different from the sound it makes in any hedge in Yorkshire, and which I had not heard in five years and had apparently kept, whole, somewhere I couldn’t get at.

Six days, I told the sink. Six days and a tree.