Twenty Past Eight

I did not sleep, and at half past seven on Sunday morning I was sitting on the wall at the top of the slipway with a mug of Bea’s coffee and the tide a long way out and the whole marsh flat calm and steaming very slightly in the first proper sun of the week.

Dev came out at eight in yesterday’s shirt with two slices of toast.

“Morning,” he said. “Terrible night. Wonderful day. Arun got the slideshow working at one o’clock and everybody had gone.”

“Congratulations.”

“Thank you.” He sat down on the wall. “My wife is asleep with one shoe on.”

We ate toast.

“You’re going to ask me something,” I said.

“No,” said Dev. “I’ve got a thing I’m going to say and then I’m going to go back to bed, because I’m a coward and I’ve got four hours before the brunch.”

“Go on, then.”

“When something’s balanced,” said Dev Sundaram, “it isn’t still. It’s just two things pulling the same amount. It looks like nothing’s happening and actually everything is, all the time, and it’s exhausting, and it can go on for years.” He brushed crumbs off his knee. “You and him have been perfectly balanced since Sunday. Nobody moves, nothing breaks, everyone’s very reasonable. And it can stay like that for the rest of your lives if neither of you does anything, and it will look, from outside, exactly like a decision.”

He stood up.

“That’s it,” he said. “That’s the whole thing. I told Cleo I’d say it and she said, don’t, and I said, I’m going to, and she threw a shoe at me, which is why she’s got one on.”

And he went in.

I rang Hilary Bonsall at twenty past eight on a Sunday morning.

She answered on the fourth ring, in a kitchen, with a dog barking somewhere behind her, and said, “Greer? Is somebody dead?”

“No. Sorry. I know it’s Sunday.”

“It is extremely Sunday.”

“I want to ask you for something,” I said, “and I want to ask you now, before I’ve had time to make it sound better, because if I write you an email about it on Tuesday I’ll have turned it into a proposal with three options in it and you’ll pick the safe one.”

There was a small pause, and then the sound of a woman sitting down.

“Go on,” said Hilary.

“I want to move to East. Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex. Based Norwich.”

“East isn’t vacant.”

“East is vacant in January because Martin’s going to the Wildlife Trusts and he told me in July and asked me not to say anything, and he’ll have told you by now because it’s the end of September.”

“He told me on Thursday,” said Hilary. “You are a menace. Why?”

“Personal reasons,” I said, and then, because I have had a week, “No. That’s the football-results voice. I’ll do it properly. There’s a man here. We were together for two years when I was twenty-five and we made a complete mess of it, and I’ve spent six days in a field with him and I want to build a life with him, and he lives here and he can’t leave, and he’s got reasons that are real and I’m not going to ask him to.”

“Well,” said Hilary Bonsall. “Goodness.”

“And I want to be clear about the rest of it, because you’re going to have to say it to Anneka and I’d rather you heard me say it first.” I had the mug in both hands and I was looking at the mud. “I know what it costs. If I go East in January I come off the national list, because you cannot appoint a national veteran tree lead who started a new region eight weeks earlier, and the panel is in January, and the post won’t come round again for three years. I know East is eleven properties against my twenty-three and I know the budget’s about two-thirds. And I know I’d be handing Ravensthorpe to Sam after four years, in the middle of the second phase, with the tenancy negotiation not finished.”

“You’d be handing Ravensthorpe to Sam,” Hilary repeated.

“Yes.”

“Greer, you have made three people cry about those oaks.”

“Four,” I said. “And I’d want a proper handover, and I’d want to finish the tenancy thing before I go, and I’d want it minuted that the phase two money is ring-fenced, because if I’m giving it up I’m not having it quietly reallocated in March.”

There was a long silence from a kitchen in North Yorkshire.

“Right,” said Hilary. “I’m going to say four things and you’re not going to like the fourth. One: I’m glad. Two: I’m sorry, because you’d have got the national job, and I’d have voted for you, and I don’t say that to people. Three: I’ll put it to Anneka this week, and it’s not mine to give, and there’s a recruitment freeze consultation going on that nobody’s told you about.”

“And four?”

“Four is that I’m not doing it quickly,” said Hilary. “You’ve rung me at twenty past eight on a Sunday in a state of high emotion at a wedding and I am not going to be the person who lets you turn a career round in a morning. So I’m going to take six weeks. I’ll do the work, I’ll fight for it, and in six weeks if you still want it you’ll have it or you’ll have the reason why not. And if in six weeks you don’t want it, we will never speak of this again.”

“That’s fair.”

“It’s extremely fair, I’m superb,” said Hilary. “Go and have your brunch.”

I sat on the wall for about ten minutes afterwards with the phone in my lap.

Nobody had said yes. That was the thing. I had given away a job I have wanted for three years, out loud, to my director, on a telephone, in exchange for a probably, and I had done it without knowing — genuinely without knowing, I would have put it at sixty-forty and not in my favour — whether the man at the top of the hill was still offering.

I have never in my life felt so ill or so completely sure.

He was at the yard at ten past nine, doing something to the chipper that did not need doing.

“Morning,” he said.

“I need twenty minutes.”

“Right.” He put the spanner down on the deck and wiped his hands on his jeans and sat on the tailgate, and I stayed standing, because I had rehearsed it standing.

“At twenty past eight this morning I rang Hilary Bonsall and asked to move to the East region in January,” I said. “Based Norwich. It’s an hour from here.”

He did not move at all.

“It isn’t confirmed. She’s taking six weeks, which is the right thing to do and I hate it. But it’s asked. It’s out of my mouth and she’ll have told two people by Tuesday and I can’t quietly un-ask it.”

“Greer—“

“Let me get the rest out, because the rest is the part that matters.” I had my hands jammed in my coat pockets. “It costs me the national job. That’s the veteran tree post I’ve been on a shortlist for since July and have thought about every day since. I don’t get it, and I don’t get to be considered again until 2029. It costs me Ravensthorpe, which is four hundred oaks and four years and the best work I will ever do. East is half the size and two-thirds the money and I will be bored by June.

“And there are four things I don’t know, and I’m going to say them out loud rather than find out I’ve been carrying them in eighteen months’ time.

“One. I don’t know if the Trust will let me.

“Two. I don’t know if I’ll resent it. Not now — in three years, in a wet February, when Sam’s got my oaks and somebody else has got my job. I think probably not. I don’t know.

“Three. I don’t know if your sister will forgive me, and I’m not moving here on the assumption that she will.

“Four.” I had to stop for a second. “I have lived on my own since I was twenty-six and I am extremely good at it, and I don’t know if I can live somewhere where a woman I have never met knows about my hair.”

Elias sat on the tailgate of a truck in a yard with his hands on his knees.

“Right,” he said. “My turn, and it’s worse.”

“Go on.”

“I can’t leave. Not won’t. Can’t, and I want to give you the actual numbers so you’re not wondering whether I’ve been gallant about it.

“Dad’s at Marram and Marram is fourteen hundred and ten a week and it goes up in April. The Burnham money is four hundred and twelve less what’s gone, and on any sensible arithmetic that’s finished some time in 2029, and after that it’s me and Cleo out of income. I’m forty minutes from him. If I’m in Norwich I’m an hour twenty and I can’t do four nights, I can do two.

“The business is me, Tomasz, three lads and a seasonal, and the yard’s got nine years left on the mortgage, and about sixty per cent of the work is inside twenty miles of where you’re standing because it’s a tidal coast and you can’t do it from anywhere else.

“So that’s it. That’s not a philosophy about the sea and it’s not a thing about my father’s wall. It’s a bloke who can’t move.” He looked up. “And I’m saying it out loud instead of absorbing it and being fine about it, which is what I’d have done in 2021, and which is why you’d have found out in year three when I was strange at Christmas.”

“Right.”

“And I want you anyway,” said Elias. “That’s the other half and I’m not leaving it off. I’m not saying only if it’s right for you. I want you, and I’m not going to be noble about it, and if it turns out in three years that it was the wrong trade for you I’d rather we had that row than that you never came.”

I sat down on the tailgate.

“Say something,” he said.

“I’m not living with you in November.”

He turned his head.

“I mean it,” I said. “I’m not doing the thing where I hand in my flat and arrive with four boxes and my entire life is in your house by the second week, because if that goes wrong I’ve got nowhere to stand, and I’ll spend a year being agreeable in case I have to leave.”

“All right.”

“Bea’s cousin’s got Church Cottage empty. I asked her at half seven this morning because I am a coward and it was easier than ringing Hilary.” I could hear myself doing it, and for once it was not a fall zone, it was a floor. “Six months from the first of November. I’ll let the York flat out — Ravensthorpe’s got two seasonal ecologists who’d take it tomorrow. And we don’t live together until the spring, and then we do, and we talk about it in March like grown-ups instead of drifting into it.”

“That’s a plan.”

“It’s a plan with an end date, which is different from we’ll see.”

“It is,” he said. “I’d have taken we’ll see from you in about four days, mind, so I’m glad you didn’t offer it again.”

“And Cleo in October,” I said. “I’m going to Lynn in October and it’s going to be horrible and it’s going to take more than one evening, and you’re doing yours separately, and we are never again doing a version of this where you and I agree something in a van first.”

“No.”

“Say it properly.”

“We’re never again agreeing anything about my sister before my sister’s heard it,” said Elias. “And I’m taking her the folder on Tuesday.”

“And Sundays,” I said.

“What about Sundays?”

“Sundays are your dad. Four nights is four nights and that’s yours and I’m not going to be gracious about it twice a year — but I’d like Sundays to be both of us, if he’s all right with a stranger, and if he isn’t then I’ll sit in the car park with a flask like a dog and I don’t care.”

He did not say anything for a moment.

“He liked you,” he said. “Thursday, at the window. He was going on about it Friday morning before any of it. He said, there’s a girl on the quay, and I said, yeah, and he said, good.”

“Well,” I said.

“Yeah.”

We sat on the tailgate of a truck in a yard with the sun coming over the shed roof and a chipper we were both pretending to look at.

“There’s a brunch at twelve,” he said.

“There is.”

“And the boiler in that cottage is forty years old and it goes out if the wind’s in the east, which it is for about five months of the year, and Bea’s cousin will tell you it’s been serviced and it has not been serviced since 2019.”

“Then I’ll get it serviced,” I said.

“I’ll do it,” said Elias. “I know a bloke.”

“Of course you do.”