What the Fork Is Doing

At twenty-eight minutes past seven I put two knuckles against the trunk of the holm oak and knocked twice, and it answered the way a good tree does, a sound with no hollow in it, and I said, “Morning,” out loud, to a tree, in front of a man.

“Still do that, then,” Elias said.

“It’s diagnostic.”

“It’s not, though.”

“It’s slightly diagnostic.” I set my bag down in the wet grass and started laying kit out on a tarp in the order I’d want it. “You can hear a cavity if it’s big enough and shallow enough. Mostly it’s superstitious and I don’t care. My dad did it on scaffolding. Knocked on everything. Ladders, roof timbers, the bonnet of the car.”

“Your dad knocked on my father’s sea wall at Deepdale,” Elias said. “Nineteen. Twenty? He had that green jumper.”

I stopped with the throwbag in my hand.

“He did,” I said. “God, he did. You remember that.”

“I remember he said it sounded expensive.”

“It was extremely expensive.”

“It was forty years of my father’s life,” said Elias, “and it’s a lagoon now,” and then he picked up my rope bag and carried it round to the north side without any further comment, which is the most Tarrant sentence I have ever been given and I had to stand in the grass for a second with my face doing something.

Half seven, I had said. And nobody talking to me for the first two hours.

He gave me three.

Here is what I do. I put a throwline over a limb at about fourteen metres — took me four goes, wind coming across, and he retrieved the bag each time and handed it back without a single word about the four goes — and I pulled a climbing line up over it, and I isolated the limb, and then I went up on a rope-and-harness system with a foot ascender and a chest harness, which is dull and safe and slow, and slow is the point, because the whole job on the way up is to look.

You climb a tree like you read a page. Not the interesting bit first. Buttress, root flare, base of the stem, all the way round. Then up.

At three metres there was a lightning scar on the west side that had healed over about seventy years ago, the wound wood rolled in on itself like a lip, fine, no action. At four and a half, an old pruning cut somebody had made badly in the sixties, flush with the stem, no collar left, decay behind it going in maybe a hundred and sixty millimetres. Noted. Not fatal. At five, a squirrel had taken a strip of bark off in the spring and the tree was already walling it.

And at six metres, the fork.

Two stems, each one the size of a decent oak in its own right, going up out of the same place at an angle of about fifteen degrees to each other — which is far too tight. A branch joins a trunk properly when there’s room for both of them to lay down wood around the joint, the way you’d splice a rope. Fifteen degrees is not a splice. Fifteen degrees is two things growing past each other with their own bark trapped between them, a seam of dead tissue running down into the union, getting deeper every year, and no structural connection through it at all.

I hung there on the rope with my boots braced and put my hand into the crack.

Three fingers went in up to the second knuckle.

“Elias.”

“Yep.”

“Have you got that rule on you?”

A pause. “Always.”

“Send it up. Don’t throw it.”

He clipped his boxwood folding rule to the tail of my rope — the same rule, I’d bet money, a hundred and fifty years old and belonging to somebody’s grandfather, brass hinges, the varnish gone to honey — and I hauled it up, and I measured the crack, and I wrote the numbers in the yellow book in 2B pencil with my teeth in the spare loop of the strop.

Three hundred and forty millimetres long. Fourteen at its widest.

“What’s it doing?” he called up.

“It’s open.”

“How open?”

“Fourteen millimetres.”

There was a silence from down there of a particular quality. Elias Tarrant has never in his life said oh no. What he does instead is stop making noise.

“And here’s the bit I don’t like,” I said, mostly to myself. “Cleo’s got a photograph. The one on her fridge, her mum and dad, 1986, under this tree. The fork’s in the background and it’s dead sharp. I looked at it on my phone for twenty minutes last night at one in the morning like a lunatic, and I blew it up, and there is a crack in it in 1986, and it is not fourteen millimetres.”

“How much?”

“On a photo? I couldn’t swear to it in court. Call it six or seven.”

“So it’s doubled in forty years.”

“So it’s doubled in forty years,” I said, “and the last three of those were the three driest summers in the record, which does interesting things to clay, and this hill is clay. Pass me the callipers, the big ones, they’re in the red pouch.”

They came up the rope before I’d finished the sentence.

That is the thing I had forgotten and had no business forgetting.

I have a team of nine. I have four contractors I use and one of them is genuinely excellent. And I have spent eleven years on ropes with men who talk the whole time, who tell you what they’d do, who hand you the wrong tool and then explain why it’s the right one, who need you to say thank you at a volume that can be heard from the ground.

Elias Tarrant stood under a two-hundred-year-old holm oak for three hours and said, in total, about forty words, and every single thing I wanted arrived at the end of my rope within fifteen seconds of my wanting it, and twice he sent up something I hadn’t asked for and needed.

At about ten he said, “Coffee’s here whenever.”

At half ten he said, “Wind’s picking up a bit. You’re fine. Just telling you.”

Just before noon he said, “That’s a hobby,” because I’d stopped dead in the crown with my head tipped back watching something go over, and I’d said “what’s that” without meaning to, the way you do, and he answered without looking up from whatever he was doing. Which was, I discovered when I finally came down, splicing a new eye into the end of my rigging line because he’d noticed on Sunday that the old one was furred.

“You’ve spliced my line.”

“It was furred.”

“You’ve spliced my line with purple twine.”

“It was what was in the truck,” said Elias, and did not look up, and that was the entire conversation we had about it.

There is a particular kind of tiredness you get after five hours on a rope, which is nothing whatever like the tiredness of a bad week, and I sat down in the grass and let it happen to me.

I came down at twenty past twelve with sap on my hands and my forearms shaking in the good way and a notebook full of numbers, and I sat on the tarp and ate a sandwich the size of a paving slab that Bea had put in a bag with an apple and a bar of chocolate, and I was so happy I could have sung.

That matters, because of what comes after.

I was happy. Not stirred, not tormented, not any of the things I had been braced for on the drive down. Happy. I had spent five hours doing the work I am best at in the world, in a tree that had been standing there since before photography, with a man who handed me things.

“Right,” I said, with my mouth full. “Tell me about the tide, because I’m going to have to write the two of them into one document.”

And he did. He got down on his heels on the tarp and drew the creek in the mud with a stick — the whole four miles of it, the way the water comes in over the marsh from the east and fills the drains before it fills the flats so the last place you’d think to look is the first place that cuts you off — and he talked for nine minutes without stopping, which I have seen him do about four times in my life, all four on this subject.

“See, everyone thinks it comes in off the beach,” he said. “It doesn’t. It comes in round the back. That’s how people drown here. They watch the front of it.”

“That’s horrible.”

“It’s arithmetic.” He drew another line. “Saturday’s four point nine metres on the prediction. Quay goes at four fifty-five. Track goes at four thirty.”

“So the track’s out for how long?”

“Three hours and a bit either side of high water. Eleven till quarter past two.” He sat back on his heels. “That’s the prediction. There’s a low coming in on Friday night and if it deepens and the wind backs north-north-east, you can put anything up to half a metre on top of that and nobody will have told you.”

“Can that happen?”

“It happened in 2013 and it took the front out of two houses.” He said it entirely without drama, wiping the stick on his knee. “It won’t happen Saturday. Probably.”

“Probably.”

“I’ll know Thursday night.” He looked up at me then, straight on, for the first time all morning. “You’ll know Thursday night, I mean. Same time as me.”

I ate my apple and did not say anything for a bit, because there was a thing sitting just under my breastbone and I did not want to give it any air.

At twenty-five to one I got up to pack the tarp, and I walked round the base of the tree the way you always do at the end — one last slow lap, because the ground tells you things the crown doesn’t — and on the north-east side, the seaward side, where the biggest buttress root comes out of the bank and the grass gives up, there was a patch of something on the bark at soil level, about the size of two hands side by side.

It was grey-white at the edges, going to black in the middle. Crusted. Faintly wrinkled, like something that had been poured hot and set.

I crouched down. I got the blade of my knife under the edge of it and it lifted in a brittle flake, black all the way through, with that unmistakable charcoal look, and underneath it the bark was soft.

“Greer?”

“Give me a minute.”

I got my knife out and went in maybe eight millimetres at the base of the buttress, very slightly, where I could justify it, and the wood came away in a pale dry crumb with a black line running through it like a pencil stroke.

Kretzschmaria deusta.

There is no common name that anybody uses. Brittle cinder, some people say. It is the one you do not want. It is the one you do not want because it does not make a bracket you can see from forty feet, and it does not make the tree look sick, and it does not rot the wood soft and spongy the way honey fungus does, so the tree does not respond by laying down more. It makes the wood brittle. A tree with it can stand there in full leaf, green as anything, apparently sound, and then fail at the base in a gust with no warning at all, and it fails not by bending but by snapping, like a stick of charcoal, which is where the name comes from.

I stayed on my heels with my hand flat on the bark.

Behind me the wind came across the rise and moved the whole eastern side of the tree at once, that dry rattling roar, two hundred years of it, and down on the quay somebody dropped a scaffold board and swore.

“What is it?” Elias said.

I looked at the black flake on my thumb.

“Go and get Cleo,” I said.