The Number Out Loud

I drilled the tree at two o’clock and told Cleo at three, and in between I sat in my van in Bea’s field with the door open and my boots in the grass and read the same three printouts eleven times looking for a version of them I could live with.

The drill is a thing about the size of a small angle grinder with a needle on the front of it — one and a half millimetres, thinner than a knitting needle, so thin the tree seals it in a fortnight. You push it in at a constant rate and it draws you a graph of how hard the wood is pushing back. Sound wood gives you a nice busy scribble, high and even. Decay gives you a flatline.

I did three, all at three hundred millimetres above ground level, all in the seaward buttress, spaced at forty-five degrees.

All three showed the same thing. Forty millimetres of good wood on the outside — the tree’s response growth, laid down in the last decade, doing exactly what a tree does when it knows it’s in trouble. Then, from forty to about two hundred and ten, a long flat run where the needle went in like it was going through a wine cork.

And here is the part that matters, and the part I spent an hour drafting a sentence about, and the part I still cannot make sound like anything other than what it is.

With most decay you can do arithmetic. There are rules of thumb — the thickness of sound wood you need against the radius of the stem — and they are crude and conservative and they work, because most fungi rot wood into something soft, and a tree can feel soft coming and put more wood on the outside to compensate.

Brittle cinder doesn’t do that. It takes the lignin out and leaves the wood hard. Hard and dry and sharp-edged, like the charcoal in the bottom of a barbecue. A tree with brittle cinder in the buttress does not bend and groan and warn you. It stands there looking magnificent, and then one afternoon in a gust it snaps at the base, and the fracture face is black and the wood is dry and it has been like that for two years.

So the rules of thumb do not apply, and any arborist who tells you they do should not be allowed near a rope.

I got out of the van at four minutes to three and walked down to the granary with the printouts under my arm and my heart doing something unhelpful, because I have delivered this news to a duke’s land agent, a parish council and a primary school and I have never once in my whole career had to deliver it to Cleo Tarrant.

She was up a stepladder with a staple gun.

“Don’t tell me,” she said. “Tell me the tree’s fine and Jean’s approved the cake table.”

“Come down off there.”

She came down off there.

I did it properly, which is to say I did it the way I would have done it for a stranger, because the alternative was to do it badly. I put the three graphs on a trestle in the right order and I talked her through what she was looking at. I told her about the fork and the fourteen millimetres and the 1986 photograph. I told her about the flake of black stuff on my thumb. I told her the Met Office had a low coming in Friday night and the current guidance for Saturday afternoon was a north-easterly six with gusts to forty-five miles an hour, and that gusts are what kill trees, not wind, because wind is a load a tree has learned to shed and a gust is a load it hasn’t.

And then I said the number out loud, because that is my entire job.

“I can’t sign off eighty-four people standing under the south-west spread of that tree on Saturday afternoon.”

Cleo looked at the graphs.

“That’s the tree,” she said.

“I know.”

“No, Greer — that’s the tree. That’s the one on the fridge. That’s where he asked her. He had the ring in a bag of chips because he’d got nervous and bought chips.” Her voice had gone up at the end and she heard it, and stopped, and put both hands flat on the trestle. “Sorry. I’m not — sorry.”

“You don’t have to be sorry.”

“I’ve had that picture in my head since I was nine. Nine. Before I had a fella I had that picture.” She laughed, badly. “And Mum’s dead and Dad’s in Wells and doesn’t know what month it is and I thought, right, well, at least there’s a tree.”

“Cleo.”

“Is it going to fall down?”

“Probably not on Saturday.”

“Probably.”

“If you want a man who’ll say definitely, he exists, and I’ll give you his number, and he’ll charge you four hundred quid and he’ll be guessing.” I kept my voice level. “I’m telling you what I actually know. At the base, in that buttress, there’s a couple of hundred millimetres of wood that isn’t wood any more. Above that there’s a fork with a crack in it that’s opened up by seven or eight millimetres since 1986, and the single biggest thing hanging off that fork is the south-west limb, which is fourteen metres long, weighs somewhere north of four tonnes, and is exactly the thing that levers the bad buttress every time it blows from the sea. That’s the machine. That’s what’s actually going on up there.”

There were four minutes of it. I have thought about that four minutes since and I do not think I would change a word of what I said, and I would change everything about where I stood, which was on the other side of a trestle table like a man presenting a quotation.

Then Cleo wiped her face with the back of her wrist, and said, “Right. What do we do?” — and that was worse.

That was much worse, because it is what I would have done.

“Three things,” I said. “One, the south-west limb comes off, or a third of it does. That’s not cosmetic. Take a third of the length off that limb and you’ve taken about a tonne and a half of green weight and a huge amount of sail area out of the exact place it does the most damage. Two, a brace across the fork. It’s a hollow synthetic rope on a big sling round each stem, non-invasive, no bolts, nothing goes into the tree — it sits slack in normal conditions and it takes the load when the fork tries to open. Three, nobody stands under the south-west side. Not on Saturday, not ever, as far as I’m concerned, but definitely not on Saturday.”

“So no chairs under the tree.”

“Eighty-four chairs, arranged in the one place they cannot go.”

“Right,” said Cleo. She picked up the staple gun and put it down again. “How long’s the limb take?”

“A day. With a decent ground crew and a chipper and somebody who can rig.”

“And the brace?”

“Couple of hours after.”

“And who’s paying for all this?”

“Me,” I said. “Well — nobody. I’m here. My kit’s here. I’ll write the report tonight and I’ll put my name on it and it’ll say exactly what I’ve told you, and if Jean wants to argue with it she can have a lovely time.”

Cleo looked at me for a moment.

“You’re so good at this,” she said. It was not an insult and it was not entirely a compliment. “You have always been so good at looking at a thing and going, right, here’s what it can take, and here’s what it can’t. You did it to my dissertation. You did it to my car.”

“Your car was a death trap.”

“It was, though, wasn’t it.” She smiled, and then the smile went somewhere else. “Do you ever do it to yourself?”

I did not have an answer ready, which is unusual for me, and the silence lasted a beat longer than a silence should.

“He won’t know me,” Cleo said.

I had to catch up. “Your dad?”

“He might. It’s about fifty-fifty at lunchtime and worse after four, and the wedding’s at half three, which is the stupidest possible time, and I picked it because of the light.” She said it fast, the way she says everything, but she was holding the edge of the trestle. “And I keep thinking, is it fair? Is it fair to put a man in a suit and drive him twenty-five minutes and stand him in a field so that I can have a thing. Because he’s not going to remember it. And I’m the only one who gets anything out of it. That’s not a dad walking his daughter down an aisle, that’s — that’s me with a prop.”

“Cleo—“

“And Elias says it’s fine.” She said her brother’s name with something in it I filed and did not examine. “Everything’s fine. Every week. Fine, fine, fine. He’s fine, Cleo, don’t worry about it, Cleo, I’ve got it. He’s had it for two years.”

From the doorway, where he had been standing for I do not know how long with a rolled-up drawing in his hand, Elias said, “There’s a way to do it.”

We both turned round.

“Not Dad,” he said. “The other thing. The tree.”

“Go on then.”

He came in and moved the printouts to one side, politely, and turned over the seating plan — eighty-four names, four months of Cleo’s life, an entire evening of arguments about an aunt — and flattened it out blank side up on the trestle.

“You’ve got it the wrong way round,” he said. “You’re thinking, where do we put eighty-four people so they’re safe. Wrong question. Question is what’s the water doing at half three.”

“What is the water doing at half three?” I said.

“Saturday, high water’s ten to one. By half three it’s three hours down and the creek’s still carrying about a metre and a half. Enough to float anything with less than two foot of draught, easy, and it stays like that till twenty past four.” He put a finger on the blank paper. “So. Ceremony’s not under the tree. It’s on the seaward side of it, on the flat bit by the wall, where the trunk’s between you and the whole south-west spread. That’s your twelve people. Bride, groom, registrar, witnesses, Dad, whoever else Cleo wants. Everybody else stands up on the rise, back here — that’s, what, thirty metres out?”

“Thirty-two,” I said. “Thirty-two is outside the fall zone, comfortably.”

“Thirty-two. Looking down at the tree, with the creek and the marsh and the whole of Scolt behind it.” He drew the curve of the creek. “And there’s water in it. So Arun’s mates can bring the boats up — there’s four in the village and Wilf’s got that black one — and the rest of them can sit out there and watch it from the channel.”

There was a pause.

“Oh, you bastard,” said Cleo. “That’s better than what I had.”

“It’s the same tree,” said Elias. “You just don’t stand under it.”

“That’s better than what I had!”

“Bit of a walk up from the quay for your aunt.”

“My aunt can walk up from the quay, my aunt did the Three Peaks in July, my aunt will not stop talking about the Three Peaks—“

And Elias said, “Right,” and took the pencil out from behind his ear and started to draw it properly — the rise, the tree, the twelve, the eighty-four, the line of the creek with a little scribble for the water and four boxes for the boats, and the arrows for how eighty-four people get from the field to the hill without crossing the same six feet of wet flint twice.

I stood behind him and put one hand on the back of his chair and leaned over his shoulder to see.

I did it without thinking about it at all. I did it exactly the way I had done it a hundred times at a kitchen table in a cottage at Burnham in 2020 with the radio on. My hand went to the chair back, and my shoulder came down level with his, and I said, “Do the parking as well, do it in blue so we can see it,” and he made a small sound that meant yes, and reached for the blue one.

It was only afterwards — twenty minutes later, going down the granary steps into a wind that had got up — that I heard the whole of it back.

Not the leaning. The reaching.

I had asked for the blue pencil and he had gone for it before I finished the sentence, and there had not been a single moment, in either of us, in which we had had to decide.