Brace or Fell

Jean Pettifer’s kitchen has a table you could land a helicopter on and one chair that is hers, and at half past nine on Tuesday morning there were six of us round it and a man called Barry on speakerphone from an office in Ipswich.

“Right,” said Jean. “Miss Maddox has done us a report. Miss Maddox, how long is it?”

“Nine pages.”

“Barry, have you read it?”

“I’ve read the summary, Jean.”

“Read the whole thing before Thursday or I shall come to Ipswich.” Jean folded her hands. “Go on, then.”

I went on. I did it in about six minutes, because Jean Pettifer is seventy-four and has chaired that Trust for nineteen years and does not need the same sentence twice. Decay at the seaward buttress, quantified, roughly thirty-eight per cent of the section at three hundred millimetres. A fork at six metres with bark inclusion and a crack that has doubled in forty years. The species of fungus and what it does and what it does not do, which is warn you.

“And your recommendation?”

“Reduce the south-west limb by a third. Install a dynamic brace across the fork. Exclusion zone on the south-west side, permanently, which means moving the two benches and the bin. Formal inspection every eighteen months, and a look at it after any named storm. Total cost, if you use a local firm and I write the spec for you for nothing, about two thousand four hundred pounds.”

“And the tree lives?”

“The tree lives. I’d expect it to stand another twenty years, minimum, and holm oak is not in a hurry.”

“Barry?”

“I’d want to know,” said Barry, in the voice of a man in a chair in Ipswich, “what the alternative is.”

“The alternative,” said Elias, “is you take it down.”

I had known it was coming from the moment he sat down, because he had sat down at the end of the table rather than beside me, and because he had a folded piece of paper in front of him, and because I have watched this man be about to disagree with somebody in a room maybe forty times in my life and it looks like absolutely nothing at all.

“Go on, Mr Tarrant,” said Jean.

“Three things.” He did not unfold the paper. “One, that fungus doesn’t warn you. She’s just told you that herself, and she’s right. So every survey anyone does on that tree from now on is a survey of the bit you can reach. Two, it’s a two-hundred-year-old evergreen on a clay rise thirty metres from a tidal creek, and the summers are getting drier, and the tide’s getting higher, and in fifteen years that bank is going to be doing things nobody in this room has modelled. Three—“ and here he did look at me “—she goes home Sunday.”

“That’s not—“

“Let him finish,” said Jean.

“She goes home Sunday,” Elias said. “And the piece of paper stays. And in four years’ time it’ll be a different Trust and a different chair and someone will find a folder that says inspect every eighteen months, and it will not have been inspected for six, because it never is, anywhere, and the village will have got used to a certificate with a name on it. I’ve seen it. My father had a folder like that for the wall at Deepdale and it said the same thing for thirty years and the wall went in one night in December.”

“You breached that wall yourself,” I said.

“I did.”

“With a machine. On purpose. Because it was cheaper to let the sea have four hundred acres than to keep buying rock.”

“Yes,” said Elias, without the smallest flicker. “And the marsh behind it is the best bit of saltings between here and the Wash, and there’s four thousand birds on it, and it cost a third of what the rock would have cost, and my father has never forgiven me, and I would do it again in the morning.”

“Barry,” said Jean, “are you getting all this?”

“I’m mostly getting a number, Jean.”

“Two thousand four hundred,” I said, “versus — Elias, what does a two-hundred-year-old holm oak on a slope with no vehicle access cost to take down?”

“Six and a half. Seven, with the stump.”

“So the cheap option is mine.”

“This year it is.”

“And there are three bat roosts in it,” I said, “which I found on Monday, and which are a criminal matter rather than a financial one, and there is not another mature evergreen within eleven miles of this village, and every single person in Saltmere navigates by that tree, including a man in Wells with vascular dementia who is coming here on Friday. Barry, I’ll put every word of this in writing and I’ll sign it.”

There was a pause from Ipswich.

“If Miss Maddox signs it,” said Barry, “and the exclusion zone’s in place on the day, we’ve no issue with Saturday.”

Jean Pettifer put her hands flat on the table and looked at the pair of us for slightly longer than was comfortable.

“I’ll tell you something nobody’s asked about,” she said, “and then I’ll decide. That tree was down for felling in 1988. There was no Trust then, it was the parish, and there was a surveyor up from Norwich who said very nearly what you’ve just said, Mr Tarrant, and considerably less politely. And the man who stopped it was your father.”

Elias did not move.

“Roy stood up in the village hall in a donkey jacket and said he’d put a rope round it himself and he’d like to see anybody get a saw past him.” Jean’s mouth did something dry. “He was an appalling man to have on a committee and he was right twice in nineteen years, and that was one of them. I’m not being sentimental. I’m telling you because you are about to be asked to stand next to a decision, and I think you ought to know whose you’re standing against.”

“That doesn’t change the fungus,” said Elias.

“No,” said Jean. “It doesn’t.”

“Then that’s what we’ll do,” said Jean Pettifer, and closed her hands, and that was the end of the meeting, and it had taken twenty-two minutes.

Elias stayed to move Jean’s compost bin because Jean had asked him to on the way in, and I walked out into the lane, and I was about thirty feet down it when I discovered that I was not finished.

I have thought a good deal about why. I had won. I had had the professional judgement, the data, the insurer and the chair, and I had had all of them inside half an hour, and I was standing in a Norfolk lane with my ears hot.

He came out and shut the gate behind him.

“Say it, then,” he said.

“You think I’m wrong.”

“I think you’re right about the tree.”

“That’s not the same sentence.”

“No.”

“Then what’s the other one?”

He put his hands in his pockets and looked down the lane at the water.

“I think you’d rather spend twenty years holding something together than one afternoon admitting it’s over,” he said. “That’s all. It’s not about the tree. The tree’s fine. You’re better at trees than anyone I’ve ever met.”

And I said — because I am not a saint, and because I had had three hours’ sleep and a coat round my shoulders on a bank at six in the morning — “And I think you’ve confused giving up with being brave.”

That landed. I watched it land. He is very still when something lands.

“Go on,” he said.

“You’ve built a whole career out of it. You’re the man who takes the wall down. Everybody claps. There’s a piece about you in the EDP with a photo of you standing in a breach in a hi-vis looking like a man who’s made peace with something.” I could hear myself and I could not stop. “And it is brave, some of the time, and the birds are real and the money is real. But you have made a philosophy out of the one thing you were always going to do anyway, Elias, which is let go of something before it can go wrong, and you’ve got four thousand redshank to prove you were right.”

“That’s fair,” he said.

“Don’t do that.”

“It’s fair. Some of it.” He turned round. “Here’s the rest. You’d have braced us.”

“What?”

“In 2021. If I’d let you.” He said it flatly, without cruelty, which made it about nine times worse. “You’d have put a slack line across the top of it and an inspection every eighteen months and a folder somewhere with a certificate in it, and we’d have gone on for another twenty years like that, two things growing past each other with a seam of dead bark in the middle, and you’d have called it a repair. And I’d have let you, because it would have meant you didn’t go.”

The lane was very quiet. Somewhere down on the quay a halyard was tapping.

“That isn’t what happened,” I said.

“No. What happened was worse, and it was mine, and I know it.” He said that part fast, like a man getting past something. “I’m only saying I know what you’d have chosen, because you’d choose it every time. You have never once in your life let a thing be finished. You’ve still got your dad’s number in your phone.”

“How do you—“

“Because you looked at it on the wall on Sunday when Cleo said his name.”

We stood there.

“The limb comes off Thursday,” I said. “All day. I’ll need you, Tomasz, a chipper, and the track dry enough at seven to get it up there.”

“Track’s fine till eleven Thursday.”

“Then Thursday.”

“Right,” he said.

“And I’ll go and see Wilf Chalmers tomorrow morning about his boat and Bea’s bunting, since nobody else is going to.”

Something crossed his face, very quickly, and was gone before I could name it.

“He’s in the shed by half seven,” Elias said.

I walked down the lane to the quay and I sat on the bollard at the end of it for about ten minutes with my notebook open on my knee, not writing anything, watching the water go out.

Here is what I did not say to him, then or at any point that day, or to Cleo, or to anybody.

He was not wrong.

And more than that — and this is the thing that sat in my chest like a swallowed coin all the way through Tuesday — he was not this person five years ago.

At thirty he agreed with me about everything. Everything. Where we ate, what we watched, whether my boss was being unreasonable, whether the extension on the cottage was ugly. I had thought, at twenty-five, that this was an unusually restful form of respect; I had told two friends that he was the least combative man I had ever met and they had both said how lovely.

It was not respect. I could see it perfectly clearly from the other end of a lane at thirty-two. A man who never disagrees with you is a man who has decided the conversation does not have consequences. It costs nothing to agree with somebody you are not planning to build anything with. He had deferred to me for twenty-one months for the same reason he had never told his sister: because a person you agree with cannot leave you over anything you said.

And now he sat at the end of Jean Pettifer’s table and argued for the destruction of a tree I loved, in front of an insurer, and lost, and shook my hand about it in a lane.

I did not know what to do with that at all. It was extremely inconvenient.

It was, in fact, the single most attractive thing that had happened to me in five years, and I sat on a bollard in the sunshine and hated it very much.