The Memory of Trees

by F. G. Cottam

  He looked around. Slightly to the north-west of where he stood, on a bearing that he reckoned would eventually take him to the cliffs and the sea, he noticed then the smudge of something that looked man-made. It was slate grey and solid and unmoving, but the lie of the land prevented him from seeing more than a fraction of it, low and perhaps a couple of miles distant. He began to walk towards it. It seemed the logical thing for him to do.

  He was quite close to this building before the contour of the land exposed more of it and it was finally resolved into a small chapel or church. It was too plain to be a folly. He was only five hundred metres away when it revealed its detail fully as a place of worship built from stone in what he assumed were Saxon times. It was square in shape and a squat single storey only in height.

  The studded oak wonder of a door looked original to this building when he reached it. It was blackened by time and exposure but still carried the scars of the primitive tools that had fashioned it in faith. When he pushed it, it creaked open on iron hinges and the cool smell of the church interior was a sudden, stony contrast to the sweet grass smell of the spring morning outside.

  Gloom enveloped him. His eyes adjusted to it. He became aware of the one light source in there, beyond the gaps cleaved as narrow as archery slits at even spaces in the masonry.

  This was a stained-glass window. It was high to his left and the angle of the sun through it cast shimmering lozenges of light on the wall opposite. There was enough light, now his eyes had grown accustomed, to see that the interior of the church was denuded of any furnishings. There was no altar, no pulpit, no benches in cramped rows or bolsters on which to kneel and pray. There were no lamps. There were no pictures hung or candles in holders to light. The church interior lacked a font. There was just the flagged stone floor and that one ornamental window to look upon, and so he did, studying its detail.

  It was not religious in subject matter. If anything, Curtis thought, it might actually be construed as slightly blasphemous.

  The window was tall and narrow and arched. It pictured a knight, bareheaded, clad in silver armour. His war horse stood tethered to a sapling with its head bowed to his rear. From his right hand, a bloodied broadsword trailed, its tip buried in the ferns growing lushly around his feet. In the grip of his left fist, his arm extended, he held a severed head by its hair. Its eyes had risen to white blankness in its face in death. It was not human, this grisly trophy displayed by the knight in the stained-glass window. It was twice as large as any human head Curtis had ever seen. And its skin was ridged and coarsened with scales.

  ‘Man, that’s one ugly motherfucker,’ a voice from behind him said.

  Curtis jumped at the sound of the voice and turned and recognized the facial features of Saul Abercrombie contorted into a grin. He looked pleased with himself at the shock he’d just inflicted. ‘Relax, brother,’ he said. He nodded up at the window. ‘The bad guy looks pretty dead to me. Dude in the steel suit saw to that.’

  ‘Do you know who they are?’

  ‘It’s a thousand years ago,’ Abercrombie said. ‘People float theories. But guesswork is bullshit. Truth is, nobody knows.’ He put out a hand and Curtis shook it. ‘Saul,’ he said.

  ‘Tom Curtis.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. My tree guy.’

  ‘Only if I pass the audition.’

  Abercrombie was slightly shorter than he looked in pictures. He was grey-bearded with white, wavy hair he wore at the same shoulder length he had in the famous picture of his arrest at the Red Lion Square demo back in the early seventies, when his tresses had been a youthful shade of brown. He was wearing a wrinkled blue linen suit, the trousers belted with a knotted club tie. His feet were laced into sneakers. He looked like he always looked, except that on his head was perched a pair of old-fashioned leather aviator goggles, their round glass lenses framed in circles of brass.

  He said, ‘I already like the vibe you give off, Tom. I’m rarely wrong about people. We’re simpatico, the two of us. Everything is going to be cool, trust me.’

  Curtis heard an engine approaching outside. Because he owned one himself, he knew it belonged to a Land Rover.

  Abercrombie cocked his head at the sound. ‘My principle gofer, Sam,’ he said. ‘Quad bikes on the trailer. You and me, Tree Man, are going to take the tour.’

  Thus the steampunk goggles, Curtis thought, smiling to himself. There was something slightly pantomimic about Saul Abercrombie. But the man could afford to play the fool, couldn’t he, having proven so conclusively over the years he was anything but. And he was likeable. Curtis realized with surprise that despite all of the reservations and prejudices he’d brought with him to Wales, he’d liked his potential new employer immediately.

  ‘What is this place, Saul?’

  Abercrombie adjusted the goggles over his eyes before answering. Outside, Curtis could hear Freemantle lower a ramp or running boards from the trailer to the ground to unload the bikes.

  ‘The church is nameless,’ Abercrombie said, blinking. ‘It’s lost, like the identity of the guy who won the argument up there in the window. The spot we’re on is known as Raven Dip. It’s a natural depression, the reason you have to get up close to recognize the building we’re in for what it is.’

  ‘I saw Raven Dip on the map,’ Curtis said. ‘I studied the lie of the land on my laptop yesterday. I didn’t see any sign of buildings at all.’

  ‘Google Earth?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re shitting me.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Which goes to prove, you can’t trust anyone,’ Abercrombie said, slapping him on the back and steering him towards the door in a single deft movement of his hand.

  The quad bikes gleamed like alien and bulbous toys on the ground outside the old building, the Land Rover already distant, its trailer sashaying when Curtis looked, over the bumps and through the depressions of the ground on the route back to wherever it came from.

  The estate occupied a tract of land that stretched seaward to an area of the Pembrokeshire coastline between Fishguard and Aberaeron. That finite boundary was made up of eight miles of cliffs. They ranged in height from about seventy feet to over 200 in a couple of places, undulating smoothly rather than raggedly because this part of the coastline was not prey to the erosion, Abercrombie told him, that plagued the eastern shoreline of Britain, ravaged as it was by the North Sea.

  They toured the perimeter, travelling counter-clockwise. They stopped only when they reached what Abercrombie announced was the tallest of his sea-facing promontories, the one offering the best view out west over the water in the direction of Ireland and, beyond that, six thousand miles away, the Eastern Seaboard of the United States.

  They were quiet for a moment, seated on the bikes, Curtis enjoying the relative peace after the belligerent roar of their engines, aware after a few moments of the rhythmic wash of the surf on the shore a fairly remote distance beneath them.

  Abercrombie sniffed and lifted his goggles up on to his head. He looked skyward and said, ‘Is salt a serious downer? In the rain, I mean, at the edge of the sea?’

  ‘It’s a common enough fallacy,’ Curtis said. ‘But most of your clouds coming from offshore will have gathered above the Irish land mass. Even if they hadn’t, clouds don’t carry salt in damaging concentrations. Drench would be a problem. Persistent sea spray could afflict the soil. But everything on your land is so far above sea level it nullifies all that.’

  ‘Anything else that should be costing me sleep?’

  ‘The depth and pH balance of the soil. Mature root systems will undermine the cliffs if the soil isn’t there to sufficient depth.’

  ‘You’ll measure all of that shit, right?’

  ‘I’ll do all the testing necessary,’ Curtis said. ‘But I’m reasonably confident, having seen what you’ve shown me, that your plan’s achievable. The scale is pretty awesome. But we’re only really putting back what was originally there.’

  Abercrombie w
as quiet for such a long time that Curtis thought perhaps he hadn’t heard this last remark. There wasn’t much wind to snatch away his words. But men of his new boss’s vintage were sometimes a little deaf. Then, quietly, Abercrombie said, ‘When was the last time you were allowed to see your daughter?’

  ‘It’ll be four months on Tuesday.’

  ‘Bummer.’

  ‘I’m surprised you know about that.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be. I like to know everything significant about the guys I hire.’

  ‘Is it significant?’

  ‘On a project this size, everything is that could put it in jeopardy. Anyway, it sounds like a bitch of a problem.’

  ‘It’s my problem.’

  ‘And the reason you want this gig so bad.’

  ‘I thought we were simpatico?’

  ‘Tree Man, it’s not confined to you and me.’

  ‘I want access to my daughter. Her mother’s putting every possible obstacle in the way of my seeing her. We’re unmarried, so my rights are limited. Litigation is expensive and I’ve no savings. You’re right, I need this job. I need it far too badly to be likely to fuck it up.’

  ‘My worry is you’ll convince yourself the project’s feasible, even if it isn’t,’ Abercrombie said. ‘You’ve just admitted you’re desperate for the bread.’

  ‘I’ll do my tests. I’ll tell you the objective truth when I’ve done them. Right now, things look promising, but I won’t lie to you, Saul. What would be the point? If we begin this and it fails, I’ll be unemployable.’

  ‘You got that right, Tree Man.’

  ‘What’s your budget?’

  ‘It stretches somewhere slightly north of fifty million pounds.’

  ‘You won’t need anywhere near that much.’

  ‘It’s there if I do,’ Abercrombie said. He turned to look behind them, at all the grassy wilderness he owned.

  ‘It’s an awful lot of what you call bread.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s a chunk of change, all right. What can I tell you, Tom?’ Abercrombie said, laughing. ‘I like trees.’

  He liked them so much that he was going to oversee their planting across every part of this vast Welsh acreage. He was going to return to it the character the land had possessed in the Dark Ages, when England and Wales and Ireland too had been covered in dense, deciduous forest.

  They had cleared it first for their settlements and then for their by-ways and then for cultivation. In the end, they had cleared it because cleared land seemed to them a symbol of civilization and forests the home of outlaws or just the gloomy refuge of magic and barbarism. They had chopped and hacked and burned in the name of progress until only a few areas of forest remained as a precious legacy to be nurtured and preserved in modern times by professional conservationists.

  Saul Abercrombie wanted to reverse that process. He wanted to restore his domain to the virgin woodland it had been a thousand years ago. And he didn’t want to do it by planting saplings and watching them grow through patient decades. The stealth approach didn’t work for him. He was seventy years old. He had neither the decades nor the patience in him for stealth. He wanted a mature forest rightfully restored on a gigantic scale and had set aside north of fifty million pounds to see this ambition realized.

  ‘Ash and elder,’ Abercrombie said. ‘Yew, chestnut, oak, sycamore and beech.’

  He talks like a hippie, Curtis thought, and this is his mantra. He wants to build something profound and unprecedented. It will be wild and beautiful and his spectacular legacy. That was what Curtis supposed he had meant when he’d said the project went beyond whether the two of them could rub along all right together. He was a man for whom getting what he wanted was a lifelong habit. And he wanted nothing more than for his forest kingdom to be successfully realized.

  As though reading his mind, Abercrombie said, ‘Broadleaf, brother, as far as the eye can see.’ Then, ‘Where will you source the trees?’

  Curtis had thought about that. Of course he had. There were plenty of heavily wooded areas of British coastline doomed by erosion caused by the sea. Blackgang Chine on the Isle of Wight was one such spot. If someone was prepared to take the physical risk and organize the engineering and logistics, who would not be pleased to see those threatened trees on the precipice there saved and re-planted?

  More cynically, there were lumber companies in Canada and the United States who would do almost anything to improve their compromised ecological credentials. They would get the same tonnage dollars from Abercrombie that they would get from customers looking to turn the wood into floors and furniture and roof joists. They wouldn’t get the same kudos, though. They’d bend over backwards to facilitate him.

  Curtis explained all this. He did so once the quad bikes had taken them back to Abercrombie’s house, located about half a mile from the sea, towards the southern extremity of his land.

  The house would have been a surprise had he not Google-Earthed it the previous day. It was modern, made mostly of wood from what Curtis assumed was a sustainable source. There were solar panels on the gentle slope of its roof. It was a spacious, handsome, two-storey affair, but even the most hyperbolic of estate agents would have blushed when calling it a mansion.

  Abercrombie had mansions. He had homes in Barbados and London and British Columbia and they were far grander than this one was. Curtis had the intuition it might be razed and obliterated when the forest reached completion. The integrity of the forest would not be compromised by something modern and man-made. What a lonely construction that would make of the Saxon church, with its gory, stained-glass mystery, six or seven miles to the north-east of where they sat, the sun descending, on lawn chairs at a garden table to the rear of the property.

  Unless Abercrombie planned to have the church razed too, of course. The church was an ancient monument and its stones had once been sanctified. But you could do such things, couldn’t you, when you were in the business of playing God.

  They were sipping beer. That had turned out to be the second and less pleasant of two surprises. The first, welcome surprise had been Saul’s daughter, Francesca, exiting the house through the kitchen door and delivering their chilled bottles and iced beer glasses on a tray. She smiled and was introduced to Curtis, who stood and shook her hand. She was dressed in jeans and a blue cardigan he thought was probably cashmere over a plain white shirt. The breeze blew a tress of her hair across her face and she lifted a languid hand and brushed it away. She was one of those tall and slender women who move like liquid.

  Her father asked her if she would join them, but she said she was working on something she was vague about in what she called the studio. She was as beautiful and as graceful in life as her pictures suggested she would be. With his counter-cultural phraseology and Artful Dodger manner of delivering it, there was something of the East End still about Saul. Francesca, by contrast, sounded like the product of a Surrey boarding school.

  The unnerving surprise was the brand of beer Francesca had delivered him. Abercrombie’s was a Heineken. Curtis was served a Hoegaarden.

  ‘How did you know?’

  Abercrombie chuckled. ‘That you have a taste for Weiss beer? Knowledge is power, friend.’

  ‘I’m flattered and all,’ Curtis said. ‘But really, how did you know?’

  ‘If you value your privacy, brother, don’t shop online.’

  ‘You’ve had me spied on?’

  ‘Assessed,’ Abercrombie said. ‘Secure Internet connectivity is an oxymoron, Tree Man. When it comes to privacy, the web is one faithless fucking bitch.’

  A man exited the house and joined them, then. Dusk was gathering and he looked huge before he got close, loping over on light feet to where they sat and the detail of his clothing and features were properly resolved. He was shaven-headed and about six-four, dressed in camouflaged fatigues. And Curtis endured a third surprise, because he suddenly knew he’d had Sam Freemantle all wrong.

  Deliberately so, he thought. Freemantle on the phone h
ad just played on his preconceptions, planting assumptions, toying with him. He was nothing to do with tweed and twelve-bores; with partridge shoots and baiting traps to catch hares. His prey, should he hunt, was much more likely to be of the human variety. His claim to having spent the bulk of his life outdoors was probably true but had also been deliberately ambiguous.

  He was Saul’s security and didn’t look to Curtis of the cut-price variety that gave the trade a bad name. Physically, he looked like he could create some serious carnage in the second row of a rugby scrum. But his body language suggested ex-military. Curtis would have bet what little money he had on that.

  He nodded and smiled at Curtis and said, ‘Everything OK, Saul?’

  ‘Go and grab yourself a beer,’ Abercrombie said to him.

  To Curtis, Freemantle said, ‘I took the liberty of locating your car and bringing up the things you left in the boot. In case you need them, I mean.’

  ‘I left my car locked,’ Curtis said. But this remark went ignored.

  ‘I assume you’ll stay the night?’ Abercrombie said.

  ‘I’d be delighted to stay.’

  ‘Go and grab that beer,’ Abercrombie said to Freemantle. ‘And bring me and Tree Man here another fresh one apiece.’

  The three men talked. Curtis learned that his host had started buying the land he owned here in parcels twenty years ago. The bulk of it had belonged, ironically, to the Forestry Commission. They had planned to cultivate conifers on it but had enjoyed such success with their planting in Snowdonia and the Scottish Highlands that the site had never been brought into productive use. There had never really been sufficient demand.

  Ten years ago, when he finally owned the whole area that was originally covered by the forest he wanted to re-create, Abercrombie had everything on it ploughed under and then just left it to lie fallow for a full decade before embarking upon his scheme.