It was the third week of March and Fen Sallow stood in an orchard that had not carried an apple in fifty-six years, explaining to a woman with a clipboard why she was selling it. “They’re not dying,” Fen said. “Write that first.” Delia Norrish looked up the row. “They look dying.” “Six of them never leaf out properly and the rest go green in June and stop. Nothing is killing them.” Delia had sold land in that parish for twenty-two years. “My mother’s apples went in the sixties. You don’t argue with the weather.” “A hard frost in 1969 killed the flower and it was never the same again.” “You’ve had it checked.” “No.” The sale was thirty-one acres. Eleven of orchard, which nobody could price, and twenty of grass and two fields a company from the next county wanted for a yard and twelve houses. Fen had signed an option in January for eleven thousand pounds, because a yard company needs planning consent and planning consent needs trees.

“It can have the orchard as it is,” she said. “Rootstock, dead branches, the lot. My mother’s seventy-seven and her knees are finished. The money buys her a house in Nethergill with no steps.” “And the eleven acres of trees.” “Grass in my grandmother’s book. Nobody wants them. She won’t let them be cut down, and that is all that is stopping it.” “Will she sign?” “She’ll sign the house.”

The kitchen at Kiln Piece smelled of coal and liniment. Nan Sallow was ninety-five, at the table with a saucer and a magnifying glass. “She wants a photograph of the six.” Nan put the glass down on the saucer, which was more alarm than the price of heating oil had got. “Who told her about the six?” “Everybody. It’s on the old plan.”

“They’re numbered,” Nan said. “Six in a row down the long hedge. One, two, three, four, five, six, cut into the trunk with tar in the cuts, and my mother’s hand and not mine. And I am going to tell you the rule now and I am not going to tell you again, so have it right. An apple tree that grows over a buried promise fruits when that promise is kept, or when it is broken out loud in front of the person it was made to. If you will not speak to that person, nothing happens at all. And hear that last part properly, because it is not that the tree is cross. It is an accounting. A kept promise and a broken one both put the money in. The tree does not care which. It only wants the entry.” “Why would it want an entry?”

“Because that is what it is. You pay a man and he owes you nothing further. You break his leg and pay for the leg and he owes you nothing further. Same book.” Nan turned a shoelace round her finger. “This family has left every page open for fifty-six years. Nobody is being punished. They are waiting on the book.”

The burying was done at night in the last week of August of 1951, and Nan dug all six holes herself, because Vic had a bad back and Joy would not touch a spade. Under the first she put a thin gold ring and said Joy aloud, because the top two acres were hers to give away and she had said since they were girls that they would be Joy’s. Under the second she put the head of a broken grafting knife, because that was Emrys Tuke’s hedge. Her father Wilf had cut the line four yards north in 1949, into Emrys’s side, and told him it was a spring clean and the hedge would go back in the winter. It did not go back in the winter. Under the third she put nothing and said no name, because the promise that hole was for had not been made yet. She planted the tree anyway, and in 1958 came back with a receipt book from the grammar school at Nethergill, put it under the same tree, and said Beryl, who was six and in the room.

Under the fourth she put nothing either and said Vic aloud. He had come home from the navy in 1946 and their father had promised him the top orchard and a place in the firm of it before he was forty, said in the yard. Under the fifth she put a thimble, a hairpin and a five-shilling piece and said Dot Slee out loud. Dot stood at the head of that hole and said nothing at all, which was how Dot said things. Under the sixth she put her father’s last wage book and said his name, and he had been dead since the March before. She planted that one alone at three in the morning after the funeral.

Ed Sallow took the farm in 1956 with a bank loan and his brother-in-law’s goodwill, and Vic Dobson’s goodwill was worth exactly what you would expect. Beryl Sallow was seventeen and working in that kitchen in 1969, and she cut the grass. “I did the last picking,” she said. “There is a photograph of it on the dresser. Six bin loads off those six trees and forty off the rest, one afternoon, the twenty-ninth of September 1969, and Dad carried every one into the cold room with his own arms. It was the biggest day of his life and he never let anybody forget it.” “Eleven months?”

“Until the March.” Beryl turned her cup round on the table. “There was a hard frost in April of 1969 and the flower came on that year the way it does now, and everybody said, that is that then. Then the second week of April had nineteen degrees in it and took the lot. What the frost missed dried on the trees through the summer and came in through the split bark. Alan was fourteen and found it and came into the kitchen crying and none of us knew what to say. After that they did nothing. The season after, it was the drain. The season after that, the rootstock. After that nobody raised it.” “Alan will be in the ground before he is wrong about it,” Beryl said. “And I have never in my life seen a single apple out there.”

The first came on the eighth of April at eleven in the morning, in a year with no frost in it at all. Fen had been in the top row with a spade because the buyer’s engineer wanted to know how many stumps were under the grass. Forty centimetres down, the blade hit something that was not a root. It was cloth, and it had cloth round it, because cloth was what things were wrapped in. She opened it with the tip of the spade, in the open, with nobody watching. A thin gold ring, green at the shoulders, and nine inches of blue dress material gone the colour of a bruise. The number had been cut into that tree for the same reason a post office is built on a crossroads: so that somebody would know where to dig. She went to Nethergill at four o’clock and stood in her great-aunt’s front room with her coat still on.

“Joy. The ring came out and the ring was never the point. The two acres were the point, and you are eighty-nine and you live in a terrace, and I am not giving you two acres and I am not giving you money, and I am not going to pretend that either is the same thing. There are two acres of grass up there worth four hundred pounds to me and nothing at all to you, and I would like that said in this room where you can hear it.” “You have thought about it on the walk over.” “In the ditch, since six this morning.” “Then say the rest,” Joy Pritchard said. “You have not said what you came to say.” “Your daughter was to have this orchard when I die and I have never told her, because she would come down here inside a month and sell it to a man with a clipboard. You lived in a terrace for eighty-nine years on the word of a woman who cannot come down the lane, and I am not going to be the second woman who says you are owed something and then goes back up the hill.” Number one came in hard, and by the middle of May it had set nine.

The solicitor found the rest of it in the title register, which Fen had not opened at all. In the conveyance of 1956 the top orchard had gone into the names of Wilf Sallow and Nan his wife, and on the schedule there was a note in an outsider’s hand, dated 1946, saying that the freehold of the upper strip was held as joint tenants with Victor Dobson and could not be severed. He had asked once, in 1959, and was put off in the yard with a fortnight’s notice in his hand. “Then there was no point, was there,” Delia said. “The search turns that up in the first ten minutes, and your uncle cannot sell the grass without a signature. In eleven days the option dies, and a man of ninety-seven finds out he owns eleven acres of an orchard that has never grown anything.” Number four was Vic, and it took longest, because she had to write it out for him first and he made her read the last sentence again.

“You were to be a partner before you were forty,” she said. “You were thirty, and then forty, and then fifty-nine and in the yard on a Friday in March with a fortnight in your hand. It is not going to happen now. I cannot give you a partnership in an orchard with no fruit in it, and if there was fruit in it I still could not, because you are ninety-seven and I am twenty-four and neither of us is doing anything. That is the broken version and I am saying it out loud to you, and I will not soften it with money, because money does not close a page. It only moves the ink.” Vic Dobson looked at her a long moment. “Your gran read that out to me once, when I was thirty-one, and I told her it was a figure of speech.” “It was not a figure of speech.” “No,” he said. “It was not.” Number four came into leaf on the eleventh of May and set six.

Number two was the one she could fix, and fixing it nearly ruined her. The company’s engineer asked why the drainage plan ran so close to the boundary. The trench had been dug in 1952. Four yards north of the line it should have been. The drawing carried a note in another hand that said, moved to suit new ditching, agreed E.T. Emrys Tuke had signed for a drain across ground that was not his, at seventy-one, with a bad heart, and not argued. Which meant the hedge had not been moved for the thin field at all. It had been moved for the drain, and Wilf Sallow had cut four yards into his neighbour’s ground to get a boundary he could defend, promised it back, and then signed away the reason. Emrys Tuke had kept that promise. He had let it be built, put his own name to the end of it, and died in 1981 not knowing there was anything in it for him. She gave the strip to his son, told him what she had found in front of the tree, and he said, “You could have kept it. The register does not make you say anything out loud.” “No,” Fen said. “But the tree does.”

Number three she did on a Monday morning with her mother at the sink, in under a minute. “You were to have the grammar school at Nethergill and you went into service at sixteen and you have never once made a joke of it to anybody, including me, in fifty-eight years,” Fen said. “I am not asking you to forgive anybody. There is nothing to forgive, that is the point. Everybody has behaved decently about it for fifty-six years and that is exactly how it has stayed open. Nobody ever said it out loud to you. You were not short of a school. You were short of somebody saying the sentence to your face.” Beryl Sallow put down the plate she was drying and did not pick it up again.

There were five apples on the six trees that autumn and eleven hundred on the rest, and the rest had never borne eleven hundred in living memory. The structural engineer came out in a hired car, walked into the middle of number two eating an apple and did not believe that anything had changed. She withdrew the option herself, in writing, on the fourth of October, because a yard company cannot be built on eleven acres of apples, and because her grandmother had said the rule once in February in a kitchen and did not need to say it again. Number six is still bare, because it grew over a promise made to a man who died in March 1951, and Nan has been asked twice to say what it was and has said no both times.

The fifth took eleven weeks and it was the hardest, because Dot Slee was ninety-two and had come up the lane at seventeen in 1951 and had not set foot on the farm since 1971, and because Fen had the money. That was the difficulty. She could have bought the whole street out of the sale and put Dot Slee in a house with a bath, and the figures were fine four times over, and she could not do it, because the tree wanted an entry, not a payment. She went down to Nethergill in September with the car full of apples and no plan.

Dot Slee opened the door and Fen said, “I have had eleven weeks to write this and have not managed it once. Seventy-five years ago my grandmother was twenty and she dug a hole at the top of that orchard in the dark and said your name into it and put a thimble and a hairpin and five shillings in and covered it up. No money, no land, no wages. Then she went home and never came back to it, and never said one word about it to you, and neither did anybody else in this family. That is why that tree has done nothing for seventy-five years.” Dot Slee did not move.

“That is not what I came to say,” Fen said. “I came to say it was not kept. Your cousin Jess was to have the cottage at the bottom of the lane for as long as she wanted it, and she had it four years, and then a caravan in the yard for a winter, and then she went to Skell and did not come back, and nobody said one word to you about any of it then or since. There is no cottage and no caravan and no way I can hand you back a thing that has been gone since 1971. I am saying it in this hall with you standing in front of me, and I would rather you had a sentence than a cheque.” “Say it again,” Dot Slee said. Fen said it again word for word, and it took longer the second time. Number five came in three weeks later.

Dot Slee came up the lane in the last week of October on a walking frame, because word travels in Nethergill at the speed of an apple tree fruiting, and stood in the long row looking at five of the six. “I have had seventy-five years of being owed a sentence by a house with six trees in it,” she said. “And I have told the whole of my life that nobody in that family cared whether I was in that kitchen or out of it. I said it as a hard thing, and it turns out it was never even a hard thing. It was nobody standing in a field with a spade and saying it out loud.” She put one hand flat on the trunk of number five.

“I am not going to tell you that you did me a kindness,” she said. “You did not. You opened a book that has been shut in this family since before your mother was born, and I have got to live in the house with all of it now. But I will tell you what it wanted, because nobody has asked me. It did not want the cottage. I had a cottage and I was miserable in it. It wanted somebody to come down the lane and finish the sentence they started saying to me, out loud, with me standing there to hear it. And that is all a promise has ever wanted off anybody. Every one of us in this village is holding something we have been owed the end of, and most of us will never get it, and the ones who do get it find out they are not happy about it and have to go on being polite to the person. But you did come down the lane. And I am seventy-five years old, and my knees are the price, and it was worth it.”