Pears for a fortnight

From "Marrow Lane"

Marit had not meant to stay for the pears. She had come to Marrow Lane for a single afternoon, with a folder of estate agents' forms and the firm intention of being back on the evening train, and she had taken the precaution of keeping her coat on, as one does when visiting a house that has already decided to be sold.

The orchard had been her aunt's pride and her aunt's argument with the world. Nine trees, none of them young, leaned over a wall of mossy stone, and in the third week of October they were doing what they did every year with the indifference of old professionals: letting go, one hard green fruit at a time, into the long grass where no one now collected them. A wasp, gorging on the first of the windfalls, worked its way across a bruise with the concentration of a clerk.

'You'll want a ladder,' said a voice at the gate. It belonged to a man of seventy or so in a cardigan the colour of porridge, who regarded the orchard and then Marit with the same unhurried attention. She recognised him, vaguely, as the neighbour whose name her aunt had pronounced in a particular way, as one handles a cup that has been mended.

'I'm not picking,' said Marit. 'I'm only here to measure things.'

'Ah,' said the man. 'Then you'll want the ladder for that, too.' He did not move from the gate, and she understood that this was a courtesy: he would not enter a garden uninvited, even one that no longer had an owner to object.

She let him in. For an hour he said very little, and Marit, who had prepared several polite sentences for the occasion, found that none of them fitted. He fetched the ladder from a shed she had not known existed, set it against the oldest tree with a care that suggested a long acquaintance, and went up it, slowly, with a canvas bag. Marit stood below and held the ladder because it seemed discourteous to do anything else. Once he remarked, to the branches rather than to her, that pears were meant to be picked hard and left to soften indoors, and that her aunt had never believed this and had lost half her crop every year to her own impatience.

'She was a stubborn woman,' said Marit, and was surprised to hear that her voice had gone unsteady, as if the remark had been something other than the plain truth.

'Oh, very,' said the man comfortably. 'It was the best thing about her.'

When he came down the bag was full, and he put it into her arms without ceremony, the way one hands over a baby to someone who has not asked to hold it. The pears were small, freckled and hard as stones. They smelled of nothing at all. 'Give them a fortnight,' he said, and touched two fingers to his forehead, and was gone along the lane before she had thought of a suitable thing to say.

The evening train left at ten past six. Marit watched it go from the kitchen window, with the forms spread unsigned on the table and the bag of unripe pears on the sill, and it occurred to her, without any great alarm, that for the next fortnight she would have to find out whether anyone had left sheets in the house.