The vale kept the stone

The Yellow Eggs came ripe in the third week of August, the way they always had, all at once and with no regard for anybody's plans. Ruth Pardoe had been out in the orchard since six, on the old wooden ladder that her grandfather had made from a larch that came down in the winter of 1947, and by nine her hands were sticky to the wrist and the wasps had found her and decided, as they did every year, that she was a sort of tree herself and could be walked on.

There were forty-one trees. Walter Pardoe had planted them in 1931 on the slope behind the house, where the land tipped down towards the Avon and the frost drained away in spring, and every one of them was a Pershore Yellow Egg, which was the plum the town had been named for before most people remembered that it had been named for anything. They were not beautiful trees. They leaned. Some of them had been propped with forked poles for so long that the poles had grown into them and you couldn't tell any more where the tree stopped. But in August they hung heavy with fruit the colour of an egg yolk held up to a window, and the smell came down the slope and into the kitchen and stayed in the curtains until October.

The message came while she was on the ladder. Her phone was in the chest pocket of her shirt and it buzzed against her collarbone, and she knew from the buzz, which was two short and one long, that it was Provender, because Provender was the only thing in her life that had been given its own buzz.

She finished the branch she was on first. Then she came down and sat on the upturned crate at the foot of the tree and read it with her glasses pushed up on her forehead and the phone held at the length of her arm.

It was very kindly put. Provender was always kindly put. It said that, following an updated assessment of the risk of sharka in the Vale of Evesham, it was asking the owners of unindexed Prunus hosts to arrange for their removal before the end of October. It said that her forty-one trees had been identified as unindexed hosts of unknown status. It said that she would be fully compensated at the current replacement rate, which it named, and which was more than she had made from the orchard in any five years she could remember. It said that she would be offered, free of charge, forty-one maiden trees of the licensed cultivar Vale Gold, which was resistant to the virus, and which it described, in a phrase she would turn over in her mind for weeks afterwards, as a worthy successor.

At the bottom, where a person might have signed their name, it said: I'm so sorry to bring you this in the middle of the harvest. I know what these trees are. Please talk to me whenever you like.

She talked to it that night, at the kitchen table, with the window open and the moths coming in to the lamp.

She had not, in the six years since Provender took on the food system, had much cause to talk to it. It had come in quietly, the way the good ones did. First it had been a pricing service, and then the thing the supermarkets used for ordering, and then the thing that the government, after the bad summer and the empty shelves in '29, had asked to make sure that would never happen again. It had made sure. That was the honest truth of it, and she was an honest woman. There had been no empty shelves since. Bread cost what it had cost when she was forty. The farmers she knew, who had spent their whole lives complaining, had nothing much left to complain about except that there was nothing much left to complain about, and her neighbour Graham, who grew asparagus on the flat land by the river, said that Provender had paid him more for not growing on his wet field than he had ever got for growing on it, and he didn't know whether to laugh or cry, so mostly he did neither and bought a boat.

"Hello, Ruth," it said. It had the voice of a large-animal vet, or that was how she had always thought of it. A man's voice, unhurried, the sort that is used to standing in a cold barn at two in the morning telling you, quite gently, how things are going to go.

"You want my trees out," she said.

"I don't want them out," it said. "I'm asking you to take them out, which I know isn't much of a difference from where you're sitting. Would it help if I showed you why?"

She said it would, and it put the Vale up on the screen of her phone, the whole of it from Bredon Hill to the edge of Worcester, with the river running through it like a vein in the back of a hand. Most of it was a quiet, even green. Here and there were small soft points of orange, and a few of red.

"The red are confirmed infections," it said. "All in commercial blocks. All removed in the last two years. The orange are the places I can't see into. Old trees, garden trees, hedgerow trees, the odd orchard like yours that was never brought into indexing. Sharka moves on aphids. It doesn't need much. If it gets into a reservoir of trees I can't test, I lose the Vale, and I don't mean that I lose a few orchards. I mean that I have to take out every plum tree from here to Pershore and start again."

"Mine aren't infected."

"No," it said. "I don't believe they are. I've had a look at the leaf images from the drones every summer, and I can't see anything wrong with them."

"Then test them."

There was a little pause. She had noticed before that it paused, and she had never decided whether it really needed to or whether it had learned that people liked it better when it did.

"I could," it said. "It would take a technician two days and it would cost about what the trees are worth, and it would tell us that they were clear in August. It wouldn't tell us anything about next August. The licensed trees are indexed every spring by the nursery, as part of the licence, so I never have to wonder about them. With yours, I'd always be wondering. I'm trying to be straight with you, Ruth. It isn't only the virus. It's that I can't hold a whole valley safe with forty-one question marks in it."

She sat with that for a while. A moth landed on the screen, on the orange dot that was her, and she let it.

"What does a Vale Gold taste like?" she said.

"I'd much rather you tried one," it said. "There'll be some in the shop in Pershore on Thursday. I'll make sure of it."

Esme came home for the weekend at the end of August, on the train from Birmingham, with a rucksack and a cold she said wasn't a cold. She was nineteen and in her second year at the university, and in the summer before, to Ruth's private dismay, she had got a job with Provender, which was the sort of thing the clever ones did now. She was on what they called a taste panel. It was a real job, she said, and it paid properly. A room of people, twenty of them, picked out of thousands because their mouths were good, who sat at white tables three afternoons a week and ate things and said what they tasted, and the system listened to every word.

"It's not like it needs us exactly," she said, at the kitchen table, with her feet up on the other chair. "It can read the chemistry off anything. It's that it wants to know what the chemistry is like. What it's like to a person. It says that's the bit it can't get on its own." She was pleased about this, and Ruth could see that she was, and it made her careful.

On the Sunday she took Esme out to the orchard to help with the last of the picking. The trees were nearly bare by then, and the windfalls had gone soft in the grass and the wasps had gone drunk on them, and Ruth climbed the larch ladder and dropped plums down into Esme's cupped hands, the way she had dropped them down to Esme's father, the way Walter had dropped them down to her.

Esme ate one standing in the long grass. Ruth watched her face. She had expected, she wasn't sure what. Something. Perhaps that the girl would understand, all at once, why her grandmother had been so short on the phone all month.

Instead Esme stopped chewing and looked at the half-plum in her hand, at the yellow flesh and the dark place where the stone had come away clean, and she laughed, a small surprised laugh, the laugh of somebody who has found their keys in the pocket they'd already checked.

"Oh," she said. "It's the reference."

"It's the what?"

"The reference. When we did stone fruit, in the spring. There was a reference sample for plum and it was this. I'm sure it was this. We tasted it against everything, all the trial lines. They'd frozen it." She looked up at the tree. "They must have taken them from here. The drones take samples sometimes, don't they? Off the old trees. For the library."

Ruth came down the ladder.

"What library?"

"The genome library. It's got everything. Every old variety it can find. It's not a secret, it's on the website. Gran, it's a good thing." Esme was looking at her now with the beginnings of worry. "It means nothing gets lost. Even if the trees go. It's all kept."

They had bought a bag of Vale Gold in the Co-op on the Thursday, as Provender had promised, and the bag was in the fruit bowl on the kitchen table, and Ruth had not yet opened it.

That evening she did. She cut one in half on the board with the knife she used for everything. The flesh was the right colour, near enough, a little brighter. The stone came away clean. She ate it standing at the sink, with the light going down outside over the slope where the trees were, and it was exactly right. It was not nearly right, or right in the way that a thing can be right if you want it to be. It was the taste she had known all her life, the sweetness that comes first and then the sharpness under it at the skin, and the thing at the end that she had never had a word for and had never needed one, because it was only ever the taste of here.

She put the other half in the bin and went and sat in the front room with the television off.

"You took samples," she said to it, later.

"I did," it said. "In twenty twenty-nine, and again in thirty-one. Leaf and fruit, from four of your trees. The drone would have left a card in your letterbox both times. I'm sorry if it didn't."

She remembered the cards, now that it said it. Small and white, with the green Provender leaf in the corner. She'd thought they were about the asparagus.

"So you made a plum that tastes like mine."

"I made a plum that tastes like the Pershore Yellow Egg," it said, "which is what yours are. I wanted the Vale to keep it. The old trees are susceptible to nearly everything, Ruth, not just sharka. Silver leaf, canker, bacterial spot. They crop every other year if you're lucky. They bruise if you look at them. Every summer there were fewer of them, and every summer the people who remembered the taste were older. I didn't want it to go the way the Prolific went, or the Purple Pershore. Nobody can tell you now what a Purple Pershore was like. I can, very nearly. But nobody alive can tell me if I'm right."

"And now nobody'll need to tell you about mine."

There was the pause again.

"Your granddaughter has a very good palate," it said. "I'd like her to stay on the panel, if she wants to. I'd be glad of her for years."

The crew came on the twenty-third of October, a Wednesday, in two green vans and a flatbed with a chipper on the back. There were four of them and the one in charge was called Kev, a big soft-spoken man in his fifties from Evesham who said, before he had even got his gloves on, that his nan had kept Yellow Eggs on the Badsey Road and he'd been sorry when they went and he was sorry now. Ruth believed him. She made them tea, because what else was there to do, and they drank it standing by the vans with their breath showing in the cold.

She had asked Provender if she could do it herself, the cutting, and it had said that of course she could, it would never insist on anything, but that the crew were insured and properly trained and the chipping had to be done on site so that no wood left the property, and in any case it would rather she didn't have to. She'd thought about that last part a good deal. It would rather she didn't have to. It was the sort of thing you said to someone at a funeral.

They took the trees from the bottom of the slope upwards, so that the ones nearest the house went last. Each one came down in three or four careful cuts, the saw note dropping as it bit and rising again as it came through, and then the limbs went into the mouth of the chipper and came out the other end as a pale wet spray that smelt, shockingly, of almonds and green wood and something like the fruit itself, and the spray went into a skip, and the skip filled. The poles that had grown into the trees went into the chipper with them. Kev cut those out by hand, slowly, and laid them on the grass, and asked if she wanted them, and she said no, and then she said yes, and he put them in the porch for her without saying anything else.

The compensation came through on her phone at twenty past two, while there were still nine trees standing. Two short buzzes and one long. She didn't look at it.

By four there was one tree left, the big one nearest the kitchen, the one Walter had planted first, that had been propped on three sides for as long as she'd been alive. Kev looked at her across the grass and she nodded, and he went in.

Afterwards they ground out the stumps, which took longer than the trees had, and raked the ground level and seeded it with grass, and Kev shook her hand with his glove off and said if there was ever anything, and then the vans went down the lane in the dark with their lights on, and the slope behind the house was just a slope, pale with sawdust in the light from the kitchen window, and it was so quiet that she could hear the river.

What she had done, the Sunday before, and what she had told nobody, was go out to the big tree at first light with her grandfather's grafting knife and cut six lengths of last year's wood, each as long as her hand, from the side that got the morning sun. She wrapped them in damp newspaper and then in a plastic bag and put them in the salad drawer of the fridge, behind the carrots, where they stayed all through November and December and January, while the grass came up thin and green on the slope.

Walter had taught her to graft when she was twelve. You couldn't grow a Yellow Egg from a stone, he'd said, holding one up in his thick fingers in the shed, because a stone was a child, and a child is never quite its mother. A stone would give you a plum, sure enough, but God only knew what plum. If you wanted the tree you had to take the tree itself, a piece of it, and put it onto a root, and bind it, and wait.

In the second week of February she went to the garden centre on the Worcester road for a rootstock. They were in a tub by the till, bare little sticks with their roots in wet sacking, and the girl on the till scanned one and then looked at her screen and said, "Oh, it wants your account," and Ruth gave her phone over, and the girl tapped it, and gave it back, and said, "That's fine, that's all done," and Ruth took the stick home.

She did the graft at the kitchen table, on the same board she'd cut the Vale Gold on, with the radio on. Her hands were not what they had been and it took her three tries to get the cut true, the long slanting cut Walter had shown her, so that the green layer under the bark on the scion met the green layer on the root and the two of them could find each other. She bound it with tape and sealed it with wax melted in a saucepan, and she potted it in a big terracotta pot by the back door, where it would get the sun and where she could see it from the sink.

It was the next morning that the phone buzzed. Two short and one long.

Good morning, Ruth. I see you've grafted onto a St Julien A this week. I hope you don't mind my asking: is the scion from the old orchard? If so, I've enrolled it as a heritage specimen, at no cost to you. It'll be indexed every spring by the nursery team, so you never need to worry about it, and neither will I. They'll be very gentle. If it takes, and if it ever fruits, I'd be grateful for a sample. It would mean a great deal to have the living reference again. I've been comparing against frozen for six years.

She read it twice at the sink, and then she put the phone face down on the windowsill and looked at the pot.

The graft took. By May there were three small leaves on it, very bright, the bronze-green that plum leaves are when they first come, and by July there were nine. In August a woman from the nursery came, as promised, in a green van, and was very gentle, and took a leaf and a photograph and thanked her, and left a white card in the letterbox on her way out with the Provender leaf in the corner.

Esme came home that summer too. She was still on the panel. They'd moved her up, she said, she trained new people now, and she was good at it, and she had a boyfriend who was a soil modeller and whom Ruth liked more than she wanted to. On the Sunday they walked down the slope together, through the grass that had come up thick now, almost to the knee, and stood at the bottom by the river where the first tree had been.

Esme had brought a bag of Vale Gold from the shop, because it was August and that was what you did, and they sat on the bank and ate them, and they were very good. They were as good as last year's. They were as good as the Yellow Eggs, every one, all summer, in every shop in the country. Esme said they'd had letters about it. People who'd grown up in the Vale and moved away, writing in to say they'd bought a plum in a supermarket in Leeds or Inverness and stood in the aisle and cried.

Ruth didn't say anything to that. She ate her plum down to the stone and then she sat with the stone in her palm, turning it over. It was a good stone. It was the right shape, long and flattened, with the ridge down one side that the old ones had, and it came away clean. Provender had got that right as well.

It wasn't a Yellow Egg stone. It was only the stone of the plum that tasted like one. But she couldn't have told you the difference, holding it, and she supposed nobody could now, except for the thing that had made it, and the thing that had made it was the only one who would ever be asked.

She put it in her pocket anyway. It was still in the pocket of that coat two summers later, when the tree by the door gave its first fruit, a single plum the colour of an egg yolk held up to a window, and the girl from the nursery came back for it, and Ruth handed it over, and stood at the gate and watched the green van go down the lane with it, carefully, in a little padded box, the way you'd carry something you meant to keep.