The Lean
The pole had been there since 1961.
Gerald knew this because the pole had a small metal plate near its base with ‘1961’ stamped on it, and Gerald had noticed the plate on the morning of the fourteenth of March, which was a Tuesday, which was the morning he noticed the lean, and he had thought: well, there it is then. Sixty-odd years and nobody’s said a word. He felt, in a mild way, that this reflected poorly on the street.
He stood on the pavement in his good coat—not his best coat, which was for funerals and the occasional wedding, but his good coat, which was for Tuesdays and anything that required a degree of presentability—and he looked at the pole. The pole rose from the pavement outside number fourteen, which was Mrs Fennick’s house, and it carried three wires that went off in different directions toward other poles and ultimately, Gerald supposed, toward the wider world. He had never given the pole any thought before this morning. It had simply been there, the way lamp posts and pillar boxes and other people’s garden walls were simply there, part of the texture of things.
But it was leaning.
Not enormously. Gerald was not a man given to exaggeration—Barbara had said this about him at their wedding, in a speech that had surprised everyone by being about Gerald’s character rather than her feelings, and which had been, in its way, rather good. He was not a man who saw cracks and called them chasms. But the pole was leaning. Perhaps three degrees. Perhaps four. Toward Mrs Fennick’s house, which seemed, when Gerald thought about it, somewhat presumptuous.
He tilted his head. The pole remained leaning.
He straightened his head. The pole did not straighten with it.
He walked on to collect his newspaper.
Mrs Fennick was in her front garden when Gerald came back, doing something to a rose bush that the rose bush did not appear to be enjoying. She was a small, precise woman of seventy-one who had very decided opinions about a great number of things and had been known, on one occasion, to write to the Radio Times about a continuity error in a drama series and to receive, to everyone’s astonishment including her own, a reply.
‘Your telegraph pole is leaning,’ Gerald said.
Mrs Fennick looked up. She had soil on her gardening gloves and a look on her face that suggested the rose bush had been trying her patience since early morning.
‘Which one?’
‘The one outside your house.’
‘I know which one is outside my house, Gerald. I meant which way.’
Gerald considered this. ‘Toward you,’ he said. ‘Toward the house.’
Mrs Fennick pulled off one gardening glove and walked to the gate. She stood beside Gerald and they both looked at the pole together, the way people look at things when they are trying to reach a consensus. The pole rose from the pavement. The wires went off in their various directions. The plate said 1961.
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Fennick.
‘I thought so.’
‘That’s definitely a lean.’
‘I’d say three degrees,’ Gerald said. ‘Perhaps four.’
Mrs Fennick narrowed her eyes. ‘Four,’ she said. ‘Minimum.’
Gerald nodded. He felt the satisfaction of a man whose observation has been confirmed by a reliable source. ‘I expect someone should know,’ he said.
‘I’ll phone the council,’ said Mrs Fennick, in the tone of a woman who has phoned the council before and has no illusions about what this will involve but who understands that the alternative is a leaning pole, which is worse.
‘Good,’ said Gerald. He folded his newspaper under his arm. ‘I’ll leave it with you, then.’
He went home, made a pot of tea, read the paper from front to back including the crossword, which he completed except for seventeen across, which he suspected had a misprint, and then had his lunch, which was a cheese sandwich and an apple, and then watched forty minutes of a programme about canals, which was soothing, and then fell asleep in the chair.
He did not think about the pole again until Thursday.
The council sent a man on Wednesday afternoon.
His name, according to the laminated badge on his high-visibility jacket, was K. Burrows, and he arrived in a white van with the council’s logo on the side and a spirit level on the passenger seat, which suggested either that he had done this before or that he was a man who liked to be prepared. He was perhaps forty, with the look of someone who had explained things to members of the public many times and had developed, in the process, a facial expression that was professionally neutral in the way that a wall is professionally neutral: solid, unremarkable, and not going anywhere.
Mrs Fennick came out immediately. She had been watching from the front window.
K. Burrows placed his spirit level against the pole. The bubble sat in the centre of its little window, serene and unambiguous.
‘Perfectly upright,’ said K. Burrows.
‘That’s wrong,’ said Mrs Fennick.
K. Burrows looked at his spirit level. He looked at Mrs Fennick. He looked at his spirit level again, in the way that people look at things twice when they are certain they are right but have learned that certainty, expressed too quickly, tends to inflame situations.
‘The bubble is centred, madam.’
‘Then your bubble is wrong.’
K. Burrows wrote something in his notebook. Mrs Fennick watched him write it and her expression suggested she would very much like to see what he had written. He closed the notebook.
‘I can assure you—’
‘My neighbour saw it leaning,’ said Mrs Fennick. ‘He’s a very observant man. He noticed a gas leak in 2019 before anyone else on the street.’
This was true, though the gas leak had turned out to be a drain, but the principle stood.
K. Burrows held his spirit level against the pole once more, as though the pole might have changed its mind. The bubble remained centred. He wrote something else in his notebook, got back in his van, and drove away.
Mrs Fennick phoned her son Derek.
Derek arrived on Thursday evening with a spirit level in a cardboard box. He was forty-three, broad across the shoulders, and had the manner of a man who distrusted anything he hadn’t personally verified. He worked in insurance, which had given him a professional interest in things going wrong and a personal interest in proving that they had. He held up the box as he came through the gate.
‘Stabila,’ he said. ‘German. Thirty years ago I bought this and it has never been wrong.’
‘The council man said the pole was straight,’ said Mrs Fennick.
‘The council man,’ said Derek, ‘uses a spirit level that lives on a van seat. I wouldn’t trust that to hang a picture.’
They went out to the pole together. Derek placed his spirit level against it with the care of a man performing a procedure. He looked at the bubble. He adjusted his grip. He looked again.
‘Hm,’ said Derek.
‘What?’
‘It’s leaning,’ he said. ‘But the other way.’
Mrs Fennick stared at him. ‘What do you mean, the other way?’
‘Away from the house. About two degrees. Maybe three.’
‘Gerald said it was leaning toward the house.’
‘Gerald,’ said Derek carefully, ‘is not using a Stabila.’
They stood in silence for a moment, both looking at the pole. The pole stood in the way that poles stand: committed to its position, indifferent to the controversy.
‘Perhaps,’ said Mrs Fennick, ‘it leans in different directions at different times of day.’
Derek opened his mouth and then closed it again, because he was a man who had learned, in forty-three years, that some sentences his mother said were best allowed to pass through the world without being engaged.
It was Mrs Fennick who thought of Raymond Stokes.
Raymond Stokes had retired from the Ordnance Survey in 2003 after thirty-one years and had kept, in his garage at number twenty-seven, a theodolite in a case the size of a small suitcase. He had kept it because it was his, technically—there had been some ambiguity about this at the time of his retirement that Raymond had resolved by putting it in his car—and because he felt that a man who owned a theodolite should not be without one. He had used it twice since 2003: once to settle an argument about the gradient of his driveway and once for reasons he preferred not to go into.
He carried the case to the pole on Friday morning with the expression of a man recalled from retirement for a matter of national importance. He was seventy-seven and walked with a slight list to the left, which he did not mention and which no one mentioned to him, though Derek noticed it and thought several things he kept to himself.
Raymond set up the theodolite with a thoroughness that suggested he had been waiting for this moment. A small audience had gathered: Mrs Fennick, Derek, a woman from number nine whose name no one could remember but who had appeared with a folding chair, and two men from the end of the street who had come to see what was happening and stayed because something clearly was.
Raymond looked through the eyepiece. He made adjustments. He looked again.
‘One point eight degrees,’ he said. ‘Toward the house.’
‘There,’ said Mrs Fennick.
‘My level says away from the house,’ said Derek.
Raymond straightened up and looked at Derek with the expression of a man who has thirty-one years of the Ordnance Survey behind him and does not feel that this is a contest.
‘Your level,’ said Raymond, ‘measures relative to gravity. My instrument measures relative to a fixed horizontal plane established by—’
‘What’s the difference?’ said the woman on the folding chair.
Everyone looked at her. She looked back at them with the equanimity of a woman who had brought a folding chair.
‘It’s,’ Raymond began. ‘It’s—’ He stopped. ‘In practice,’ he said, ‘in this specific instance, the difference is approximately four point eight degrees.’
‘So neither of you knows,’ said the woman.
‘We both know,’ said Raymond. ‘We know different things.’
The woman appeared to find this satisfying in a way that the rest of the group did not.
The photograph appeared online that evening. Derek had not taken it—he was firm on this point when asked later—but someone had, and it showed the pole, the theodolite, Raymond, Derek, Mrs Fennick, the woman on the folding chair, and the two men from the end of the street, all in a composition that looked, in the particular way of photographs taken on phones without any artistic intent, like a Renaissance painting of something minor and inexplicable. The caption read: POLE SCANDAL—RESIDENTS AND EXPERTS CLASH OVER TELEGRAPH POLE ‘LEAN’ IN QUIET STREET.
Forty-seven people shared it by midnight. Most of them lived in the area. Several of them did not but felt strongly anyway.
The local paper sent a journalist called Fiona Marsh, who was twenty-six and had covered, in the previous month, a dispute about a car park, a dispute about a fence, and a dispute about whether a local business constituted a business or a hobby for planning purposes. She arrived on Saturday morning with a notepad and the expression of a woman who understood that the pole was not really about the pole.
She spoke to Mrs Fennick, who said the pole was definitely leaning and had been for years and that someone ought to have noticed sooner.
She spoke to Derek, who said the council’s equipment was inadequate and that he was considering a formal complaint.
She spoke to Raymond, who gave her a seven-minute explanation of the difference between spirit levels and theodolites, which she wrote down in full because she had learned that the things people explained at length were rarely the things the story was about.
She tried to speak to the woman with the folding chair, who was not there on Saturday.
She knocked on Gerald’s door.
Gerald answered in his good coat, because he had been about to go out.
‘I’m writing a piece,’ said Fiona, ‘about the telegraph pole. I understand you were the first to notice the lean?’
Gerald looked at her. He looked past her at the pole. He tilted his head.
‘Was I?’ he said.
‘Mrs Fennick says you mentioned it to her on Tuesday.’
‘Did I?’ Gerald looked at the pole again. It rose from the pavement. The wires went off in their directions. The plate said 1961. ‘I may have said something,’ he said. ‘I honestly can’t remember what the specific—I mean, I walk past it every morning. It’s possible I said something. Is it leaning?’
Fiona looked at the pole. It was, she thought, possible. Or not. It was very hard to say.
‘That’s what everyone’s been—there’s been quite a lot of—’ She stopped. ‘There are two spirit levels and a theodolite involved,’ she said.
‘Good Lord,’ said Gerald, with the mild interest of a man hearing about something that happened in a country he has no plans to visit. ‘What for?’
Fiona wrote something in her notebook. She looked at Gerald, who was looking at the pole with the expression of a man who has genuinely never thought about it and is not sure he intends to start now.
‘Do you think it’s leaning?’ she said.
Gerald considered this with what appeared to be genuine open-mindedness.
‘I think,’ he said, ‘that it’s a telegraph pole. They put them in the ground and they stay there. Sixty-odd years, that one. Since 1961—there’s a plate.’ He nodded at it. ‘I expect if it were going to fall on someone it would have done it by now.’
He said good morning to Fiona, stepped around her, and walked up the street to collect his newspaper.
The piece ran on Wednesday under the headline ‘SPIRIT LEVEL STANDOFF: WHO DO YOU TRUST WITH YOUR TELEGRAPH POLE?’ It was, Fiona felt, not her finest work, but it was accurate. There were quotes from Mrs Fennick, Derek, Raymond, a man from the electricity board who had come on Monday and declared the pole structurally sound, a woman who had emailed the paper to say she had noticed a different pole leaning in a different street and felt this was connected, and a professor of civil engineering from the university who had not seen the pole but had views about poles in general.
There was no quote from Gerald. Fiona had included one—‘I expect if it were going to fall on someone it would have done it by now’—but her editor had cut it on the grounds that it didn’t advance the story.
The pole remained where it had always been.
On Thursday morning, on his way back from the newsagent, Gerald stopped outside number fourteen and looked at it. He stood for perhaps thirty seconds. He tilted his head one way and then the other. A woman walking a dog slowed down and looked at him, and then looked at the pole, and then looked at him again.
‘Is something wrong with it?’ she said.
‘No,’ said Gerald. He straightened up. ‘No, I don’t think so.’ He tucked his paper under his arm. ‘It’s been there since 1961,’ he said, gesturing at the plate, and walked on home.
The woman with the dog stood and looked at the pole for a long time.
It was, she thought, possible. Or not.
She took out her phone.