1998

That spring business boomed. Wood was omniscient. Stuart could not get enough of it. He took on more staff. He bought two new lorries. He did a deal on some land with the neighbouring farmer and got planning permission to build a new warehouse. In April he flew out of Bristol. The sky was clear and the plane skidded down over pines, the trees densely packed along either side of the runway. In Stockholm his hotel was in Södermalm. On the first day he admired the Opera House and the park and the quayside. He visited a museum about coins. It grew cold. He bought a new coat. He ate cinnamon buns and drank coffee. He tried pickled fish and licked his lips. On the second day he took a boat trip out to the islands and marvelled at the clean lines of the landscape. He found a small cove and stood by the tide with the water lapping at his feet. On the third day he took a train.

Borlänge was only recently defrosted. Everything was made of wood and surrounded by trees. At the hotel Stuart was encouraged to sauna. He walked into a room of steam. He sat alone and sweated profusely. He thought of Emma. He felt light-headed. He was joined by a German businessman.

“I’m Dietmar, you must be here for the timber?” he said.

Dietmar discarded his towel. Through the steam, Stuart nodded.

“What’s timber doing in Germany?” he asked, in an attempt at conversation.

“Booming probably,” said Dietmar. “But I’m in paper so really I wouldn’t know.”

“Oh,” said Stuart. “What’s paper doing?”

“Paper is going fucking insane.”

Emma called the hotel to check that Stuart had found it. Her voice arrived dusted with nutmeg. She said the hotel would want Stuart to sauna. He told her he already had. She laughed. Stuart felt the receiver warm slightly against his check.

“Do you have dinner plans?” she asked.

“Not yet.”

“You will,” she said.

Stuart sat in the lobby until Dietmar convinced him to walk into town.

“But I have dinner plans.”

“It’s early,” Dietmar said. “We should go and look round.”

Dietmar was insistent. He was also angry. He had got into the paper trade at just the right time and he hated himself. “They are paying me so damn much,” he explained. “Even if I wanted to leave, I couldn’t. No-one can turn down the amount of money they are paying me. It’s criminal.”

“How much are they paying you?”

“So much, look there’s a bar.”

Dietmar insisted that they enter the bar. The only other customer was an old man in snow shoes. Over expensive drinks that he insisted on paying for, Dietmar explained that he wasn’t meant to be working in paper. He was meant to be a political journalist. “I come from a long line of devoted reporters. I studied at the Freie Universität in Berlin, I interned at Handelsblatt. But news was slow. I ended up in paper. I’m a huge disappointment to my family. They tell this joke at Christmas, I will try to translate: You were meant to be in the paper not in paper.”

Dietmar laughed hard across the empty bar. Stuart took a sip from his expensive beer.

“It’s not funny is it?” said Dietmar. “We should drink snaps?”

They drank snaps. Two of them, in quick succession. Stuart felt groggy. Dietmar enquired about a titty bar that had been recommended by a sales rep from Austria.

“That’s not really my thing,” Stuart said.

“My father spent four years as an undercover reporter. He exposed racism towards the Turkish community and the exploitation of steel workers. I am reduced to looking at Swedish tits before I visit a saw mill. My life is very sad. What were you meant to do with your life?”

“People used to say I’d make a good lawyer.”

“See. Our lives are tragic. My father was a wanted man for a time. He was given a medal last year for his vigilance. Let me buy you more snaps.”

They drank more snaps. The old man shuffled off in his snow shoes. The barman returned to say that there was no titty bar in Borlänge.

“This is bullshit,” Dietmar said. “Never trust a competitor.”

They left. Stuart tried to go back to the hotel, Dietmar said they couldn’t quit now: “Sometimes in the nice bars they lie about the nasty ones,” he said. They found a bar that advertised a Rage Against the Machine concert in Karlstad. Inside were several large Swedish men sat beneath beards and biker jackets and two very tall girls with blonde hair and leather trousers. Guns N’ Roses was playing on repeat. There was no snaps. Dietmar bought beers.

“I hate my job,” he explained. “It’s the least I can do.”

He tried to speak to the girls but they just laughed and said they were leaving. He asked the bearded Swedes about the titty bar he’d been told about by the sales rep from Austria. The Swedes just laughed.

“Are you here for the timber?” they asked.

“Yes, we’re here for the timber.”

They nodded. They said that they worked in the forest.

“What do you do there?” Stuart asked.

They laughed again and said they cut down trees. Stuart wanted very much to leave. Dietmar bought everyone drinks. “They pay me so goddamn much,” he said. “What do they expect?” At midnight Dietmar ordered a cab from which he stumbled to his room. The concierge stopped Stuart to say that someone called Emma had come by around seven. She had left a message to say that she was sorry to miss him and was looking forward to meeting him tomorrow.

Out loud, in the wood-panelled reception, Stuart swore. He drank water. He cleaned his teeth. He cursed. He decided it was not possible to call his wife. From the window of his room he could see a small hill where pine trees stood in silhouette against a moonlit sky.

Emma was tall and so blonde her hair was almost white. It glinted like frost as she shook Stuart’s hand in the lobby. She smiled and said nothing about dinner. Stuart was deeply in love.

“I see you met Dietmar,” she said.

She drove them out of the small town and into the trees. They drove through trees, past trees, around trees. Along one stretch of road the trees were so dense that you could not tell where one ended and the next began.

“I feel terrible,” said Dietmar from the backseat.

The sawmill was in a clearing. Emma worked in a wide-windowed office on the first floor where she offered them coffee. Dietmar drank his black with biscuits. From the window you could see sparse grass and tall trees, men in plaid shirts and hard hats. At a lightwood table Emma gave a short history of the mill.

It was founded by her grandfather in 1933. It grew rapidly after the Second World War and very soon established itself as an exporter to Europe. Her father took over in the ’70s and managed the mill until ’95 when Emma and her brother took over. Dietmar said it was a beautiful story and he needed more coffee. Emma pressed on with the tour.

Stuart met people. Swedish people with fair hair and broad smiles. He was given a hard hat and ear plugs and led into an enormous sawmill. He watched a tree arrive whole with its bark still on and leave in roughly sawn planks. Dietmar disappeared to the bathroom and then returned to bellow out questions about provenance. Stuart watched Emma’s hand as she led them out of the mill to the forest where trees would be ready in forty years’ time.

Stuart inhaled the scent of the forest, his bare face taut in the sunlight. Emma had changed into boots to show them the trees. Dietmar asked about lunch. He repeated that he hated his job and made further reference to how much he got paid. Emma walked through the pines, down a narrow path until the canopy disappeared and they were surrounded by birch. The trees were young, saplings, barely ten feet tall. Their bark peeled slightly from their trunks, branches shot out of clefts in their stems and up above the new leaves blushed pink in the morning sun.

“Do you have a canteen here?” Dietmar asked.

“You should pay attention,” Emma said. “We’re growing the birch especially for you.”

Dietmar said he was too cold and stomped his way back to the office.

“I called by the hotel,” Emma said.

Stuart stared into the silver branches. “Dietmar made me go drinking.” He stopped. “What did you mean you’re growing them specially for him?”

When a tree is cut for timber, it is divided into three separate products. The lower, central timber is the oldest and densest wood and thus of the highest quality. It is milled and planed and used for joinery and structural beams. The middle section, leading up to the branches, is used for carcassing and more general construction, lengths of 4×2, 6×2, 8×2 and so on. It is bundled into packs and sold to housebuilders. Everything else from the bark to the branches and twigs at the top is given over to paper and pulp. Some of it is ground up into sawdust or shavings and mixed with glue to make MDF or Stirling board, but most of it is used for paper. In Borlänge the separation of the products occurred in the sawmill. It was a seamless process. The lengths of timber were stacked on racks indoors awaiting delivery while the paper and pulp were bundled up and sold to people like Dietmar. He had only really come to see a byproduct. Maybe that was why he was angry.

“Dietmar is a huge problem,” Emma said as they walked through the birch. “Him and people like him keep demanding pulp. But the paper is not why we grow the trees. It takes over thirty years for a pine tree to reach a decent height, fifty for it to reach maturity. We can’t just cut them all down for paper. It’s unsustainable. So two years ago I planted this birch. It’s a new idea. My father thinks I am mad. A whole section of woodland devoted to birch! But others are doing it too. Birch is fast growing. In ten years it will be ready and we can chop it all down and turn it into paper.”

They were deep into the forest now, with birch as far as the eye could see; young limbs blistered in the late morning light.

“Besides,” said Emma. “They’re kind of pretty, don’t you think?”

“They’re beautiful,” Stuart said.

Back home Stuart made changes. He hired a sales team to ease the pressure on Carol and bought an integrated computer system that covered purchasing, sales, delivery, and stock. Craig was promoted to systems administrator and given his own office. He purred with delight. Only Carol remained unconvinced. “It cuts down paperwork,” Stuart said in a bid to persuade her.

But this was a lie. It did not.

Every time anything was done on a computer a printer leapt into action. There were four of them at Ford’s Mill: one in the sales office, one in the purchasing office, one in the yard office, one in Stuart’s office. They fizzed constantly throughout the day, churning out reams of paper framed by dotted edges that people ripped off and left scattered across the floor like confetti. The paper was carbonless copy paper that produced three identical sheets. This meant that the information could be divided between the office, the yard, and the customer. It also meant that every time anyone printed anything, whenever printers jammed or incorrect information was sent, the waste tripled.

The printers jammed all the time. Craig would be summoned to hunch over the ribbon and tease out the offending sheets. The waste went in the bin. The excess sheets went in the bin. Every day someone went round the office picking up the frayed edges and putting them in the bin. Sometimes, often when Stuart was least expecting it, the printer in his office would start spewing out paper for no reason — that paper also went in the bin.

Every week — sometimes twice a week — Stuart emailed Emma an order. He pictured her computer leaping into action by the window that looked out over the mill. He imagined her taking breaks during lunchtime and walking out through the thick snow, to stand in the midst of the birch. He remembered the way her hands moved as she explained about paper and pulp. He tried to think of things to add at the end of his emails: How’s your family? How’s your father? How’s your birch?

“Birch is good,” Emma wrote. “It is growing well. We hope to harvest in eight years, not ten, which is good because right now the paper mills are really squeezing production.”

Stuart had bought all the land between Ford’s Mill and the main road to make way for new racks of timber. The farmer who sold it to him also offered him the acres on the far side that led back towards the canal. It was just a field and a small copse where he would rear pheasants for city bankers to take the train down from London and shoot. It was not a large bit of land, but it was Stuart’s if he wanted it. Stuart decided he did.

In an email to Emma he sketched out his plan. He could fit several hundred trees into the acreage and in England, where the growing season was longer, they could be ready in just eight years’ time. “Dear Emma,” he wrote, “I’m getting into the birch game!”

Emma replied instantly. She was excited. They could compare notes. If Stuart’s grew quicker she would be jealous. Stuart smiled. His printer began spewing out paper.

“Are you building more sheds?” his wife asked later that evening.

“I’m going to plant birch trees.”

“Birch?”

“They use it to make paper.”

“Paper?”

She was confused. Stuart left the new extension before she could ask what his father would say or whether he’d thought it all though. Besides, he had thought it through. Paper was everywhere. With computers and emails and the web there was more printing than ever. Everyone was drowning in the stuff. And it was his mill now, not his father’s. He was making changes. He was shaking things up. Every generation had to betray the traditions of the previous one. That was common sense. And thus the birch, well, that was economies of scale. Yes, he’d thought it all through. Stuart was smart, remember; an almost lawyer, remember; and smart people made changes. They did not stand still.

“Paper?” his wife repeated later in bed.

Stuart rolled over.

“Isn’t everything going to be done by computers? Please be careful.”

“Careful of what?” Stuart cried.

His wife cowered behind the Egyptian cotton and muttered that they should think of the future. At one point she tried to take his hand. He threw it away and slept downstairs. The next morning a letter arrived from Shoreham to say that Mr. Jennings was dead.

“You should send flowers,” Stuart’s wife said.

The birch saplings arrived before Christmas when the ground was cracking with frost. There were hundreds of them. Small stems of silver wrapped in hessian. Five men came to do the planting. Stuart stayed to watch. Holes were dug. Trees were raised. Earth was moved. Roots were covered. By four o’clock everyone had left and Stuart was able to wander through the new trees as the sun set around them. The ground was compacted from where lorries had driven and people had stood. The trees were spread a few meters apart. Barely five feet tall. In ten years they’d be ready to harvest. “I thought you bought that land for a warehouse?” Carol asked from an office that was knee deep in paper. Stuart ignored the question and locked his door. Triplicate copies were piling up across the floor. He clambered over them until he reached the window and could look across the yard, through the street lamps that guarded the forklifts, towards the silhouettes of the birch.

Every morning Stuart walked across the timber yard and through the wide gate that separated the mill from the birch. He let Ted Coles take care of deliveries and spent time amidst his new trees. He felt their young branches. He ran his fingers over their blistering skin, felt shreds of bark muddy his fingertips. He wondered in what direction the new shoots would burst and whether there would be pink leaves next spring. A few of the trees did not take and died where they sat in the soil. Tears ran down Stuart’s face as he removed the branches and burnt them. He buried the roots where they lay. In the evenings he would sit on the thin grass that grew up beneath the trees and listen to the sound of the wind. His wife was pregnant now. The baby was due in June.

That May, Stuart received a complaint. A phone call was put through to his office from a man called Keith. Keith was head of purchasing at a big housebuilding firm in the west. He said he would have to be blunt.

“The timber you’ve been sending has been a load of crap. The wood’s all wet and warped and the quality is low.”

Stuart apologised. It was an oversight. A mistake. There would be a full refund and the promise never to do so again. Stuart would see to it personally that this was never repeated.

“I appreciate that,” said Keith.

Printers leapt to work to correct the oversight. Emergency deliveries were made. A week later another complaint arrived from a man named Mark. Then from Joe. Then Steven.

“It’s Sweden,” Ted Coles explained. “They’re sending us lousy wood.”

Stuart shook his head. That night he sat for a long time amidst the birch. He listened to rooks crowing as they came in to roost along the canal, cawing at one another as they negotiated their perches. It was dark by the time he got home.

After three weeks of complaints, Stuart called Emma.

“Stuart! How’s your birch?”

“Beautiful, how is yours?”

“Slow. Far too slow.”

Stuart explained about the problems with quality. Emma apologised. It was the paper, she said. Between friends, it was all because of the fucking paper. Orders were off the scale. They had harvested too many trees the year before. More trees than they could fit in their sheds. Some of the wood had been stood outside over winter beneath tarpaulins. “We invested in the very best tarpaulin,” Emma explained, “but the very best tarpaulin is no match for Swedish snow.” Anyway, this was beside the point. Stuart should not have been sold the timber left outside. As a valued customer, as a friend, he should have been sold the timber from indoors. Emma apologised. It was an oversight. A mistake. There would be a full refund and the promise never to do so again. Emma would see to it personally that this was never repeated.

“Anyway,” she said, “I hear congratulations are in order.”

The next load of timber that arrived at Ford’s Mill was the worst Ted Coles had ever seen. He sent it all back and sulked in the delivery office. Emma was not in when Stuart rang. A sales clerk cut the price on the phone. Stuart cut his prices. Printers whirred. Keith emailed to say that he was switching suppliers. Mark said the same. Most people just stopped placing orders. Timber stood still on racks. Piles of grey wood lay propped up in mounds, beside the paper that Stuart did not know how to recycle. The baby was due in a month. The birch was seven feet tall.

Shortly before his son was born, Stuart rang Shoreham.

“I was sorry to hear about your old man, I have this horrible feeling I forgot to send flowers.”

“My old man?”

“Your father, Mr. Jennings?”

“You’ve got the wrong bloke. Bob Jennings’ son sold up first chance he could. We’re owned by Peter’s & Bamber’s now.”

The sales manager, whose name Stuart missed, was sympathetic. He listened attentively. He knew about all the problems in Sweden. It wasn’t just Sweden, though. Everywhere had harvested their forests to keep up with the paper. “There are stacks of timber slowly rotting across the whole of northern Europe,” the sales manager said. It was a struggle for quality all round, but Stuart was lucky he’d called when he did. “There’s a lot of clout up here after the merger. We’ve been able to squeeze the mills to get the good stock, but it comes at a price.”

Stuart was quoted a figure that was almost double what he’d been paying Emma at Borlänge. In truth there was no real choice. It did not matter that the timber was good. Responses were blunt. Phones were placed on receivers. Memories were short. Sales fell. Printers jammed. Wood wasted away on the racks. Stuart’s son screamed all night and in the day the forklifts lay silent. Craig left to take a job in IT. Carol retired. Ted Coles said he’d never seen the like. The paper was taken away by the council in a lorry that cost Stuart four hundred pounds. The birch reached shoulder height. Stuart spent whole days there now, walking through the trees, touching them, caressing their leaves, wondering if he would ever have the heart to fell them.