The Vote

The meeting had been called for seven, which at the Ashfold allotment society meant that people arrived at ten past and the first item was reached at half past. Eileen, who had chaired the committee for nine years, no longer pretended otherwise. She wrote the real starting time in pencil beside the printed one on the agenda.

Item four was the greenhouse. It had been built in 1974 by men whose names were still on the plots, it leaked at both ends, and it had been discussed at every meeting since February. The motion before the members was simple: pull it down and put up a shed that everyone could use.

"Twelve square metres of glass," said Douglas, the treasurer, opening his folder. "Twelve square metres of glass, and we have spent four months on it. If we had put the same hours into the paths, nobody would need wellingtons in October."

Nobody laughed, because everybody agreed, and because agreeing with Douglas had never yet changed anything. Eileen counted the room, established that they had a quorum with four to spare, and asked whether the motion could be taken on a show of hands.

It could not. Marion Tebbit, who kept bees on plot nineteen and who had taught secondary school for thirty-one years, said that a matter of this kind ought to go to a proper ballot, and said it in a voice that had been trained on far worse rooms than this one.

So slips of paper were torn, folded, handed along the rows and dropped into a biscuit tin. The whole business took eleven minutes. Eileen watched people write, and understood that at least three of them were voting against the shed for reasons that had nothing whatever to do with sheds.

Douglas counted; Marion watched him count. Fourteen for, fourteen against, one abstention. The margin, in other words, did not exist, and thirty-one people looked at Eileen with the particular patience of a group that has just handed its problem to somebody else.

There was one vote left. Ray Fenwick had given up plot six in the spring and moved ninety miles north to be near his daughter, and before he went he had signed a proxy and left it with the chair, sealed in an envelope, without a single word of instruction inside it.

"You'll know what to do with it," he had said at the gate, with his hands full of seed trays. It had sounded generous at the time. Standing in a cold hall with a biscuit tin in front of her, Eileen thought it was the least generous thing anybody had ever done to her.

Ray had loved the greenhouse. He had also complained about it for eleven years, which is a form of love that allotment societies understand better than most institutions. Had he wanted it saved, he would have said so; had he wanted it gone, he would have said that too, at length, twice.

"The proxy is valid," Marion said, not unkindly. "It was lodged in March and it was witnessed. Whatever you do with it, Eileen, it goes in the minutes."

Eileen opened the envelope, read the empty half of the page for longer than was strictly necessary, and said that the motion was carried. She did not explain, and nobody asked, and Douglas wrote one line in the book: carried by proxy, 15–14. The meeting was adjourned at twenty past nine.

The glass came out in October. In November Eileen wrote to Ray with the newsletter, mentioned the shed in the third paragraph, and did not mention the envelope at all. He replied in January, asked after the bees, and said nothing about it either.