Chapter 14: Jim Visits Arthur

Jim went on a Saturday, which was deliberate, because Saturday was the day that Arthur's father had always received visitors, the farming week running from Monday to Saturday with Sunday for church and rest, and Jim's generation still observed the rhythm even though the church was closed and the rest was no longer earned by six days of physical labour but was simply the absence of anything else to do, and Jim thought that Arthur would appreciate the formality of a Saturday visit, the acknowledgement that even in dying the man's time had a structure, a week had a shape, and a visit was not just a visit but a social call, conducted on the correct day, at the correct hour, with the correct ceremony.

He brought eggs. A dozen eggs from his own hens, brown-shelled, still warm, carried in a paper bag on the passenger seat of the Transit, and he brought a bottle of whisky, a Dalwhinnie, which was not the whisky that Arthur drank — Arthur drank Grouse, the cheap blend, the farmer's whisky — but which was the whisky that Jim drank on the occasions that he considered worth drinking for, and this was such an occasion, the visit to a dying friend, the last visit perhaps, the visit that required a good whisky because there might not be another opportunity to drink one together.

He parked in the yard beside the Defender, which meant Tom was on the hill, and he stood in the yard for a moment and looked up at the wall, and he could see it from here, the line of grey stone running along the hillside, and he could see Tom, a small figure moving along the wall, and he could see the wall's shape against the sky, the batter, the profile, and even from this distance, half a mile below, he could tell that the wall was well-built, could tell by the line of it, the straightness, the evenness of the coping height — no, the wallhead, the coping was not yet set — and he felt a pride that was not quite pride because he had not built the wall, but that was adjacent to pride, the feeling of a teacher whose student has done well, the satisfaction of seeing the craft passed on and properly exercised.

He knocked on the kitchen door, which was an unusual thing for Jim Pratt to do, because in the dale you did not knock on a farmhouse door, you walked in, the doors being left unlocked, the kitchens being public spaces where neighbours entered without invitation, but Jim knocked because the house was changed, the house was now a sickroom, and a sickroom had a different etiquette, a different set of rules, and Jim understood this without being told, understood that the man inside the door was no longer the man who received visitors standing in his kitchen with his boots on, but was a man in a chair, a man diminished, and that the knock was a form of respect, a recognition that the man's space had contracted, that his privacy had increased as his world had shrunk, and that you knocked before entering that smaller space.

"Come in," Arthur's voice said, and the voice was quiet, quieter than Jim had expected, and he pushed the door open and stepped into the kitchen and saw Arthur in his chair and stopped.

He had not seen Arthur for three months.

Three months was not a long time in the life of the dale, where you could go three months without seeing a neighbour and think nothing of it, the distances and the weather and the demands of the land making casual visits rare, but three months was a long time in the life of a man with pancreatic cancer, and the Arthur that Jim saw in the chair was not the Arthur he had seen three months ago, was not the Arthur he carried in his memory, was a different man, a reduced man, a man whose body had been stripped back the way Tom stripped back a damaged wall, course by course, stone by stone, the substance falling away, the structure diminishing, the man being taken down to his foundation.

Arthur's face was yellow-grey, the colour of old newspaper, and his eyes were sunken, and his hands on the arms of the chair were thin, the bones and the tendons showing through the skin, the hands of a man who had not lifted a stone or gripped a crook or held a struggling ewe for months, the muscles atrophied, the strength gone, the hands that had worked the farm for sixty years now resting on the polished arms of the chair with the passivity of objects, tools that had been set aside.

"Jim," Arthur said.

"Arthur."

Jim stood in the doorway and looked at his friend and his friend looked back at him, and between them the kitchen stretched, the flagstone floor and the range and the table and the chairs, the kitchen that was the same kitchen it had always been, the same range and the same table and the same flagstones, unchanged in fifty years, and yet completely changed, because the man in the chair was changed, and the kitchen was the man's kitchen, and the man's change changed everything in it.

Jim put the eggs on the table and the whisky beside them and sat down in the chair at the table and looked at Arthur.

"You look terrible," Jim said.

Arthur laughed. It was a real laugh, the first real laugh that Jim had heard from Arthur in years, a laugh that came from the belly, from the place where laughter lived, and it hurt Arthur to laugh, Jim could see the pain cross his face like a shadow, but the laugh was real and the pain was worth it.

"You look the same as always," Arthur said. "Miserable."

"I am miserable. I've come to see a dying man. What do you expect?"

The word "dying" sat in the kitchen between them like a stone on a table, hard and solid and unavoidable, and neither of them flinched from it, because they were men of a generation that did not flinch from words, that called things what they were, that did not dress the truth in softer language. Arthur was dying. Jim had said it. Arthur had not objected. The word was there, acknowledged, accepted, and now they could proceed.

"Whisky?" Jim said.

"It's eleven in the morning."

"Aye."

"Go on, then."

Jim opened the bottle and found two glasses in the cupboard above the sink, the cupboard where the glasses had always been, and he poured two measures and gave one to Arthur and kept one for himself, and they drank, and the whisky was warm and smoky and good, and Jim felt it settle in his stomach like a stone settling on a foundation, solid, grounding.

"Tom's nearly done," Jim said.

"I know. I watch from the window."

"He's done well."

"He has."

"Better than I expected, for that section. It's a difficult stretch. The ground falls away on the west side. Makes the foundation uncertain."

"He managed."

"Aye. He managed."

They drank and talked, and the conversation was the conversation of two men who had known each other for fifty years, the conversation that did not need to establish anything or prove anything or arrive anywhere, the conversation that simply existed, that flowed the way the river flowed, following the contours of the ground, finding its way around the obstacles without effort, without plan, the talk going where the talk wanted to go.

They talked about walls. Jim told Arthur about a wall he had seen in Wensleydale, a wall built on a slope so steep that the foundation course had been stepped, each stone set on a terrace cut into the hillside, the wall zigzagging up the slope in a series of steps, each step a foundation, each foundation a wall, and the whole thing climbing the hill like a staircase, and Arthur listened and asked questions and Jim answered, and the wall in Wensleydale was present in the kitchen, described into existence by Jim's words, built in the air between the two men the way a wall was built in stone, one course at a time.

They talked about sheep. Arthur told Jim about the lambing, about the hundred and sixty per cent, about the stillborn lamb that Daniel had lost, about the ewes that were out in the fields now with their lambs, the lambs growing strong, the flock healthy. He talked about the sheep the way he always talked about the sheep, with the detailed knowledge of a man who knew every animal individually, who could tell one ewe from another at fifty yards, who knew which ewes were good mothers and which were not, which lambed easily and which did not, which grew the best fleece and which grew the best lamb, and Jim listened and knew that this was Arthur's testament, Arthur's version of the names and the marks that Helen was writing in the notebook, the knowledge spoken aloud, given to the air, released.

They talked about the weather. The spring had been wet, wetter than usual, the rain coming in waves from the west, and the ground was saturated, the rivers high, the becks running full, and the hay would be late this year, the grass growing well but the ground too wet to cut, and the farmers were watching the sky and waiting for the drying days that would come in June, or July, or whenever they came, because you could not predict the weather in the dale, you could only respond to it, and the response was always the same — wait, watch, work when the weather allowed, wait again.

Jim poured more whisky. Arthur's glass was still half-full but Jim poured anyway, topping it up, the gesture of a host although he was not the host, the gesture of a man who wanted to keep the moment going, who wanted the whisky to last and the talk to last and the morning to last, because the morning was a good morning, the best morning Jim had had in months, sitting in a kitchen with a friend and drinking whisky and talking about walls and sheep and weather, the things that mattered, the things that were the substance of their lives, the hearting.

"I should have come sooner," Jim said.

"You're here now."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be soft."

"I'm not being soft. I'm being — I'm saying I should have come."

"And I'm saying you're here now. That's what matters. Not when you came. That you came."

Jim looked at his whisky and then at Arthur and then at the through-stone on the armrest of the chair.

"What's that?"

"A through-stone. Tom brought it. From the wall."

Jim reached over and picked up the stone and turned it in his hands, the way a waller turned a stone, assessing it, reading it, and he could see that it was a through-stone, could tell by the length and the shape, and he could see that it was too short for the wall, twenty-six inches, and he could see why Tom had brought it, the stone as a token, a representative, an ambassador from the wall to the man who could no longer visit it.

"It's a good stone," Jim said.

"Tom said that."

"He's right. Good grain. Sound. It'll outlast both of us."

"It'll outlast everything."

Jim set the stone back on the armrest and Arthur's hand found it, the fingers curling around the stone's edge, the touch automatic, habitual, the man's hand finding the stone the way a ewe's nose found her lamb, by instinct, by the knowledge that lived below the level of thought.

They sat in silence for a while, the two old men, the whisky in their glasses, the light in the window, the stone on the armrest, and the silence was the silence of the dale, the silence that was not empty but full, full of the things that did not need to be said, the things that were understood without being spoken, the things that were the hearting of their friendship, the invisible substance that had held them together for fifty years, the shared life, the shared dale, the shared knowledge of stone and sheep and weather and the way the light fell on the hills in the evening and the way the curlew called in the morning and the way the walls stood in the dark and the way a good wall felt under your hands and the way a bad wall made you angry and the way the dale looked from the top of the fell on a clear day, the whole valley laid out below you, the river and the fields and the walls and the farms, the pattern of the place, the shape of the world they had lived in.

"I don't want to go," Arthur said, and Jim knew that he did not mean go from the kitchen or go from the farm but go, the final going, the departure that was not to another place but to no place, the going that was not a journey but an end, and Jim felt the weight of the word in the room, the heaviness of it, the stone of it, and he did not try to lift it or move it or set it aside, he let it sit where Arthur had placed it, on the table between them, the word doing what words did when they were true, which was to make the thing real, to give it weight, to give it a place.

"I know," Jim said.

"I'm not afraid of it. I thought I would be. But I'm not. I'm just — I don't want to. There's a difference."

"There is."

"I don't want to leave the farm. I don't want to leave the dale. I don't want to stop being here."

Jim looked at his friend and his friend's eyes were clear and dry and the eyes of a man who was telling the truth, the whole truth, the truth that was the foundation of his life, the truth that was set into the ground like a foundation stone, immovable, solid, and the truth was that Arthur loved this place, loved it with the love that was not spoken because it was too large for words, the love that was lived rather than expressed, the love that was in the walking and the farming and the watching and the knowing, the love that was the man's relationship to his land, the bond between the farmer and the farm, the through-stone that ran between them.

"You won't stop being here," Jim said. "The wall's here. The stone's here. The names are here. You're in all of it."

"That's what people say."

"I'm not people. I'm Jim Pratt. And I'm telling you that the wall Tom's building will have your name on it for the next hundred years. Not written on it. In it. In the hearting. You're in the hearting, Arthur."

Arthur looked at Jim and Jim looked at Arthur and the kitchen was quiet and the whisky was warm in their stomachs and the light was moving across the floor and the stone was on the armrest and the wall was on the hillside and the dale was around them, holding them, the way it had always held them, the way it would hold them when they were gone.

Arthur finished his whisky and set the glass on the table beside the eggs that Jim had brought and the bottle that Jim had opened.

"Good eggs?" Arthur said.

"Best in the dale."

"I doubt that."

"Doubt away. They're the best."

"How many hens?"

"Six. All brown. They're useless in winter but they lay like machines from March to September."

"You always did keep a good hen."

"I always did."

The conversation returned to the mundane, to the practical, to the small details of dale life that were not small at all but were the substance of the life, the hearting, the daily facts that held the daily life together — how many hens, what breed, how many eggs, how much feed — and Jim understood that Arthur needed this, needed the ordinary talk, the talk that was not about dying or selling or leaving but about living, about the ongoing business of being alive in a place, of keeping hens and counting eggs and knowing the price of feed, and Jim gave him the talk, gave it freely, gave it the way he would give a man a hand with a gate or a lift to the auction or a lend of a trailer, the gift of the ordinary, the gift of the normal, the gift of the world going on.

Jim left at one o'clock, the bottle of whisky on the table for Arthur, the eggs in the fridge, and he walked to the Transit and sat in the driver's seat and looked up the hill at the wall and at the small figure of Tom working on it, and he sat for five minutes without starting the engine, just sitting, his hands on the wheel, his eyes on the wall, and then he started the engine and drove down the track and into the dale and home.

He did not tell Tom about the visit. Tom would ask and Jim would say it was fine, and the fine would be a through-stone, the word spanning the gap between what the visit had been and what Tom needed to hear, the word connecting the two men's understanding without revealing the full interior, the hearting of the visit, which was grief, which was love, which was the terrible weight of sitting with a friend who was dying and drinking whisky with him and talking about hens and knowing that the next time he came to this kitchen the chair might be empty and the stone might be on the table instead of the armrest and the kitchen might be cold and the man might be gone.

Jim drove home and parked the Transit and went into his cottage and sat in his own chair in his own kitchen and looked out of his own window at his own dale, and the walls ran across the hillsides and the sheep grazed in the fields and the sun was moving across the sky and the world was going on, the world going on as it always went on, regardless of who was in the chair and who was on the hill and who was gone, and the walls stood, the walls always stood, the walls that he had built and the walls that Tom had built and the walls that Arthur's grandfather had commissioned and the walls that the Wensleydale gang had erected a hundred and seventy years ago, the walls standing, the hearting holding, the through-stones binding, the foundation sound, the coping shedding the rain, the walls doing what walls did, which was to stand, which was to last, which was to be there.