Chapter 15: Midsummer

The longest day came on a Wednesday, and Tom did not go to the wall.

He had not planned to take the day off. He had planned to begin the coping, the final course, the stones set on edge along the wallhead to crown the wall and finish it, and he had the coping stones ready, sorted and stacked on the uphill side, twenty-eight pieces of roughly triangular limestone, each one chosen for its shape and its weight and the angle of its edges, each one waiting for his hands. But he woke that morning and lay in bed and listened to the birds — the dawn chorus at its peak in June, the warblers and the thrushes and the blackbirds filling the dale with sound, the sound so dense that it was almost solid, a wall of birdsong between the dark of the night and the light of the day — and he decided not to go.

He did not know why. He had never taken a day off in the middle of a job before, had never stopped when the work was not finished, had always pushed through to completion the way the wall pushed through to its coping, the momentum of the work carrying him past fatigue and weather and the small disincentives that accumulated over a long job. But today he could not push. Today the wall could wait. Today the coping stones could sit on the grass and the wallhead could stand uncovered and the wall could be what it was, which was nearly finished, nearly complete, nearly done, and the nearly was where Tom wanted to be, the space between the almost and the entirely, the gap between the wallhead and the coping, the last gap, the gap that when filled would end the job and leave him with nothing to do on the hillside above High Scar Farm, nothing to build, no reason to drive up the dale each morning, no reason to climb the hill, no reason to stand beside the wall and look down at the farmhouse and see the shape behind the window, the hand raised in greeting.

He told Helen at breakfast that he was staying home.

"Are you ill?"

"No."

"Then why?"

"I don't know."

She looked at him across the table, the look of a woman who had been married to a man for twenty years and who could read the silences between his words the way he could read the stones between the faces of a wall, and she did not press him, did not ask again, understood that the not-knowing was the answer, that Tom's inability to articulate why he was not going to the wall was itself the articulation, the expression of a feeling that had no words, a feeling that the coping stones would make permanent, a feeling that the last stones would seal, and that Tom was not ready for that sealing, not yet, not today.

She left for her rounds and he stood in the kitchen and looked out the window and the day was beautiful, the kind of day that the dale produced two or three times a year, the days that made up for all the grey days and the wet days and the dark days of winter, the days when the light was perfect and the sky was deep blue and the grass was so green it hurt your eyes and the walls were vivid against the hillsides and the river sparkled and the air smelled of hay and wild thyme and the warm stone of the walls, and Tom stood at the window and looked at the day and did not go to the wall.

He went to the garden instead.

The garden was Helen's, a small rectangle behind the house, bounded on three sides by dry stone walls that Tom had built when they moved in twenty years ago, low walls, two feet high, built from stone that he had gathered from the field behind the house, and the walls were well-built, as well-built as any wall he had made, the hearting tight, the batter true, and inside the walls Helen grew vegetables — potatoes and runner beans and courgettes and the salad leaves that she planted in spring and that bolted in the heat of July — and there were flowers along the walls, foxgloves and geraniums and the climbing rose that Tom had trained along the south-facing wall, the rose in full bloom now, its flowers red against the grey stone, the colour of life against the colour of permanence.

Tom sat on the stone bench by the back door and looked at the garden walls and thought about the walls he had built in his life. Hundreds of them. Thousands of yards of wall, built and rebuilt and repaired, the stone lifted and placed and lifted again, the work of twenty-five years running through his hands like water through limestone, dissolving nothing, shaping everything, and the walls were out there, all of them, scattered across the dale and the dales beyond, the record of his life's work written in stone, legible to anyone who knew how to read it.

He thought about the first wall. Arkengarthdale. Jim Pratt standing beside him. The wall that he had taken down three times before Jim said "That'll do." He thought about the walls he had built in the years after that, the years of learning, the years when every stone was a lesson and every course was a test and every job was an examination that Jim would grade with a silence or a criticism or, rarely, an "Aye, that'll do." He thought about the walls he had built alone, after Jim retired, the walls that were his and only his, the walls where the decisions were his own and the mistakes were his own and the successes were his own, and the walls had improved, year by year, the craft deepening, the eye sharpening, the hands learning things that the mind could not teach, the knowledge passing from the stone to the fingers, from the weight to the muscles, from the shape to the eye.

He thought about the wall at High Scar Farm, the wall that was nearly finished, the wall that waited for its coping on the hillside above the farmhouse where Arthur sat in his chair with a through-stone on the armrest, and he thought about what the wall meant, not what it was — which was a boundary wall, a thing that divided one field from another, a practical structure with a practical purpose — but what it meant, the meaning that had accumulated over the weeks and months of building it, the meaning that had been packed into the wall along with the hearting, invisible, integral, inseparable from the stone.

The wall meant Arthur. The wall was Arthur's wall, built on Arthur's land, commissioned by Arthur, watched by Arthur from his kitchen window, visited by Arthur in the early days when he could still walk the hill, and the wall meant Arthur the way a portrait meant its subject, the wall a likeness of the man rendered in stone, not a physical likeness but a likeness of the man's character, his stubbornness, his endurance, his insistence on doing things properly, his love of his land. The wall was built the way Arthur lived, solidly, without pretension, without ornament, the structure honest, the materials local, the craft inherited, the result durable.

And the wall meant something else, something that Tom could feel but could not quite articulate, something about the relationship between the permanent and the transient, between the stone that would last and the man who would not, between the wall that would stand for a hundred years and the farmer who would not see another winter, and Tom thought that this was the thing he could not face today, the thing that had kept him from the wall, the knowledge that finishing the wall would make permanent the transience of the man, would set in stone — literally — the fact that the wall would outlast Arthur, would stand on the hillside after Arthur was gone, would be the last thing that Arthur had commissioned, the last act of the farmer's will upon his land, and that the coping stones would seal this fact, would crown it, would make it final.

He sat in the garden all morning, the sun moving across the sky, the shadows shortening, the longest day reaching its peak, the sun at its highest point, the light at its strongest, and the garden walls threw sharp shadows on the ground and the flowers bloomed against the stone and the bees moved between the foxgloves and the rose, and Tom sat and did not work and did not go to the wall and the hours passed.

At noon he walked to the bridge over the Swale and stood on it and looked at the river, which was low, the summer level, the water clear and slow, running over the stones in the riverbed with a sound that was not the roar of the winter flood but a murmur, a whisper, the sound of water that had nowhere in particular to be, water that was taking its time, and Tom stood on the bridge and watched the water and thought about time.

Time in the dale was not the time of clocks. Time in the dale was measured in seasons and in the work that the seasons demanded — the lambing in spring, the shearing in June, the hay in July and August, the tupping in November, the feeding in winter — and within each season the time was measured in days and within each day the time was measured in light, the hours of light that the day offered, the hours in which the work could be done, and the longest day was the day when time was most generous, when the light lasted from five in the morning until ten at night, seventeen hours of light in which to work and walk and build and live.

And time in a wall was something else again. Time in a wall was the time of stone, which was geological time, the deep time of the limestone's formation three hundred million years ago, the time of the tropical sea and the coral reefs and the creatures whose shells had become this rock, and that time was embedded in every stone that Tom lifted, was present in every fossil that showed on the surface of the limestone, the ghost of a creature that had lived and died in a world so different from this one that it might as well have been another planet, a world of warm water and equatorial sun, and that world was here, was in the stone, was in the wall, was in Tom's hands every time he lifted a piece of limestone and set it in its place.

He walked back from the bridge and went home and ate lunch alone in the kitchen and thought about the wall and about Arthur and about the coping stones waiting on the hillside, and in the early afternoon he got in the Defender and drove up the dale, not to the wall but to the farmhouse, and he parked in the yard and went inside.

Arthur was awake, sitting in his chair, the through-stone on the armrest, and the kitchen was warm and dim and smelled of the medication that Helen administered, the faint chemical smell that had become the smell of the kitchen, the smell of the farm's last days.

"You're not on the hill," Arthur said.

"No."

"Helen said you weren't going today."

"She told you."

"She tells me everything. She thinks I need to know."

Tom sat down at the table and looked at Arthur and Arthur looked back at him, and the two men regarded each other across the kitchen, the waller and the farmer, the builder and the owner, and between them the table with its crumbs and its ring marks and its sixty years of meals and conversations and the notebook that Helen had filled with Arthur's knowledge, the notebook lying closed on the table, its pages full, its work done.

"I'm not ready to finish," Tom said.

Arthur looked at him. "The wall?"

"The wall."

"Why not?"

Tom did not answer immediately. He looked at the window, at the view of the hillside, at the wall visible above the bracken line, the wall that was four feet high and nine yards long and waited for its coping, and he thought about how to say the thing that he could not say, the thing that had kept him from the wall, and then he said it.

"Because when the wall's finished, it's finished. And I'm not ready for it to be finished."

Arthur was quiet for a moment and his fingers moved on the through-stone, the slow turning, the habitual touch.

"You think it means something," Arthur said.

"I think it means everything."

"It's a wall, Tom."

"It's not just a wall."

"Aye. It's not just a wall. But it needs finishing. You can't leave a wall without a coping. It'll take the water. The wallhead'll be ruined by winter."

"I know."

"So finish it."

Tom looked at Arthur and Arthur's eyes were steady, clear, the sharpness that came and went with the medication, and in this moment the sharpness was there, the farmer looking at the waller with the pragmatism of a man who had never let sentiment interfere with work, who had docked lambs' tails and culled weak ewes and sent sheep to slaughter without hesitation because the farm required it, and the farm's requirements were not sentimental, were not emotional, were simply the requirements of the land and the animals and the seasons, and the wall's requirement was a coping, and the coping had to be set, and the waller had to set it, and that was the end of it.

"Tomorrow," Tom said.

"Tomorrow."

They sat together for an hour, the two of them, and they did not talk about the wall or the coping or the finishing. They talked about the dale, about the long day, the midsummer light, the way the dale looked at this time of year, the grass deep and the flowers out and the lambs grown and the ewes shorn — the shearing had been done the previous week, Daniel and two lads from the village spending three days in the shed with the clippers, the fleeces coming off in single pieces, the sheep emerging from the shed white and naked and ridiculous, half the size they had been, the wool piled in the corner of the shed in greasy heaps that smelled of lanolin and sheep and the summer that was just beginning.

"I used to shear," Arthur said. "When I was young. Before the machines. Hand shears. My father taught me."

"How many a day?"

"Forty. On a good day. Fifty if the wool was dry and the sheep were quiet."

"That's a lot."

"It was a lot. My arms ached for a week after. But the fleeces were better. Cleaner. No second cuts. The machines leave second cuts. Short bits, no good for anything."

"Jim says the same about walls. That the old ways were better."

"Jim's right about some things. Not everything. But some things."

Tom left at four and drove home and the day was still long, the light still strong, the sun still high in the western sky, and the dale was golden and green and vivid, and the walls stood in the light, every stone visible, every course, every joint, the walls displayed in the midsummer light like objects in a gallery, each one a work of craft and time and the accumulated knowledge of generations, and Tom drove through the dale and saw the walls and knew them and thought about the coping stones on the hillside and the wall that waited and the man who had told him to finish it.

Tomorrow he would finish it.

He went home and sat in the garden and waited for Helen and she came home at six and they sat together on the stone bench and the evening was warm and the light was gold and the garden walls threw long shadows across the vegetables and the flowers, and the climbing rose on the south wall was in full bloom, its red flowers open to the evening sun, and the bees were still working, the last bees of the day, making their final visits to the foxgloves before the light went.

"I went to see Arthur," Tom said.

"I know. He rang me."

"He told me to finish the wall."

"Good."

"He said I can't leave it without a coping."

"He's right."

"I know he's right."

"Then finish it."

Tom looked at Helen and she looked at him and the through-stone of their marriage held them, the connection that ran between them, invisible, structural, and he thought about the through-stones in the wall on the hillside, the fourteen stones that bound the two faces together, and he thought about the through-stone on the arm of Arthur's chair, the fifteenth stone, the stone that was too short for the wall but that connected the man to his land, and he thought about the through-stones in his own life, the connections that held him together, Helen and the dale and the craft and the stone, the things that ran through him, binding him, making him one thing instead of two faces with nothing between them.

The light lasted until ten o'clock, the longest light of the year, the midsummer light that stretched the day to its maximum, and Tom sat in the garden and watched it go, the shadows lengthening, the sky turning from blue to gold to rose to the deep blue of the midsummer night, and the walls of the garden caught the last light and held it, the stone glowing, warm, alive with the light that the sun had given and that the stone would release through the night, the wall breathing out the warmth of the longest day.

Tomorrow he would set the coping. Tomorrow he would finish the wall.

But tonight the wall was unfinished, and the gap between the wallhead and the sky was open, and the longest day was ending, and the light was going, and the dale was settling into the short darkness of the midsummer night, and somewhere on the hillside above High Scar Farm the wall stood in the last light, four feet high, nine yards long, the wallhead level, the hearting packed, the through-stones set, the stile built, the creep hole in place, and the coping stones sat on the grass beside the wall, waiting, patient, ready, the stones that would finish the wall and seal the work and crown the structure, the stones that were the last stones, the final course, the ending.

And in the farmhouse below the wall Arthur sat in his chair in the fading light with his hand on the through-stone and his eyes on the window and the dale going dark around him and the longest day ending and the year beginning its long turn toward autumn and the dark and the cold and the end.