Chapter 2: Stripping Back

Monday came with fog, a low ceiling of white that sat on the dale like a lid, pressing the sound of the river down into the valley and muffling the bleating of the ewes in the fields above the village. Tom loaded the Defender in the half-dark, the tools going into the back in the same order they always went: walling hammer, cold chisel, pinch bar, spirit level that he rarely used but carried out of a superstitious respect for the idea of measurement, gloves that he rarely wore, the battered canvas bag of pins and string that he used for the lines, and the flask that Helen filled each morning with tea strong enough to dissolve a nail. The flask went on the passenger seat where he could reach it while driving, and the tools went in the back where they rattled and clanked on the corrugated floor of the Defender as he drove up the dale, the headlights catching the fog and throwing it back at him in a wall of white that dissolved and reformed around the vehicle as it climbed.

He parked in the yard at High Scar Farm and sat for a moment with the engine running, listening to the diesel tick over, watching the fog move across the cobbles in slow currents. The farmhouse lights were on, a yellow glow in two downstairs windows, and he could see the shape of Arthur moving behind the glass, a dark figure against the light, and then the back door opened and Arthur came out into the yard with two mugs of tea and handed one through the window of the Defender without a word.

"Ta."

"Fog'll lift by ten," Arthur said.

"Aye."

"It always does this time of year. March fog. Burns off when the sun gets up."

Tom drank the tea, which was weaker than his own, milkier, made by a man who had been making his own tea for six years since his wife Margaret had died, and who had never quite learned to make it the way she had, and who perhaps did not want to learn, preferring the reminder in each cup of what was missing.

He finished the tea and handed the mug back and got out and began carrying tools up the hill. The fog was thick on the upper slopes and he walked into it like walking into water, the world shrinking around him until there was nothing but the grass underfoot and the grey air and the sound of his own breathing and the weight of the hammer in his right hand and the bag of tools over his left shoulder. He found the wall by feel, his boots hitting stone before his eyes registered the shape of it, and he stood in the fog beside the gap and set his tools down on a flat stone and took off his jacket and folded it over the wall and began.

Stripping back was the first work, and it was the work that most people did not understand, because it looked like destruction. To rebuild a wall you first had to take more of it down. The standing sections on either side of the gap were damaged, their exposed ends leaning inward, the hearting spilling from the open faces, and if Tom built new wall against those damaged ends the joint would be weak, the new work leaning against the old like a drunk against a lamppost, and within a year the whole section would go again. So he had to strip the wall back, taking down the damaged stone course by course until he reached sound wall, wall that was plumb and true and tightly hearted, wall that he could build against with confidence, knowing that the joint between old and new would be as strong as the wall itself.

He started at the north end, working from the top down, lifting the coping stones off first and setting them aside on the uphill side of the wall. The copings were good stones, heavy, roughly triangular, set on edge along the top of the wall with their points upward, interlocking like fingers, and they were sound, unbroken, merely displaced by the collapse. He handled them with care, each one a shaped piece that would go back in its place when the wall was rebuilt, each one bearing the marks of the original waller's hammer, the chisel scars where the stone had been dressed to fit. He laid them in a row on the grass, in the order he removed them, so that when the time came to replace them he would have them in sequence, each one fitting against its neighbours as the original builder had intended.

Below the copings was the top course of the wall proper, face stones set in two rows with hearting between them, and Tom began to lift these off, working methodically, both hands on each stone, his back straight, his legs doing the lifting, the stone coming up and turning in his hands as he placed it on the growing pile beside the wall. Each stone told him something as he handled it. Its weight told him what it was — limestone, mostly, grey and dense, quarried from the outcrops on the fell above, though some stones were sandstone, darker, softer, brought from further up the dale, and a few were river stones, rounded by water, cobbles from the Swale that the original builder had gathered from the riverbed and carried up the hill in a sack or a barrow, using whatever the land offered, because a waller built with what was there.

The shape of each stone told him where it had been in the wall. Face stones were roughly rectangular, with one flat face that had been placed outward, facing the weather, and one rough face that had been turned inward, bedded against the hearting. Through-stones were long and narrow, spanning the full width of the wall, tying the two faces together like a bolt through timber. Hearting stones were small, angular, irregular — the rubble that filled the interior, the invisible core. And then there were the pinning stones, the thin flat wedges that were hammered into the gaps between the face stones to level them, to tighten them, to stop any movement, the smallest stones doing the most precise work.

As he stripped the wall back, Tom read the work of the man who had built it. He did not know the builder's name. The wall was perhaps a hundred and fifty years old, built in the great period of enclosure when the open fells were divided and walled, when teams of wallers moved across the landscape building miles of wall in a single season, transforming the dale from common land to a patchwork of enclosed fields. The builder had been good. Tom could see it in the coursing, the way each layer of stones ran level across the wall, the joints staggered so that no vertical line ran through more than one course, the same principle as brickwork but achieved without mortar, without measurement, by eye alone. He could see it in the hearting, which was dense and tight, every void filled, no hollow spaces where water could collect. He could see it in the selection of stones, the way the builder had chosen each piece for its place, using large stones at the base and smaller stones higher up, tapering the wall, grading the stone by weight as well as by size, so that the heaviest pieces bore the greatest load and the lightest sat at the top where they needed only to resist the wind.

Tom worked for two hours, stripping the north end back by five feet, reducing the damaged wall to a neat line of rubble piled beside the standing section. The fog began to thin as Arthur had predicted, the white thinning to grey and then to a luminous silver as the sun found its way through, and by mid-morning the dale was visible again, the fields appearing below him like a map being unrolled, the river showing as a line of silver in the valley bottom, and the village emerging from the fog, the stone roofs wet and dark, the smoke from the chimneys going straight up in the still air.

Arthur appeared at the foot of the hill, a dark figure on the green field, his stick in his right hand, and he climbed slowly toward the wall, pausing twice to rest, leaning on the stick with both hands, his head down. Tom watched him come without pausing in his work, lifting stones, sorting them, stacking them, his hands finding the rhythm that twenty-five years of walling had made automatic, the rhythm of lift and turn and place that was as natural to him as breathing.

Arthur reached the wall and stood watching. He did not sit. He stood with his weight on the stick, his cap pulled low over his eyes, and he watched Tom work with the attention of a man who understood what he was seeing, who knew the difference between good work and poor work, who had watched wallers all his life and could tell by the sound of the hammer and the speed of the hands whether the man holding them knew his trade.

"You're going back a fair way," Arthur said.

"Have to. It's leaning."

Arthur looked at the exposed end of the standing wall, where Tom had stripped back the damaged courses to reveal the sound wall beneath, and he could see what Tom meant, the slight inward lean of the face, the gap where the hearting had been disturbed, the top courses sitting a half-inch proud of the courses below, the creep that preceded collapse.

"Who built it, do you reckon?" Tom said.

"My grandfather said it was done in the fifties. Eighteen fifties. There was a gang came over from Wensleydale."

"They knew what they were doing."

"They did."

Tom lifted a stone from the wall, a large face stone from the second course, and held it up. The stone was roughly rectangular, about eighteen inches long and eight inches deep, and its outer face had been dressed flat with a hammer, the surface covered in shallow scars where the hammer had struck, and Tom ran his thumb across those scars, feeling the marks of a man's hand from a hundred and seventy years ago, the ghost of a gesture that had been repeated ten thousand times in the building of this wall, the hammer striking the stone, the stone yielding its excess, the face becoming flat, becoming true, becoming ready to take its place in the wall.

"Same stone going back in," Tom said.

"Aye. Course it is."

He set the stone on the pile and went back to work.

By noon he had stripped back both ends of the gap to sound wall, taking down two feet on the north end and three feet on the south where the damage was worse, and the gap was now nine yards wide instead of seven, but the standing wall on either side was sound and true, the faces plumb, the hearting tight, the courses level. He had sorted the removed stones into three piles: face stones in one, hearting stones in another, and copings in a third, each pile arranged roughly by size, the large stones at the bottom and the small stones on top, so that when he came to rebuild he could reach the stones he needed in the order he needed them, working from the bottom up, large to small, foundation to coping.

He sat on the pile of face stones and poured tea from the flask and drank it and ate the sandwiches that Helen had made, ham and mustard on white bread cut thick, and he looked down the dale and chewed and swallowed and drank and sat, and the silence of the hillside settled around him, not silence really but the ambient sound of the dale, the noise that was always there and that you stopped hearing after a while: wind in the grass, sheep calling, the curlew that circled overhead making its long descending cry, the sound that was the sound of the uplands, the sound that meant open ground and high sky and the world going on without regard for the small figure sitting on a pile of stones halfway up a hill.

Arthur had gone back to the farm after an hour. Tom had watched him go, the slow descent, the stick finding the ground, and he had felt again that settling in his chest, that weight that was not quite grief but was the shape of grief, the anticipation of it, the way you could feel a stone's weight before you lifted it, just by looking at it, just by knowing what stone weighed.

He finished his tea and went back to work.

The afternoon was given to clearing the rubble from the gap, gathering the fallen stones from the hillside where they had scattered and carrying them back to the wall line. Some of the stones had rolled twenty feet downhill and were lodged in the grass, half-buried, and he had to lever them out with the pinch bar, working the bar under the stone and lifting, the stone coming free of the earth with a sucking sound, and then he would roll it uphill, walking behind it, guiding it with his hands, letting the stone find its own path up the slope, working with gravity rather than against it, because gravity was the force that a waller understood best, the force that held the wall together, the force that pulled the stone down the hill when the wall failed, and the force that would hold each stone in its place when the wall was rebuilt.

The hearting stones were the hardest to gather. They were small, some no bigger than a fist, and they had scattered widely, tumbling and bouncing down the slope and coming to rest in the tussocks, and Tom went on his hands and knees through the grass, picking them up one by one, dropping them into a bucket he had brought for the purpose, filling the bucket and carrying it back to the wall and emptying it onto the hearting pile and going back for more. It was tedious work, the kind of work that would have driven a younger man to distraction, the repetitive gathering of small stones from wet grass, but Tom did not mind it. Every stone was needed. Every piece of hearting would go back inside the wall, would be packed between the face stones, wedged and locked in place, filling the voids, closing the gaps, making the wall solid from face to face. Without the hearting the wall was nothing, just two rows of stones with air between them, a hollow thing that would fall at the first push of wind or frost. The hearting was the wall's substance, its weight, its resistance to the forces that wanted to bring it down.

He worked until the light began to go, the shadows lengthening across the hillside, the sun dropping behind Great Shunner Fell to the west, and then he gathered his tools and his flask and walked down the hill to the Defender, his legs heavy, his shoulders aching from the day's lifting, his hands numb with cold. He drove down the dale in the last of the light, the headlights on, the road empty, the walls on either side of the road dark shapes against the sky, and he thought about the man who had built Arthur's wall a hundred and seventy years ago, a waller from Wensleydale whose name no one remembered, who had walked across the hill with his hammer and his line and had built a wall that had stood for a century and a half, that had held through winters that brought snow to the coping stones and summers that baked the limestone until it cracked, that had held through the weight of sheep leaning against it and the pressure of frost heaving the ground behind it, that had held until three days ago when it had finally given way, and then Tom had come and stripped it back and sorted the stones and would now rebuild it, using the same stones, the same techniques, the same knowledge that the original builder had used, building on the original builder's foundation, setting his stones on the foundation that another man had laid.

It was a kind of conversation, Tom thought. The wall was a conversation between the men who built it and the men who rebuilt it, a conversation conducted in stone, each waller reading the work of the man before him and answering it with his own work, and the conversation stretched back through the centuries, through the hands of the men who had built and rebuilt and repaired these walls, and it would stretch forward through the hands of the men who would repair them after Tom was gone, and the language of the conversation was always the same: stone against stone, weight against weight, the fit of one surface against another, the invisible hearting that held everything together.

Helen was in the bath when he got home. He could hear the water running upstairs, and he went into the kitchen and put the kettle on and stood by the window while it boiled, looking out at the village street, at the houses that were built of the same stone as the walls, the same grey limestone, quarried from the same ground, and he thought that the whole dale was made of the same material, the houses and the walls and the bridges and the barns, everything stone, everything built by hands, everything held together by the same force, which was gravity, which was the most reliable force in the world, the force that never stopped, that never weakened, that pulled everything toward the centre of the earth with the same patient insistence, and that asked only that you work with it rather than against it.

Helen came down in her dressing gown, her hair wet, her face flushed from the heat of the bath, and she sat at the table while he made the tea and set out the supper that she had prepared that morning before her rounds, a stew in the slow cooker that filled the kitchen with the smell of beef and onion and thyme.

"How was it?" she said.

"Stripped back. Both ends to sound stone. I'll start the foundation course tomorrow."

"How far up the hill did he come?"

"All the way."

"He shouldn't."

"I know."

"But he will."

"Aye."

They ate in silence for a while, the stew hot and thick, the bread fresh from the bakery in Reeth, and outside the window the light went completely and the village settled into darkness, the streetlights coming on, the windows of the houses glowing, and the walls of the dale disappeared into the night, invisible but still there, still standing, still holding the fields in their places, still doing in darkness the work they did in light.

"Robert's coming up this weekend," Helen said.

"What for?"

"To see Arthur. And to look at the farm."

Tom put down his fork. "Look at the farm."

"He wants to get a valuation. An estate agent from Richmond."

"Arthur knows?"

"Arthur asked him to."

Tom looked at her. "Arthur asked him."

"He's being practical, Tom. He knows what's coming."

Tom picked up his fork and ate and said nothing, and the silence between them was not empty but full, full of the things that did not need to be said because they were already understood, the way the hearting inside a wall did not need to be seen to be known, the way the weight of a stone could be felt before it was lifted, the way the shape of a life could be read in the lines of a man's face and the slowness of his walk up a hill he had climbed ten thousand times before.

After supper he went out to the shed and spent an hour sorting pins, the small metal pegs that he used to hold the string line against the batter frames, and he sorted them by size and dropped them into the pockets of his canvas bag, and the sound of them dropping was a small sound, a precise sound, the sound of preparation, of getting ready, of making sure that everything was in its place before the work began. And outside the shed the night was dark and cold and the stars were out over the dale and the walls were everywhere, invisible in the darkness, holding.