Chapter 20: The Night

The phone rang at two in the morning on a Wednesday in November, and Tom was awake before Helen, awake before the second ring, his body knowing what the phone meant before his mind had processed the sound, the way the body always knew the important things first, the way the hands knew the weight of a stone before the eyes had measured it.

Helen answered. Her voice was quiet, professional, the nurse's voice, the voice that came automatically in the dark, the voice trained to receive bad news without flinching.

"Yes. How long? I'll come now."

She put the phone down and turned to Tom in the dark.

"It's Sandra. Arthur's breathing has changed. She thinks it's tonight."

Tom said nothing. He sat up in bed and listened to Helen dress, the sounds of her movements in the dark room, the drawer opening, the clothes pulled on, the zip of the trousers, the soft thud of the nurse's bag lifted from the chair. She was practiced at dressing in the dark. She had been called out a hundred times in fifteen years, the phone ringing in the small hours, the voice on the line saying come, saying it's time, saying the end is near, and she had dressed and gone, every time, because that was the job, that was what she did, she went to the dying.

"Should I come?" Tom said.

"Not yet. I'll ring you."

She went out and he heard her car start in the drive and the headlights swept across the ceiling and then she was gone, the sound of the engine diminishing as she drove up the dale, and Tom lay in the dark and listened to the silence that she left behind, the silence of the house, the silence of the dale, the silence that was not empty but full, full of the things that were happening in the darkness, the things that the darkness contained, the dying man in the farmhouse three miles up the dale and the woman driving toward him and the wall on the hillside above, standing in the dark.

He did not sleep. He lay in the bed and looked at the ceiling and thought about Arthur and thought about the wall and thought about the relationship between the two, between the man and the structure, between the mortal and the permanent, and he thought that the wall was ready for Arthur's death the way a wall was ready for winter, structurally, the coping set, the hearting packed, the through-stones bound, the wall prepared for what was coming, designed to withstand it, built to endure it, and that Arthur's death would not damage the wall, would not weaken it, would not change a single stone in it, and yet would change everything about it, would change what the wall meant, would transform it from a boundary wall on a working farm to a memorial, a monument, the last thing that Arthur Metcalfe had built, or rather the last thing that Arthur Metcalfe had caused to be built, the final act of the farmer's will upon his land.

At three o'clock he got up and dressed and went downstairs and put the kettle on and stood in the kitchen in the dark, not turning on the light, standing in the darkness the way the wall stood in the darkness, present but unseen, and he made tea and drank it standing at the window, looking out at the village street, the streetlights casting orange pools on the cobbles, the houses dark, the dale asleep, the world continuing its slow turn toward morning while in a farmhouse three miles up the dale a man was turning toward something else.

He thought about the sounds of Arthur's farm, the sounds that he had heard every morning for two months as he worked on the wall. The sheep calling. The lambs answering. The wind in the grass. The curlew overhead. Arthur's stick tapping the coping stones. The sounds layered like courses in a wall, each one distinct, each one part of the whole, and now the sounds were different, were autumn sounds, were November sounds — the sheep still calling but the lambs gone, sold at auction, the curlew gone to the coast, the wind colder, sharper, carrying the smell of coming snow rather than coming rain — and the sound of Arthur's stick was gone, had been gone for months, the stick standing in Tom's hallway instead of tapping Arthur's copings, and the absence of the sound was a sound of its own, a silence that had a shape, a gap in the air where the tapping should have been.

The phone rang at five.

"Tom."

"How is he?"

Helen's voice was different now. Not the nurse's voice. Her voice. Helen's voice. The voice of the woman he had married, the voice that carried the weight of what she had seen and what she was seeing, the voice that was tired and sad and steady, all at once, the three qualities layered like courses, each one supporting the other.

"He's going, Tom. It won't be long. He's — his breathing is very slow. Minutes between breaths. Sandra says — Tom, if you want to come, come now."

"I'm coming."

He drove up the dale in the dark. The headlights of the Defender picked out the walls on either side of the road, the coping stones flashing in the light and then gone, the walls appearing and disappearing in the headlights, present and then absent, there and then not there, and Tom drove fast, faster than he usually drove, the Defender's engine loud in the silent dale, the only vehicle on the road, the road empty, the dale empty, the world reduced to the two columns of light and the road between them and the walls on either side.

He turned up the track to High Scar Farm and the Defender lurched over the potholes and the headlights swept across the yard and he saw Helen's car and Sandra's car parked beside the barn and the farmhouse lights on, every window lit, the house blazing with light in the dark dale, a beacon, a signal, the house declaring its vigil.

He went inside.

The kitchen was warm, the range still throwing heat, and Sandra was at the table with a cup of tea and her notes, and she looked at Tom and nodded and said, "He's in the front room. Helen's with him."

Tom went through the kitchen and down the hallway to the front room and pushed the door open and went in.

Arthur was in the bed. Helen was beside the bed in the chair, her hand holding Arthur's hand, and the room was lit by a single lamp on the table beside the bed, the lamp throwing a soft light that did not reach the corners of the room, the light concentrated on the bed and the man in it and the woman beside him, the rest of the room in shadow, the walls of the room dark, the stone walls of the farmhouse that were two feet thick and that had been built by the same hands that had built the field walls, the walls that held the room, that held the light, that held the dying man.

Arthur's eyes were closed. His breathing was slow, so slow that between each breath there was a silence that extended like a gap in a wall, a space where the stone should have been and was not, and in each gap Tom waited for the next breath, and the next breath came, and then there was another gap, and the gaps were getting longer, the breaths getting shallower, the rhythm slowing, the man's body winding down like a clock that had not been wound, the mechanism still working but the spring losing its tension, the pendulum slowing, the ticks becoming further apart.

Tom sat on the floor beside Helen's chair, his back against the wall, and he reached up and put his hand on her shoulder and she put her hand on his hand and they sat together, the three of them, the dying man in the bed and the nurse in the chair and the waller on the floor, and the room was quiet except for Arthur's breathing, the slow breaths, the long gaps, the sound of a life that was almost finished, almost done.

The through-stone was on the bedside table. Tom could see it in the lamplight, the grey stone, the stone from the wall, the stone that Arthur had held for months, the stone that connected him to his land, to his wall, to the hillside above the farm where the wall stood in the darkness. The stone was there. The stone would still be there in the morning. The stone would still be there in a hundred years. The stone was permanent, was enduring, was the thing that would last when the man who had held it was gone.

Arthur opened his eyes.

The opening was slow, the lids lifting with the effort of a man who had very little effort left, and the eyes that appeared were not the sharp farmer's eyes that Tom had known, were not the eyes that could read a sheep at fifty yards and a wall at half a mile, were something else, were eyes that were looking at something that Tom could not see, something beyond the room, beyond the lamp, beyond the walls of the farmhouse, something that was visible only to the man who was leaving.

Arthur's lips moved. Helen leaned in, her ear close to his mouth, listening, and Tom could not hear what Arthur said, the words too quiet, too thin, the voice that had spoken the names of the fields and the marks of the sheep and the instructions for the wall reduced to a whisper, to a breath, to a movement of the lips that was almost not a movement.

Helen sat back and her face was wet, the tears running down her cheeks, the professional composure gone, the coat removed, the woman exposed, and she held Arthur's hand and she looked at Tom and she said, "He said the wall."

The wall.

Arthur's last word. The last word of a man who had spent his life on a hill farm in Swaledale, whose world had been bounded by walls, whose days had been measured by the walking of walls, whose knowledge was written in the names of the fields that the walls enclosed. The wall. Not a specific wall. Not Tom's wall or the enclosure wall or the boundary wall or any particular wall but all of them, the wall, the idea of the wall, the thing itself, the stone set upon stone, the hearting packed between the faces, the through-stones binding, the coping shedding the rain, the wall, the wall that was the dale, the wall that was the man, the wall that was everything.

Arthur closed his eyes.

The next breath came. And the next. And then a longer gap, a gap that extended beyond the point where the previous gaps had ended, a gap that kept extending, the silence growing, the breath not coming, and Tom waited and Helen waited and the lamp threw its light across the bed and the through-stone sat on the table and the walls of the room held them and the breath did not come.

Helen put her fingers to Arthur's wrist. She held them there for a long time, the nurse's fingers, the trained fingers, the fingers that had measured a thousand pulses, and then she took her fingers away and set Arthur's hand gently on the covers and she looked at Tom.

"He's gone," she said.

The words entered the room and the room held them the way a wall held its hearting, invisibly, structurally, the words becoming part of the room, part of the house, part of the farm, part of the dale, the words that named the fact, the fact that Arthur Metcalfe was dead, that the last Metcalfe farmer was gone, that the farm had lost its farmer and the dale had lost its man and the wall had lost the person who had walked it every morning and tapped its coping stones with his stick and watched it from his window when he could no longer walk.

Tom sat on the floor with his back against the wall and he did not move. He sat in the quiet room with the dead man in the bed and the woman in the chair and the through-stone on the table and the lamp throwing its light and the walls holding everything, and he sat and he breathed and his breathing was the only breathing in the room, his breathing and Helen's, the two of them breathing in the room where Arthur was not breathing, and the wall of the room held them, and outside the walls of the farmhouse the dale was dark and quiet and the walls of the fields stood in the darkness and the wall on the hillside above the farm stood in the darkness and the coping stones were dark against the dark sky and the hearting was packed and the through-stones were set and the wall stood, and Arthur was gone, and the wall stood.