Chapter 24: The Other Wall

The garden wall in Reeth had been Tom's job before Arthur's, and he finished it in the last week of February, three days before the wall at High Scar Farm came down, and the finishing of the one job and the beginning of the other sat in his memory like two stones side by side in a wall, touching but different, the same material put to different purposes.

The garden wall belonged to a couple from Manchester called the Pearsons. They had bought a cottage in the village the previous summer, a holiday cottage, a weekend place, and they wanted a garden wall built around the patch of ground behind the cottage, a wall to enclose the space and give it privacy and make it look, as Mrs Pearson had said, "authentic." The word had landed in Tom's ear the way a badly shaped stone landed on a wallhead, sitting wrong, tilting, not quite fitting. Authentic. As though a wall could be inauthentic. As though a wall built from the same stone as every other wall in the dale, by a waller who had been building walls in the dale for twenty-five years, could somehow fail to be the thing it was.

But the job was a job, and Tom built the wall. Twenty yards of boundary wall, two feet six inches high, single-thickness rather than double, a garden wall rather than a field wall, and the specifications were different because the purpose was different. A field wall was built to contain livestock, to resist the lean of sheep and the push of cattle, to stand against the wind and the frost on an open hillside, and it needed to be stout, thick, double-faced with hearting between, the full architecture of a working wall. A garden wall was built to look good. It needed to be straight and even and the stone needed to be well-dressed and the coping needed to be neat and the whole thing needed to please the eye of a person who would sit in a garden chair and look at it while drinking coffee, and the wall's relationship to the person looking at it was aesthetic rather than functional, decorative rather than structural, and Tom found this difficult, found it a reduction, the craft put to a lesser purpose, the skill that could hold a hillside being asked to frame a flower bed.

He built it well because he could not build any other way. Jim had made that impossible. Jim had removed from Tom the ability to build a bad wall the way a surgeon might remove a defective organ, cleanly, completely, the capacity for poor work excised, and even a garden wall for a holiday cottage received the full attention of Tom's hands, the face stones selected and placed with care, the courses level, the batter true, the coping set on edge and interlocking, the wall as well-built as any wall Tom had made, and Mr Pearson, who had watched Tom work for three days from the kitchen window, said it was "lovely" and Mrs Pearson said it was "just what we wanted" and they paid him promptly and offered him coffee which he declined and tea which he accepted.

The Pearsons' wall had no hearting.

Single-thickness walls did not have hearting. They were one stone wide, each stone spanning the full width of the wall, each stone both face stone and through-stone and hearting, the three functions combined in one piece, and the wall was lighter, thinner, more delicate than a double wall, and it was weaker, less resistant to lateral force, more prone to frost damage, because there was no interior to protect, no hearting to insulate the core, the wall's substance entirely exposed to the weather, every surface a face, every surface taking the wind and the rain and the frost directly, nothing hidden, nothing internal, nothing invisible.

Tom thought about this as he drove away from the Pearsons' cottage on the last day of February, thought about a wall without hearting, a wall that was all surface, all face, a wall with nothing inside it, and he thought that the Pearsons' wall was like the Pearsons' relationship to the dale, all surface, all appearance, the authentic-looking cottage and the authentic-looking wall and the weekend visits and the walking boots that had never walked further than the pub, the life in the dale that was all face and no hearting, all exterior and no interior, and he thought that he was being unfair, that the Pearsons were decent people who loved the dale in their way and who wanted a wall and had paid for a wall and had got a wall, and that their way of loving the dale was not his way but was still love, was still a connection, was still a kind of through-stone between their life in Manchester and their weekends in Swaledale.

But the Pearsons' wall was not Arthur's wall. Arthur's wall was a double wall with hearting packed tight between the faces, the full width, the full weight, the full structure, a wall that had a purpose beyond looking good, a wall that divided one field from another, that contained sheep, that resisted the pressure of the hillside and the frost and the wind, a wall that worked, that functioned, that earned its place in the landscape by doing the job it had been built to do, and the hearting inside Arthur's wall was the difference, the thing that made it more than a surface, more than a face, more than something to look at from a garden chair.

Tom thought about the two walls as he drove through the dale that last evening of February, the Pearsons' garden wall finished behind him and Arthur's boundary wall not yet fallen in front of him, though he did not know this, did not know that the wall at High Scar Farm would come down that night, did not know that when he drove up the dale the next morning he would see the gap from a quarter mile below, the dark absence in the line of stone, and that the gap would become his work for the next two months, the work that would define his spring, the work that would connect him to Arthur in a way that no garden wall for no holiday couple could ever connect him to anyone.

He thought about the word "commission." Both walls were commissions. Both had been asked for, agreed upon, priced, contracted. But the nature of the asking was different. The Pearsons had asked for a wall the way they might ask for a new kitchen or a set of curtains, a consumer request, an order placed, a service purchased. Arthur asked for a wall the way a farmer asked for rain, the way a shepherd asked for a clean lambing, the way a man asked for the thing he needed to go on living in the place he had always lived, the request rising from necessity rather than desire, from the land rather than the person, from the hundred-and-fifty-year relationship between the farm and its walls rather than from the six-month relationship between the Pearsons and their cottage.

He pulled into his drive and sat in the Defender and thought about this and then he went inside and told Helen he had finished the Reeth job and Helen said good and poured tea and they sat at the table and the evening was ordinary, the evening of a man between jobs, the brief pause between one wall and the next, the silence between two sentences, the gap between two stones.

He did not know that the next wall would be Arthur's wall. He did not know that the next stone he lifted would be a stone that had been in a wall for a hundred and seventy years and that had fallen in the night and that was lying on a cold hillside waiting for his hands. He did not know that the next job would be the most important job of his life, that the wall he was about to build would be the wall that defined him, the wall that contained everything he knew and everything he felt and everything he could not say, the wall that would be his answer to the question that every craftsman carried in his chest, the question of what the work was for, the question of who it served, the question of what remained when the work was done and the hands that had done it were still.

He drank his tea and went to bed and slept, and in the night the wall at High Scar Farm collapsed, the frost heaving the ground behind it, the face stones pushed outward, the hearting spilling, the gap opening, the stones falling in the dark, and Tom heard nothing, three miles down the dale, asleep in his bed, his hands at rest, his hands that would wake in the morning and drive up the dale and see the gap and begin.