Chapter 25: Margaret

It rained on the Wednesday, a light rain, fine, the kind that wallers called wet mist, not heavy enough to stop the work entirely but heavy enough to make the stones slippery, the faces greasy, the hearting muddy, and Tom worked through it for an hour, the rain on his face, the rain on the stone, the rain making the colour of the limestone shift from pale grey to dark, the dry stone becoming wet stone, the surface changing, the weight increasing, and then the rain thickened and he stopped. He wrapped his hammer in his jacket and set it on the flat stone and walked down the hill to the farmhouse, because there was nothing else to do on a wet afternoon on a hillside, and because Arthur was there, and because the kitchen was dry.

Arthur was at the table, not in his chair, and this was unusual. Since the fall in the yard he had settled into the chair by the range the way a stone settled into a wall, finding its seat, not moving from it, the chair becoming his place in the kitchen the way the foundation stones were the wall's place on the hillside. But today he was at the table, and in front of him on the table was a photograph album, the old kind, leather-bound, the pages thick, the photographs held in place by paper corners that had yellowed and curled, and Arthur was turning the pages slowly, his fingers careful with the old paper, the careful touch of a man handling something that would not survive rough treatment.

"Come in," Arthur said, without looking up. "Kettle's on."

Tom made tea and brought two mugs to the table and sat down across from Arthur and looked at the album. The photographs were black and white, and then colour, the album spanning decades, the early photographs formal, posed, the people standing stiff in front of barns and gates and walls, the later photographs more casual, snapshots, the colours fading to the washed-out oranges and greens of the nineteen seventies and eighties. Tom could see the farm in the photographs, the farmhouse and the barns and the fields, the farm in earlier decades, the farm when it was younger, though the farm itself did not age, the stone did not age, the walls did not age, only the people aged, and the people in the photographs were strangers to Tom except for one, the man in the later photographs who was recognisably Arthur, a younger Arthur, a thicker Arthur, an Arthur whose face was brown and full and whose arms were heavy with muscle, an Arthur who stood in his fields with the confidence of a man who owned the ground he stood on and whose body was equal to its demands.

And beside the younger Arthur, in photograph after photograph, a woman.

She was small. That was the first thing Tom noticed. Small beside Arthur's bulk, her head reaching his shoulder, her frame slight, her hands narrow, and she wore the clothes of a farmer's wife, practical, unadorned, a jersey and a skirt in most of the photographs, Wellington boots in many of them, and her face was sharp-featured and pale and her hair was dark and pulled back and her expression in every photograph was the same, a look of contained amusement, as though the world were doing something faintly ridiculous and she had noticed but would not remark upon it.

"That's Margaret," Arthur said.

Tom knew. He had seen photographs of Margaret before, in frames on the dresser, the frames that were still there, that Helen dusted when she came, the photographs of the woman who had died six years ago, the woman whose absence was the other presence in the farmhouse, the ghost that was not a ghost but a shape, a space, the outline of the person who had been there for forty-seven years and who was not there now, the gap in the room.

"She was bonny," Tom said, because it was true and because it was the kind of thing you said, the word that dale men used when they meant beautiful, the word that was allowed, that did not expose too much, that held the feeling at a safe distance.

"She was," Arthur said. "She was bonny."

He turned a page. Margaret in the lambing shed, holding a lamb, the lamb's head poking over her arm, Margaret's face turned to the camera, the contained amusement, the almost-smile. Margaret at the kitchen table, the same table they were sitting at now, a plate in front of her, a glass of something, her head tilted, listening to whoever was behind the camera, listening with the attention that Tom recognised from Helen, the attention of a woman who listened as a form of care, who heard the thing behind the words, the hearting of the conversation.

"She could lamb a ewe faster than I could," Arthur said. "Smaller hands. She could get in where I couldn't. Turn a lamb that I'd given up on. She saved dozens. Hundreds, over the years."

Tom drank his tea and listened. Arthur did not talk about Margaret. In all the weeks that Tom had been working on the wall, in all the evenings he had sat in this kitchen, Arthur had not spoken her name, had not mentioned her, had kept her inside him the way the hearting was kept inside the wall, invisible, structural, the thing you did not see but that held everything together. And now the album was open and the photographs were there and Arthur was talking, and Tom understood that something had changed, that a door had opened, that the rain had brought Arthur to the table and the table had brought him to the album and the album had brought him to Margaret, and the talk was coming out now the way hearting spilled from a broken wall, once started, unstoppable.

"She ran this place," Arthur said. "People think the farmer runs the farm. The farmer works the farm. The wife runs it. Margaret did the books. The accounts, the VAT, the subsidy applications. She dealt with the ministry when they came. She dealt with the vet's bills and the feed merchants and the shearing gang. I walked the fields and she ran the farm. I was the face stone and she was the hearting."

He said it without emphasis, without drama, the analogy coming to him as naturally as breathing, the man who had lived among walls his whole life reaching for the vocabulary of walls to describe his marriage, and Tom heard it and felt it and the rightness of it sat in his chest like a well-placed stone, solid, fitting.

"She made this kitchen," Arthur said. "The range was her idea. The dresser was her mother's. The table — we bought the table at the auction in Hawes the year we married. Nineteen seventy-one. Twelve pounds. Solid oak. She said it was too dear and I said it would last and she said everything lasts if you look after it and then she looked at me and I knew she wasn't talking about the table."

Tom looked at the table, the oak surface scarred and ring-marked and smoothed by fifty-three years of meals and conversations and the placing and removing of plates and cups and elbows and hands, the table that Margaret had said was too dear and that had lasted, that was still here, that would be here long after Arthur was gone, the table passing from the farm to whoever bought the farm, the object outlasting the people who had chosen it, the furniture becoming a relic, an artifact, a thing that carried the memory of the life that had used it the way the fossil carried the memory of the creature that had made it.

"When she died," Arthur said, and he stopped and looked at the photograph in front of him, Margaret in the garden, the garden that was now overgrown, the garden that Helen sometimes cut back when she visited, Margaret standing by the stone wall of the garden with a trowel in her hand and the contained amusement on her face, and Arthur looked at the photograph and Tom waited and the kitchen was quiet and the rain fell on the windows and on the walls and on the hillside above.

"When she died I thought the farm would stop. I thought it would just — stop. The way a clock stops. Because she was the mechanism. She was the thing that made it go. And I was right, in a way. It did stop. The books stopped. The accounts stopped. The house stopped. I couldn't cook. I couldn't — I didn't know where anything was. She'd organised the whole house and I didn't know the system. I didn't know where the bills went or where the cleaning things were kept or how the washing machine worked. Seventy-two years old and I didn't know how to work a washing machine."

He turned the page. Margaret and Arthur together, standing in front of the farmhouse, the photograph taken from the yard, the house behind them, the stone of the house and the stone of the walls and the sky above, and the two of them standing side by side, not touching, a few inches of space between them, the space that was not emptiness but was the air between the face stones, the gap that allowed for movement, for breathing, for the expansion and contraction that every structure required, and in the photograph Margaret was looking at the camera and Arthur was looking at Margaret, and the look on Arthur's face was a look that Tom had never seen on the living Arthur's face, a look of unguarded attention, the look of a man watching the thing he loved most in the world, the look that was the face stone of everything Arthur was, the surface that showed the interior, the outside that revealed the inside.

"I learned," Arthur said. "You learn, don't you. You learn to do the things you never did. You learn to cook and clean and pay the bills and work the washing machine. You learn because there's no choice. The farm doesn't stop because you don't know how to work the washing machine. The sheep don't stop needing feeding because your wife is dead. The walls don't stop needing mending. You learn, and you do it badly at first, and then you do it less badly, and then you do it well enough, and well enough is what you settle for, because well enough is what you can manage on your own."

Tom thought about the tea that Arthur made, the weak milky tea that was not Margaret's tea, the tea that Arthur had never learned to make properly because learning would mean accepting that Margaret was not coming back to make it, and he thought about all the small refusals of competence that Arthur had made in the six years since Margaret's death, the small ways he had kept her alive by keeping her role open, the gap in his domestic life that was not a failure but a feature, the creep hole that he had left in the wall of his solitude, the opening through which Margaret's memory could pass.

"Helen reminds me of her," Arthur said.

Tom looked at him.

"Not in how she looks. Margaret was dark. Short. Helen's fair. Tall. But in how she — in how she is. The way she listens. The way she looks at you and you know she's heard everything you've said and everything you haven't said. Margaret did that. Margaret could hear the hearting."

Tom said nothing because there was nothing to say that would not diminish what Arthur had said, nothing that would honour the comparison without cheapening it, and the silence between them was the silence that held the heaviest things, the silence that was the hearting of the conversation, the invisible substance between the spoken words.

Arthur closed the album and pushed it to the side and put his hands flat on the table, on the oak surface that Margaret had chosen fifty-three years ago, and his hands on the table were thin and yellowed and the veins showed through the skin and the hands were the hands of a man who had done everything with them, lambed and sheared and walled and ploughed and held his wife and buried his wife and sat in his chair and held a through-stone, and now the hands rested on the table and the table held them the way it had held Margaret's hands and Arthur's hands and the plates and the cups and the meals and the conversations for fifty-three years, the table bearing the weight without complaint, without acknowledgement, the way a foundation bore the weight of the wall.

"You and Helen," Arthur said. "You're like us. Margaret and me. You're the same. Not in how you are but in what you are. She's the hearting and you're the face stone. She's the bit that holds it together and you're the bit that shows. And neither of you works without the other."

Tom felt the words enter him and settle, the way a through-stone settled across the width of a wall, spanning the gap, connecting the two faces, and he knew that Arthur was right, had always known it without being able to say it, and Arthur had said it for him, had given him the words, had placed them in the conversation the way a waller placed a stone in a wall, precisely, with care, in the right place.

The rain eased. The light brightened at the window. The afternoon was not over.

"I'll go back up," Tom said.

"Aye."

"Thank you, Arthur."

"What for?"

"For telling me. About Margaret."

Arthur looked at him and the look was steady and clear and the pain was there, the pain that was always there, but something else was there too, something that the talking had produced, a lightness, a release, the feeling of a stone set down after a long carrying, the weight transferred from the body to the ground, from the man to the air, from the interior to the exterior, the hearting becoming visible for a moment, the hidden thing showing itself and then being packed away again, behind the face stones, inside the wall, invisible, structural, holding.

"She'd have liked the wall," Arthur said. "Margaret. She'd have liked what you're doing."

Tom nodded and stood and went to the door and out into the clearing afternoon, the rain thinning to mist, the hillside showing through the grey, and he walked up the hill to the wall and picked up his hammer and unwrapped it from his jacket and began again, the stones wet but workable now, the rain easing, the face stones glistening, and he built and the wall rose and the afternoon passed and below him in the farmhouse Arthur sat at the table with his hands on the oak and the album beside him and Margaret in the photographs and Margaret in the room and Margaret in the walls and the hearting of the kitchen holding everything together, the seen and the unseen, the present and the absent, the living and the dead.