Chapter 26: The Sunday

On Sundays Tom did not wall.

It was not a religious observance. It was Helen's rule, established in the first year of their marriage when Tom had worked seven days a week for three months straight, coming home each evening with stone dust in his hair and his hands too stiff to hold a fork, and Helen had said, not angrily but with the firmness of a woman who had diagnosed a problem and was prescribing the treatment, "Sundays you stop." And he had stopped, because Helen was right, because the body needed rest the way a wall needed through-stones, the pause that bound the days together, the break that made the week a structure rather than a collapse.

So on Sundays Tom stayed home.

He woke later than on weekdays, the body's clock releasing him at seven instead of five-thirty, and he lay in bed and listened to Helen breathing beside him and listened to the dale outside the window, the sounds different on a Sunday, quieter, the absence of the Defender's engine and the clink of tools in the back and the ritual of loading, and instead there was only the dale, the river and the sheep and the birds and the wind, the sounds that were always there, the ambient sound, the background, the hearting of the dale's daily noise.

He got up and made tea and brought it to Helen in bed, the Sunday ritual, the one domestic act that was entirely his, the tea carried upstairs in the two mugs, Helen's with more milk, his with less, the proportions known from twenty years of making, the knowledge in the hands, the hands that could build a wall and that could also carry two mugs up a narrow staircase without spilling, the precision of the craft applied to the precision of the domestic.

"Thank you," Helen said, sitting up, taking the mug, her hair loose, her face soft with sleep, the face that Tom saw only in the mornings and the evenings, the private face, the face that was not the nurse's face or the public face but the face of the woman he had married, the face that he knew better than his own because he saw it more often than his own, the face that was the face stone of his life, the surface that showed, the thing that was visible.

They drank tea in bed and talked about the things that Sunday mornings were for talking about, the small plans, the domestic arrangements, the life of the house rather than the life of the dale. Helen wanted to go to the garden centre in Richmond. The raised bed by the back door needed compost. The runner beans would go in next month if the frost held off. The guttering on the shed was leaking. Had Tom noticed the crack in the bathroom tile. Tom had not noticed the crack in the bathroom tile. Tom noticed cracks in walls, fractures in coping stones, voids in hearting, but cracks in bathroom tiles were invisible to him, belonging to a different category of observation, the domestic category, Helen's domain, the interior of the house as opposed to the exterior of the dale.

"I'll look at it," Tom said.

"You'll look at it and then you'll forget."

"I'll look at it."

"I'll get a man in."

"Don't get a man in. I'll do it."

"You've been saying that about the kitchen tap for six months."

"The kitchen tap works."

"It drips."

"It drips slowly."

Helen looked at him over the rim of her mug and the look was the look of a woman who knew her husband's evasions as well as she knew his virtues, who understood that the man who could rebuild a wall with the patience of a geologist could not summon the patience to fix a dripping tap, who accepted this the way a wall accepted the weather, as a force that could not be changed but could be endured, and the dripping tap would continue to drip and Helen would eventually fix it herself, the way she fixed most things in the house, quietly, competently, without fuss, the way she managed Arthur's medication and her patients' care and the household accounts and the garden and the meals and the hundred small tasks that kept the domestic life from collapsing, the hearting of the marriage, the invisible work that held the visible structure in place.

They drove to Richmond after breakfast, the Defender on the open road, the dale opening out as they drove south, the valley widening, the hills falling back, the walls becoming less frequent, the landscape changing from the close-walled intimacy of upper Swaledale to the broader, more open country of the lower dale, and the castle at Richmond appeared on its rock above the river, the Norman keep, the oldest secular building in England, stone upon stone, the same principle as the walls, gravity and weight and the fit of one surface against another, the castle having stood for nine hundred years because the stone was sound and the masons knew their trade.

At the garden centre Helen moved between the rows of plants and compost and tools with the purposeful efficiency of a woman who knew what she wanted and where to find it, and Tom followed her, carrying the bags of compost, his arms accustomed to loads heavier than this, the bags light in his hands, forty-pound bags that he carried two at a time the way he might carry two buckets of hearting stone, and he set them in the back of the Defender and went back for more and the work was easy, was nothing, was the ghost of the real work, the heavy lifting of stones replaced by the light lifting of compost, and he felt the absence of the wall in his hands, the absence of the weight and the texture and the cold angular surface of limestone, and his hands felt empty even when they were full, the bags of compost being the wrong shape, the wrong weight, the wrong material for hands that had been shaped by stone.

They ate lunch in a pub in Richmond, the pub on the market square, the pub where they had eaten lunch on Sundays for fifteen years, the same table by the window, the same view of the cobbled square, the same menu that changed with the seasons but that always included the Sunday roast that Tom ordered and the fish pie that Helen ordered, the ritual of the Sunday lunch, the domestic liturgy, the ceremony of the married couple at their table, the food ordered and the drinks poured and the conversation following the channels that twenty years had worn, the channels as familiar and as comfortable as the grooves in a well-walked path.

"Arthur was talking about Margaret," Tom said, and the words came out of him the way a stone came out of a wall when the wall was being stripped, unexpectedly, without planning, the thing surfacing because the layer above it had been removed.

Helen set down her fork.

"When?"

"Wednesday. When the rain came. I went down to the kitchen and he had the photograph album out."

"He never looks at the album."

"He was looking at it. He was talking about her. About how she ran the farm. About the table. About how he didn't know how to work the washing machine."

Helen's eyes were on him, the nurse's eyes, the eyes that assessed and measured and understood, and she was assessing now, measuring the significance of what Tom was telling her, understanding that Arthur talking about Margaret was not casual reminiscence but a form of preparation, the man opening the album the way a waller opened a section of wall, stripping it back, examining the interior, looking at the hearting.

"He said you reminded him of her," Tom said.

Helen was quiet for a moment. She looked out the window at the market square, at the cobbles and the buildings and the castle on its rock above the town, and her face was still and her eyes were bright and Tom could see the effort of her composure, the professional surface holding the personal interior, the face stone over the hearting.

"That's a kind thing to say," she said.

"It wasn't kind. It was true."

"It can be both."

"Aye. It can be both."

They ate and the Sunday continued, the afternoon in the garden, Helen planting and Tom digging, the compost turned into the raised bed, the soil dark and rich, and Tom dug with the spade the way he dug with the pinch bar, the same action, the same leverage, the body doing what the body knew how to do, the work different but the motion the same, and the garden wall that he had built twenty years ago stood around them, the low wall, the wall without hearting, and the roses climbed the south face and the vegetables grew inside and the garden was the domestic version of the dale, the small enclosed space that Helen tended the way Arthur tended his fields, with attention, with care, with the daily act of looking and seeing and responding to what was seen.

In the evening they sat in the kitchen and Tom cooked, the Sunday cooking, the one meal of the week that he prepared, the roast that he had learned to make from Helen's instructions twenty years ago and that he now made without thinking, the routine coded into his hands the way the walling routine was coded into his hands, and the kitchen filled with the smell of roasting lamb and rosemary and the potatoes crisping in the hot fat, and Helen sat at the table with a glass of wine and watched him and the watching was a form of pleasure, the pleasure of seeing a competent man do a thing competently, the same pleasure that she took from watching him work on the wall, the pleasure of skill, of craft, of the thing done well.

They ate and washed up side by side and went into the front room and Helen read and Tom sat in the chair by the window and looked out at the darkening dale and thought about the wall. He always thought about the wall on Sundays, the way a man always thought about the thing he was not doing, the absence of the work making the work more present, more vivid, the wall on the hillside three miles up the dale sitting in his mind as clearly as it sat on the hillside, and he thought about the courses he had laid that week and the courses he would lay next week and the hearting he would pack and the face stones he would set and the slow progress of the wall from foundation to coping, and the thinking was a pleasure too, a form of the work that did not tire the body, the mental walling, the building in the mind.

"You're thinking about the wall," Helen said, not looking up from her book.

"How do you know?"

"You get a look. When you're thinking about walls. Your hands go still and your eyes go somewhere else. Somewhere up the dale."

"I was thinking about the second course. The grading. Jim was right about the grading."

"Jim's always right."

"Not always. But about grading. About the weight distribution."

"Come to bed."

"Aye."

They went to bed and lay in the dark and Helen's breathing slowed and steadied and she slept, and Tom lay awake and listened to the dale and thought about the wall and thought about the Sunday and thought about the marriage that held the Sundays and the weekdays together, the structure that contained the work and the rest, the wall and the garden, the dale and the house, and the marriage was a wall, he thought, a double wall with hearting, Helen on one face and Tom on the other and between them the invisible stuff that held them together, the through-stones of the shared meals and the shared bed and the shared concern for the man on the hill, the through-stones binding, the hearting packed, the coping shedding the weather, the marriage standing because it was well-built, because the foundation was sound, because the two faces leaned into each other at the correct angle, the batter of companionship, the taper of love, wider at the base where the heavy stones of the early years had been laid and narrower at the top where the lighter stones of the practiced years sat, the wall of the marriage rising from the foundation of the wedding to the coping of the present, and the wall was good, was sound, was Jim-approved, was a wall that would stand.

He turned toward Helen and her warmth was there, the warmth of the sleeping body, the warmth that the body produced and released the way the stone produced and released the sun's heat, and he moved toward the warmth and his body found hers and the fit was the fit that twenty years had made, the shape of his body against the shape of hers, the arrangement that gravity had always intended, and he slept, and the dale slept, and the wall on the hillside stood in the darkness, and the Sunday ended and the Monday waited and the work would begin again and the stones would be lifted and placed and fitted and the wall would rise, course by course, and the week would have its shape, and the shape would hold, and the hearting of the days would be the Sundays, the invisible days, the days of rest, the days that bound the working days together the way through-stones bound the faces, and without the Sundays the weekdays would lean apart, would separate, would fail, and without the weekdays the Sundays would be empty, would be air between faces with no hearting, and the two kinds of days needed each other the way the two faces of a wall needed each other, and the marriage was the wall that held them both, the structure that contained the work and the rest, the building and the not-building, the stone and the absence of stone.