Chapter 3: The Foundation Course

The foundation stones were already there, set into the ground a hundred and seventy years ago by the Wensleydale gang, and they were sound. Tom knelt beside them on the wet grass and ran his hands along their surfaces, feeling for cracks, for movement, for any sign that the base of the wall had shifted. The foundation course was the most important part of a dry stone wall, the course that bore the weight of everything above it, and if the foundation was compromised then nothing built upon it would hold. But these stones were solid, bedded into the earth, locked in place by their own weight and by the soil that had grown around them over the decades, and Tom felt a satisfaction in their soundness that was almost physical, a rightness, the way you felt when you picked up a stone and it sat perfectly in your hand, the weight balanced, the shape fitting the curve of your palm.

He spent the first hour of the morning clearing the foundation course, scraping the soil and moss from the stones with a trowel, exposing the full width of the base, which was thirty-two inches, slightly wider than the wall above would be, and he dug the soil back from the edges so that the first course of face stones would sit on clean stone, solid contact, no soil or vegetation between the old foundation and the new work. This was the principle of dry stone walling: stone against stone, nothing between them, no mortar, no cement, no adhesive of any kind, just the weight of one stone pressing down on the stone below it, and the friction between the two surfaces holding them in place. It was the simplest form of building in the world and the most demanding, because there was nothing to hide behind, no mortar to fill the gaps where the fit was poor, no cement to bind a badly placed stone to its neighbour. Every stone had to earn its place by fitting, and if it did not fit then it was the wrong stone, and you set it aside and tried another, and another, until you found the one that belonged there, the one that gravity had been waiting for.

The morning was cold but dry, the fog of the previous days replaced by a thin high overcast that let the light through without warmth, and the dale was sharp-edged in the grey light, every wall and barn and field boundary drawn in clean lines against the hillside, the colours muted — grey stone, green grass, brown bracken on the upper slopes, the white dots of sheep scattered across the fields like punctuation. Spring was coming but had not arrived. The grass was still winter-brown in places, the trees in the valley bottom still bare, the hedgerows along the roads still skeletal, and the ground was cold under Tom's knees as he worked, the damp seeping through his trousers, the chill of the earth communicating itself to his bones.

He began to lay the first course.

The first course sat directly on the foundation, large stones, the heaviest in the wall, chosen for their size and their flatness, their ability to bridge the width of the foundation and provide a stable base for the courses above. Tom had sorted them the previous day, pulling the best from the pile of salvaged face stones, and they were lined up on the grass beside the wall, twenty or thirty pieces ranging from twelve inches to twenty inches in length, each one roughly rectangular, each one flat on its bottom face where it would sit on the foundation and roughly flat on its top face where the next course would sit on it. He lifted the first stone and held it in both hands, turning it, feeling its weight, looking for the face — the surface that would show on the outside of the wall, the surface that the weather would touch, that the eye would see. Every stone had a face. Some had two, and you chose the better one. Some had none, and they went into the hearting, into the invisible interior where appearance did not matter, where only fit and weight and solidity mattered.

He set the first stone on the foundation at the north end of the gap, pressing it down, feeling it settle, and then he picked it up and looked at the foundation beneath it and saw a slight hollow, a dip in the surface where the stone had not made full contact, and he took a thin flat stone from the hearting pile and set it in the hollow as a shim, a levelling piece, and then he set the face stone down again and this time it sat firm, solid, its weight distributed evenly across the foundation, its face flush with the string line that he had already stretched between the batter frames.

One stone.

He stood back and looked at it, one stone on a foundation, the beginning of a wall, and the absurdity of it struck him as it always did at the start of a job, the distance between this one stone and the finished wall that it would become, the four and a half feet of height and the nine yards of length that he would have to build, course by course, stone by stone, before the wall was complete. It was like looking at the first word of a book and trying to imagine the last page. But the first stone was the important one, because it set the standard, it established the line, it declared the intention. If the first stone was right then the wall would be right. If the first stone was wrong — too high, too low, proud of the line or behind it — then every stone after it would inherit the error, and the error would compound, course by course, until the wall was visibly wrong, visibly off, and by then it would be too late to fix it without going back to the beginning.

Tom set the second stone beside the first, tight against it, the two faces flush, the joint between them a thin dark line where the stones met but did not quite touch, a hairline gap that was not a flaw but a feature, the gap that allowed for movement, for the expansion and contraction of the stone with the changing temperature, for the slight settling that every wall did in its first years. A dry stone wall was not rigid. It moved. It breathed. It flexed with the frost and the thaw, with the weight of snow on the coping, with the lean of a sheep scratching its back against the face. A wall that could not move would crack, would fail at the joints, would come apart at the places where the mortar should have been if there had been mortar, which there was not, because mortar was the enemy of movement, the enemy of flexibility, the enemy of the wall's ability to accommodate the forces that acted upon it and to absorb them and to remain standing.

Stone by stone, the first course grew. Tom worked from the north end toward the south, laying face stones on both sides of the wall simultaneously, building the two faces together, keeping them level with each other, the string line running along the outer face of each side to show him the batter, the inward lean. Between the two faces, as each pair of stones was laid, he packed hearting — small stones, angular pieces of limestone rubble, pushed into the gap between the faces and tamped down with the handle of his hammer, filling every void, every space, so that the wall was solid from face to face. The hearting had to be tight. If there were voids inside the wall, if there were hollow spaces where the hearting had not been packed properly, then water would collect there, and in winter the water would freeze, and the ice would expand, and the expansion would push the face stones outward, and the wall would fail. It was water that killed walls, water and frost, the same forces that had brought Arthur's wall down in the first place.

By mid-morning he had laid three yards of the first course and was sweating despite the cold, the work of lifting and placing and packing generating a heat that pushed through his jacket and rose from his shoulders in faint wisps of steam. He straightened and stretched and felt the muscles in his lower back protest, the familiar ache that came from hours of bending and lifting, and he walked to where he had left the flask and poured tea and drank it standing, looking down the dale.

Arthur was coming up the hill.

Tom watched him climb, the slow progress, the stick finding the ground, the pauses for breath that were longer today than they had been on Monday, and he felt a twist in his stomach that was not hunger. Arthur was wearing his tweed cap and his brown jacket and his Wellington boots, the same clothes he wore every day, the uniform of a hill farmer that had not changed in fifty years, and he came up the slope with the determination of a man who had decided that he would walk his fields regardless of what his body told him, regardless of what Helen told him, regardless of what the consultant in Darlington had told him in the quiet room with the blue chairs where they explained the scans.

"You've made a start," Arthur said when he reached the wall.

"First course. Three yards."

Arthur looked at the line of stones, the face stones sitting on the foundation, the hearting visible between them where the second course had not yet been laid, and he nodded.

"Same stone."

"Same stone. Same wall, near enough."

"My grandfather used to say that a wall was never finished. He said you build it and it stands and then it falls and you build it again, and it's the same wall each time, the same stones, just rearranged."

"He was right."

Arthur stood for a while, watching Tom work, and then he walked slowly along the standing wall to the south, tapping the coping stones with his stick, checking them, each tap producing a solid sound, the sound of stone well-set, and Tom listened to the tapping as he worked and it became a rhythm, a counterpoint to the sound of his own hammer, Arthur's stick and Tom's hammer, the farmer and the waller, the man who owned the wall and the man who built it, their sounds meeting and separating and meeting again in the cold air.

"Lambing starts next week," Arthur said, coming back.

"Are you managing?"

"I've got a lad coming. From agricultural college. He'll do the nights."

Tom nodded. Lambing was hard work at the best of times, weeks of broken sleep and cold hands and the urgent intimacy of birth, pulling lambs from ewes in the small hours, the blood and the fluid and the first bleat of a new animal, and it was not work for a man of seventy-eight with cancer eating his pancreas, but Arthur would be there, Tom knew. Arthur would be in the lambing shed at three in the morning, kneeling beside a ewe, his hands inside her, turning a lamb, because that was what the farm required and the farm's requirements were not negotiable, not even by death.

"How many ewes?"

"Hundred and forty. Swaledale crosses, mostly. Some pure Swaledales on the higher ground."

"Good lambing last year?"

"Aye. Hundred and sixty per cent. Would've been higher but for the snow in April."

They talked about sheep for a while, the conversation following the familiar channels of dale life, the subjects that never changed — sheep, weather, the price of wool, the state of the grass, the condition of the walls — and under the talk, beneath it, inside it like hearting inside a wall, were the things they did not say, the things that did not need to be said because they were already known: that this would be Arthur's last lambing, that the ewes would be sold after he was gone, that the agricultural college lad would go back to college and the lambing shed would stand empty and the fields would fall silent, and the walls that Tom was building would enclose nothing but grass and memory.

Arthur left after an hour, making his way back down the hill, and Tom watched him go and then turned back to the wall and worked through the rest of the morning and into the afternoon, the first course extending yard by yard across the gap, the face stones finding their places on the foundation, the hearting filling the spaces between them, the wall beginning to take shape at the lowest level, the level that no one would see once the wall was finished, the level that would be hidden by the courses above it, buried under four feet of stone, invisible as the roots of a tree are invisible, doing their work in darkness, holding everything up.

He thought about roots as he worked, about the way a tree's roots mirrored its branches, the underground structure as complex and extensive as the structure above ground, and he thought that a wall was similar, that the foundation course was the wall's root system, the hidden structure that anchored it to the earth, that gave it its hold on the ground, and that the coping stones at the top were like the leaves, the visible crown, the part that met the sky, and that between the roots and the crown was the trunk, the body, the face stones and the hearting that made up the bulk of the wall, the part that did the work, that bore the weight, that resisted the wind and the frost and the lean of the sheep.

In the early afternoon a van came up the track to the farm, a white van that Tom did not recognise, and he watched it park in the yard and a man get out, a man in a suit, and the man walked to the farmhouse door and knocked and Arthur opened it and let him in. Tom watched this from the hillside, half a mile above, and he knew who the man was without being told. The estate agent from Richmond. Robert had sent him. Robert, the nephew, the solicitor from Leeds, who would inherit the farm and sell it, who would take the two hundred years of Metcalfes on this land and convert them into a figure on a balance sheet, a sum to be divided, a property to be disposed of.

Tom turned back to the wall and picked up a stone and set it in place with more force than was necessary, pressing it down onto the foundation, feeling the stone grate against the stone beneath it, and then he adjusted it, moving it a fraction, settling it, finding the fit, because that was what the work required, precision, not force, and the stone did not care about estate agents or solicitors or the sale of farms, the stone cared only about the stone beneath it and the stone beside it and the weight that would rest upon it, and Tom's job was to honour that, to give each stone what it needed, which was a solid seat and a true face and the pressure of the hearting against its inner surface, holding it in place.

By three o'clock he had completed the first course across the full nine-yard gap, and he stood back and looked at it. A single course of stone, six inches high, sitting on the foundation, the two faces straight and true, the hearting packed tight between them. It did not look like much. It looked like a low kerb, a garden edging, something you might step over without noticing. But it was the beginning, the base, the thing upon which everything else would rest, and Tom felt the quiet satisfaction of a job properly started, the satisfaction of the first course laid true.

He walked the length of it, checking the line, running his eye along the string, and the face stones were good, flush with the line, none of them proud or recessed, and the hearting was solid, no voids, no gaps, and the foundation beneath was sound, the old stones bearing the new weight as they had borne the old weight, as they would bear weight for as long as the ground held them, which would be a long time, which would be longer than any of the men who walked these fields.

The light was changing, the overcast thinning to let the late afternoon sun through, and the dale was suddenly vivid, the grass glowing green, the stone walls picked out in sharp detail, every stone visible, the shadows deep in the joints between them, and the river in the valley bottom caught the sun and threw it back in fragments, broken light on broken water, and Tom stood beside his one course of wall and looked at the dale and felt the light on his face and thought that this was enough, that this was a good day's work, one course laid true on a sound foundation, and that tomorrow he would lay the second course, and the day after that the third, and the wall would rise a course at a time, the way all things were built, the way all things grew, one layer at a time, each layer depending on the one below it, each layer supporting the one above, and the hearting between them, always the hearting, the invisible substance that held the visible thing together.

He gathered his tools and walked down the hill.

In the yard, the white van was gone and Arthur was standing at the gate to the home field, looking out across his land, and Tom stopped beside him and they stood together in the last of the light, looking at the fields and the walls and the sheep, and the silence between them was the silence of men who knew each other's thoughts without speaking them, the silence that was not emptiness but fullness, the silence that was the hearting of conversation.

"He offered eight hundred thousand," Arthur said.

Tom said nothing.

"For the farm. The house, the barns, the land. Three hundred acres."

"That's not enough."

"It's what the market says."

"The market doesn't know this farm."

Arthur turned and looked at Tom, and his eyes were clear and sharp, the eyes of a man who had spent seventy-eight years looking at hills and sheep and sky, and who could read the weather in a cloud and the condition of a ewe from fifty yards, and who knew the value of his land in a currency that no estate agent could calculate.

"No," Arthur said. "It doesn't."

They stood for a moment longer, and then Arthur went inside and Tom got in the Defender and drove home. The road was empty, the dale quiet, the walls on either side dark shapes against the fading sky, and he drove slowly, taking the corners with care, the Defender heavy and steady on the narrow road, and he thought about eight hundred thousand pounds and what it meant and what it did not mean, and he thought about the wall he was building and the man he was building it for, and he thought about the first course of stone sitting on the foundation in the darkness up on the hill, the beginning of something that would outlast them both, that would stand on the hillside long after Arthur was gone and long after Tom's hands had lost their strength, and that would hold because the foundation was sound and the hearting was good and the stones were set in their proper places, each one bearing its share of the weight, each one doing its part, each one held by gravity and by the stones around it, by the invisible force that asked nothing and gave everything, that held the wall and the hill and the dale and the world in its patient, unbreakable grip.

Helen was waiting for him in the kitchen.

"The estate agent came," Tom said.

"I know. Arthur rang me."

"Eight hundred thousand."

Helen looked at him. "That's the market."

"The market's wrong."

"The market's the market, Tom."

He sat down and she put tea in front of him and he wrapped his hands around the mug and felt the heat seep into his fingers and he thought about markets and values and what things were worth, and he thought that the worth of a thing was not the price someone would pay for it but the cost of what would be lost when it was gone, and the cost of losing High Scar Farm was not eight hundred thousand pounds but two hundred years, a hundred and forty ewes, a lambing shed that smelled of straw and lanolin, a set of walls that ran across the hillside in lines that followed the contour of the land as faithfully as a river followed its bed, and a man who stood at his gate every morning and looked out across his fields and knew every stone on every wall and every sheep in every field, and who would soon be gone, and whose going would leave a gap that no waller could fill, a gap in the landscape, a gap in the dale, a gap in the line of stone that ran from the past to the future, and that needed, like every gap, a man with a hammer and a line and the patience to rebuild.

He drank his tea and ate his supper and went to bed and lay in the dark beside Helen and listened to the wind in the dale and thought about the first course of stone on the hillside above the farm, the beginning, the foundation, the thing on which everything else would rest, and he slept.