Chapter 32: The Sale

The farm sold in January, two months after Arthur's death, and Tom heard about it from Helen, who heard about it from the postwoman, who heard about it from the estate agent's secretary in Richmond, the chain of information following the same route it always followed in the dale, mouth to mouth, kitchen to kitchen, the news travelling through the village and up the dale and down the dale the way water travelled through limestone, finding every fissure, every joint, every permeable surface, the information seeping through the community until everyone knew and no one could say exactly how they knew, the knowledge having arrived not as a single announcement but as a saturation, a gradual wetting, the dale absorbing the fact the way it absorbed the rain.

Robert had handled the sale from Leeds, through a firm of agricultural agents in Richmond who specialised in hill farms, and the listing had described High Scar Farm in the language of agricultural property sales, the language that was precise and impersonal and that bore no resemblance to the farm as Arthur had known it: three hundred and twelve acres of upland grazing with traditional stone farmhouse and agricultural outbuildings, situated at the head of Swaledale with extensive views across the dale, the property to include all permanent fixtures and the benefit of common grazing rights on the fell above.

Permanent fixtures. Tom thought about this phrase. Permanent fixtures. The walls were permanent fixtures. The walls that the Wensleydale gang had built and that Arthur's grandfather had maintained and that Arthur's father had maintained and that Arthur had maintained and that Tom had rebuilt were permanent fixtures, were part of the property, were included in the sale, were things that would transfer from one owner to the next along with the farmhouse and the barns and the fields and the rights, the walls being assets, items on a schedule, entries in the particulars of sale, the walls reduced to a legal category, the living structures that breathed and flexed and held the dale together becoming, in the language of conveyancing, fixtures.

The buyers were a couple from London. Tom learned this from Helen, who learned it from the postwoman, who learned it from the estate agent's secretary, and the couple were called Harris, Mark and Sarah Harris, and they were in their late forties, and they had made money in something that Helen described as "technology" and that Tom understood to mean computers, the internet, the world of screens and data that existed parallel to the world of stone and sheep and that was, for Tom, as remote and incomprehensible as the Carboniferous sea that had produced the limestone.

The Harrises had not bought the farm to farm it. This was the first thing that Tom learned and the thing that settled in his stomach like a badly placed stone, the thing that did not sit right, that tilted, that would not find its seat. They had bought the farm to live in it, or rather to live in the farmhouse, which they intended to renovate, to modernise, to transform from the working kitchen and the cold bedrooms and the flagstone floors and the range into something else, something that the estate agent's brochure would call a country home, a residence, a property, the farmhouse becoming a house, the farm becoming an address, the place where Arthur had lived and died becoming the place where the Harrises would spend their weekends and their holidays and their retirement.

Tom did not know the Harrises. He did not know what they looked like or how they spoke or whether they understood the dale or whether they cared about the walls or whether they would walk the fields or whether they would sit in the renovated kitchen and look out of the new windows at the hillside where Arthur's wall stood and see the wall for what it was, the boundary between the intake and the common, the enclosure wall, the wall that Tom had rebuilt, the wall that Arthur had watched from his chair, the wall that was the last thing Arthur had built, the last act of his will upon his land, and Tom thought about the Harrises sitting in Arthur's kitchen and looking at Arthur's wall and not knowing any of this, not knowing the story, not knowing the hearting.

Helen was careful about the Harrises. She did not condemn them or resent them or mock them, because Helen was not a woman who condemned or resented or mocked, and because Helen understood that the dale had always absorbed newcomers, had always taken in the people who came from elsewhere, from the cities and the towns, from the south and the east, the people who came because the dale was beautiful and because they could afford to come, and the dale had absorbed them the way it absorbed the rain, slowly, reluctantly, through every crack, the newcomers seeping into the community and finding their level, some of them settling and staying and becoming part of the dale and some of them flowing through and out the other end, the dale a filter, a sieve, a structure that let some things through and held others back.

"They might be good for the place," Helen said, on the evening she told Tom about the sale.

"They're not farmers."

"No. But they'll live there. They'll keep the house warm. They'll mend the roof when it leaks. They'll keep the yard clear. An empty farmhouse is a dead farmhouse. You've seen them. The ones that stand empty for five years and the roof goes and the walls crack and the whole thing falls in on itself. At least the Harrises will keep it standing."

Tom knew she was right. He had seen the empty farmhouses, the abandoned farms, the places where the last farmer had died or moved or given up and the farm had stood empty and the decay had begun, the slow collapse that started with a missing slate and ended with the four walls standing open to the sky, the interior gone, the floors rotted, the stairs collapsed, the house returning to the state it had been in before it was built, returning to stone, to rubble, to the raw material, the house un-building itself, the process of construction running in reverse, and the sight of an empty farmhouse in the dale was the saddest sight Tom knew, sadder than a collapsed wall, because a wall could be rebuilt but a farmhouse, once gone, was gone, the house not being a structure that could be stripped back and relaid the way a wall could be stripped back and relaid, the house being a more complex thing, a more fragile thing, a thing that required constant habitation to survive.

"What about the sheep?" Tom said.

"There are no sheep. The flock was sold."

"I mean will they keep sheep."

"I don't know. They might. People do. Incomers buy farms and keep sheep sometimes. They hire a shepherd. They run a small flock."

"It's not the same."

"No. It's not the same."

Tom drank his tea and looked out the window and thought about High Scar Farm without sheep, the fields empty, the lambing shed silent, the gathering spots on the fell unused, the sheep marks that Arthur had dictated to Helen rendered meaningless, the code broken, the identification system made redundant by the absence of the animals it was designed to identify, and the farm without sheep was a wall without hearting, was a structure with nothing inside it, the face stones standing but the interior empty, the thing looking like a farm from the outside but being something else on the inside, a house, a property, a weekend retreat.

He went to see the Harrises in March, the month of Arthur's wall, the month when the dale turned from winter to spring and the grass greened and the lambs came and the walls emerged from the grey of winter into the light of the lengthening days. He drove up the track to High Scar Farm and parked in the yard, the yard where he had parked a hundred times, and the yard was different, was cleaner, the cobbles swept, the weeds pulled from between the stones, and there was a new car in the yard, a Range Rover, not the old Series Land Rover that dale farmers drove but the new kind, the glossy kind, the kind that cost more than Arthur had earned in a decade, and the car was parked where the Defender had parked, where Tom's Defender had parked, and Tom parked beside it and got out and stood in the yard and looked at the farmhouse.

The farmhouse was being renovated. He could see the scaffolding on the south side and hear the sound of power tools from inside, the whine of a circular saw, the thud of a hammer, the sounds of construction, the sounds that were his sounds, the sounds of building, but the sounds were wrong, were not the sounds of stone against stone but the sounds of wood and plaster and the materials that were not stone, the materials of interior renovation, the materials that would transform Arthur's kitchen into something else, something that the Harrises wanted and that Arthur would not have recognised.

Sarah Harris came to the door. She was tall and thin and her hair was grey and cut short and she wore clothes that were new and expensive and that had been chosen to look casual, to look as though the wearer had not thought about what to wear, and the not-thinking had required a great deal of thought and a great deal of money, Tom could see, the jeans and the jersey and the boots all selected with the care of a person who wanted to belong to a place they had just bought.

"You must be Tom," she said. "Robert mentioned you. He said you'd rebuilt the wall."

"Aye."

"Would you like to come in? I'm afraid it's a mess. We're having work done."

Tom went inside and the kitchen was unrecognisable. The range was gone, replaced by an Aga, a blue Aga, the kind of Aga that came from a showroom in Harrogate and that cost four thousand pounds and that would burn oil instead of the coal that Arthur's range had burned, and the flagstones were covered with dust sheets and the dresser was gone, Margaret's dresser, the dresser with the plates and the cups, and the walls were being plastered, the stone walls that had been bare stone for two hundred years being covered with plaster, the stone hidden, the surface of the wall concealed, and Tom felt the covering as a physical sensation, a weight on his chest, the stone being buried, the wall's face being hidden, the visible thing being made invisible, the reverse of what a waller did, the reverse of setting a face stone, the face being covered rather than placed.

"We're opening it up," Sarah said, gesturing at the space where the wall between the kitchen and the front room had been, the wall now reduced to a pile of rubble in the yard, the wall that had divided Arthur's kitchen from Arthur's front room, the wall that had separated the living from the dying, the wall through which Tom had walked on the night Arthur died, and the wall was gone, the space opened, the two rooms becoming one, and the one room was large and light and empty and Tom stood in it and felt the absence of the wall the way he felt the absence of Arthur, as a gap, a void, a space that had been filled and was now open.

He did not say any of this to Sarah Harris. He did not say that the range had been the heart of the farmhouse and that the dresser had been Margaret's and that the wall between the rooms had been two hundred years old and that the flagstones beneath the dust sheets had been worn smooth by the boots of seven generations of Metcalfe farmers. He said nothing because there was nothing to say that would not be rude and nothing to say that would be heard, because Sarah Harris was not being unkind, was not being disrespectful, was simply making the house hers, was doing what every new owner of every old house had always done, which was to change it, to alter it, to make it fit the life of the person who lived in it rather than the life of the person who had left it, and the changing was natural, was inevitable, was the way that houses survived, by adapting to their inhabitants, by being modified and modernised and opened up and plastered over, the houses that were not changed being the houses that stood empty and fell in on themselves, and the Harrises were keeping the house standing, were keeping it warm, were keeping it alive.

"The wall on the hill," Sarah said. "Robert said you rebuilt it. It's beautiful. We can see it from the bedroom window."

"It's a boundary wall."

"Yes, but it's beautiful. The line of it. Against the sky. Mark wants to walk up to it."

"There's a stile. At the south end."

"We've seen it. We climbed over it last weekend. Mark said it was like stepping over a threshold. Like going through a door into another room."

Tom looked at Sarah Harris and the thing she had said about the stile was not wrong, was in fact exactly right, the stile being a threshold, a crossing point, a place where you passed from one space to another, from the intake to the common, from the enclosed to the open, and her seeing this was something, was a sign, was a face stone that sat better than Tom had expected.

"The wall needs checking every year," Tom said. "After the winter. The frost gets into the joints. If you see a stone that's been pushed out, if you see a lean developing, call me and I'll come up."

"Thank you. We will."

Tom left and drove down the track and the Harrises stood in the yard of High Scar Farm, their farm now, their yard, their cobbles, their walls, and Tom drove down the dale and thought about ownership and about the difference between owning a thing and belonging to it, because Arthur had not owned the farm the way the Harrises owned the farm, Arthur had belonged to the farm the way the stone belonged to the dale, the relationship not one of possession but of identity, the man and the place being the same thing, made of the same substance, and the Harrises' ownership was a different kind of relationship, a relationship of choice rather than of origin, of purchase rather than of inheritance, and the relationship might deepen, might grow, might become something more than ownership over the years, the way a new stone set in an old wall might weather and darken and become indistinguishable from the stones around it, the newcomer becoming the native, the incomer becoming the dale.

He drove home and told Helen about the visit and about the Aga and the plaster and the missing wall and the missing dresser and Helen listened and said nothing and then said, "Did they seem decent?"

"Aye. They seemed decent."

"Then they'll do."

Tom looked at Helen and heard Jim's words in Helen's words, the words that meant acceptable, that meant sufficient, that meant the minimum standard below which a thing should not fall, the words that were a beginning and not an end, and he thought about the Harrises in Arthur's farmhouse and about the wall on the hillside above them and about the dale that held them all, the dale that had held the Metcalfes for two hundred years and that would hold the Harrises for however long they stayed, the dale that did not care about names or ownership or the origin of the people who lived in it, the dale that cared only about the stone and the ground and the water and the walls, the dale that was older than all of them, older than the farms, older than the names, the dale that was three hundred million years old and that would be here when the Metcalfes and the Harrises and the Ashworths were all in the ground, all in the churchyard, all under the wall that Tom had built when he was twenty-three, the wall that enclosed the dead, the wall that held the names.