Chapter 6: Robert

Robert Metcalfe drove a BMW that was the colour of pewter, a car that looked as though it had been designed in a room where no one had ever seen mud, and it came up the track to High Scar Farm on the Saturday morning with its suspension bottoming out on every pothole, the undercarriage scraping on the raised centre of the track where the grass grew between the ruts, and Tom, working on the wall above, heard it before he saw it, the sound of an engine that did not belong in this landscape, too smooth, too quiet, too refined for a place where the vehicles were Land Rovers and tractors and the occasional quad bike, machines built to endure rather than to impress.

He watched the car park in the yard beside his Defender, and the contrast was pointed, the BMW sleek and clean next to the Defender's battered green flanks, the city next to the country, the new next to the old, and Robert got out and stood in the yard and looked around with the expression of a man who had been here before but who had never quite arrived, a man who knew this place but did not belong to it, who had visited as a child and remembered it as a child remembers things, in fragments, in impressions, the smell of the barn and the sound of the sheep and the feel of the cobbles under his feet, but who had left and had built his life elsewhere, in Leeds, in an office, in a world of contracts and conveyances and the orderly transfer of property from one name to another.

Robert was fifty-two and looked younger, the way people who worked indoors looked younger, preserved by central heating and filtered air from the ageing that wind and sun and cold inflicted on the faces of men who worked outside. He was tall and thin and wore a jacket that was not quite a suit jacket and not quite a country jacket but something in between, a garment that tried to be at home in both worlds and succeeded in neither. His shoes were wrong. They were leather, polished, with thin soles that would be ruined within fifty yards of leaving the cobbled yard. Tom noticed the shoes because shoes told you everything about a person's relationship to the ground, and Robert's shoes told him that Robert's relationship to the ground was theoretical, a matter of ownership rather than contact.

Arthur came out of the farmhouse and the two men stood in the yard and talked, and Tom could not hear what they said but he could see the shapes of the conversation in their bodies, Arthur still and upright, leaning on his stick, Robert moving, gesturing, his hands describing shapes in the air that Arthur's hands never would, because Arthur's hands did not describe things, Arthur's hands did things, lifted things, held things, and when Arthur wanted to say something he said it with words or he did not say it at all.

They went inside and Tom went back to work.

The wall was on the fifth course now, twenty-four inches above the foundation, approaching the height where the first through-stones would be set. Through-stones were the long stones that ran the full width of the wall, from face to face, tying the two sides together, and they were set at intervals along the wall, every three or four feet, a course of through-stones binding the wall at mid-height the way a belt bound a coat, and without them the wall was two separate walls standing side by side, two faces with hearting between them but nothing to prevent them from leaning apart, from separating under the pressure of frost or the weight of snow on the coping. The through-stones were the structural connection, the thing that made two faces into one wall, and Tom had been sorting them for two days, pulling the long stones from the salvage pile and setting them aside, checking their length against the width of the wall, making sure each one would span the full thirty inches from face to face with an inch to spare on each side.

He was thinking about through-stones when Robert appeared at the bottom of the field.

Robert had changed his shoes — he was wearing Wellington boots now, Arthur's boots by the look of them, too wide for his feet, and he walked up the hill with the gait of a man who was not accustomed to hills, his weight too far forward, his steps too short, fighting the gradient rather than accepting it. He reached the wall breathing hard and stood for a moment with his hands on his knees, recovering, and Tom watched him without stopping his work, his hammer tapping a pinning stone into the gap between two face stones, the thin wedge of limestone sliding into the joint and locking the stones together, tightening the face.

"Tom."

"Robert."

"Arthur said I should come up. Have a look at the wall."

"Did he."

Robert looked at the wall with the attention of a man trying to see something he did not have the vocabulary to describe, a man looking at a thing he could appreciate in the general sense — it was a wall, it was being rebuilt, it was made of stone — but could not appreciate in the specific sense, could not read the way Tom read it or Arthur read it, could not see the grading of the stone or the tightness of the hearting or the truth of the batter, because those were things that you could only see if you knew what to look for, and Robert did not know what to look for.

"It's good work," Robert said.

"It's all right."

"Arthur says you're the best waller in the dale."

"Arthur's kind."

"He says Jim Pratt was the best and now you are."

Tom set down his hammer and straightened and looked at Robert.

"What is it you want to know, Robert?"

Robert looked taken aback, the directness unexpected, and then he recovered and his face assumed the expression that Tom imagined he wore in his office, the expression of a man about to explain something complicated to someone who might not understand it, patient and slightly condescending, the expression of a professional addressing a layperson.

"I want to know how long the wall work will take."

"Three weeks. Maybe four."

"And the cost?"

"Arthur and I have agreed a price."

"I know. I've seen the estimate. I just wanted to understand the scope of the work."

"The scope. Seven yards of wall collapsed. I'm rebuilding it. Nine yards including the strip-back. Four and a half feet high to the underside of the coping. Thirty inches wide at the base, fourteen at the top. Dry stone. No mortar. Same wall that's been here for a hundred and seventy years."

Robert nodded and looked at the wall again, and Tom could see him doing the calculation that solicitors did, the calculation of cost against value, the question of whether the money spent on rebuilding this wall would be recovered in the sale price of the farm, whether the wall was an investment or an expense, and the calculation depended on how you defined value, which depended on who you were, and Robert defined value the way his profession taught him to define it, in pounds, in percentages, in the return on capital, and by that measure the wall was questionable, because the cost of rebuilding nine yards of dry stone wall was significant and the increase in the farm's sale price that would result from the rebuilt wall was marginal, because the buyers who would pay eight hundred thousand pounds for a hill farm in Swaledale were not the kind of buyers who would pay more for a wall.

"It seems like a lot of work," Robert said. "For a wall."

"It is a lot of work. It's a wall."

"I mean, given the circumstances. Given that the farm will be sold."

"The farm will be sold. The wall will stay."

"Will it? The new owners might — I mean, they might have different plans for the land."

"They might."

"So the wall might not — it might not be needed."

Tom picked up his hammer and turned a stone in his left hand, looking at it, looking for the face, and he found it and set the stone on the wall, the face outward, the back against the hearting, and he tapped it level with the hammer handle and then he looked at Robert.

"Arthur wants the wall built. I'm building the wall. That's the arrangement."

Robert stood for a moment, his mouth slightly open, and then he closed it and nodded and looked down the hill toward the farmhouse and then back at the wall and then at Tom.

"I'm not trying to — I'm not saying you shouldn't build it. I'm just trying to understand."

"Understand what?"

"Why it matters. To Arthur. Why this particular wall matters so much that he's spending — that he wants it rebuilt now, when there are other things to think about."

Tom stopped working and looked at Robert and considered the question, because it was a real question, not a hostile one, and he could see in Robert's face that the man genuinely did not understand, genuinely could not see why a dying farmer would spend money and attention on a wall when there were wills to be written and properties to be valued and the whole apparatus of death to be arranged, and Tom thought about how to explain it in a language that Robert would understand, a language of value and purpose and return, and then he decided not to, decided instead to explain it in his own language, the language of stone.

"Come here," Tom said.

Robert came to the wall and Tom pointed at the foundation course.

"See these stones? They were set a hundred and seventy years ago. They haven't moved. Everything above them has fallen at least once, been rebuilt, fallen again, been rebuilt again. But the foundation hasn't moved. It's been there since the wall was first built. It's the same stone, in the same place, doing the same job."

Robert looked at the foundation stones and nodded.

"Now look at this." Tom pulled a hearting stone from the pile and held it up, a small angular piece of limestone, grey, unremarkable, the kind of stone you would walk past without noticing. "This goes inside the wall. Between the two faces. You'll never see it once the wall is built. Nobody will ever see it. But without it, the wall falls. The hearting is what holds the wall together. The invisible part is the important part."

Robert looked at the stone in Tom's hand and Tom could see him trying to understand, trying to make the connection between this small grey stone and the question he had asked, why it mattered, why Arthur wanted the wall rebuilt, and Tom could see that Robert was close to understanding but not quite there, close to seeing the thing that the stone represented but not quite able to see it, because seeing it required a kind of knowledge that Robert did not have, a knowledge that came from putting your hands on stone and feeling the weight of it and understanding that the weight was not just physical but was also the weight of time, of continuity, of the accumulated labour of every hand that had ever touched that stone.

"Arthur is the hearting of this farm," Tom said. "When he's gone, the wall needs to stand on its own."

Robert looked at him, and something shifted in his face, a softening, a yielding, as though a stone that had been set at the wrong angle had been lifted and turned and set again, and Tom saw the man behind the solicitor, the boy who had come to this farm as a child and had walked these fields with his uncle and had watched the sheep and touched the walls and felt the stone under his hands, and who had gone away and become someone else but who still carried, somewhere inside him, the memory of that stone, that ground, that sky.

"I see," Robert said.

He stood for a while longer, watching Tom work, and then he went back down the hill, walking more carefully this time, his weight back, his steps longer, more considered, as though the hill had taught him something in the time he had been on it, and Tom watched him go and then turned back to the wall.

He worked through the rest of the morning and into the afternoon, the fifth course extending across the gap, the wall now two feet above the foundation, substantial enough to cast a shadow on the downhill side, and the shadow moved with the sun, sweeping across the grass like the hand of a clock, measuring the day in a slow arc from west to east. The shadow of a wall was a thing that Tom noticed and that most people did not, the way the wall's presence changed the ground around it, the shelter it provided on the lee side, the warmth that the stone absorbed from the sun and radiated back through the night, the microclimate that the wall created, a narrow band of stillness in the wind, a strip of warmth in the cold, a place where the snow melted first in spring and the frost formed last in autumn.

At noon Arthur came to the kitchen door and stood looking up the hill, and Tom could see him from the wall, a small figure in the doorway, and he could see that Arthur was not going to climb today, that the walk was beyond him, and he felt the gap that Arthur's absence left on the hillside, the missing figure, the missing sound of the stick on the coping stones, and he worked harder, not faster but more intently, as though the quality of the work could compensate for the missing presence, as though the tightness of the hearting could fill the void that Arthur's decline was opening in the day.

Robert's BMW left at two o'clock, the pewter car moving down the track in a cloud of dust, bottoming out on the potholes, heading back to Leeds, to the office, to the world of contracts and conveyances, and Tom watched it go and felt a complicated thing that was partly relief and partly pity, relief that Robert was gone and the hill was quiet again, pity for the man who had inherited a farm he did not want and did not understand and would sell because selling was the only thing he knew how to do with property, the only relationship he had with land, the relationship of transaction, of exchange, of converting a thing into its monetary equivalent, which was not the same as knowing the thing, was not the same as walking it every day and touching its walls and counting its sheep and feeling its weather on your face.

Helen came up to the farm in the late afternoon, her car pulling into the yard, and Tom saw her from the wall and watched her go into the farmhouse, and he knew she was checking on Arthur, taking his blood pressure, asking about his pain, doing the things that district nurses did, and he thought about the two of them in the kitchen, Helen and Arthur, the young woman and the old man, the nurse and the patient, the conversation that was partly medical and partly personal, the words that measured and the words that comforted, and he thought that Helen was a kind of waller too, building something between herself and Arthur, a structure of care and attention that was not visible from the outside but that held things in place, that kept the arrangement from falling, the hearting of the relationship between the living and the dying.

He packed his tools at four and walked down the hill and went into the farmhouse. Arthur was in his chair by the range, the chair that had been his father's and his grandfather's before that, a wooden chair with arms worn smooth by three generations of hands, and Helen was sitting at the table writing notes in a file, and the kitchen was warm and smelled of tea and the faint sweetness of the range, and Tom stood in the doorway and looked at them, the two people he loved, the wife and the dying man, and the room held them the way a wall held its stones, the four walls of the kitchen enclosing the three of them in a space that was safe and warm and lit, and the hearting of the room was the warmth and the light and the smell of tea and the presence of the people in it, and the room would outlast them all, the stone walls standing after the people were gone, the chairs empty, the range cold, the room holding nothing but the memory of what it had held.

"Robert's gone," Arthur said.

"Aye."

"He means well."

"I know."

"He doesn't understand. But he means well."

Tom sat down at the table across from Helen and she poured him tea from the pot that was always on the range, and they sat together, the three of them, in the kitchen of the farmhouse that had been built from the same stone as the walls, and outside the light was going and the dale was darkening and the walls were disappearing into the dusk, and the lambs were calling in the shed and the ewes were answering, and somewhere up on the hill the wall that Tom was building sat in the gathering darkness, five courses high, waiting for the morning, waiting for the hands that would lift the next stone and set it in its place and pack the hearting around it, the invisible work, the work that held everything together, the work that no one saw.