Chapter 7: Rain

The rain came on the Monday and did not stop.

It came from the west, from the Irish Sea, driven across the Pennines by a wind that had been building for two days, and it arrived not as a shower or a squall but as a presence, a grey weight that settled on the dale and pressed down on the hills and the fields and the walls and the river and did not lift. Tom stood at the kitchen window at six in the morning and watched it fall, the rain so heavy that the houses across the street were blurred, their stone walls softened to smudges of grey, and the street itself was a river, the water running down the camber and pooling at the drains and overflowing, brown water carrying small stones and leaves and the detritus of the gutters.

He did not go to the wall.

You could not build a dry stone wall in heavy rain. The stones became slippery, impossible to grip, the surfaces that needed to sit flat against each other were filmed with water that acted as a lubricant, preventing the friction that held the stones in place, and the hearting turned to mud, the small stones that should have been dry and angular and gripping becoming wet and round and sliding, and the whole enterprise of building — which depended on dryness, on friction, on the rough surfaces of stone meeting other rough surfaces and locking together — was defeated by the water. A waller could work in light rain, could work in drizzle, could work in the mist that hung on the hills for days at a time, but heavy rain stopped everything, shut the job down as surely as darkness, and the waller sat at home and waited for it to pass.

Tom was not good at waiting.

He spent the morning in the shed, sharpening tools, sorting the pins in his canvas bag, cleaning the batter frames that he had brought down from the hill on Friday, oiling the wing nuts so they would turn freely when he adjusted the angle. The shed was small and dry and smelled of linseed oil and steel and the faint mineral smell of stone dust that never quite left his clothes or his tools or his skin, and the rain drummed on the corrugated roof above him, a steady percussion that was almost musical, the rhythm of it varying with the gusts of wind, faster and louder when the wind picked up, slower and softer in the lulls, and Tom worked to the rhythm, his hands moving with the beat, the sharpening stone running along the edge of the hammer in time with the rain.

Helen left at eight for her rounds, her car pulling out of the drive and disappearing into the grey, and Tom watched her go and then went back to the shed and then came back to the kitchen and made more tea and stood at the window again and watched the rain and felt the idleness pressing on him the way the rain pressed on the dale, a weight, an oppression, the absence of the work that gave his days their shape and their purpose.

He thought about the wall. He thought about the five courses sitting on the hillside in the rain, the water running over the face stones, finding the joints, seeping into the gaps between the stones, penetrating the hearting, and he thought about the frost that would come when the rain stopped and the temperature dropped, the water inside the wall freezing, expanding, pushing the stones apart, and he felt an anxiety that was irrational because the wall was well-built and the hearting was tight and the water would not penetrate far, but that was real nonetheless, the anxiety of a builder whose work was exposed to forces he could not control, the anxiety of a man who had built something and then had to leave it to the weather.

By mid-morning the river was in flood. Tom walked down to the bridge and stood on it and watched the Swale come through, the water brown and fast, carrying branches and fence posts and the occasional dead sheep, the current swirling around the bridge's piers, the level rising as he watched, the water climbing the stone walls of the bridge's parapet, and he thought about the men who had built this bridge, who had set these stones in the riverbed and built the arch above the water, who had built the wall-like parapets on either side, dry stone, the same technique as the field walls, the same craft, stone against stone, gravity and friction, and the bridge had stood for two hundred years and the river had tried to take it every spring and had failed every time, because the bridge was well-built and the stones were sound and the arch was true, the arch that distributed the weight of the bridge and the traffic above it into the stone piers on either side, the arch that was the strongest shape in building, the shape that turned weight into compression and compression into strength.

He stood on the bridge for half an hour, watching the flood, and then he walked back through the village, past the pub and the post office and the row of cottages that lined the street, all stone, all grey, all built by hands, and he thought about the relationship between stone and water, the way they were opposites, the way stone was solid and permanent and water was fluid and transient, and yet the way they needed each other, the way the dale was shaped by both, the river carving the valley and the stone lining it, the water flowing and the walls standing, the movement and the stillness defining each other, each one meaningless without the other.

At noon Helen rang.

"I'm at Arthur's."

"How is he?"

"He's had a bad night. The pain's worse. I've increased his medication."

"Does he need anything?"

"He needs the rain to stop. He can't get out. He's been sitting at the window all morning, watching the yard."

"I know the feeling."

"I'm going to stay for a bit. Make sure the medication's working."

"Aye."

Tom put the phone down and stood in the kitchen and thought about Arthur sitting at his window watching the rain, and about himself standing at his window watching the rain, and about the two of them separated by three miles of flooded dale, both waiting, both watching, both unable to do the thing that gave their days meaning, Arthur unable to walk his fields, Tom unable to build his wall, the rain taking from them both the activities that defined them, reducing them to watchers, to waiters, to men sitting behind glass while the world went on without them.

He went out in the rain in the afternoon, not to the wall but to the fields behind the village, walking the footpath that followed the river upstream, the path muddy and slippery, the river roaring beside him, the rain soaking through his jacket and his trousers and his boots, and he walked for an hour, walking because he needed to move, needed the physical effort, needed the feeling of his body working against the weather, and the rain was cold on his face and the wind was sharp and the fields were empty of people and the walls ran beside him through the rain, grey and dark and streaming with water, the face stones glistening, the coping stones like a row of blades set on edge against the sky.

He stopped beside a wall and put his hand on it and felt the stone under his palm, the cold wet surface, the texture of the limestone, the slight roughness that was the stone's grain, the fossil record of the seabed that had become this rock three hundred million years ago, and he felt the wall's solidity, its resistance to his hand, its refusal to yield, and he thought that this was what stone did, this was its purpose, to resist, to endure, to stand against the forces that wanted to move it or break it or wear it away, and that the rain was one of those forces, and the frost was another, and time was the greatest of them all, and the stone resisted them all, not perfectly, not permanently, but for long enough, for decades, for centuries, for longer than any hand that had lifted it.

The rain continued through Tuesday and Wednesday, and Tom stayed home, and the idleness became a presence in the house, a third occupant, and he found himself doing things he never did: reading a book that Helen had left on the table, a novel about a woman in London, the sentences quick and light, nothing like the slow accretive sentences of the dale, and he read fifty pages and put it down, unable to enter the world it described, unable to believe in a world where there was no stone; cleaning the kitchen, scrubbing the worktops and the floor and the inside of the oven, work that Helen usually did and that he did now with the thoroughness of a man who needed to be thorough about something; calling Jim Pratt, the conversation brief and circular, Jim telling him the rain would stop on Thursday, Tom asking how he knew, Jim saying he knew because the barometer in his kitchen said so, and the barometer had not been wrong in forty years.

On the Wednesday evening Helen came home late, her face drawn, her movements slow with tiredness, and she sat at the table and Tom put food in front of her and she ate without speaking for ten minutes and then she put down her fork and looked at him.

"He's worse."

"Arthur."

"He's in more pain than he's telling me. He sits in that chair and his face is grey and he won't say anything, he just sits there with his jaw clenched, and when I ask him he says he's fine, he's managing, and he's not fine, he's not managing, he's in pain that would put most people in hospital, and he won't go to hospital because the last time he went to hospital they told him he was dying and he doesn't want to hear it again."

Tom reached across the table and took her hand, and her hand was small in his, her fingers fine and quick, the hands of a nurse, hands that measured and soothed and held, and his hands were large and rough, the hands of a waller, hands that lifted and placed and built, and the two sets of hands together on the table were a study in contrasts, soft and hard, smooth and rough, and yet they fit, the way stones fit in a wall, not because they were the same but because they were different, because the difference was the fit, the complementary shapes finding each other.

"Can you increase the medication again?"

"I've increased it twice this week. There's a limit. After a certain point it's — it becomes about managing the end, not managing the pain."

"Is that where we are?"

"Not yet. But we're heading there."

Tom held her hand and said nothing, and the rain beat on the window and the river roared in the valley below the village and the walls stood in the darkness and the rain, holding the fields in place, holding the hillsides in place, doing in the dark and the wet what they did in the light and the dry, the same job, the same purpose, the same patient resistance to the forces that wanted to bring everything down.

Thursday came and the rain stopped.

Tom woke to silence, the absence of rain on the window, and he lay in bed for a moment listening to the silence and then he got up and went to the window and the dale was washed clean, the sky high and blue, the hills sharp-edged against it, the walls vivid in the morning light, every stone picked out in the clear air, and the river was still high, still brown, but falling, the flood receding, the water retreating to its bed the way it always did after a rain, the dale draining, the ground releasing the water it had held, giving it back to the river, to the sea, to the sky, to return as rain, the cycle unbroken, the water going and coming, going and coming, and the stone remaining.

He drove up to High Scar Farm with the windows down, the air cold and clean, smelling of wet earth and grass and the sharp mineral smell that came after heavy rain, the smell of limestone washed by water, the calcium carbonate dissolving fractionally, the stone yielding to the water molecule by molecule, an erosion so slow that it was invisible in a lifetime but that, over millennia, carved the dales themselves, the river valleys that ran through the Pennines like the veins in a body, the water shaping the stone, the stone shaping the water, the two of them locked in a conversation that had been going on for three hundred million years and would go on for three hundred million more.

The wall was fine.

He checked it stone by stone, running his hands along the faces, checking the joints, pressing on the face stones to feel for any movement, any give, any sign that the rain had penetrated the hearting and loosened the fit. The wall was solid. The hearting was dry behind the face stones — he pushed his fingers into the joints and felt the small stones wedged tight, no moisture, no softening, the wall's interior protected by the same principle that protected the interior of a well-built house, the outer surface shedding the water, the joints tight enough to prevent penetration, the batter of the wall directing the rain downward and outward, away from the hearting, away from the core.

He felt a relief that was disproportionate to the threat, a pleasure in the wall's soundness that was almost joy, and he stood beside it in the morning sun and looked at the five courses of stone that he had built and felt the satisfaction of a thing well-made, a thing that had been tested and had held, a thing that had done what it was built to do, which was to stand, which was to resist, which was to endure.

Arthur came to the kitchen door and looked up the hill, and Tom could see him, the small figure in the doorway, and he raised his hand and Arthur raised his stick in reply, the two gestures meeting across the distance, and then Arthur went back inside and Tom went back to work.

He laid the sixth course that day, working in the sun, the stone warm under his hands for the first time that spring, the heat of the sun drawing the moisture from the surface of the limestone and leaving it dry and pale, the colour of old bones, and the wall grew by six inches, the sixth course following the fifth, the string line moving up the batter frames, the gap closing, the wall extending across the hillside yard by yard, the shape of the wall becoming clear now, the thing itself emerging from the pile of stones and the idea of the wall and becoming real, becoming present, becoming a wall.

In the evening he sat with Helen in the kitchen and they did not talk about Arthur. They talked about the wall, about the rain, about the river, about Jim Pratt's barometer, about the lambs that were growing in Arthur's shed, getting stronger, beginning to venture out of the shed and into the home field, their legs steadier now, their fleeces thickening, their voices deeper, the bleat of the newborn giving way to the bleat of the growing lamb, louder, more confident, more demanding. They talked about these things and they did not talk about the thing that sat between them like a stone on a table, the fact of Arthur's decline, the approach of the end, and by not talking about it they held it, the way the hearting held the wall, invisibly, silently, structurally, the unspoken thing doing the work of the spoken things, holding the conversation in place, keeping it from falling.

And the wall stood on the hillside in the darkness, five courses high, soon to be six, the rain gone, the stone drying in the night air, the hearting sound, the batter true, the foundation holding, and the gap that Tom had come to fill was narrowing, closing, the wall growing to meet itself, the two ends of the standing wall reaching toward the new work in the middle, and soon the gap would be gone and the wall would be whole and the line of stone would run unbroken across the hillside, and the field would be enclosed, and the sheep would stay where they belonged, and the wall would stand, and the rain would come again, and the wall would stand again, because that was what the wall was built to do, and that was what the man who built it had made it to do, and that was enough.