Chapter 9: The Stile

Arthur had asked for a stile.

The original wall had not had one, the gap in the wall being far from any footpath or right of way, but Arthur wanted one now, a set of stone steps built into the wall at the point where the path from the farmhouse met the upper field, the path that Arthur had walked every morning for sixty years, the path that his father had walked before him, a track worn into the grass by the passage of feet and hooves, visible from above as a faint line running up the hillside, a crease in the green, the landscape's memory of the people who had crossed it.

"Put a stile in," Arthur had said the previous evening, when Tom had visited after packing his tools. "Where the path meets the wall."

"There's a gate fifty yards south."

"I know there's a gate. I want a stile. At the path."

Tom had looked at Arthur and understood that this was not about convenience, not about the shortest route from the farmhouse to the upper field. The gate was functional, wide enough for a tractor, hung on stone posts, and it served its purpose. The stile was something else. The stile was Arthur's mark on the wall, the farmer's contribution to the waller's work, a request that would change the wall from a thing that Tom had built to a thing that Tom and Arthur had built together, because a stile was a declaration of use, a statement that this wall was not just a boundary but a threshold, a place where people crossed from one side to the other, from one field to another, from one part of the hill to another part, and by putting a stile in the wall Arthur was saying that people would cross here, that people had always crossed here, that the path that his feet had worn into the grass would continue to be walked after he was gone, that the stile would invite the passage that the wall otherwise prevented.

Tom built the stile on a Thursday morning, the dale bright with April sunshine, the grass vivid, the lambs in the home field below making the noise that lambs made when the sun was out, a continuous high chatter, the sound of young animals discovering that the world was larger and warmer than the shed in which they had been born. He built the stile at the point where the path met the wall, three through-stones left protruding from the east face of the wall, spaced eighteen inches apart vertically, each one sticking out twelve inches from the face, forming a set of steps that a person could climb to get over the wall, and three corresponding through-stones on the west face, the steps on the other side, so that you could climb up on one side and climb down on the other, the wall crossed, the boundary negotiated, the two fields connected.

The through-stones for the stile had to be longer than the regular through-stones, because they had to span the full width of the wall and extend twelve inches beyond the face on each side, and Tom had selected them carefully from the outcrop above the intake wall, choosing stones that were forty-eight inches long, heavy pieces that required both hands and a flexion of the knees and a controlled lift from the ground to the wall, the stone coming up in a smooth arc, the waller's body a lever, the legs doing the work, the arms guiding, the back straight, the weight travelling from the ground through the legs and the torso and the arms and into the wall, the body a conduit for the stone's journey from the earth to its place in the structure.

He set the first step-stone at the height of the second course, low enough for a booted foot to reach easily from the ground, and the stone protruded from the face of the wall like a shelf, solid, flat, wide enough for a foot, and he stood back and looked at it and put his boot on it and pressed down, testing it, feeling the stone take his weight, feeling no movement, no give, the stone anchored inside the wall by its own length and by the hearting packed around it and by the courses above that would press down on its inner end, locking it into the wall with the accumulated weight of every stone above.

The second step he set at the height of the fifth course, and the third at the height of the eighth, which was the top of the wall before the coping, and from the third step a person could swing a leg over the coping and step down onto the corresponding stones on the other side, a manoeuvre that required a certain agility, a certain familiarity with the movement, the kind of thing that you learned as a child and never forgot, the body remembering the sequence — foot on the first step, foot on the second, foot on the third, swing the leg, step down — the way the body remembered all the movements of the dale, the gate opening, the sheep gathering, the wall climbing, the movements coded into the muscles by repetition, by years, by the daily practice of living on steep ground.

Tom thought about who would use the stile. Arthur would not use it. Arthur could no longer climb the hill, let alone climb a stile, and the stile was not for Arthur's body but for Arthur's intention, the intention that someone should cross here, that the path should continue, that the wall should accommodate the walker as well as the sheep. The stile was for the future, for the people who would come after, the walkers who would follow the footpath across the upper field and find the stile and climb it and cross the wall and continue on the other side, and they would not know who had asked for the stile or why, they would not know about Arthur or the farm or the two hundred years of Metcalfes, they would simply find the stile and use it, the stone steps solid under their boots, the through-stones protruding from the wall like an invitation, come over, cross here, this way.

He thought about the paths that crossed this land, the network of footpaths and bridleways that laced the dale, some of them ancient, older than the walls, older than the farms, paths that had been walked for a thousand years, since before the Normans, since before the Vikings who had named the dale — Swaledale, the dale of the Swale, the river's name from the Old English, swalwe, the rushing water — and the paths had been worn into the ground by the feet of the people who had lived here, farmers and miners and drovers and monks, the feet pressing the grass down and the soil down and the stone down, year after year, century after century, until the path was a groove in the hillside, a channel, a permanent mark on the landscape, the record of human passage written in the earth the way the record of the sea was written in the limestone.

And he thought about the walls that the paths crossed, the walls that had been built across the paths and that had had stiles built into them so that the paths could continue, the walls and the paths coexisting, the boundaries and the passages, the things that divided and the things that connected, and the stile was the point where they met, the place where the wall acknowledged the path, where the boundary yielded to the passage, where the stone stepped aside — or rather stepped forward, protruding from the face, offering itself as a foothold — and allowed the walker to cross.

At eleven o'clock a figure appeared at the bottom of the field, not Arthur but someone else, someone Tom did not immediately recognise, and the figure climbed the hill slowly, using a stick — not Arthur's hazel stick but a modern walking pole, telescopic, aluminium — and as the figure came closer Tom saw that it was a woman, middle-aged, wearing walking boots and a waterproof jacket and carrying a small rucksack, and she reached the wall and stood looking at it with an expression of pleased surprise, the expression of a person who has found something interesting on a walk that they had expected to be ordinary.

"Morning," she said.

"Morning."

"Are you rebuilding this?"

"Aye."

"It's beautiful work."

Tom did not know what to say to this. The wall was not beautiful. The wall was correct. It was well-built, properly hearted, true to the batter, but beautiful was not a word that Tom applied to walls, because beauty implied decoration, ornament, something added to the function for the sake of appearance, and a dry stone wall had nothing added, every stone was functional, every element served a purpose, and if the wall was beautiful it was beautiful the way a hand was beautiful, the beauty of function, the beauty of a thing perfectly adapted to its work.

"Thank you," he said, because that was what you said.

"I walk this path every spring," the woman said. "I come up from Reeth. Over the top and down to Keld. I've been walking it for twenty years."

"You'll have seen the wall before, then."

"I have. I saw the gap. Last month, when I came through. I was sorry to see it."

"Frost heave. It happens."

"And now you're fixing it."

"Aye."

She watched him work for a few minutes, the way people sometimes watched, fascinated by the slowness of it, by the care, by the way each stone was turned and examined and placed with a deliberation that seemed excessive until you understood that the deliberation was the point, that the care was not optional but essential, that a wall built quickly was a wall that would fall quickly, and a wall built slowly was a wall that would stand.

"Is that a stile?" she said, looking at the protruding through-stones on the east face.

"It will be. When it's finished."

"There wasn't one before."

"No. The farmer asked for one."

"That's kind of him. The gate's a bit far south."

"That's what he thought."

She smiled and looked at the stile and then at the wall and then at Tom, and her smile was the smile of a person who understood something without needing to have it explained, who could see the stile not just as a set of stone steps but as an act of generosity, a farmer's gift to the walkers who crossed his land, and Tom thought that she was right, that the stile was generous, that Arthur's request had been an act of giving, a final addition to the infrastructure of the dale, a last contribution to the network of paths and walls and stiles that enabled people to move across the landscape, and that the stile would be there long after Arthur was gone, long after the farm was sold, long after the woman in the walking boots had stopped making her spring walk from Reeth to Keld, the stone steps protruding from the face of the wall, waiting for feet, offering passage.

She moved on, climbing the stile — the steps that were in place already, the wall not yet high enough to require the third — and crossing the wall and continuing up the hill, her walking pole tapping the ground ahead of her, and Tom watched her go and then went back to the stile, building the courses around the step-stones, packing the hearting tight against their sides, building the wall up to the level of the second step, the wall and the stile growing together, the boundary and the passage inseparable.

He told Arthur about the walker that evening, sitting in the kitchen, the through-stone still on the arm of Arthur's chair.

"A woman from Reeth. She walks the path every spring."

"There's a few of them. Regulars. They come through every year."

"She was pleased about the stile."

"Good."

"She said it was kind of you."

Arthur looked at the through-stone on the arm of his chair and turned it slightly with his fingers, a small movement, an adjustment, and Tom saw that the stone had been turned before, many times, the arm of the chair showing a faint mark where the stone had been moved back and forth, Arthur's fingers worrying the stone the way a hand worries a rosary, the repetitive touch a form of meditation, a way of connecting to something beyond the chair, beyond the kitchen, beyond the closing walls of his diminishing world.

"My father built a stile," Arthur said. "In the intake wall, above the barn. For the postman. The postman used to walk across the fields from Gunnerside, and my father put a stile in for him so he didn't have to go round by the gate. That was fifty years ago. The postman's long dead. But the stile's still there."

"I've seen it."

"Course you have. You've seen every wall in this dale."

"Not every wall."

"Near enough."

They sat in silence, the kind of silence that was not empty but full, the silence of men who had said what they needed to say and were content to let the silence fill the space that the words had left, the way the hearting filled the space between the face stones, the silence structural, supportive, holding the conversation in place.

Helen came in from the hallway, where she had been on the phone to the palliative care team, and she sat down and her face was composed, the professional face, the face that held the information she had just received without letting it show, and Tom could read that face the way he could read a wall, the small signs, the slight tension around the eyes, the set of the mouth, and he knew that the conversation had not been easy, that the information was not good, but he did not ask because Helen would tell him when she was ready, when they were home, when they were in their own kitchen and the professional face could be set down like a tool at the end of a day's work.

"The stile's going in nicely," Tom said to Helen.

"I saw. From the road. When I was driving up."

"You can see it from the road?"

"The step-stones. They catch the light. They're paler than the wall."

Tom had not noticed this, that the new through-stones from the outcrop were lighter in colour than the salvaged stones that made up the rest of the wall, the new stone not yet weathered, not yet darkened by the wind and the rain and the lichen that would eventually cover it, and he thought about the stile catching the light, drawing the eye, the new stone shining against the old, and he thought that in a year or two the new stone would darken and match the old, the stile becoming invisible, just another part of the wall, the step-stones protruding but no longer conspicuous, and the walkers who used them would not know that they were new, would not know that they had been placed there in April by a waller named Tom at the request of a farmer named Arthur, would not know any of this, would simply put their boots on the stone and climb and cross and continue.

He drove home in the long spring evening, the light lasting past seven now, the dale golden in the low sun, the walls casting long shadows across the fields, and the lambs were out in the fields everywhere, white shapes against the green, and the ewes were grazing, and the river was low and clear after the weeks of rain, the water running over the stones in the riverbed, the same stones that the walls were made of, the same limestone, the water and the stone sharing the dale, sharing the valley, the water passing through and the stone remaining.

At home he sat in the garden for a while before going in, sitting on the bench by the back door, the bench that he had built from stone, a slab of limestone set on two uprights, a bench that was a small wall, a wall that was a bench, and he sat and watched the light go out of the dale, the shadows climbing the hillsides, the sky turning from gold to orange to red to the deep blue of the spring evening, and the first stars appeared, and the walls disappeared into the darkness, and he thought about the stile on the hillside, the step-stones protruding from the wall, waiting for feet, waiting for the morning when the first walker would come along the path and find the stile and climb it and cross the wall and continue into the field beyond, the wall crossed, the boundary negotiated, the passage made.

And he thought about Arthur, sitting in his chair, his hand on the through-stone, his fingers turning it slowly on the arm of the chair, and he thought about the path that Arthur was on, the path that led from the chair to the bed and from the bed to the end, the path that could not be crossed, that had no stile, that led in one direction only, and he thought that Arthur knew this, had always known it, and that the stile in the wall was Arthur's way of saying something about paths and passages and crossings, about the fact that some walls could be climbed and some could not, and that the walls that could be climbed deserved a stile, deserved the stone steps that made the crossing possible, that offered the walker a way over, and that the walls that could not be climbed — the walls that had no stile, no steps, no passage — those walls you could only stand before and look at and know that on the other side was a place you could not reach, a field you could not enter, a country you could not visit, and that the wall was not cruel in its refusal, the wall was simply there, doing what it was built to do, which was to stand, which was to hold, which was to mark the boundary between one thing and another, between this field and that field, between the living and the dead, between the here and the gone.

Tom went inside and closed the door and sat with Helen and she told him what the palliative care team had said, and he listened, and the walls of the house held them, and the through-stones of the house ran through the walls from room to room, binding the structure, holding it together, and outside the dale was dark and quiet and the walls stood and the stile waited and the path continued, as it had always continued, as it would always continue, the path and the wall and the stile, the passage and the boundary and the crossing place, there in the dark, there in the light, there.