Long Field

My guitar hangs on the kitchen wall of a farmhouse above Hebden Bridge, on an iron hook that was put there a hundred years ago for a ham, and it’s still in my tuning.

Nobody’s touched the pegs since we came up. I play it most days, in the front room, and I bring it back and hang it up, and the two lied-to strings are where I left them every time. The kitchen’s warm from the range and the wall doesn’t get the damp, and the farmer’s wife, who let us the house for November and December at a price Hal described as a kindness to the arts, said the ham used to keep all winter on that hook, so a guitar should be fine.

The farmhouse is at the top of a lane you go up in first gear, with a field in front of it that falls away to the valley and a field behind it that goes up to the moor. There’s a front room with a low ceiling and two windows and a fire, and that’s where the record is. There’s the kitchen, with the range and a long table and three doors: one to the yard, one to the hall, one to a pantry with a sloping floor. I know it’s three because I counted them the first day. I haven’t since.

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Hal is in the front room with his coat on.

Jonesy came up for the first fortnight, before a winter tour took him, and put the microphones where they’d go, and ran the cables under the rug, and left Hal two pages of instructions in capitals that Hal has pinned to the curtain and never once read. Hal doesn’t need to. Hal stands at the little desk by the window with a pair of headphones round his neck, and listens for the thing that’s wrong, the way he stood at the desk in seventy rooms, and when he hears it he says, “Again,” mild as milk, and we do it again.

It’s a small record. Femi comes up from Cardiff on the Tuesday train and goes home on the Thursday one, because Simi has a school play and a part in it that’s a sheep. Dot came for the second week and slept in the room over the kitchen, and rang Ailsa every night at nine from the yard, where the signal is, walking up and down by the wall in her coat. People come up the lane and go down it again, and nobody counts anybody in or out; the door to the yard doesn’t lock. There’s no drummer. Lenny’s view of that is on the fridge.

We did “Long Field” first. The first morning, before Jonesy had finished with the cables. It’s never been recorded; it’s the song we wrote in a pub kitchen in Leeds before three in the morning seven years ago, a verse each, and named the band after, and played once to strangers on Anglesey, and never to a room that knew who we were. We played it in the front room with the fire lit and Hal at the desk with his coat on, and he didn’t say again. He took the headphones off and said, “That’s the first track,” and that was the whole of Hal’s opinion, and it was right.

My verse is the walk. His verse is the gate. On the record you can hear the fire.

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Ninebark wrote to Hal on the twelfth of November.

It came in the post, to the farmhouse, in an envelope with the name in the corner, and Hal opened it at the kitchen table with a knife from the drawer and read it through once and handed it to me. It was one page. The board had sat. It had heard the mixes of the Lanternfield record and the single. The single had done well. It had done what a good single does, the letter said, and it was grateful, and the live album would be released in March as planned, with the sleeve as designed. The board would not be taking up its option on a third Longfield record. It wished us well. It was signed by Annika Strand.

It was a kind letter. Nobody had been threatened, and nobody had been blamed, and there wasn’t a word in it that wasn’t true. Annika had said in her office that it wasn’t a threat, it was a calendar, and she’d been right, and here was the date.

The single had done well. That was true too. The Lanternfield clip went round the week after, the way they all had, somebody by the barrier with steady hands, two amber lamps and a field of lanterns and a woman singing the last line herself. People watched it. A great many people. And they didn’t argue about it in the comments, or in ten spellings, or on hand-painted signs, because there was nothing left to argue about. Nobody buys a question once it’s been answered. She’d said that too.

“Right,” said Hal, and put the letter on the dresser behind the teapot, where it’s been since, and went back to the front room and said, “Again,” to nobody, because nobody was in there yet.

That was all that happened about it. Nobody rang anybody. The third record is ours now, masters and all, and it’s being made in a front room with a fire, paid for out of the Lanternfield fee and whatever Hal could get a bank in Halifax to believe. The spring tour is thirty halls, a thousand to two thousand a night, Hal’s booking and Fitz’s bus, and it pays the four of us and Hal and a crew of three and a bus with no bunks, and it pays Dot’s mortgage for another year. She says she’ll take the nineteen years one at a time.

Lenny went on his session tour on the second of October. Six weeks. Arenas. The postcard came from Hamburg, with a picture of a harbour on the front, and on the back, in capitals that went downhill:

BIGGER ROOMS. NOBODY TELLS ME ANYTHING. IT’S GREAT. MISS YOU ALL A NORMAL AMOUNT. RECORD WITHOUT DRUMS IS A CRIME. L.

It’s on the fridge. Femi read it twice, the first Tuesday, and said, “Right,” and then, which I’ve never heard him do, read it a third time.

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The sleeve came on a Friday, with the test pressing, in a flat box, and Annika had sent it herself.

Two lamps and a dark field. That’s the front. On the back, the title and the fifteen songs and the date and the name of the valley, and nothing else. No notes. No photographs. No booklet, no process, no pages. Nobody on it. Annika had designed it in March to say nothing, so that everyone who’d ever pointed a phone at that bridge would buy it and argue, and it says nothing, and there’s nothing on the record to argue about. For the first time since I was twenty-four, the sleeve and the song were telling the same story.

There was something else in the box, under the test pressing, wrapped in brown paper.

Two frames. The size of windows. The glass was fine; she’d had them packed properly. My handwriting, blown up, and the crossings-out, and down the right-hand margin in blue biro the line about my mother’s hands in the sink. The brass plate had been taken off. You could see the four screw holes where it had been.

There was a card tucked in the paper. The lobby’s being repainted. I thought these should go home rather than in a cupboard. A.

She never says the noun. It’s her whole trick. I stood in the hall with the brown paper round my feet and read the card four times, and I didn’t know whether it was an apology or a kindness or a woman clearing a wall, and I decided it didn’t matter, because she’d never once asked me anything and she wasn’t asking now. I rang my mother. On Sunday I drove the frames down to Keighley in the back of Hal’s Volvo, and my mother looked at them on her kitchen table for a long time, and then at her hands, and said she’d need a bigger wall.

We played the test pressing in the kitchen that night, on a record player the farmer’s wife had in the loft. Hal stood by the range with his coat on. Ezra sat at the table. Femi had gone home to the sheep. I sat on the step to the pantry, because it’s the lowest seat in the house and I wanted to be low.

It’s a good record. The field’s on it, the whole valley. The fourteen songs and the one. And at the bridge, if you listen, there are two lines at once: twelve thousand people singing that I’d never say it, on the beat, every word right, and one woman over the top of them singing that I was, and a gap where a word had been, and a man a third below and a fraction late, landing it.

Hal didn’t say again. He lifted the needle at the end and put it back in its sleeve, and went out to the Volvo, and the interior light came on in the yard, and stayed on for a while before it went.

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He played “Daylight” on a Tuesday afternoon, when the rain had stopped.

Hal had gone to Halifax to argue with the bank. Femi’s train wasn’t till six. The sun had come out low over the valley, the way it does in November for an hour before it gives up, and it came in through the kitchen window and lay across the long table and the floor in a strip, nearly to the range, and I’d never seen daylight in that kitchen before. You only ever see it at night, when you’re working.

I’d kept the set list. Birmingham, fifteen songs in big type, the tape marks at the corners, and on the back of it the words in his writing that goes uphill. It had been in my guitar case since Aberdeen. I took it out and put it on the table in the strip of sun, face down, words up, and I didn’t say anything.

He looked at it for a long time.

“It’s yours,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “I’d like to hear it. Once. In here.”

He got up. He took my guitar down off the ham hook, which he’d never done, and put the strap over his head, and it sat high on him and wrong, the way it had in Birmingham, and he didn’t adjust it. He felt the two lied-to strings without looking. They were where I’d left them. Third time in his life. The Feathers, and a soundcheck in Birmingham, and a kitchen above Hebden Bridge.

He played it through, standing by the range, to me.

I’m not going to write down the words he sang. They’re on the back of a set list and they’re mine, and there are two lines I’ve let out already, and that’s enough for anybody. It was four minutes. Four bars from a harbour wall, and a fifth that was a chord from a pub kitchen, and a road with a house at the end, and no bridge and no chorus and nothing a room could take off him and sing back, because there was no room. There was me, on the pantry step, and the sun going across the floor.

On the last fifth bar he sang the line that goes on it, It’s always been you, and it’s broad day, and it was. It was broad day, in the kitchen, for about another quarter of an hour.

He stopped with his hand flat on the strings. Then he took the strap off, and hung my guitar back on the ham hook, in my tuning, and sat down at the table, and didn’t ask me anything.

He hasn’t asked me to say anything since Aberdeen. I’d like that down. Not on a stage, not on a sofa, not at a table. He said by a runway that he could know where he was on his own, and he’s done it. He’s never once said the word yet to me again, or waited at a door for a sentence, or looked at me across a room as if there was a thing I owed him. There’ve been no interviews. Hal said no to all of them, and for the first time in five years there was no label to ask why.

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It was a Thursday. It was raining again. Femi’s train had gone. Hal was in the front room with his coat on, listening back to Tuesday’s takes with the door shut, and every so often through the wall you could hear him say, “No,” to a piano.

Ezra was at the kitchen table with a cup of tea going cold, writing the running order for the spring tour on the back of an envelope, in pencil, so he could rub it out. Thirty halls. He had “Long Field” at the top. He’d crossed out the second song twice. He was frowning at it the way he frowns at a chord chart somebody’s handed him in a hurry, and he’d a piece of toast in his other hand that he’d forgotten about, and the butter was going into the envelope.

I was at the range with the kettle. It was ticking. Hotel kettles are always dry; farmhouse ones never are.

Nobody was asking me anything. There was no camera. There was no crowd, no field, no truck, no Rhian Teague with a warm hand, no girl in the fourth row with a sign, no Pete with a bodhrán, no six-year-old who’d know if I laughed. There was a man at a kitchen table with butter on a running order, and rain on the window, and my guitar on a ham hook in my tuning, and three doors I hadn’t counted in a month.

I didn’t decide it. I’d like that on the record, last of all. There wasn’t a moment where I stood at the range and thought, now. I’d have noticed. I notice everything. The kettle clicked off and I turned round with it in my hand and he was frowning at his second song, and it came out of my mouth the way my hands do the first chord, because they’ve been waiting to.

“I love you,” I said.

He looked up. He put the toast down on the envelope. He didn’t do the joke, and he didn’t wait the length of a whole answer, because there wasn’t a question and there wasn’t an answer, and he knew that before I did.

“I know,” he said.

“I know you know,” I said.

And I said it anyway.