The Fen House stood at the end of Coldditch lane with the fen at its back and the village at its front, and in the front room a woman had been asleep since she was nineteen. She was thirty-eight now. She lay on her left side with her right hand open on the blanket, and the room had a bed, a chair by the window, a table, a jug, a cup, and a fire that was kept laid. The village furnished it. A different family did a week at a time and handed it on, and each found something to be shocked about and each mended it. She went down on a Thursday in the wet, in the year the sluice was rebuilt, and the last thing anybody could put in the book was that she had been heard laughing at something in the passage. Nobody has ever been able to say more than that. Maren Stile did the washing at the Fen House on a Friday. She was fifty-four and she spoke to a room the way other women speak to dogs.

“She comes up for her first name,” Maren said. “The one her mother gave her. Out loud, in there, by somebody who means it. That is the whole of it, and it is the only thing in nineteen years that has ever come close.” “Then that is not much of a rule,” said Bess Tither, who had the lease of the house and no paper to show for it. “It is the whole of it,” Maren said. “You can ring the bell and it is not that. You can kiss her and it is not that. It is the name, and somebody has to mean it.” Nell Crake was nineteen and she was at the table with the sheets, folding. She kept her head down over them the whole time Maren said it, and she did not look up, and the woman on the bed did not stir.

Joss Naylor was twenty-four and he was clerk to the vestry at Coldditch, and for eleven years he had kept the Register of Tryings. The book was his grandfather’s, begun the year the fen was drained, and it was kept because the village had a habit of forgetting what it had already tried. Every attempt to wake the woman went in: the date, who tried, what was said, and what came of it. Most entries are one line. Eleventh of August, a girl from the town with a guitar, nothing. Twice in one August, the whole school, nothing. Later, the fourth of March, Mr Marlow, senr., a name given, not hers, nothing came of it. Later still, the Kett boy, a name given, not hers, nothing came of it. The book is four hundred pages of the same six words in his grandfather’s hand and then in his, with the names changed.

His own entry for the woman is the only one he has never been able to finish. It is on a page by itself at the end, because he would not put it with the others. It gives her as the Hask girl of the Fen House. It gives the nineteen years. It gives every name said in that room with the clerk’s own note of what it was, and against the last one, this: A name I have not written down because I do not know it. Everything else has been said in that room and I have it all. This one is not in the parish book, the page being torn out, nor in the deeds, which give only Ann Hask, her father’s name, and he was not the one who named her. I have asked the old woman and the Tithers and the Marlows and the Kett woman. I have asked the man who buried her mother. Nobody in this village has ever heard it except one person, and she is not a person anybody thinks of.

Nell Crake had been at the Fen House eleven months. She slept over the washhouse end of the Tither kitchen. She had no father living, no people in the district, no money, and no claim on any house in Coldditch, and Maren Stile had picked her up off the carrier at Fen End because Maren Stile picks up anybody. Joss had asked her twice, politely, in the vestry with the door shut. Both times she said the same thing: she was four when she came here, and four is nothing, and she could not be expected to carry a name out of a village like this in her head for fifteen years.

The Marlows wanted the inheritance. Josiah Hask had left the Fen House and nine acres of fen strips, and the trust said the whole of it stood for his daughter, and a girl asleep is not a person the law can ask. Mr Marlow, senr., had the trust paper and a lawyer in town, and he came out on a Tuesday in April with his hat in his hand and sat on the chair by the window and looked at her a while before he said anything. Then he said her name. He said it well. He said it the way a man says a name when he has been practising it in a car on the way out, with the weight on the first syllable and no hurry at the end, and he said it to her, and he meant it as a holder of a trust means a name, which is to say he meant it the way you mean the name on a gate. Her hand lay on the blanket. It did not move.

“Nineteen years,” he said, putting his hat back on. “I should have thought one good lawyer and a decent coat would be worth something by now.” Joss wrote it up that evening in the plainest words he had: a name given, not hers, nothing came of it. He did not write that the man had meant it. He never wrote that anybody had meant it, because he had no way of knowing, and a clerk who writes down what he cannot see has stopped being a clerk.

The Kett family had wanted her for a marriage that was arranged and never finished. In the spring before she went down, her father and Alec Kett’s mother had had her named out in church on three Sundays, and the wedding was set for the Tuesday, and on the Monday she went to bed and did not get up. Alec Kett was forty-nine now and farmed the high ground and had never married, and his reason was in the vestry press in a yellow envelope with his mother’s ring in it, and everybody knew it and nobody said it out loud. He came in the June of the year before last with his mother’s name on his tongue, and he put it into the room, and it was a good plain name he had carried about for twenty years. Nothing came of it. He stood there until the fire went out.

Then he leaned down and kissed her forehead, which he had not planned and which everybody in the lane saw through the window, and the village held its breath about it for a week, and the bell rang at four, and at ten, and a fortnight after that a man came back from the fen with the news that her hand had gone across the blanket a foot to the right, high up, near her own face, in the middle of the night. Joss went in and put his hand flat on the blanket. It was no warmer than the rest of the blanket, and he wrote: hand moved in the night. Nothing came of it. “Twenty-two months,” Bess Tither said to him afterward. “A kiss did it, and the bell did the rest.” “No,” said Joss. “She heard him.” “She heard a bell,” he said. “If you write them down together in the same book you will have a village that believes a thing that is not so.”

Ada Hask was ninety-one and lived in the low cottage with the good door, and she was the only one of them who was not after anything. She wanted the woman’s hand. That was all she ever said she wanted, and she said it so often that people stopped hearing the size of it. She came on a Sunday and sat beside the bed and put her own hand, all knuckles and veins, into the woman’s open one, and she did not let go for an hour, and she talked the whole time about a pony. Then she bent down and said the name she had used since the woman was in arms, the silly one, the one nobody outside the cottage had ever used, which had come to stand for her entirely. “There she is,” Ada Hask said. “There’s my Mim. Come on, Mim.” The hand was still warm under hers. It did not take. Ada Hask waited a long time and then let go and sat back and looked at the face and said, “Well,” and laughed, and was angry with herself for laughing, and asked Joss on the way out whether he had written it down.

He had. It is in the book: the old woman said a name she has used every day of her life, and it was not the one, and nothing came of it. Afterward he asked her, in the lane, the question he had put to everyone in Coldditch. “What was she christened?” “Her mother said it once and then she was dead inside a year,” Ada Hask said. “I never asked. She was a baby, and then she was asleep, and I had a name for her that I liked the sound of better, and I used it, and the two of us were happy. Nineteen years, boy, and I have never once said the other one out loud, because what would I have started?”

The Tithers wanted her signature. They had the lease of the Fen House and no title, because the trust gave the house to the Hask girl and not to the tenants, and the sluice wanted mending, and the only money anybody in that parish could see was the Fen House itself. Bess Tither brought it up in the church hall and in the yard and in the end in the vestry, and she was not a bad woman, she said, and she was not asking for the house, she was asking for a signature on a paper, and a signature is a mark on a paper and not a hank of land. So they went looking for the name to sign it with. It was not in the trust paper, which gave Ann Hask. It was not in the parish book, the page being torn out. It was not in the deeds. It was in a tin box on the top shelf of the linen press, where schoolwork and letters and a ribbon had gone when Bess Tither cleared the front room out in the first year.

There were eleven letters in it in her own hand, and Joss Naylor read every one out loud in that room, and the eleventh had her name signed at the foot of it, the way a girl of sixteen signs a letter about a pony and the weather. He read it exactly as it was written, standing at the table with the paper in his hand. Nothing came of it. “It was her name,” Bess Tither said. “Her own name in her own hand, and it did nothing.” “She wrote it when she was sixteen,” Joss said, “and it is a name nobody has meant to her in nineteen years. It is a mark on a paper now, and a mark on a paper is the one thing she cannot hear.” He wrote it up. The entry is longer than the others: a name in her own hand, signed by herself at sixteen, read aloud entire in that room by a clerk, and nothing came of it, and it ends with the clerk’s hand shaking in the margin where he could not keep it steady.

There were other things, and the book has all of them. In the seventh year the tenor bell was hung and rung for the first time at ten in the morning, and a woman at the back of the chapel said she had seen the woman at the Fen House sit up, and half the village went up the lane to look, and she was lying on her left side with her hand open on the blanket where it had always been. And Joss had fallen asleep in the chair by the window one afternoon in his second year in the office, and woke with her talking. Not loudly. She was saying a name, two syllables, in the voice of somebody standing in a cold room at a kitchen table. The entry reads: she said a name in her sleep. Whether it was hers, I could not say. She did not wake, and nothing came of it. He took the entry out of the book once, some years later, and read it, and put it back in the same words.

Nell Crake washed at the Fen House on Fridays. On the last Friday in October the sluice was let off at noon, the lanes ran and the washing stayed in the pails, so Nell Crake was in the front room alone with the woman when the door came open and Ada Hask came in without knocking, which she did now, and stood in the middle of the rug. “You said you was four,” Ada Hask said. “Yes.” “What did they call you in for?” Nell Crake did not answer at once. Outside, the water was going down the lane in a brown sheet.

“They used to play with me in this room,” she said. “I was sat on the table, and the women asked me questions about her, and they were all laughing, and I answered them, and they told me not to say it again. Then my aunt came and took me away, a fortnight later.” She looked at the bed. “And then I was nine, and then I was in service, and then I was here. And every person in this village has asked me what she was called, and not one of them asked it the way you are asking it now.” “Did you remember all that time?” “Yes.” “You told that boy you did not.” “Yes,” said Nell Crake. “I did tell him so.” Ada Hask sat down on the end of the bed, which no one did, and put her hand on the blanket, not on the hand, and thought about it. “Then why now,” she said. “There is money in it. There is a coach at eight.” “There is a coach at eight,” Nell Crake agreed, “and I am on it.” “Why are you telling me?”

Nell Crake got up and put the chair back where it stood and looked at the window and the water. “I have not got a reason and I am not going to invent one at this hour,” she said. “I am not here for the house, and I am not here for the sluice, and I never had a mother in this village to be sorry for. You have all been at me since I was seventeen because you want a thing, and I am not sorry for you and I am not sorry for her either. I am not going to be handed a reason and use it, because then it would be the reason and not the name.” Joss Naylor was in the doorway with his book under his arm, and he had heard the whole of it, and he came in and shut the door and sat down. “If you say it now,” he said, “I have to write it in the book.”

“You write down what I say about it and you leave the name out of your book, or I do not say it at all,” said Nell Crake. “And I am saying it once, and I am not saying it a second time, because a thing said twice is a thing said twice.” “Say it once,” said Ada Hask. Nell Crake stood by the chair by the window. The water had got as far as the step. She looked straight at the woman’s face, and she was not gentle about it, and she was not crying, and she meant it the way you mean the name of the thing you have come out of a room for. She said it. The hand on the blanket did not move for the length of a breath, and Ada Hask said nothing and did not touch her, which was the only thing anybody in Coldditch had managed to get right in nineteen years. Then the woman opened her eyes and looked at the three of them in the room, one at a time, and her hand closed on the edge of the blanket, and she said, in a voice that had had no use for a long time, “Is the water up to the step?”

The water went out of the lane by six and left a brown line along the bottom of the door, the way it always did. The fire was out in the grate and the grate was cold and grey in the morning, and the blanket was pushed back, and the chair by the window stood square to the room with the seat still dented in it. The jug on the table had a skin on the water in it, and the cup beside it was dry. On the table, under the salt, lay the register, open at the last written page, with the clerk’s last line ending in a full stop and a lot of white paper under it. The window had one fly on it. Outside, the cart tracks down the lane were full of water and the alders at the fen end were still dropping, and the bell was due at ten.