Idris Lardner died in his bed on the Tuesday night, and Nell Cardew heard about it at twenty to seven on the Wednesday morning, because the red lamp on the corner of the lower station was lit and would not go out, and that is not a thing the lamp does for weather. Ivo Trant was standing on the drum room floor with his hand flat on the brake lever, the red mitten on his left hand and the right one bare and white to the second joint. “North-north-east, fourteen at the mast, gusting twenty-two,” he said. “She will hold. It is not the wind. Go down and see.” She went down the iron stair to the balance room and there were four people on the floor, and one of them was Bronwen Vasey with her spectacles off and in her hand.

“It is not a journey,” Bronwen said. “There has not been a journey. He held on Thursday. That is all of it. He held on Thursday and he was going to hold on Thursday, and now nobody has told me anything and I cannot ask because I am not going to ask his wife before eight.” The lamps were down and the pans were hanging. Six of them, in three pairs, two deep, two middle, two shallow, each one cut for a person to stand in, and the floor under them worn into a curve by eleven thousand pairs of boots. “He stood in the deep one,” Nell said. “On the Thursday. He always stood in the deep one.” “He always stood in the deep one,” Bronwen said, “and he was in it from twenty-five minutes to the minute, and he never once moved, and I have never had a complaint from him in nine years, and he cannot be complained of now, and that is the end of what I know about him this morning.”

The rota came in on the Wednesday on a sheet of paper with Teofil Rownt’s name at the head of it in a small tidy hand, and he brought it himself, in shoes that had never been on a cobbled quay. He put it down on the desk in the office and put one finger on the Thursday line and did not say anything for a while. “He is on it three times this week,” he said. “The two o’clock up, the twenty past three down, and the six past five, if the wind allows. He has stood nine times in the year. He is the steadiest weight on this line and I have never had to think about him.” “Mr Rownt,” Bronwen said. “He is dead.” “I know what he is,” Teofil said. “I have known since twenty to seven this morning, and I have been at that table since six, and there is a thing I have to say about the Thursday, and then I will go.”

“Go on, then.” “There is a bench.” He turned the sheet round so that she could see it. “Three names against the Thursday afternoon, and four against the Friday morning, and that is the week. And behind them the bench, which is seven names, and the bench is what a rota has instead of a prayer.” “How many of your seven can stand on a Thursday afternoon?” He did not look at the sheet. He had the answer ready, which told her that he had done this at six in the morning. “Two are at sea. One is in the hospital at Machynlleth and has been since Whitsun. Two are on the mill line, and they may hold for the mill and not for this, and you know that better than I do. One is a woman of sixty-eight who could not get up the steps at the top of Quay Street in a westerly and I have not put her on since Michaelmas. That is six.” “And the seventh?”

“The seventh is Evan Lardner, and he is twenty-four, and his father’s name was on the Thursday, and he is the natural, and it cannot be done.” “It cannot be done for two reasons,” Bronwen said. “He lives at nine Tannery Cottages, which is the upper line, and he has not spoken his name this year. That is two, and either of them is sufficient, and I will not write him into the book for a figure on a sheet.” “Then write him on the sheet and not in the book.” “That would be a lie with a coat on it,” Bronwen said. “Then it is for the week, then,” said Teofil, and stopped, because he could not finish it without costing it.

Mared Lardner came in at eleven on the Wednesday and sat on the settle by the stove with her wet coat over her knees, and she did not cry while she was there and Ivo Trant was in the doorway with his tea and did not sit down. She asked for one thing, and she asked for it the same way twice, and the second time was not louder. “Take his name out of that book.” “It is yours to ask for,” Bronwen said. “And it is the clerk’s to do, and it is not done while the cable is running, and it is not done in front of the drum.” “Then when?” “When the last journey is in and the book is shut, and I will do it myself, and I will do it with a straight edge, and I will write the day and the reason beside it in the margin, and that is the way the eleven clerks have done it since 1889.”

“You will write the reason?” “Mared,” said Bronwen, “the reason is that he is dead, and there is no column for that, and it goes in the margin in my hand, and it will be there as long as the book is.” Mared Lardner said thank you and went home, and Ivo Trant stood in the doorway with his tea going cold and counted under his breath, one, two, three, four, and did not go up. “Twenty-nine times in thirty-one years I have taken a name out of that book on the asking of a widow,” he said, “and it is the only job I have ever had that I could not do with a rule in front of me.”

The Thursday ran. It is the plainest day the Grip has and it ran plain. At twenty-five minutes to seven Nell Cardew checked the tallies on the pans. At two minutes past seven the seven-forty went down empty with five standing and one stone of plate, and at nine twenty it went up with eleven in it and four standing. The wind came round to the north-west and fell away to nine and she wrote it down because it was nine. At twenty minutes past two on the Thursday Mared Lardner came to the office again, and Bronwen Vasey had gone out to the drum room to give Ivo the Thursday figures, and had left the book open on the desk with the week’s figures half copied up, and Nell Cardew copying them because that was her work on a Thursday and because her hands were better with a brass straight edge than anybody over thirty in this town.

She was still copying when Mared Lardner came round the desk and put her hand flat on the page. “There,” she said. “That is the Thursday. Strike it out and let him be finished with.” “Mrs Lardner. Bronwen said not while the cable is running.” “Bronwen Vasey is not here.” “It is the third column of the Thursday,” Nell said. “It is not his name you are asking me for.” “It is his column.” “It is the Thursday,” Nell said, and heard herself say it, and did not know yet why she had said it. The page is ruled in three. The line a man holds for is in the first, the name in the second, and the days he has stood in the third, and they run down the page in the clerk’s hand in the order of the week, a column for the Monday and a column for the Tuesday and so on across, with a ruled line between each. A clerk does not strike a name. A clerk strikes a day. If a man does not stand on a Thursday then the Thursday is struck through for him, and if a man has not stood all year then the name is finished with at the foot of the page, which is the only part of the book anybody outside the office ever sees. Nell Cardew had ruled lines for eleven clerks.

She took the brass straight edge out of the drawer and laid it down the third column of the page and put the pen to it at the head of the Thursday and drew one stroke from the top rule to the foot of the page, the way you rule a margin. The cable was turning under the floor the whole time she did it and nobody in that office knew what a stroke in a book was. “There are four names in it,” Mared Lardner said. “There are four,” said Nell Cardew, and she counted them out loud, because she counted everything out loud. Then she put the pen down in the inkwell and went out on to the balance room floor, because that is what she has always done. It was twenty-four minutes past two, and the two o’clock up was twenty-two minutes out from the bottom station with eleven in the car, and Bethan Pryce was standing in the deep pan and Emrys Lloyd was in the shallow one with the plate at his feet, and the pans were locked, because the pans are locked when the cable moves and no name may be given or taken in the hour. Bethan Pryce felt it before she knew what it was. The chain came slack and the pan came down under her, three inches, four, the way a bucket comes down when you take your hand off the rope. And then the cable stopped.

She knew what had happened, because she had been in the balance room in 1919 when the mill line was struck out by a clerk at Cardigan and the town stood still for forty minutes, and she had never told anybody that story and she told it now, to the two men on the floor, in pieces, while the cable stood. “What was it?” Emrys Lloyd said. “Oiv — Ivo. What was it?” Ivo Trant had his hand flat on the brake lever. He had not touched it. The brake went on nine seconds after the drum stopped, and he had put it on, because the grip-man pulls the brake rather than trust anybody’s timing, and he did not know why and neither did anybody else. “Two twenty-four,” he said. “Hold your pans. Nobody out of them. Nobody moves at all.” “Why?”

“Because I do not know yet,” he said, “and because the car is two hundred feet up the span with eleven people in it, and I am not going to have one of them come out of a door on a cable.” That was an order. He had given an order in the Winding House at twenty-four minutes past two on the Thursday, and he had never given one in thirty-one years, and every order he had ever given in his life would have sounded exactly like a request, and he did not know that yet either. It was the only thing he did that day that he could not have done differently.

Gwilym Ore came down the ladder at ten past three with his leather apron on and the pencil behind his ear that he had forgotten was there, and he put the recorder drum on the bench in the balance room and turned it so that they could all see it. The recorder is a drum that turns once a day and a pencil that writes on it, and the pencil writes the weight of the balance against the hour of the day, and nobody in Wyver Hold reads it except Gwilym Ore, because it is the only instrument in the town that keeps writing when everybody has gone home. “Gwilym,” Ivo said. “What did it see?” “It saw the balance go from three hundred and eight pounds to nothing at two o’clock twenty-four and nought seconds,” Gwilym Ore said. “It saw the drum stop at two o’clock twenty-four. And it saw your brake go on at two o’clock twenty-four and nine seconds.”

The balance room was quiet enough to hear the river. “Three hundred and eight,” said Bronwen Vasey. “That is Bethan at nine stone two and Emrys at ten stone six and one stone twelve of plate under his boots, and it is the figure to the pound and I will not call it exact.” “It is exact,” Gwilym Ore said. “Three hundred and eight pounds, the recorder, the eleventh of November.” “Then the crossing-out did it,” said Ivo Trant, “and not the brake.” “No,” Gwilym Ore said. “The brake did not do it. The brake came after.” They went up to the office and found out what had been done. The Thursday had been struck from the third column of the week page from the top rule to the foot of the page with a brass straight edge and one stroke of the pen, and there were four names in the Thursday, and two of them were in the pans. “Hal Williams,” said Bronwen Vasey. “Cwm yr Yglas. He stands on Thursdays and he stands on Fridays and he has stood since 1913. And this Thursday is gone, and there are seven Thursdays left in the year, and he will not get one of them.” “Can it be put back?” said Ivo. She looked at the page for a long time.

“No,” she said. “Rule six. A name removed from the book stops holding at the moment of removal, wherever the person is. Bethan and Emrys were in the pans and they stopped at two twenty-four, which is why the drum stopped. And Hal Williams is in Cwm yr Yglas eating his dinner with his Thursday struck through, and none of the three can be put back by anybody, because a name is in the book by one spoken sentence containing the writer’s own name at the pan with the grip-man hearing it, and rule four says once a year for the line the speaker lives on, and all three of them said their names in January and not one of them may say them again.” “Then a Thursday is gone and three people have to wait for January.” “They said their names in January and there was nothing that wanted them,” said Bronwen Vasey, “and that is the part of this that is going to hurt, and I would rather say it now than at Christmas.”

At four o’clock Nell Cardew came into the balance room with the tallies in her hand and asked Gwilym Ore whether the recorder drum could be read for the morning, and he said it could, and she read it. She read it standing up, facing the drum, which is how she eats her lunch. “Seven forty-two, seven hundred and sixty-four,” she said. “Nine twenty-one, six hundred and forty, four standing and no plate. Two o’clock twenty-four, three hundred and eight, and then nothing at all, and there is no more line after that until a pencil mark at ten past three where I came in and looked at it.” “They are both right,” said Bronwen Vasey. “That is the awful part. The machine is accurate and the book is the law, and they agree, and two honest things are holding opposite ends of the same evening.”

Ivo Trant asked for the water at five. It was the only way anybody ever thinks of, and he thought of it because he has been on the drum for thirty-one years and knows every trick there is. “Gwilym. How long to put six hundred gallons into the bottom tank from the millpond standpipe?” “Forty minutes.” “And then you fill the bottom tank and the balance is over three hundred and eight again and the car comes down, and it makes not one penny’s difference what is standing in the pans.” “Yes.” “No, and a car that goes down on six hundred gallons of water goes down on its own account. It is a machine moving. It is not anybody’s promise, and if I run that car down on the water then in six weeks every man in this town will know that the line can be run on the millpond, and it can, and we will do it, and one day somebody will be nine pounds light in a car with a woman in it who cannot swim.” “The book is not on the recorder,” said Gwilym Ore. “The water is accurate,” said Gwilym Ore. “I know it is.” Nobody said anything else about the water.

Then it was a matter of asking. The Thursday sheet for the twenty past three down, with eleven in the car, wanted nine standing and one stone fourteen of the plate, and the rack in the corner of the balance room held two stone eleven of plate and had held two stone eleven of plate for nine years. “A car going down empty wants four,” said Bronwen Vasey. “And the twenty to nine up wants four. And there are two hundred and sixty people on the moss and the school is on the moss and the terminus is on the moss, and the car is two hundred feet below the terminus, and every one of them has to have it go up first.” “And the people on the moss,” said Ivo Trant, “cannot hold for this line, because they live on it.” There was no answer to that, and everybody in the room had known it for thirty years.

“Then it is nine now and four for six hours after,” said Ivo. “And a man who has spoken his name this year may stand as often as the year requires. That is rule five. The balance is worked out over the year and the work is divided as the year comes. I am not asking anybody for their name. I am asking for an hour.” “Ivo,” said Bronwen Vasey. “If you ask them for an hour and you do not like the answer, that is an order.” “It is a question and I will take any answer I am given and I will not ask a man twice,” said Ivo Trant, “and if it comes to that I shall stop asking, and we shall have no car, and that will be on me and not on them.” He asked between six and half past six. He asked at the pans, one at a time, in the pit, out loud, and he said the same eleven words to every one of them, and he wrote the answers down himself on the back of Teofil Rownt’s sheet, and he had never once in his life written on another man’s sheet and he did it now without asking.

Three were at the mill and would have come inside the hour and cannot hold for this line. Three had spoken in January for the upper line and cannot hold for this one. One was in the hospital at Machynlleth and his wife had told him not to get up. One was a woman whose husband was on the ferry and not back and who would not leave the quay. One said no, and gave no reason at all, and Ivo Trant said thank you and wrote it down and did not look at him again and did not ask him a second time. Two were at sea and he did not ask them, and he wrote their names with a line through them and did not put the word sea beside them. That is eighteen asked, and nine that could not or would not, and nine that said yes, and nine is what the sheet wanted, and Ivo Trant read it twice before he believed it.

They were not nine strong men. Bethan Pryce was not one of them; Bethan Pryce was standing in her own kitchen with her hands behind her back looking at the wall, because the book said she was not holding anything at all, and she had held for eleven years and had never once been told the time of it. Half of the nine were over sixty. One had a plate in her leg from the mill and stood with her weight on the other. One was seventy-four, lived at the far end of Quay Street, came in on his own two feet and went out at one in the morning on somebody else’s arm. They came at half past six and they did not go home at nine. They stood from half past six until half past twelve, with the plate at the limit and the pans locked and the drum turning under them, and they could not shift their feet, because the pans are one man’s width and the chain takes up when a man moves, and rule eight holds the whole time, and a man in a pan in the Winding House in November is a man standing in a cold iron box in the dark for five hours. She asked him at seven o’clock whether she could be one of the nine. “No.” “I take the tallies. I trim the shallow one. I have trimmed it since I was thirteen.”

“You trim it,” Ivo Trant said, “and I have not counted you towards the margin in nine years, and I am not going to start on the worst night this house has had. Rule one wants the weight of one adult over. You are not that, and you are not going to be that in January either, and I have never told you so and I should have told you years ago.” Nell Cardew stood in the pit and looked at the brass straight edge in the drawer, and there was a great deal she wanted to say about January and she said none of it. “I know what you are not asking,” she said. “I am not asking you anything,” said Ivo Trant, and counted under his breath, and one, two, three, four, and went up.

Aldith Marner had the top station. The two o’clock up had eleven in it and never arrived, and the terminus on the moss was two hundred feet above a cable that was standing still, and she had two hundred and six children’s worth of habits to keep and one stove, and she kept them, and she counted under her breath before she answered anybody all evening, which she does. She has never ridden the upper section and she had spent twenty-nine years describing the view from it to a class of children on Fridays. A boy of thirteen came to her at seven o’clock on the platform with his hat in his hands. “Miss. I’ll stand in the pan.” “No you will not.” “If I stood in the pan then the car could come down and then we could all go down.” “No,” said Aldith Marner. “Have you spoken your name this year?” “No, miss.”

“Then you could speak it. At the pan, at the bottom, out loud, with your own name in it, and the grip-man has to hear it, and then you could stand. That is all it would take.” The boy thought about it and looked at the standing cable and the wet mist going flat across the moor. “I could say it now,” he said. “You could not say it now,” said Aldith Marner, “because it must be said at the pan and he must hear it, and you are four hundred and ten feet up here and there is no pan here. And when there is a car again going down you may say it, or you may not say it, and it is the same size either way, and nobody in that building tonight will know which you did unless you stand in it.”

The boy put his hat on and went home. She did not see him again until the Saturday, and on the Saturday he told two boys at the school gate that he had been asked by the schoolmistress whether he could hold for the line and had said no, and did not explain further, and both of them thought he was lying, and Aldith Marner heard about it from the parish clerk in March and did not correct it. It came down at twenty to nine. It came down in the quiet and it came down slowly and Ivo Trant gave the wind and the brake time first, as he does, and then he said the number, and the number was eleven, and they were all eleven, and one of them was a boy of eleven who had gone to sleep over the second span and had slept through six hours of a car standing still in the dark. It was the twelfth time in thirty-one years that the line had stopped with a car on the span and nobody had been hurt. Ivo Trant wrote it in the drum room book, in the twelfth line, with the wind and the time and the number of feet and the number in the car, the way he has written the eleven before it.

Then he ran six journeys between twenty to nine at night and half past twelve, and the top emptied by twenty to one, and there were people on that cable after midnight who had been on the moss in the afternoon eating their tea out of tins. The nine stood twenty-two minutes a journey, six journeys, two hours and twelve minutes each, and nineteen hours and forty-eight minutes in the whole of it. Bronwen Vasey wrote it into the second book with her own ruling, and gave the total as nineteen hours and fifty, within two minutes. “I will not call it exact,” she said. “A figure of that size is not a figure I can call exact, and it does not need to be, and the margin is inside what the book will carry.”

Mared Lardner came into the office at eight on the Friday morning, before the coffin was put on. “Could I have said my name?” she said. “In January. At the pan. Is there a thing about it I have not been told?” “You live on the lower line and you said it once in January and you were not on the rota, and there was no journey that wanted you that week,” said Bronwen Vasey. “So your name is in the book and it has been spent, and I cannot put it back in for you, and I am not going to invent a column for it.” Mared Lardner stood with her hand on the edge of the desk for a while. “Then it will have to be January,” she said. Nell Cardew took her sheet and went up to the drum room and left the two women to it, which was what she was for.

In the office on the Friday morning at ten minutes to eleven, Teofil Rownt made a list of the nine names in the margin of his own sheet in pencil, because he would not alter a printed rota with a hand-picked addition in ink. “That is not a record,” Bronwen Vasey said. “It is for me and it is mine,” said Teofil Rownt. “And you may have it in the second book in ink, and I will witness it, and it is not in the rota, and the rota is what runs the line.” “No,” said Ivo Trant, from the doorway, and then he stopped, and then he said the rest of it. “Mr Rownt. It was never in the rota, not for one hour in thirty-one years. Every one of those nine is a name in the book, and every one of them said it once in January, and the only thing the rota did was decide that they would never be asked. That is all the rota is.”

He put his hand on the door frame. “Your sheet is a good sheet and I have not the least complaint against it,” he said, “but I cannot retire on it. My daughter is at the top of this hill and I have not stood in that room in my life, and if you put me down for the Thursday afternoons to fill this margin out, then some day in thirty years somebody will cross a Thursday out of the book and nobody will notice that I was in it.” “Mr Trant,” said Teofil Rownt, “for the year, then.” “For the year, then,” said Ivo Trant. The first journey went up at eleven o’clock on the Friday, with the coffin on it and six bearers, and Evan Lardner holding one of the corners, and nine names on the pans of whom not one was on the rota, and the wind north-west at twenty-two, and it would hold.

At twenty to one that morning there had been two hundred and sixty people off that cable on the moss, and among them a schoolmistress of twenty-nine who had never ridden the upper section and did not see the view at all, because it was dark and she was busy counting the children off a car. On the Friday morning she stood at the rail of the top station while the coffin went up past her, and she counted under her breath before she went down, and she did not finish the count.