The town of Tarnby is built on a field that is not there any more. Two hundred years ago the millers wanted a bigger head race, and the way a man gets a bigger head race is to hold water over the land above the mill, and that is what they did. They cut a new channel across the upper meadow, they raised the old beck wall a foot, and in the wet spring that followed the water came up and did not go back down. The top fields went under in a fortnight. There is a wall down there with its top course level with the surface, and hedgerow trees grown fat enough to be called boats. In a dry August you can see the lines of the hedges under the water the way you see a road under fog.

Nobody in Tarnby finds that part tragic. It was done for the price of flour, and the price of flour was good, and the town has had a hundred and eighty years of clean water out of it. It is the oldest fact in the place and the half of it that matters is the other half. The meadow was taken on a date. There is a book. The book is called the water-book. It lives in the sluice house on a shelf above the spare gate irons, where the damp gets at it in a hard winter. I kept the sluice eleven years. My mother kept it before me. The water-book was never hers and is not mine. It belongs to the man whose whole work is the book, and for forty-four years that man was Corin Slee, and he was seventy-one when I started asking him about it. The book is ruled in five columns. Date. Wind. Tailrace at dusk. Received. And second from the left, a column headed NAMES. I had looked at that column a thousand times without reading it, the way you look at a nail in a doorframe.

The Received column is where Corin Slee wrote. Every ninth of October, in a hand that never changed, he wrote 1 yr. Two hundred of those, day by day, with no gaps anywhere in the book, and no shillings ever set beside them. On that same night he wrote the tailrace, and the figure on a ninth of October was always the highest in the book. Higher than any flood. A foot or more above anything else in two hundred years of figures. One March morning he came out along the head race where I was working the chain and the spanner, and he stood a while before he said anything.

“I want it said out loud once,” he said, “while there are two of us left who can hear it. You will have had the talk your whole life. Here is the shape of it. The meadow went under on the ninth of October in the year of the big water. The town took it. Every ninth of October since, one year comes out of one house in Tarnby. It comes out of a life, not out of a purse. It goes quiet. Nobody is carried off and nobody dies of it and nothing is marked on anybody. The house does not know anything has gone. Then the next ninth comes round, and the arithmetic comes out wrong, and that is the house that learns it. There is no more on it than that.” I asked him the question the whole town has one answer to, which was whose year. “That is not in the book.” “Somebody’s has to be.” “Aye,” Corin Slee said. “That is the whole of what I have been trying to say to you for three years.”

The house Tarnby knows about is the Teels. Wren Teel paid on a ninth of October thirty-one years ago, in the year of the hard winter, and the story is so well worn that people tell it in the same words, which is a sign that nobody ever went and checked any of it. Hal Teel was eleven. His mother was forty-four on that ninth of October and forty-six on the tenth of October the year after, and there was no year missing in between that anybody could put a name to. He noticed at her hands. She had washed in cold water since he was tall enough to see her doing it, and in one ordinary year her hands had gone the shape and colour of her mother’s, and her wedding ring would not go past the knuckle. That was what he told them. Not that she was tired. That her hands were different and the ring was stuck.

Nobody in the Teel house ever said the word to her. That is the part Hal has not got past. His father asked her if she was all right and she said she was, and there the thing sat in that kitchen for the rest of her life. She lived nineteen years more. She was seventy-three when she died, and seventy-three was the age she had a right to, and that was the end of it. And nobody ever told her either. There was no telling to be done. The arithmetic has to be found, and finding it is work somebody inside the house does without being asked. That year it was found. After that there was nothing left to say to her, and so nothing was said, and the Teels stayed on the corner and the town stayed pleasant to them about it for thirty years.

The house that paid last year was the Ashes, and I was in the room when the bill came in. Bo Ashe is a carter and drives the four horses between Tarnby and the coast road. On the ninth of October last year he took a load of flour to Halder, and came back, and put the horses in, and ate his supper, and slept the same as any other night. On the tenth he could not get his glove on his right hand. By the end of the month his back had taken to the shafts and there was a thing on his heel that the bootmaker said was his age and not his work. He was fifty-three. On the ninth of October this year the arithmetic came out and put him at fifty-five, and the mill’s rate sheet changes at fifty-five, and the chit for that week had him on the fifty-five rate. Two years in one. He did his teeth like a young one all his life, and the dentist in Halder wrote a note about it.

The thing nobody is ready for is that Bo Ashe is not mourning. He is fifty-five and he feels exactly as he felt when he was fifty-three, and he keeps saying so, and he is not lying. “I have not lost a thing,” he said. “I went to bed and I got up and the year was in me and I do not remember one hour of it. Do not sit there looking sorry for me, Roza. I had a good year as far as I can tell.” That was in the mill office with nine of us in it, and it was Fenn Ashe, thirty-two, his son, who would not let it lie. Fenn had come in with the chit in his hand and he put it flat on the desk. “Then it is on your paper,” he said. “You write a number in a column every ninth of October and you have never once put a name under it. I have had a year off this house. I am the one standing here with my father on the wrong side of a rate sheet. Write his name.” Corin Slee turned the book round on the desk and put a finger on the second column. “NAMES,” he said. “There is your column,” said Fenn. “Two hundred years of lines ruled down it and not one name on any of them.” “I have never chosen a house in my life,” Corin Slee said. “I write down what the water does.”

He came out to the sluice the next morning with the book under his arm and shut the door behind him and stood in the dry with his coat still on. “I have made a decision,” he said, “and you are going to tell me I am a fool, so I have said it first and you can get on with it. Tomorrow I stop. That is all. The book goes on the shelf and the door shuts and we all go down to the mill and work. If nothing is written then nothing is owed. That is the only argument I have and I have been keeping it since I was sixty.” “The water stood over the top gate mark last night,” I said. “I was down there with the rule and the lamp at one o’clock.” “Yes,” he said. “The mark is level with the sill. That mark only goes under in a real spate.”

“Yes,” he said. “The book is not what does it, Roza. I have been telling you that for three years and you have not heard a word of it. The water came up over that meadow in the wet spring of the year of the big water and it has come up every ninth of October since, and I did not make it, and my not writing will not stop it. But not writing is the only thing in this that is mine.” Then he went home, and he did not look back at the shelf, and nothing at all happened in Tarnby that night. I want that set down plainly, because it is the part people do not believe afterwards. No light in a window. Nobody up. Nobody crying out, nobody ill, nobody found in the morning on the towpath or in the race or anywhere else. I sat on the wall above the tailrace until the lamp burned out, and the water went down, and the town slept. In the morning he was at the table with his coat off. “No entry for the ninth,” he said. “No.” “Then it is done.” “It is done,” he said, the way a man says that the rain has stopped.

The ninth of October a year later was a Monday and it rained in the afternoon, and Fenn Ashe came to the sluice house with a coat he had not bothered to button. He had spent the year looking for the one that went missing. He had gone at it the hard way: door after door on the row above the mill and along the terrace, and out to Halder with a list of birthdays and wage chits copied out of the mill books, the same as he would have done for a debt. He had found nothing whatever. “You cannot miss what nobody knows is there,” he said. “I went to door after door asking had anybody aged, had anybody’s back gone, had anybody lost a tooth, and every one of them looked at me as if I had asked them whether their kettle was sound. And they are right. They are all exactly the age they were. Except one, somewhere in this town, and he does not know it, and he will never know it, because there was nothing written and there was nothing for anybody to find.” “There was the tailrace,” I said.

Corin Slee put the book on the table and opened it at the ninth of October and we all three looked at it. Two hundred years of day after day, one line to every date, one gap, and the gap was ruled and empty and sat in the middle of the book like a missing tooth. “There is your year missing,” he said, not unkindly. “And here is the ninth of October after it. Nine feet one. The highest figure in the book, and the highest of the two hundred beside it is eight feet four on a night in the year of the big water. So it came up. Somebody paid it. It is just not written down anywhere on this earth, and it never will be, and there is no house in Tarnby you could point at and say that one, and it is not because of anything I have done.” “You did it for nothing,” Fenn said. “That is what you have done. You took the year and you threw the receipt away.”

Then Corin Slee squared the book and put both hands flat on it. “There is a date coming on Thursday,” he said, “and there is a hand to write it, and the hand has been mine for forty-four years. I am not doing it again. I have written that figure down two hundred times and I was never once told what it was for, and I am seventy-two, and this year I watched a man of fifty-three try to put a glove on.” “You cannot hand the book to nobody,” I said. “A book has to be carried.” “No it has not. It can sit on a shelf. It has sat on that shelf every day of its life and it will sit there perfectly well till it goes to pieces, and nobody in this town will be a day older.” “You could put his name in it,” Fenn said. “Bo Ashe, ninth of October, 1 yr. There. Then we know, and I can say it out loud.” “No,” Corin Slee said. “Then his wife does the arithmetic and finds her husband gone, and his son is the one who read it out. What good is that.”

Then he put a finger on the empty column and said the thing about it without any pride in it at all. “I ruled this myself in 1981,” he said. “Straightedge and my own ink, in the winter I took the job. Nobody made me rule it off. There was never a name in this book because there was never a name to put in it.” “There is one now,” I said.

I wrote the ninth of October a year on. Corin Slee wrote the wind and the tailrace and the figure in the fourth column in the hand that had not changed in forty-four years, and he wrote 1 yr, and then he pushed the book across the table to me without a word, and I put Roza Kell in the names column, in ink, sitting on a stool in the sluice house with the lamp on because the light had gone early. It bought one thing and one thing only, and my mother is the one who bought it. Wenna Kell keeps the household book. It is not a money book. It is dates. The day I was born in this room, the day the sluice came to me, the year I married and the year I did not, and once a year, on the ninth of October, a line with the age of every person in the house against the year. She has kept it since before I was born, in the same small hand, without any fuss.

She came down to the sluice house on the Thursday morning of the ninth with the book open to that page, and she put her finger on the last line she had written, which was the year before. “Forty-one,” she said. “That is my age.” “Forty-two in that column.” “I know what is in that column, Mother.” “Aye,” Wenna Kell said. “I know you do as well. I have not slept, and I have been over it four times, and I am not going to do it again. It says forty-two, and it is the ninth of October, and it is a year since last Thursday. So that is one year, and you are forty-three.” “I am not,” I said. “You are,” she said, “and you are at the kitchen table with your hand on the bread board, and it is exactly these hands, Roza. It is my hands this time. I had a fortnight with them in 2011 and I know them.” Corin Slee came down at eight with his coat off to look at the name, and he stood at the table a while.

“So there it is,” he said. “Two hundred years and somebody’s name in it, and the water came up the same as ever. Not a drop more for it and not a drop less.” He put two fingers on the page, the way he had put them on the spine of the book that March morning two years before.

“You will want to know why there was never a name in it,” he said, “so here it is, once, and you can carry it up to the mill if you have a mind to. The river has never asked this town for a year of anybody’s life. Not once in two hundred years. It came up over that wall in the wet spring of the year of the big water, because men wanted a bigger race and men can do what they like to a river. Since then it has come up over that wall every ninth of October the same as it comes up over everything else, and it has never said one word to us about money, or about years, or about what is owed. The debt is ours. We took an afternoon of somebody’s grass in a wet spring and we have never paid for it, so every ninth of October one of us goes out and takes it out of whichever one of us is nearest. That is the whole of the sum. There is no water in it.” He shut the book and squared it against the table edge. “I made the column blank because I could not stand to be the one who chose,” he said. “And the river never asked me to choose anything. I chose it every ninth of October for forty-four years, and the river never gave me a line.”