A miller named Bess Vail kept the mill on the Wen, above a low weir, and a slab ford lay a hundred paces downstream. Bess's boy Roon was six when she went into the ford on a March night and did not come back out of it. The parish book for that March has three entries, and the last is a single line. B. Vail, at the ford, not found. The village raised Roon. He ate in nine kitchens and stayed long in none of them. He learned the mill from a man who disliked him, and learned it well, because a wheel and a race do not care whose son you are.

He knew his mother from a tin in the drawer of the mill kitchen. She was sitting on the porch with her hands in her lap, not looking at the camera, and there was no other picture of her in Tarbeck. They stopped saying her name before he was old enough to ask.

He was nineteen. It was the end of August, and he was clearing weed out of the weir boards in the dark, because there was no moon. His arm was in to the elbow when his hand closed on something solid. A comb. Black horn, most of the teeth gone, worn smooth as a stone on the edge that showed. He had it half a foot under the surface, on his palm, when she came up the step. She did not come out of the water. She came up out of it, the way a woman comes up off a washing line, and stood on the slab in wet greys. She looked at him the way you look at a sum you have to finish.

Nobody in Tarbeck had told him there was anybody in the river. Ed Brale, eighty that year, said it afterwards: “We call her the Clerk. We don't know what else to call her, so we say Clerk, and she keeps a slate like the clerk at the board school.”

“Then that is what you have taken,” she said, “and this is what it is worth. You owe me one true thing a day. You name it out loud, here, before the light goes off the water. I keep a slate, so I will write it down. I will not ask you twice, not on the same day and not on any other day, and I will not forgive a day you have not named. A day you leave goes down with the date and nothing beside it. And it does not stop, Roon Vail. It does not stop because you lose interest in it. It does not stop because I do.” He said, “How do I get out?”

“Give me the comb.” She held out her hand. “Set it in my hand and set it down.” He put it in her hand. She looked at it. She did not shut her fingers on it. She gave it straight back. “Not yet,” she said. “You have not named them. That is all. You have not named them.”

The first thing he named that night was that he had been selling the mill flour short weight since he was seventeen, that two families in Kilbride had gone hungry because of it, and that he had weighed the sacks anyway. She wrote it in a small square hand. Then she looked up. “Tomorrow,” she said. He named things for three years. He named the day he put the weigher's thumb on the scale. He named the hired girl and her wages. Twice in one year he named the same thing, because there were two of them. Ed Brale caught him going down at dusk with the lantern and stopped him at the bottom of the lane. “You know she is not punishing you,” Ed said. “I know.” “No, but listen. That is not a punishment up there. That is an account. A man at Kilbride is owed four hundred pound and does not care whether you are sorry. She is like that.”

He stopped coming in the autumn of his twenty-sixth year. Nothing happened for a week. Then he went down one evening to say one thing and be done with it, and the slate was turned so he could read it: dates in chalk down the left, true things on the right, and a great many dates with nothing against them. He counted them with the end of his finger. “A thousand and forty-three,” she said. “And eleven that are written. You will not get it right twice, so read it twice.”

He asked whether it ended when she got tired of it. She said she had not got tired of it. He asked whether it ended if she died. She said it was not a thing she was going to be asked twice. Then she wrote the date and left the line blank. After that he watched what she did not do. She never asked him for a day. Not once in four years. He could stand on the slab a quarter of an hour saying nothing, and she would stand there the same, and then say, “Tomorrow,” and go under. He had been courting Norea Fenwick since he was twenty-four, and told her in the winter that he had somebody. She did not marry him.

Father Wick came out from Kelling in the spring and asked to see it. He put his cope on the slab and read the office for the dead over the ford at low water, and told Roon the comb was a thing of the world and must be given back to the world and not spoken to any more. Roon took it out of the weir boards with a boat hook and put it in and watched it go. He waited a week, feeling lighter every day of it. Then he went down at dusk to say one true thing, and there was a new line at the bottom of the slate with that evening's date and nothing beside it. “She wrote that night the same as any night,” Ed Brale said afterwards. “Say the words twice over and it makes the same line.”

Tobit Grale kept a scrivener's shop over the smithy and wrote for people who could not write. He came out to the mill with a sheet of good paper already begun on, having thought it all the way through, which was the trouble with Tobit. “Your mother is not dead,” he said. “That is my whole argument. She is a woman of Tarbeck, a widow, with a name and a house and a son. So write down that she lives. Set her up as a living woman, and the comb is a comb, and a comb is property, and property comes back to the family.” “Who writes down that she lives?”

“The court, in Kelling. There are men on that bench who will hear a thing like this in an afternoon and rule her alive.” They went on the Thursday. Mr Dunse heard the case in a room with a stove in it, and listened to Tobit twice. “Where is the comb now?” he said at last. “In the river, at the ford.” “You threw it in?” “That was the office of the dead read over it,” said Tobit. Mr Dunse looked at Roon for a while.

“Son,” he said, “I can make a finding about a deed, a will, or where a hedge is. I cannot make one about how many days a man has left unsaid, and if I could it would not serve you, because she would not take it off a court.” He shut the paper. “You handed it back to her, or you did not?” “I threw it in.” “That is a different word,” said Mr Dunse.

That winter Tam Fenwick bought the comb for two pounds. Tam carried it forty miles in a wool sack and put it in the sea off the boat ramp at Wrenthorpe, where the water is deep and there is nothing to catch on. Roon stood on the shingle and felt fifteen years come off him. It was not there the next week, or the week after. He waited a month, then went down to the ford at dusk to say one true thing, because he still had that to do.

She wrote it on the slate. Then she turned the slate round, and there was the thousand and forty-three, and the eleven, and the new lines he had named in between, and a great many dates with nothing against them, all the way down. “You have thrown away the paper,” Tobit Grale said when he heard of it. “Not the bill. Nobody ever throws away a bill by throwing away the paper.”

At the end of that winter Roon asked her how many there were. She turned the slate round and held it up where he could see it. He could not read a number in her hand. She read it out, he made her read it again, and she gave him the same number both times. “Nine hundred and sixty-two,” she said, “and no more, and it has been no more since Martinmas.” He said, “That is two years of talking. I have never talked for two years.” “You have never started,” she said.

It took him two years and two winters, and by the end of it he had the look of a man who has been in a room too long. She went on keeping the day's line while he paid it, one date a day, so the two numbers ran along together.

He named the weigher and the thumb on the scale. He named the four years he had not come. He named the summer he told himself he would come back and then did not, twice, because there were two of them. He named the girl again, and her wages, and her name. He named his mother sitting on the porch. He named the morning of the twenty-second of June, when he stood at the weir in the dark with a boat hook on purpose, and afterwards told everybody and himself that the water had put it in front of him. He kept that one back to the end. In all that time he had not named it once, and it was the oldest blank line on the slate.

On the last evening of the third March he went down before the light went off the water and said it out loud, and she wrote it and turned the slate round. The last line on it was full. “Give me the comb,” she said. He got it out of the boards with the boat hook and set it in her hand, and this time she shut her fingers on it.

At first light he shut the mill door and took his coat off the hook. The scoop stood in its place on the bench. The tin was in the drawer where it had always been. There was one plate on the table and it was clean, and the chair opposite had nothing over the back of it. Down at the ford the water came over the slab and went on its way. The comb was in it, going, black, the teeth gone, turning over once in the current and going downstream. Above the ford the mill wheel lifted a blade out of the race and dropped it and lifted the next.