It had not moved by four o’clock, and by then there were nine people on the frontage of the lower station with their cases and their hats, waiting to go up to Tannery Moss. Nell Cardew stood in pan two, in her wicker splash, with harbour mud in the seams of her boots. She had come off the loading stage at three for the balance sheet and had not stopped to clean them. The drum came on. It came on smoothly, the whole width of its turn, and it took up nothing.

Ivo Trant took his hand off the brake lever. “Sixteen knots and falling,” he said. “Twenty-two on the gust. Four seconds to stop her and she is not stopping short. Nell, step down.” She stepped down onto the grating. The cable above her went slack and hung there with the rain in it. “Thank you,” she said. “Do not thank me yet.”

They fetched Gwilym Ore out of the engine shed, where he had been at the brake gear since morning. He had a leather apron on with a horseshoe burn across the front of it, and a pencil behind his ear that he had forgotten was there. He put one hand flat on the side of the car, and went along it to the far end, and came back and did it again. “Two hundredweight of water in the bottom tank,” he said. “Since Tuesday. She came in with it.”

They opened the valve and let it go over the stage. It went out in a long grey sheet across the flags and off the edge into the harbour, and the smell of it came up, iron and weed and cold. “Now try.” Nell said her name again, out loud, in the room, with Ivo hearing it, which is the whole of how it is done. “Nell Cardew holds for the lower line.” The drum came on. The car went up the width of a thumbnail and stopped, and the cable above it went slack in one long curve. “Two hundredweight,” Gwilym said. “That is not why.”

The arithmetic took the rest of the afternoon and it was not difficult. Four hundredweight of car with the tanks dry. A ton of mail in the back. Four people in the front at eleven stone apiece, one of them a man with a paintbox and his own idea of what a paintbox weighs. Six of them standing in the pans at nine stone, which is fifty-four stone of people, which is nothing.

“Three hundred and twenty stone of her,” Gwilym said. “A hundred and sixty of mail. Forty-four of your four. And then one grown person standing beside it, because there is no tolerance on this and there never has been.” “And it wants more than that.” “It wants five hundred and thirty-eight, and it has fifty-four.” He put the pencil behind his ear again, which he did not have to do. “You were never going to lift her. None of you were.” Somebody at the back of the frontage said, “Well, put somebody else on.”

There was nobody else on. That was the arithmetic of it as well. The pans were empty. That was why the car would not go, and not the water at all. At the end of every journey the ballast comes out of the pans and down through the grating into the pit, so that the pans are light to be pulled down, and in the morning somebody has to bring it up again in barrows, and this morning nobody had. “There is stone enough down there for forty-one journeys,” Gwilym said. “Eleven years of it.”

Nell got down onto the grating and looked through it. The pit is two deep under the balance room. The grating is the only place in Wyver Hold where a person can look at the whole weight of the town at once, and there was stone down there to the depth of a man’s knee, grey and wet and the right size for two hands, and not one piece of it had a name on it.

They barrowed it up out of the pit from half past four. Four men, and the good-natured sort of swearing you get in a building where everybody is useless at the same job. Nell counted the barrowloads, because she was the one who counted things. Seventeen, and then eleven of the small stuff, and Ivo Trant put his hand flat on the side of the last barrow coming down the ramp and stopped it. “Leave that one,” he said. “Three hundred and eleven is not a figure you get twice.”

“Thirty-one years on that drum,” he said. “I have been at the top of this town twice. Both times I walked down.” She wrote it on the sheet in chalk with her finger up the side of her nose against the cold. Then she got into pan two on top of it and said her name into the room for the third time, and eleven stone of her went onto three hundred and eleven stone of stone.

The car went up. It went up slowly, with the sound that every person in Wyver Hold can name and no other town has, both cables going taut at once and a long iron shrug going through the whole building. Nine people stood on the frontage and watched four of them climb a hill, and one girl standing at the bottom of the world holding up the other end.

They let them out at intervals. Gwilym said the mail would go at eight and the paintbox man could take his chances on Thursday, and nobody argued with him about it, because he is a mechanic and a mechanic is not a person you argue a poundage with. At five the stone had been used and the car was down and empty, standing under the water in the shed with its chains slack and its floor wet through.

Gwilym had said four hundredweight, and he is not a man who says a thing he has not weighed. Four hundredweight of car, and the pit had to hold up every pound of it twice a day, and there was nine stone of girl in it and a pair of boots with the harbour in them. She ate her lunch standing up, because she always did, and she was facing the drum.

The doctor is at the top of the hill, because the hospital is, and at twenty past six a message came up the quay from the house by the fish market. A man had gone down on the loading stage and they wanted the doctor. Nell was still in the balance room with the sheet on her knee and the lamp going. The car was empty. The pans were empty. The stone was all in the pit where it had come from, and there was half an hour of light left in it, and it takes an hour and ten.

They barrowed it up again. She counted twenty-one loads, and she did not tell anybody what the twenty-first was for, and then she stepped into pan two and said her name into a dark balance room with the grating under her boots and the rain going over the frontage. “Eleven shillings,” somebody said, from out on the flags, in the voice people use. “And would you not go up, if the book were not there?” “Thursday,” said Nell.

Then the drum came on, and the floor came up through the soles of her boots, and an empty car went up to the moor with a lamp lit by hand in it and nobody in it at all.