Ysolde kept the lock at Marrow Bend, and the lock kept a book.
Every boat that went through went into it: the name painted on the bow, what it carried, which way it was headed, the hour by the lock-house clock. The canal company sent a clerk twice a year to copy the book into their own ledgers. The rest of the time it hung on a hook by the window, a fat, soft-cornered thing with a pencil tied to it on a string.
In the ninth autumn she went upriver for two days to see her sister. When she came back after dark the hook was empty.
She stood looking at it with her coat still on. She checked the floor under the hook, the table, the chair, behind the stove. Nothing. The door had been latched, not locked; anyone on the towpath could have come in. She thought of the coal barge men who'd argued with her over the toll in August. She thought of damp, of rats, of the boy who sometimes slept in the boathouse. None of it mattered. The book was gone, and with it the whole season.
So she lit the lamp, found a new copybook in the drawer of spares, and began again from memory.
She worked all night. She was good at it, at first. She remembered the Cormorant coming down with slate in the first week of spring, because the skipper had a cough you could hear across the basin. She remembered the pleasure boat with the green awning that came through four times in June. She remembered the hay barges by the smell.
Past midnight it got harder. The hours went first. She knew the Tidewell had come through on a wet morning, but not which wet morning, so she wrote eight o'clock, because eight was when most things came. Then she noticed she'd written eight o'clock for nine boats in a row, and let it stand, because she had nothing better.
Some boats she was sure of and wrote down firmly. The Maudlin, with timber, upstream, in the hot week. She could see its blue bow in the chamber with the water rising.
By grey light she had forty pages. They were neat. The boats followed one another sensibly, the cargoes made sense for the season, and the hours were round. She tied the pencil to it, hung it on the hook, and slept in her chair.
In the morning, getting the kettle down, she moved the lamp. Underneath it was a square of paper in a clerk's hand:
Called Tuesday. Entries copied through 30th Sept. Book returned to the left-hand drawer for safekeeping, as your hook is by an open window. — Pask, for the Company.
The left-hand drawer was the one under the spares drawer. The book was in it, warm-cornered and whole, with the pencil on its string.
The paper had been on the table the whole night. She had lit the lamp on top of it.
She sat down with the two books side by side, because she couldn't help it.
The real one was untidy. The Tidewell had come through at twenty past six, not eight. Somebody called the Hen & Penny had paid its toll in eggs, and she had no memory of it at all. One small boat had gone up and then come back down the same afternoon, which she'd forgotten, so her copy had it only once. The green-awning boat had come five times in June, not four.
And there was no Maudlin. Not in the hot week, not anywhere. She turned every page twice. Then she found it in the back of last year's book, on the shelf: timber, upstream, the hot week, a year ago. She had seen the blue bow quite clearly. It had simply been the wrong summer.
Her neighbour from the cottage by the weir came over at noon, heard the story, and laughed.
"Well, that's all right then," he said. "Nothing lost. Burn the new one."
She almost did. It would have been the tidy ending. The real book was back on its hook, and the forty pages were a night's fright and nothing else.
But she kept thinking about the clerk, who would come again in spring, and the next lock-keeper after her, and anyone else who might open the spares drawer one day and find a second passage book for the same season in her own handwriting. It looked exactly like a record. It had dates. It had a boat in it that hadn't been there. Someone could believe it.
And she kept thinking about the eight o'clocks. She had not known, before last night, that when her memory ran out it wrote eight o'clock. Or that it would fill a blank with a boat it knew from somewhere else and hand it to her with the colour of the bow, so she'd feel certain. She had always trusted that part of herself. Now she had forty pages showing how it worked.
So she didn't burn it. She took the pencil off its string and wrote across the cover, in letters big enough to read from the door:
Written from memory, the night I thought the book was lost. It was not lost. This is not a record.
Underneath, smaller: The note was under the lamp.
Then she put it on the shelf beside last year's book, spine out, where she would see it whenever she reached for the real one.
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