The rain gauge stood at the bottom of Nora Whitlock’s garden, on a post between the apple tree and the fence, and it had been there since the spring of 1979. A white funnel, a clear inner tube, and a measuring cylinder that lived indoors on the shelf beside the kettle.
Somebody had walked down to it at nine every morning with a torch and a notebook. For the first forty-three years that somebody was Bernard. For the last fourteen months it had been Nora.
She had not wanted the job. On the fourth morning after the funeral she went down to the post without deciding to, found the tube full from a night of rain, carried it back to the kitchen and poured it into the cylinder. Twenty-one point six. She wrote 21.6 mm in the column for the second of September, and after that she wrote something every morning, because there was no gap in the book, not one day in forty-three years, and she was not going to be the one who made one.
The village knew about the gauge. In the shop they asked her what the weather was doing, as though she had inside information. Her son Martin rang on Sundays from Bristol about the flat with a lift, and she said she was thinking about it.
On the fourth of November it rained from before light. She was at the back door in Bernard’s coat, the torch already in her hand, when somebody knocked at the front.
The young man on the step was soaked through. He had a clipboard in a plastic bag and a high-visibility vest under a jacket that was not waterproof. He apologised twice before he gave his name.
“Sam Okonjo. I’m with the drainage board. Second year of my apprenticeship.” He lifted the bag. “I’ve got photocopies of some letters your husband wrote to the council. I’d like to talk to you about them, if it’s not a bad time.”
She let him in anyway and put the kettle on.
He sat at the kitchen table with the folder open, dripping quietly onto the tiles. The letters were dated between 1996 and 1998. Bernard had typed them on the machine still in the cupboard under the stairs, and had never mentioned posting them.
“He wrote about the ford,” Sam said. “Mill Lane. He said the culvert was too small, and that somebody would be killed there.” He turned a page. “Then he wrote again in December 1998.”
“I know what happened in 1998.”
“Yes. Sorry. That isn’t why I’m here.” He started again. “The board is remodelling the Beck. The logger on the bridge keeps failing, and we need a long rainfall series for the catchment. Mr Whitlock’s is the longest anyone has at one site.”
Nora looked at the shelf above the kettle. Forty-four exercise books, one to a year, the year on each spine in biro.
“You want the books,” she said.
“I want to photograph them. In here. They don’t leave the house.”
That was reasonable, which was inconvenient. She took down the volume for 1998 and put it in front of him.
He read for ten minutes without writing anything. Then he asked the question she had been waiting for.
“There’s a gap.”
“No, there isn’t.”
He turned the book round to show her. October 1998: the fourth, 38.2 mm. Then eleven pages with the columns ruled and empty, and words in Bernard’s handwriting across the middle of the paper. No record. No record. No record.
“Eleven days,” Sam said. “Then nothing until March.”
“The Beck came over the bridge on the fifth. The water was waist-deep in the village hall, and it went through six houses on Mill Lane. Alan Pryce drove into the ford at half past nine at night and drowned in his car. My husband was one of the men who pulled it out.” She heard her own voice go flat and let it stay flat. “After that he didn’t write anything for five months. In March he started again, wrote an apology at the top of the page, and never missed another day until he died.”
Sam sat still. Rain worked at the window behind him.
“He never mentioned that in the letters,” he said at last.
“Letters to a council are about culverts.”
“He wrote eleven of them. Somebody answered all eleven. The culvert was replaced in 2001.” “My supervisor had the file in a drawer for twenty years. He gave it to me the week I started and told me to find out who this man was.”
Nora said nothing for a while. Down at the fence the Beck was running high and brown, carrying leaves.
“What do you do with the missing days?” she asked. “When you build your model.”
“We fill them in from the nearest gauge. Bishop’s Norton. Twelve miles off.”
“Then print them as missing days, not as Bishop’s Norton rain. Eleven days of a village under water is the most important part of those forty-three years.”
“I can do that.” He took a pen out of the plastic bag and wrote it on the back of his hand. “I’ll flag them in the series and my supervisor signs it off.”
She brought the rest of the books down from the shelf, all forty-four, and stacked them beside him. He photographed pages until half past one, standing the volumes against the teapot to hold them open, and she sat across the table and watched the whole record go into his phone.
Then she took him out to the post in the rain and showed him how to lift the tube out without spilling it, how to tip it into the cylinder on the draining board and read the line against the light.
“Twelve point four,” he said.
“Then write it.”
He wrote 12.4 mm in the column for the fourth of November. She told him to put his initials after it, and he did, S. Okonjo, in small careful letters, and left a smear of ink at the end of the line.
He came back at nine the next morning. She gave him the torch and stood in the doorway with her arms folded, and the rain went on doing what it had done every day of the book.
