Alderwick is a cathedral town of about eleven thousand people, and if you have never been to one it is difficult to explain what they are like.
There is a river and a weir. There is a cathedral you can see from every field for nine miles. There is a college that was founded in 1340 and has been quietly wealthy ever since, and a high street with four charity shops and a Waitrose and a pub called the Founders' Arms, and there are about nine families who have been there since anybody has been keeping track.
You can tell the families by the street names. Vane Street. Hallow's Row. Thorne Lane. Sinclair's Yard, which is a car park now.
Selena had noticed the street names in her first week of first year, in the way you notice anything at eighteen — briefly, and then not again for two years.
Her roommate, Wren Okonkwo, was doing chemistry and had stayed up for the summer because of a lab placement, and was therefore the only other person Selena knew in a town of eleven thousand.
"You've gone weird," said Wren, on the Tuesday.
"I've been in a basement for a fortnight."
"You've gone weird, though. You did the thing at dinner where you look at the wall." Wren put her feet up on the other chair. "Is it the archivist? Because I'd go weird if I had to report to that woman once a week. She's like something out of a play."
"She's fine."
"She's about ninety and she's got hands like a girl of nineteen. I've seen them. It's the single most disturbing thing in this town and nobody talks about it."
Selena walked down to the river that evening because she could not sit still.
The Weir is a hundred yards below the boathouse, where the river goes over a stone lip and turns white and then very fast for about forty feet before it goes quiet again. There is a footbridge above it and a chain-link fence on the college side that has been there since the eighties, and a small brass plaque screwed to the handrail that Selena had walked past perhaps four hundred times.
She stopped and read it, for the first time, at half past nine on a Tuesday night in July.
IN MEMORY OF FRANCESCA HALLOW, 1965–1985. THIS COLLEGE REMEMBERS.
She stood on the footbridge and looked at it.
Then she went back up the hill and did not sleep for a while, and at about one in the morning she sat up in the dark and said, out loud, to nobody:
"Nineteen eighty-five."
Which was eleven years after 1974, and meant nothing at all, and which she wrote on the pad anyway, because that is what you do with a thing you cannot put down.