The water arrived on the night of the eighteenth of January, when the frozen river above the town decided, in the dark, to become a liquid thing again, and it climbed the bank and laid its long cold tongue against the basement windows of the Southern Range of the Whitmore Institute for Letters, where the Eleanor Fairchild Archive, bequeathed to the nation on her death eighteen months earlier and still, owing to the chronic insufficiency of the preservation budget, packed in acid-free boxes and shelved with a patience that now looked less like prudence than like a wasted virtue, sat in perfect order in the dark; and Edward Ashworth, Senior Conservator of Manuscripts, arriving at five in the morning with water already wrist-deep in the basement corridor, stood in his leaking boots with his glasses fogged and said, with a lightness that would later be remembered against him, "At least the river has good taste in fiction," because Eleanor's archive had been shelved, by alphabetical accident, exactly where the water wanted it.

By noon the pumps had beaten the river back, and the staff of the Institute — four conservators, two librarians, and a retired cataloguer who had come in from the rain because her initials were on the door — stood in a row above the blue boxes stacked like drowned bricks in the dim light, and the air was thick with the smell of wet paper, a smell like no other, at once vegetable and mineral, the smell of something that has given up its structure without giving up its pretensions; and young Amber Croft, the paper conservator, wept openly, because she had trained at West Dean and had never lost a sheet in her life, and Edward said, gently, "Amber, darling, you mustn't cry. The paper is crying for itself, and we have only to mop up the tears."

Margaret Holloway, the Director, arrived at four in a car the colour of a wet pigeon, and she stood on the asphalt apron with her hands in her coat pockets and delivered, without preamble, the institutional position: the boxes were to be frozen, freeze-dried, documented, and stored; no sheet was to be handled beyond the minimum; no page was to be read; no loss was to be signed off as anything but loss; the insurers wanted an inventory of ruin, not a salvage operation.

"You tell the water," Edward said, cheerfully, "that it can have the inventory."

Margaret looked at him as one looks at a man whose jokes have begun, over many years, to weigh the same as bricks. "Edward, I am not your adversary. I am your director. The Eleanor Fairchild Papers are a public asset. The novel is a public asset. Your feelings, though I respect them, are a private liability."

"And the woman who wrote the novel," Edward said, "is a private catastrophe, and she is my own."

He was sixty-one at the time of the flood, though he looked older in the oily light of the sub-basement, and the arthritis in his hands, which he had concealed from the medical board the way a fugitive conceals his papers, had begun to express itself in small audacious ways — a tremor over the lip of a hot drink, a hesitation in his script, a violence in his knuckles whenever he attempted a leaf-casting operation — and it was this, more than the flood, that he privately understood as the true destruction under way around him, for a man who can no longer lift a sheet of paper by two corners has no business weeping over paper.

The commercial freeze-dryers arrived from a firm in Leeds, and the boxes went into them like bodies, and for eleven weeks Edward attended the salvage operation as a layman attends a funeral for a stranger, signing forms, making tea, cracking jokes that nobody laughed at, until the box marked FA/09.4 was returned to the conservation laboratory and its contents, which the operation had declared a total loss — the novel, The Pale Tale, its three hundred and twelve pages fused into a single dense block by the water and the mould and the dark — were set aside on the stainless steel workbench for a decision; and it was then, on a Tuesday, with the rain working against the windows like a crowd trying to see in, that Edward Ashworth began the long and secret ordeal of his resurrection of the text, though he would not have called it that; he would have called it, if anyone had asked, which no one did, a rescue, or a duty, or, at his most grandiose — and he was, at his most grandiose, a fool — an act of love.

The block was still wet in its heart, and the odour that came off it was the odour of her study after she had finished working in it, a room he had never entered while she worked because she had never allowed him, and the top sheet, a palimpsest of itself, bore six words that had survived the water with a clarity that seemed, under the fluorescent light, almost a deliberate cruelty: "the pale tale of forgetting" — and Edward's throat closed like a fist, because he had heard her say once, in the year before the illness took the names out of her mouth, that she was writing a book about the thing that happens when a story is loved more carefully than it is told, and he had laughed and told her she was the only woman in England who could turn a confession of failure into a plot summary.

He worked at night, after Margaret had gone home and Amber had caught her bus and old Farrell, the security man, had taken to leaving the sub-basement key on the hook because Edward always looked so harmless with his glasses and his jokes, and he worked with the tools of his trade — the microspatula, the tacking iron, the dental mirror, the humidification chamber he rigged from a fish tank and a thermostat — and he separated the pages as a man might separate the steps of a staircase buried under ash, and he read what the water had spared.

"Nicholas said he would mend the book before he mended the marriage," the text ran, in Eleanor's hand, which at the beginning of the illness was still upright, almost defiantly upright, the hand of a woman in her forties, "and Elena, who had stopped asking for anything to be mended, said only that the spine was broken and could not take another turning."

Edward read the passage twenty times that first night, and the next morning in the canteen, over a cup of tea, he said to Amber Croft, "Have you noticed that the people in Eleanor's novels are always fixing things that cannot be fixed?"

Amber, who was twenty-nine and had a hangover, said, "I didn't know her."

"No," Edward said, "you wouldn't have. She had a theory," he went on, warming to it, because warmth was his only method, "that the world is made of two kinds of people — those who repair and those who refuse to see the damage. I was a repairer. That was my use to her."

"What was her use to you?" Amber asked, with a directness that surprised him, and Edward laughed, because he could not remember being asked that question by anybody ever, least of all by himself, and the laugh came out too loud and too quick, and he said, "Why, she was the text. And I was the conservator. We were a perfect professional relationship."

The work went on, and the pages, as they dried, revealed their order like a deck being dealt by a ruined hand, and because the flood had redistributed them according to no logic but the water's, Edward was forced to read the novel in the way one reads a country from the window of a train that keeps derailing, and what he found, among the passages of a marriage dissolving with terrible politeness, was a woman named Elena who kept a notebook in which, every morning, she wrote down the name of her husband so that she would not forget it, and who wrote, on the morning of the day her husband first lay with another woman, the single word: "Nicholas." He had expected accusations; he had expected the savage, clear-sighted revenge of the betrayed wife, the legal brief of the heart; what he found instead was stranger and colder, for the wife in the novel wrote the name, and then the next morning, having forgotten the first morning, she wrote it again, and again, and again, and the husband, Nicholas, unaware of the notebook, went to his bench and restored other people's books with hands that smelled of another woman's soap, and there was in the novel no anger at all, only an inventory.

Margaret summoned him on the last day of March, because the disciplinary machinery had been set in motion, because the night-attendant's log had been examined, because old Farrell had confessed, because the conservation laboratory had been audited, and Edward stood on the carpet of her office under the portrait of the first Whitmore with his hands shaking at his sides, and she said, "You have read the manuscript."

"I have read what was left of it."

"You have made a reconstruction."

"I have made a fair copy," Edward said. "I have made it legible. That is what I do for a living, Margaret. I make things legible. It is the whole of my character."

"It is a public asset that you have privately remade," she said, "and you will surrender it to me now, together with your notes, and you will not remove another sheet from this laboratory, and you will submit to a professional conduct review, and the review, I can promise you, will find every page of your work alarming."

"Promise me," Edward said, and the lightness left his voice for the first time in the interview, "promise me you'll read the ending before you file it away."

The ending, which he had transcribed from a cluster of pages recovered from the lining of a box where they had been pressed by pressure alone, read as follows, in Eleanor's late hand, the hand of the final year, in which the letters leaned like fence posts in a gale: "Elena died, and Nicholas stood for a long time at the shelf of his restored books, and he understood that he had spent his life making beautiful the outer parts of things, and that the pale tale she had written every morning in the margins of her forgetting was the only text of importance he had ever been given, and he had not read it, and now the book was closed, and the water was rising, and there was no one left to fix."

He had told himself, during the weeks of the reconstruction, that the novel was a fiction, an exercise in the plausible grief of an invented husband; he had told himself that Eleanor had never known about Miriam, that the coincidence of names and circumstances was the ordinary coincidence of the novelist's art, which draws everything from the air and from everyone; he had filed her accusation, when he was forced to read deeply, under the heading of her empathy, her terrible professional empathy, by which she had made a study of him as one makes a study of a species, and he had gone on, in this manner, mending the book with the very hands that had failed her, refusing to see the gap in his own schedule, the smell of another woman's soap, the years of silence he had built around her study like a wall of water held back by hope.

And then, on the night of the fourth of April, when the reconstruction was complete and his fair copy had been typed and bound and hidden in the boot of his car, Edward found the last page, the page that had stuck to the inside of the box during the freeze-drying and had detached itself at last, like a scab, and it bore, in Eleanor's hand from the year before the diagnosis, still upright, almost defiantly upright, a dedication that the water had spared as deliberately as a surgeon spares a vein: "For Edward, who believed me incapable of noticing. This is the notice. I loved you anyway."

He read the line standing under the single bulb of the laboratory at two in the morning, and the truth arrived with none of the violence he had imagined, because truth never arrives violently; it arrives quietly, like paper, and settles, and the man who receives it understands that he has known it all along, known it in the fear that made him laugh, known it in the way he never entered her study, known it in the six years he had spent constructing, with enormous professional skill, a version of their marriage in which she had never once looked at the gap in the record — and Edward stood there in the dark of the institution that had housed his deceit, holding the page that contained his wife's last address to him, and he could not decide, then, whether the address was a verdict or a pardon; and after a long time he said aloud, to the empty laboratory, in the tone of a man announcing a discovery at a party, "Fate is not a bell that rings once. It is a correction that arrives by post, in installments, with the final bill already paid."

He delivered his fair copy to Margaret Holloway at nine o'clock the same morning, page by page, in the order she had asked for, and then he sat in the chair in her office and told her, with an uncharacteristic slowness, that he was withdrawing the novel from any proposal of publication, that the reconstruction was a falsehood not because the words were wrong but because the aim was wrong, and that the Institute should exhibit, if it chose to exhibit anything, the fused block itself, the broken text, the pale original, with a label that stated plainly what water does to paper and what time does to the heart; and Margaret said, "You understand what this means for your position," and Edward said, "It means I have used the Institute's time and equipment to confess to her, and I have been doing that for six years, Margaret, on the Institute's time, with the Institute's equipment; the only new thing is the page," and Margaret said, "You have committed professional misconduct," and Edward said, "I have committed a marriage, and I hope that counts for something in the final collation," and he laughed, and the laugh was light, light as anything he had ever done, because lightness was his nature, and the seriousness of grief was a texture he had borrowed for the flood and could not now, before that woman, be expected to keep.

The retrospective opened in November, in the South Gallery, and the glass case at its centre held the block — the pale block, the fused novel, the three hundred and twelve pages of her last book lying in a shape like a loaf burned in the oven of the river — and beneath it, on a plaque the size of a postcard, the words stood as he had asked, in plain letters: "The Pale Tale, by Eleanor Fairchild. Recovered without restoration. It is not possible to preserve what one could not protect." Edward attended the opening in a suit that smelled of naphthalene, and he stood at a distance with a glass of white wine that he did not drink, and he watched the visitors lean before the case with their heads tilted, reading the plaque, reading the ruin, reading the title that had been, for one season, the scandal of the Institute, and he did not approach the glass, because he had approached it once, in the empty gallery that morning, and he was afraid of what the