From the Agreement of Temporary Cooperation, Preamble: "The Parties shall be punctual, courteous, and keep a straight face."

On Wednesday morning Tang Rui appeared at the door of the Gu Family Workshop with a clipboard under one arm, a pencil through her fringe, and the expression of a woman who has been saving something up for two days.

Chengyan did not look up from the plank. He knew the footsteps. They were quick and light and entirely without remorse.

"Photographs," said Tang Rui.

"No."

"You haven't heard what they're for."

"I've heard the word. It's enough."

"The county office is sending a photographer on Friday. Her name is Sun Mei, she is very good, and she is very busy, and she has agreed to give each entered couple one morning of her time." Tang Rui consulted the clipboard, with a flick of pleasure. "They want a portrait of every pair for the gallery wall in the committee hall. And for the campaign leaflet. And for the website that Mr. Shen's people are building, which I understand will have a section called Meet the Couples."

"We're not a couple."

"You are as of yesterday at eleven o'clock. I have the receipt."

He set the plane down. Behind him, at the lathe, Zhaoyu's whistling had stopped in mid-note with the tact of a man who very badly wanted to hear the next part.

"What does it involve?" said Chengyan.

"A date."

"A what?"

"A sample date. Sun Mei likes to photograph people doing something together, not standing in front of a wall. So I've put you down for the east dock and one of Uncle Ma's boats, Friday at ten, for an hour or two on the canal. You wear something nice. You look as if you enjoy each other's company. She takes a hundred photographs and picks the best." She turned the clipboard round so that he could read the schedule. "I've put it in the book as Strictly Business. In the notes column."

"I never said that."

"Didn't you? I thought it was in your preamble." She gave him a smile of angelic sweetness. "I'll see you at the dock. Punctually. And courteously."

She went out. He stood very still with his hand on the plank. In the silence behind him, a lathe slowly wound down, and Zhaoyu said, in a small and respectful voice, "What preamble?"

"Go and sharpen something," said Chengyan.

He owned two good shirts.

This was something he had never had cause to think about before. One of them, the dark one, had gone to the banquet and now hung in the cupboard with the faint, accusing air of a thing that had been worn once and seen. The other was blue, a soft washed cotton the colour of a canal on a clear morning, and his grandmother had bought it for him six years ago, for a cousin's wedding, saying that he looked like a person in it and not like a piece of furniture.

He ironed it on Thursday night, on the kitchen table, with a damp cloth and an iron older than Zhaoyu. It took him forty minutes. The sleeves would not behave. He did them three times, and when he held the shirt up to the lamp at last there was a crease down the left cuff as sharp as a joint, and he looked at it with the exact quiet despair he had once felt on discovering a knot in the middle of a good board.

"You're doing it wrong," said a voice from the doorway.

Old Mr. Gu stood leaning on his cane, wrapped in his padded jacket, with the benign unhurried air of a man who has never ironed a shirt in his life and was entirely certain of his opinion. He had been a carpenter for sixty years. His hands were gnarled as old roots. He watched the iron move with an expression of grave interest.

"The cuff," he said. "You've pressed in the wrong direction."

"I know, Grandfather."

"Then why did you?"

"It was an accident."

"A man doesn't have accidents with a shirt. He has them with his mouth." The old man came a step further into the room and lowered himself onto a stool with a small grunt of the knee. His eyes, under their heavy white brows, were very bright. "Where are you going in it?"

Chengyan unplugged the iron. "There's a photographer. For the campaign. Tang Rui arranged it."

"With the Su girl."

"With Su Wenxi. Yes."

"Mm." It was a long, comfortable, contented sound. His grandfather folded both hands on the head of his cane and looked, for an unnerving moment, like a man listening to a very pleasant piece of music. "Wear the blue one," he said. "Your grandmother always said you looked well in blue. And don't talk so much."

"I don't talk."

"That's what I mean. Don't try to start." He rose, slowly, the cane tapping. At the door he paused and added, without turning his head, "It's a good thing, A-Yan. Whatever it is. It's a good thing to have something to iron a shirt for."

He went out. Chengyan stood alone in the kitchen with the hot iron ticking as it cooled, and the blue shirt over his arm, and a feeling in his chest like a nail being driven carefully in.

He did not sleep much.

In the morning he shaved, and nicked his chin, on the old scar, and stood in front of the small square mirror above the washstand holding a square of tissue to the place. He looked at the man in the glass, who looked back at him with a doubtful, stubborn, unfamiliar face. He cleared his throat.

"Good morning," he told the mirror.

It sounded like a man announcing a train.

"Good morning," he said again, lower, and then, trying a different angle, "Morning, Wenxi." He tilted his head. "Hello." He bared his teeth in what he hoped was a smile. The man in the mirror looked as though he had been caught stealing a pie.

"You look nice," he said, experimentally.

There was a pause.

"You look nice." He tried it with a shrug. "You look nice." He tried it with his hand in his pocket. "You look," he said, and stopped, because from the passage a muffled noise had arisen, the unmistakable noise of a young man pressing his face into a sleeve.

"Zhaoyu."

"I'm not here," said Zhaoyu, in a strangled voice.

"Go away."

"I'm only getting my tools. Carry on. It was very moving." He backed down the passage, still shaking. "Try it with your eyes next time. They do most of the work."

Chengyan took the tissue from his chin and threw it at the door. It missed.

He was at the east dock at ten minutes to ten, because the Agreement said punctual and he took the Agreement seriously. It was a warm, bright, windless morning, the kind that makes Yunxi look as if it has been painted onto silk. The canal was green and still and full of reflections. White egrets stood on the stone steps. The air smelled of water and warm wood and the first of the honeysuckle on the walls. At the foot of the dock, tied up beneath a cluster of drooping willow, lay one of the old wupeng boats, long and black and slender, with its woven canopy rolled back, and on the stern, with a bamboo pole across his knees and a thermos at his side, sat Uncle Ma.

"Young Gu," said the old man.

"Uncle Ma."

"Mm."

There was a great deal in the sound. Chengyan, who had no intention of discussing any of it, went and stood at the end of the jetty with his hands in his pockets and looked at the egrets.

He heard her coming.

It was the hitch in the left step, light and quick, tapping down the bluestone from Sixth Alley. His back went rigid. He did not turn round. He counted five of her steps, and six, and seven, and on the eighth he gave in and turned.

She had on a dress of pale yellow linen, cut simply, with short sleeves and a high round neck, and her hair was tied low with a ribbon of the same colour, a loose bright tail that swung as she walked. She had a flower pinned behind one ear, a white one, small and waxy, a gardenia. In the clear light her face looked very young. She had put a little colour on her mouth. She had her hands folded in front of her, tightly, like a girl on her way to be examined.

She stopped, a pace and a half away.

"Good morning," said Wenxi.

"Good morning," said Chengyan.

There was a pause. A duck went by. It was, he thought, the loudest silence he had ever stood in, and he remembered, with a lurch, what he had spent the whole of the previous night preparing to say, and the whole of the morning rehearsing in a mirror.

"You look nice," he said.

It came out like a notice pinned to a door. She blinked. A slow, bright, dumbfounded pink came up over her cheeks.

"Thank you," she said. "You, also."

"It's the blue one."

"It's a very good blue."

"It's from a wedding."

"Oh," said Wenxi faintly. "Good."

They stood there, two feet of morning air between them, as stiff as a pair of fence posts. Behind them, on the boat, there was a small, well-bred, perfectly audible cough.

The photographer arrived at five past ten, on a bicycle, with a canvas bag as big as a sack of rice and the brisk, wiry, unhurried look of a woman who has photographed a great many people being uncomfortable and has made her peace with it. Sun Mei was thirty-five or so, very thin, with short hair and a pair of enormous round glasses and a way of looking at a person as if she were measuring their jaw. She looked at Chengyan. She looked at Wenxi. She looked at the space between them, and he saw her lips press together.

"Right," she said. "Which of you is nervous?"

"Neither," said Wenxi.

"Both," said Chengyan.

"Excellent. Honesty. That's a start." She slung the bag off her shoulder, and looked at the boat with deep approval. "Is this the one? Beautiful. All right. Into the boat, please, and sit. Under the canopy. On the bench."

They got into the boat. Chengyan went first, because the planks were slick, and turned and held out a hand to help her down, and then stopped with his arm half raised, because it had not occurred to him until that moment that this might count.

Wenxi looked at the hand. She looked at his face. Her mouth twitched.

"It's only a hand," she said, very low. "We haven't started the count."

He held it steady. She took it for the length of one step, light and warm and gone, and sat down on the bench with her skirt tucked round her knees, and he felt the whole of that second go up his arm like a current.

He sat beside her. It was a narrow bench. The canopy made a long green-gold shade over their heads, and the water slapped at the hull, and Uncle Ma pushed off from the steps with a single easy shove of the pole, and the world slid sideways.

"Closer," said Sun Mei.

She was crouched in the bow, with a camera the size of a small dog held to her face. Her voice came out muffled, behind the lens.

They moved an inch.

"Closer. You look like two people on a bus who don't want to be seen to know each other."

"We're sitting quite close," said Wenxi.

"You're sitting as far apart as the bench allows. Closer, please. Shoulders."

They moved another inch. Her shoulder came to rest against his arm. It was the lightest touch. It was warm through the thin linen and the washed blue cotton, and it weighed almost nothing, and he found that he was no longer capable of breathing in the ordinary way.

Click.

"Stiff," said Sun Mei, with sorrow. "So stiff. All right. Talk to each other. Say something. Anything. Pretend I'm not here."

There was a silence in which he tried, with great sincerity, to think of something to say.

Wenxi began to talk.

She talked about the sky, which was a very clear shade of blue for the season, and the egrets, which she had not seen so many of since she was small. She talked about the willow tree, whose leaves were beginning to turn from the light green of spring to the darker green of summer, and the way the water caught the light and flung it back at the white walls. She talked about the boat, which she had been told was eighty years old, and the canopy, which was woven of bamboo strips split by hand, and the pole, which was ash. She talked about the price of rice, and the new steps at the east dock, and a funny thing that had happened to Auntie Zhou with a goose. She talked without pause, in a bright, quick, tumbling stream that did not so much as bend at the commas, and he understood, with the part of him that was still capable of understanding anything, that she was frightened.

"Yes," he said, when she stopped for breath.

Sun Mei's camera clicked.

"The goose," said Wenxi. "Do you remember the goose? When we were nine?"

"Yes."

"It chased us the whole length of Sixth Alley."

"Yes."

"You carried me."

"No."

"You did. You picked me up and put me on the wall."

"Yes," said Chengyan.

Click.

From the bow came a long, whistling, distressed sigh. Sun Mei lowered the camera and looked at them over the top of her round glasses, with the dispassionate pity of a doctor.

"Is this how you talk at home?" she said.

"We don't have a home," said Wenxi.

"We live next door," said Chengyan.

"Neither of those is better," said Sun Mei. "Could one of you, please, for the love of God, say something that is not a fact?"

There was a pause.

"The water is wet," said Chengyan.

A muffled explosion came from the stern. It was Uncle Ma, and it sounded very much like a man trying to swallow a tea leaf. Wenxi bit her lip. Her shoulder began, against his arm, to shake. He felt it go through him in a long helpless tremor, her breath hitching, her whole body folding with the effort not to laugh.

"Straight face," he said, out of the corner of his mouth. "Clause nothing. Preamble."

"I'm," she gasped, "keeping it. I'm keeping it very hard."

Click. Click. Click.

The boat slid down the long green avenue of the canal, between the white walls and the willows, past a woman beating a quilt on a balcony and a boy fishing off a step and a cat on a windowsill who watched them go with total disapproval. Uncle Ma poled with a slow rhythmic sweep, the water curling off the blade in glassy rings. The light fell in lozenges through the canopy and lay on their knees. Slowly, without his noticing exactly when it happened, Chengyan found that his shoulders had come down from around his ears.

He was almost, very nearly, at ease. He had stopped listening for the shutter. He was looking at the water, and at the way her ribbon lay against her neck, and thinking, with a vague drowsy wonder, that it was a very long time since he had been on the canal in the morning with nothing to do.

"Mind your heads," said Uncle Ma.

The bridge was upon them.

It was one of the low ones, a squat arch of grey stone with a keystone worn smooth, and the canal narrowed beneath it to a channel barely wider than the boat. Uncle Ma crouched, dropped the pole, and pulled the boat through hand over hand on the slimy stone. Sun Mei flattened herself in the bow. A pair of startled mallards burst out of the reeds beside the arch in a clatter of wings and water, and the whole boat lurched sideways, and the stern swung out, and the hull came up hard against a stone mooring post with a thump that Chengyan felt in his teeth.

Wenxi cried out.

She grabbed him. She did it without thinking, with both hands, and she took hold of his arm above the elbow so tightly that he felt each of her fingers like a clamp, and in the same moment the boat rocked back and she was flung against his side, her cheek against his shoulder, her breath on his collar, the whole warm slight weight of her pressed along the length of him.

He went still.

It was not a decision. Every muscle in his body simply stopped. There was a hot, gold-green dimness around them, the underside of the bridge dripping and echoing, and the smell of wet stone, and her hair against his jaw. He could feel her heart. He could feel it through two layers of cloth, a small fast frightened beat against his arm, and he could feel his own answering, slow and heavy as a hammer. His free hand had come up of its own accord. It hung in the air, an inch from her back, trembling, not touching, as though the whole of his discipline had gone into the effort of holding it there.

The boat steadied. The ducks flapped away. The echo faded.

"Sorry," whispered Wenxi, against his shoulder. "Sorry. I thought we were going over."

"We weren't."

"No."

"It was a post."

"It was a post," she agreed. She did not let go. Her fingers had not loosened. She lifted her face a little, and he saw her eyes, very wide and dark and a long way too close, with a little grey-green ring around the iris that he had not seen in eight years, and a fleck of gold at the edge that he had forgotten. The gardenia had slipped behind her ear. Her lips were parted.

"Don't move," said a voice from the bow, very low. "Don't either of you move."

Click. Click. Click. Click.

It went on for what felt like a week. Then it stopped, and the camera came down, and Sun Mei looked at them with her lips parted and her round glasses flashing in the dim.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, that is lovely. Stay there. Do not do anything. Do not do one single thing."

Wenxi let go. She did it quickly, like someone setting down a hot dish, and shuffled a decent foot away along the bench, and busied herself with the hem of her skirt. Her face was the colour of a ripe peach. She did not look at him. In the sudden space where she had been, his arm felt strangely cold.

"That doesn't count," she said, to her knees. "Under Clause Three."

"What doesn't?"

"That. The arm. It says hand-holding. It says palm to palm. It doesn't say anything about arms."

He stared at her. He could not tell, for a moment, whether she was joking. He heard his own voice come out of him, hoarse and level.

"I'll draft an amendment."

"Please do."

"Under a separate heading."

"With a diagram," said Wenxi, and a small, shaky, helpless laugh escaped her, and he found that the corner of his own mouth, entirely against orders, had gone up.

Sun Mei sat back on her heels in the bow with the camera in her lap and looked at them both.

The boat had come out from under the bridge into the open sun. They were drifting in a wide green basin where three canals met, with a long stone quay on one side and a row of ancient white houses on the other, and Uncle Ma had propped the pole against the gunwale and was studying the sky with great attention, as though he had lost something in it. Sun Mei turned the camera round and thumbed a button, and held the back of it out to them, over the cushions.

"Look," she said.

They looked.

It was a small bright rectangle of light. In it, framed in the dark curve of the arch, sat two people on a bench. The woman had both hands clamped round the man's arm and her face turned up to him, startled, wide-eyed, caught in the middle of a breath. The man had gone as rigid as a post. His face, in the dim, was a study in alarm: his jaw set, his brows drawn, every line of him braced against something that was not a boat. But his eyes, his eyes were not on the water. They were on her. They were looking down at her with an expression that he knew, with a slow cold drop of the stomach, he had never intended anyone to see.

He looked away from it very fast.

"That's the one," said Sun Mei, with deep satisfaction. "That's the cover. No one could pose that."

"Pose what?" said Wenxi, faintly.

"Terror," said Sun Mei. "Two people, in total terror of each other. It's wonderful." She switched the camera off and tucked it into its case with a kind of tender triumph. "I've been doing this nine years. You'd be amazed how rarely it happens. Everybody's smiling. Everybody's trained. They sit there with their teeth out like a pair of piano keys. But I've never been able to fake what's on that screen, and neither will you." She looked from one of them to the other, and her glasses glinted. "Whatever you've got, keep it. Don't fix it. Don't help it. Leave it exactly where it is."

She packed up. She was quick about it. She shook hands with Uncle Ma, and told Wenxi that she had a lovely neck, and told Chengyan, with a sidelong look, that he should come to her studio some time and have his photograph taken without anything to look at, and she was gone up the steps and away on her bicycle before either of them had found a word to say.

Uncle Ma poled them home.

It was a long slow way, because the old man had decided, with no explanation, to go back by the northern canal, which added half a mile and a good deal of scenery. They sat side by side on the bench. A decent foot of cushion stretched between them, and neither of them crossed it. Wenxi had her hands folded in her lap, very neat, and was gazing at the passing walls with great concentration, and the gardenia behind her ear had begun to brown at the edge. From time to time she touched it, absently, with the tip of one finger.

He had to say something. It was a rule. It was not one of the seven, but it was an older one, the kind that every man in Yunxi was taught at his grandfather's knee: you do not let a woman sit in silence after she has been frightened. He searched his mind, which had gone as empty as a swept floor. He looked at the way she sat, with her back straight and her chin up and her hands tucked together like a pair of doves. He looked at the line of her neck beneath the ribbon.

"You sit like that," said Chengyan. "It's fine."

She turned her head.

He had meant it well. He had meant, you look good, you look right, you look like exactly what you are, and it was the nearest his mouth could get to saying so. He had thought it came out reasonably clear. But Wenxi was looking at him with her brows slightly drawn, and a small, puzzled, wary crease between them, and he realised, a second too late, how it must have sounded.

"Fine," she repeated.

"Good. I meant good. It works."

"It works."

"It, yes. The way you sit. It's..."

"Is that a compliment," said Wenxi slowly, "or a review?"

He opened his mouth. There was nothing in it. He sat there with the sun on his neck and the water lapping and the whole green-gold afternoon waiting for him to find an answer, and he understood that he would have given a month's wages, and the new lathe, and possibly a finger, to know himself.

She was watching him. Her face was tilted a little, and for just a moment, in the green light under the canopy, he saw it: not the bright one, not the dimple, but the other, the hesitating, uncertain look of a girl on a doorstep with a box in her hands.

Then it was gone. She smiled, lightly, and turned back to the water.

"I'll let you know," she said.

From the stern, in a voice of immense and benevolent contentment, Uncle Ma said, "Mm."

Chengyan closed his eyes. He did not know what he had said. He did not know what he had meant. But somewhere under the bridge, in the damp green dimness, with the ducks flapping away and the whole world gone quiet, something had come undone in him that no clause would put back, and he was no longer sure that he had signed anything at all.