From the Agreement of Temporary Cooperation, Clause 3: "Hand-holding shall be limited to three (3) occasions per day, in public only, not exceeding five minutes each. Interlaced fingers count as two."

By half past six on Saturday morning, the whole of Yunxi knew.

Wenxi found this out the way one finds out about weather: first as a change in the air, then as a heavy knocking on the back door, and finally as a large round woman in a quilted jacket standing on the step with a string bag in each hand and a look of tremendous, glistening emotion.

"Xi Xi!" cried Auntie Zhou. "My little Xi! I am so happy I could burst!"

"Auntie," said Wenxi, who was in her sleep shirt with one slipper on. "It's half past six."

"I know! I have been up since four, I couldn't sleep, I am overcome." She pushed past into the kitchen like a ship coming into harbour. "I brought bamboo shoots. The first of the season, the sweet ones, from my cousin's hill. I would have brought a chicken but I thought, it is too soon for a chicken. Chickens are for the engagement."

"The what?"

"Sit down, sit down, you are as pale as a sheet." Auntie Zhou dumped both bags on the table. Out of them tumbled bamboo shoots, a bunch of spring onions, a jar of pickled mustard greens, a small packet wrapped in red paper that Wenxi was afraid to ask about, and, last of all, a hand-knitted pair of socks. They were enormous and bright orange. "For him," said Auntie Zhou. "The boy's feet are always cold. I've noticed it for years."

Wenxi sat down. There seemed nothing else to do.

"How did you hear?" she said weakly.

"Oh, how does anyone hear?" Auntie Zhou waved a plump hand. "Old Ma came by the tea house last night. He had his usual cup and he sat there with the most beautiful expression on his face. I said, Ma, what has happened? He said, Mm. I said, Ma, is it a good thing? He said, Mm. Then he said Mm again, quite differently, and I knew." She pressed both hands to her heart. "Forty years I have known that man and I have never heard him say Mm three times in one night."

"That isn't, that is hardly evidence."

"And Mr. Qian saw you under the bridge with his binoculars. And Sun Mei's assistant has a cousin at the fish stall. And Tang Rui," said Auntie Zhou, with a sly dimple, "said nothing at all. For a whole hour. Which for Tang Rui is a declaration."

Wenxi put her face in her hands.

"Now, listen," said Auntie Zhou, and she lowered her voice and leaned in, and the warm smell of ginger and mothballs and affection rolled over the table. "You are young, and he is shy. That one is so shy that when he was nine he apologised to a table he walked into. So you must help him. Do not wait for him to reach for your hand. Reach for his. Don't be coy. A man like that will stand on a bridge for ten years waiting for permission."

"Auntie, it isn't, we aren't, it's all very, " said Wenxi, and could not think how to end the sentence in a way that did not violate Clause Two.

"Very new," said Auntie Zhou comfortingly. "I know. I know, my pet. Take it slowly. But not too slowly. Take the socks."

She left a quarter of an hour later, in a state of high content, and Wenxi sat at the kitchen table among the bamboo shoots with a pair of orange socks in her lap and a feeling that her life had been taken from her hands and was now being passed around the neighbourhood like a plate of dumplings.

She made it through the morning rush by smiling.

It was a different smile today, and she was not sure she liked it. The old bright shop-window one had been bad enough. This one was wider and more helpless, because it was the smile of a person who knows she is being congratulated for a thing that is not true and cannot possibly say so. Everyone came in. Everyone had heard. Mr. Qian shook her hand for a long time and said that in his day a young man would have brought a goose. One of the Wei sisters pressed a small embroidered handkerchief on her and wept. The other Wei sister said, quite loudly, that she had always said so, and was contradicted by the first.

"A good man," said the baker from the corner, with a nod. "Quiet. Hardworking. Never been in a single quarrel in his life."

"Not one," said Wenxi, and thought of the roof, and the ladder, and the loud argument about the tarp, and the several thousand words she had spoken to him over a flour-order form.

"And you'll want to keep an eye on that Shen fellow," the baker added darkly.

"Why?"

"Too polite," said the baker.

By ten o'clock the count of times she had said "thank you, that's very kind" had passed thirty, and she had begun to say it in her sleep. She was behind the counter with her hands in a bowl of dough, trying to put an expression on her face that was neither guilty nor delighted, when the bell rang and she looked up and the whole room seemed to go bright and small.

He was exactly on time.

She knew it before she looked at the clock. Chengyan stood in the doorway in his dark work trousers and a clean grey shirt with the sleeves turned to the elbow, and a small packet under one arm. He had shaved. He had, she saw, a very small nick on his chin, in the exact place of the old scar. He did not smile. He did what he did every time he came into the shop now, which was to stop at the threshold and take in the room, the customers, the cracked case, the heads turning one by one on their necks like sunflowers, with the calm of a man assessing the load on a beam.

"Good morning," said Chengyan.

"Good morning," said Wenxi.

Nobody in the shop breathed.

The silence was so large and so interested that the little clock above the till seemed to tick in a whisper. Mr. Qian's songbird, in its cage by the door, ruffled its feathers and cocked its head. A child at the counter stared at the two of them with her bun halfway to her mouth.

"I brought this," said Chengyan. He crossed the shop in four strides, set the packet on the counter, and withdrew his hand as though it had been burned. "For the, for your grandmother. It's a latch. For the back gate. It sticks."

"Thank you," said Wenxi. "That's very kind."

There it was again. Thirty-one.

"You're welcome."

They looked at each other over the dough. His eyes went to her hands, which were buried to the wrist in flour, and then to her face, and then, with a kind of desperate dignity, to the ceiling, where the new beam ran golden across the plaster.

"It's holding," he said.

"It's perfect."

"Mm."

From the back of the shop, one of the Wei sisters made a small, wet, ecstatic noise.

"We should, " said Wenxi.

"Yes," said Chengyan. "The contract. I mean the, " He closed his mouth. His ears had begun to turn red. "The practice. We said ten."

"We said ten."

"It's ten past."

"I'll just wash my hands," said Wenxi, to a shop that was by now almost visibly vibrating, and fled.

The street was very bright.

It was one of those mornings that Yunxi did best, with the sky scrubbed pale blue and the canal running green and quiet beside the path, and the whitewashed walls so clean that they seemed to hum. A warm wind came down the alley with the scent of honeysuckle. Every window was open. Every balcony, as far as she could see, had been suddenly overtaken by a quantity of washing that nobody could possibly have needed, and every pot of herbs on every sill was being tended by a person who happened, by pure coincidence, to be facing the road.

They stood outside the door of Su Ji, side by side, at a respectable yard's distance.

"They're watching," said Wenxi.

"Yes."

"All of them."

"There is a man on that roof," said Chengyan, "who is not fixing anything."

She looked. There was. It was the cobbler from Fifth Alley, sitting astride his own ridge pole with a flask of tea and a pair of opera glasses. When he saw her looking he raised the glasses in greeting.

"All right," said Wenxi, and breathed. "We need to do the first one. The, the hand. We can't spend the whole campaign standing like this. It's not natural."

"No."

"I think it's better if one of us just, "

"I'll do it," said Chengyan.

He turned to face her. He wiped his right palm down his trousers, quickly, with his eyes on the middle distance. He took a very slow breath, in through the nose, the way a man breathes before he lifts a heavy load. Then, with the exaggerated care of someone passing a full cup across a table, he held out his hand.

It hung there between them, broad and brown and scarred, palm up.

It was not trembling. That was the odd part. His whole arm was perfectly steady. It was only the fingers that were slightly curled, as if he had begun a gesture and then lost his nerve in the middle of it, and the combined effect of that stillness and that small bend was so absurdly tender that something inside her chest went soft and heavy as warm butter.

"Right," she whispered. "Palm to palm."

"Palm to palm."

She put her hand in his.

It was the same as the night of the signing and entirely different. Then there had been a lamp and a table and a clean sheet of paper between them. Now there was nothing but sunlight and sky and forty windows, and his fingers closed round hers, slowly, with that great careful pressure, and the roughness of his palm sent a slow shiver all the way up her arm. He was warm. His thumb lay along the side of her hand. She noticed that his knuckles had healed, and that the pale line across them was still there, and that her own hand, in his, looked very small and very white.

She had thought she was prepared. She was not prepared. She felt the whole of her body arrange itself around that one point of contact, as iron filings arrange themselves around a magnet, and her breath went shallow and quick, and she knew that her face was giving her away to forty windows.

"Is this one," she managed.

"One," said Chengyan.

"It's very, " She stopped.

"What?"

"Nothing. Warm."

"It's the sun."

"It's absolutely the sun," said Wenxi.

They began to walk.

They walked down Sixth Alley, with its worn blue stones and its steep white walls, out past the third flowerpot and the sleeping cat, and the whole street turned its head to follow them. A shutter opened. A shutter closed. A man on a stepladder ceased to paint a door. From somewhere to the left came the soft, rapid patter of whispering, like rain beginning on a tin roof. A small boy ran out of a doorway, took one look, and ran back in shouting "They're doing it!" in a voice that carried to the end of the canal.

Wenxi began to talk.

She could not have stopped it if she tried. It came out of her in a low bright stream, a weather report, an account of the price of bamboo, a short history of the cat. She told him about Auntie Zhou and the socks. She told him that the baker had said he was never in a quarrel in his life, and she did it in the baker's voice, and she felt his hand tighten a little around hers, and when she glanced sideways she saw his mouth press hard together with the effort of not laughing.

"She said chickens are for the engagement," said Wenxi.

"What engagement?"

"I don't know. I think she's planning one."

"Did you," he said, with a perfectly straight face, "take the socks?"

"They're orange."

"I've seen them," said Chengyan. "I was visited at seven."

She made a noise like a kettle. They walked on. The sun was warm on her shoulders and the stones were warm under her feet, and as they came to the first turn of the canal she realised, with a strange small shock, that she had stopped being afraid. It had gone, somewhere between the third flowerpot and the willow. The windows were still watching. The whispering was still going on. But there was a hand around hers, big and sure and not moving, and it was the oddest thing: it made the whole bright foolish business suddenly bearable. It made her feel that she was walking beside something solid, like a tree that grows beside a stream and does not mind being leaned on.

She stole a glance at his face.

He was looking straight ahead. His jaw was set, his shoulders square, his whole expression one of immense dedication, like a man carrying a very valuable vase through a crowd. But the red had crept down from his ears to the side of his neck. And as she watched, his thumb moved, a tiny, unconscious stroke along the edge of her hand, back and forth, once, as though it had its own opinion and had forgotten to ask him.

She looked away very quickly. She said something about the sky.

They turned onto Liu Bridge, and the whole length of the canal opened out beneath them in a long green ribbon. The willow stirred. A woman called out from a window, "Lovely, dears!" and a chorus of voices rose from the opposite bank, and Wenxi realised she was blushing so hard that her ears were ringing.

"Chengyan," she said, "are you counting?"

"Yes."

"How long?"

"Four minutes," said Chengyan. "And ten seconds."

He had a watch. It was an old steel one with a cracked glass, strapped on the wrist of the hand that was not holding hers, and he had been consulting it, she now saw, every thirty paces, in a series of small, scrupulous, almost invisible glances. She had thought he was shy. He was timing it. He was holding her hand, in front of three hundred people, in a state of tender and complete confusion, and keeping the Agreement to the second.

It was the most ridiculous thing she had ever seen. It was so exactly him that her throat closed.

"That's very good," she said, unsteadily.

"Fifty seconds," said Chengyan.

"We needn't, if we are, if it's going well, "

"Forty."

"Chengyan, you really don't have to, "

"Thirty." His voice had gone rather low. His hand did not loosen. She could feel his pulse in his thumb, very fast, a small hard beat against the inside of her wrist. "Twenty."

She found, to her horror, that she was holding on a little more tightly.

"Ten," said Chengyan, hoarsely. "Five. Four. Three."

He let go.

He did it cleanly, all at once, as one sets down a plank. His hand fell to his side. The warm weight of it left hers, and a breath of cool air came in between them, and she stood there in the middle of the bridge with her fingers still curled around nothing, feeling absurdly and violently bereft.

"Five minutes," he said. "That's one."

"That's one," said Wenxi.

"Two more today."

"Yes."

Neither of them moved. Below them, in the shadow of the arch, a pair of ducks paddled round in a slow, deliberate circle and turned their heads up in unison.

"I think," said Wenxi, to the ducks, "that went rather well."

"Mm," said Chengyan.

"Mm," she agreed, and was aware that she was smiling, not the bright one, not the shop-window one, but a crooked, foolish, entirely private thing that she could not seem to stop. She pressed her lips together. She put her hand in her cardigan pocket, where her fingers closed on the folded strip of red paper, and she found that it was warm.

They came back down Sixth Alley a quarter of an hour later, a decent two feet apart and in a state of profound, mutual, carefully maintained silence.

The street had not lost interest. If anything it had gathered. A small crowd was strung along the flowerpots in front of Su Ji, pretending to be doing a number of other things: sweeping, watering, discussing the price of eggs. Mr. Qian had set up a folding stool at the corner and was reading his newspaper upside down. The cobbler had descended from his roof and was now hovering at the entrance to the alley with a pair of boots he was clearly not mending.

And on the doorstep of Su Ji, with her hands folded over her apron and her white head tilted to one side, stood Grandma.

She wore the expression she wore for the first rising of a very good dough. It was a look of deep, patient, almost beatific satisfaction, and it widened by an inch when she saw them, and went on widening as they came up the alley, until Wenxi had the impression of being approached by a small benevolent lighthouse.

"There you are," said Grandma. "Out for a walk."

"Just a short one," said Wenxi.

"It looked like a long one. You were gone nearly twenty minutes. Did you go as far as the bridge?"

"We stopped," said Chengyan, "at the bridge."

"Good. Good. It is a lovely bridge. A man should stand on it." Grandma beamed. "And how is the contract coming along?"

There was a silence.

It was not a long one. It lasted perhaps the length of one heartbeat. But in that heartbeat the whole alley seemed to go dim and sharp, the way a room does just before lightning, and Wenxi's blood stopped in her veins.

"The, what?" said Wenxi.

"The contract," said Grandma. She did not so much as blink. Her mild old eyes rested upon Wenxi's face with perfect sweetness. Behind her spectacles something bright and quick flickered once and was put away. "With the tile merchant. For the roof. Chengyan said he was to bring the paperwork on Tuesday, and I wondered whether you had seen it."

"Oh," said Wenxi.

"The tile merchant."

"Yes," said Wenxi. "Yes. Of course. The tile merchant. No. I haven't, yet."

Her heart was going like a hammer. She felt exactly as she had at the age of nine, at the kitchen table, with a sugar-smeared mouth and a story about a mouse. She could feel the eyes of the whole street boring into her back. She could feel Chengyan beside her, tall and silent, and a tiny cold voice in the back of her head said, she knows, she knows, she knows.

But Grandma only nodded slowly, as though that were a perfectly satisfactory reply, and turned her head.

"A-Yan?"

"Grandma Su," said Chengyan.

He said it perfectly evenly. He did not hurry. He stood there with his hands loose at his sides and his face quiet and grave, and he looked at the old woman for a long moment, and in that moment Wenxi, glancing sideways, saw something cross his face that she could not name. It was not alarm. It was not guilt. It was a kind of slow, dawning, rueful comprehension, as if a man who has been carrying a very heavy box for some time had just discovered that somebody had been quietly holding the other end.

"The merchant delivers on Tuesday," said Chengyan. "I've put the order in. Slate, as you wanted. You'll have the paperwork by noon."

"Good boy," said Grandma.

"And I'll bring the latch."

"The latch?"

"For the back gate. It sticks."

"So it does," said Grandma, with immense warmth. "So it does. How thoughtful." She patted his arm, twice, with a small brown hand that smelled of rice flour and tea. Then she turned and went into the shop, humming, and from the depths of the passage, as clear as a bell, came a snatch of an old wedding song.

The alley breathed out.

Somebody dropped a watering can. Mr. Qian turned his newspaper the right way up. The cobbler remembered a pressing engagement and left. And Wenxi, who had been holding herself as rigid as a plank for the whole of the last minute, discovered that her knees were shaking.

"She knows," she whispered.

"Mm," said Chengyan.

"She knows. She knows, she knows. She said contract. She said it to my face."

"She said the tile merchant."

"Chengyan, there is no tile merchant! You ordered the slate yourself! She knows there is no contract with a tile merchant, because the whole thing is on a handshake and a sack of cash and your word!"

"There's a tile merchant," said Chengyan.

"Is there?"

"I ordered the slate from him. Yesterday. He's called Mr. Lu."

She stared at him. He was looking at the door of the shop, with a faint frown between his brows and a very strange expression on his face, a sort of gentle, baffled, private amusement that she could not read at all. He did not look like a man who had just been found out. He looked like a man who was a good deal calmer than he had any right to be, and who had begun to suspect that the sky, from where he stood, might be rather larger than he had thought.

"You aren't worried," said Wenxi.

"No."

"Clause Two. If she knows. If she's guessed, "

"She hasn't been told," said Chengyan. "That's what the clause says."

"It says nobody is to be told. It doesn't say what happens if nobody needs telling."

"No." He turned his head at last and looked at her, and there was a kind of dark warmth in his face that made her stomach turn over. "It doesn't."

They stood there in the bright empty alley, with the washing flapping overhead and the cat winding itself round the third flowerpot. She had a strong and sudden sense that something had shifted under her feet, a very small tilt, like a boat leaving a quay. She did not know what it was. She only knew that his hand, which had held hers for exactly five minutes and had let go on the dot, was hanging at his side, and that she wanted, with a clear and quite shameless force, to take it back.