From the Agreement of Temporary Cooperation, Clause 1: "This Agreement runs from signing until the close of the Flower Boat Festival. It may be extended by mutual written consent only."
The results went up on Monday morning, and by eight o'clock the committee hall looked as though someone had announced free dumplings.
Wenxi saw the crowd from the end of the alley and slowed down. It filled the whole of the little square in front of the hall, a dense, murmuring, elbowing mass of hats and shopping baskets and small children on shoulders, all of it pressed toward the long cork noticeboard that stood beside the door. Somebody had hung bunting. Somebody else had set up a stall selling sunflower seeds in paper cones, which struck her as the clearest possible sign that the street regarded the whole business as theatre.
"Courage," said Tang Rui, appearing at her elbow with a paper cup of soy milk in each hand. She passed one over. "You look like someone being led to the dentist."
"I didn't sleep."
"You never sleep. It's your best feature." Tang Rui tilted her head toward the hall. "Go on. I'll hold your cup."
"Where is he?"
"Chengyan? He's been here since seven. He's standing at the back with his arms folded like a man guarding a bank. Zhaoyu's with him, being unbearable."
Wenxi found them at the edge of the square, near the old stone well. Chengyan stood with his back against the wall and his sleeves rolled, and the expression on his face was one of calm, stern, entirely unconvincing indifference. Beside him, Zhaoyu was bouncing on his toes with a phone in his hand and a cowlick standing straight up.
"Ninety-one," Zhaoyu was saying. "I'm telling you. Ninety-one for the old couple, easily. The odds were never in doubt. But the second place, that is the interesting one. There are three couples at eighty-eight to ninety. It could be anybody."
"It's not a horse race," said Chengyan.
"It is exactly a horse race. I have a column for it."
"Zhaoyu."
"I'm only saying, if you want a word from your odds-maker, I put you at sixty percent for the top three, and, oh. Hello, Wenxi."
Chengyan's head turned. He looked at her, and she saw him take her in quickly and thoroughly, the way a carpenter checks a plank for warp: her loose hair, her pale green cardigan, her hands wrapped around nothing. His gaze lingered a moment on her face. She had not slept, and she knew that it showed.
"Good morning," said Chengyan.
"Good morning."
"Have you looked?"
"I was afraid to."
"Mm." It was a small sound, but it was warmer than usual. He pushed himself off the wall. "We'll look together."
There was no hand-holding in it. She noticed that, and noticed herself noticing. He simply walked at her shoulder, a pace behind and to the left, the way he had once walked her to school, and the crowd parted for the two of them with a ripple of whispers that ran ahead like a wave.
The noticeboard was huge.
The committee had pinned up a long sheet of cream paper, and beside it, mounted on a board of its own, a framed photograph the size of a small door. Wenxi stopped dead.
It was the bridge.
Sun Mei had printed it in black and white, and the effect was extraordinary. The low arch curved over the top like the inside of a shell. Beneath it, in a hush of dripping stone, sat two people, a woman holding a man's arm with both hands, her face lifted and startled, and the man gone rigid as a post, his eyes fixed on her. Underneath, in neat black capitals, ran the caption: SU WENXI AND GU CHENGYAN. A COUPLE OF THE OLD STREET.
She had seen it on a camera screen the size of a postcard. She had not seen it twelve feet high.
"Oh," she said, in a very small voice.
"Yes," said Chengyan, beside her.
"Everyone can see your face."
"Yes."
"Everyone can see what it's doing."
"Yes," said Chengyan, and she heard him swallow.
It was a terrible photograph. It was, as a work of art, extremely good. And it showed beyond any doubt the one thing that the Agreement was supposed to prevent, which was a man looking at a woman as though she were the only fixed point in a tilting world. She stared at it, and felt the heat climb from her collar to her hairline, and was only dimly aware that behind her a small child had begun to say, quite loudly, "That's the lady from the boat! That's her! That's the man!"
"Results," said Tang Rui, firmly, in her ear. "Look at the results."
She looked.
The sheet was headed COUPLE OF THE OLD STREET: ROUND ONE. Below it, in a neat list, ran the five couples who would go through to the Flower Boat Festival. The others, twenty in all, had been thanked, and consoled with a voucher for the noodle shop. She read the list from the bottom.
Fifth, the Pan sisters' nephew and his fiancee, who had sold roasted chestnuts and a very sad poem.
Fourth, the elderly couple from the paper-fan stall, who had been married fifty-three years and had held hands for the whole of the market without once being asked.
Third, DR. PAN YUE AND XU JING.
She read it twice. Beside her, she felt Chengyan go very still.
"The dentist," he said.
"And the cellist," said Wenxi, and a laugh came up out of her like a hiccup. "Chengyan, that's the dentist and the cellist."
"I know who they are."
"You turned them both down. You turned them both down, in one week, and they went off and found each other. They've got an entry. They're through to the second round." She had to press her fist against her mouth. "She must have played him something that showed her soul."
"I am not listening to this," said Chengyan, with great dignity, and his ears began to burn.
She made herself look at the top of the sheet.
Second, SU WENXI AND GU CHENGYAN. Score: 89.
First, FANG DEHAI AND MEI LANYING. Score: 91.
She stood there, with the whole square roaring behind her, and a feeling of warm, ridiculous, entirely unreasonable outrage came over her like a tide.
"Two points," she said.
"Yes."
"Two points behind two pensioners with a sign that says no fakes."
"They have forty years."
"We have a photograph! We have a photograph that is twelve feet high!" She flung out a hand. "Look at the judges' notes. Presentation, seven out of ten. Seven! Because of the flour! They marked us down because a sack burst!"
"It was a very large sack," said Chengyan.
"It was an act of God!"
"It was structural."
She turned on him, and found, to her helpless fury, that he was almost smiling. It was the faintest curve at one corner of his mouth, brought under control at once, but it was there, and so were the creases beside his eyes, and she felt her outrage give way underneath her like a wet step.
"Don't," she said.
"I haven't done anything."
"You're doing it with your face."
"My face is fine," said Chengyan, with great gravity. "It's only a face."
She read the judges' comments, pinned in a column down the right-hand side. Authenticity: high. Connection to community: high. Craft: exceptional. Chemistry: remarkable, and under it, in a slanting, elegant hand she thought she recognised, someone had added, The plainness of their story is its strength. The way they stand tells the rest.
She read that last line three times, and then looked away from it, quickly, in case it should read her back.
* * *
"Come with me, my dear," said a voice at her elbow. "I want a word."
Mei Lanying stood at her shoulder in her floral coat, with her gold hair clip gleaming and her basket on her arm. She looked as bright and neat as a new coin. Without waiting for an answer she took Wenxi by the elbow, with a grip astonishingly strong for such a small person, and steered her out of the crowd and across the square and down three steps to the shaded bench beside the canal.
"Sit," said Mei Lanying.
Wenxi sat. The bench was cool and damp from the night, and beneath it a family of ducks was conducting an argument. Mei Lanying settled beside her, folded her hands over the handle of her basket, and surveyed the water with the expression of a general before a battle.
"You are cross about the two points," she said.
"I'm not cross. I'm, a little cross."
"Quite right. I would be. It is a disgrace that we won. You are better than we are." She said it calmly, as a simple fact, and Wenxi looked at her in astonishment. "Oh, we're good. We are very good, we have had a great deal of practice. But you made that dumpling without trying, and I have not seen a dumpling like that since my mother died. Dehai cried. He will not admit it. But I saw him with the handkerchief."
"Then why did you win?"
"Because the judges are human beings," said Mei Lanying, "and human beings like to give a prize to a thing that has already survived." She smiled. "Forty years, you see. It is the same as an old teapot. Nobody asks if the tea is good."
They sat in silence for a moment. A boat slid by, laden with cabbages. The boatman raised a hand and Mei Lanying raised hers.
"I thought," she said, "that I might give you the secret."
"The secret?"
"Of keeping a husband forty years. Everyone asks. I tell them it's patience, and they go away disappointed." She turned her bright black eyes on Wenxi, and the twinkle went out of them, and what was left was grave and steady. "But I will tell you the true one, because you are young, and because I think you are in a hurry to be frightened."
Wenxi opened her mouth, and found that she had nothing to say.
"First," said Mei Lanying, holding up one finger. "Never go to sleep angry. It is a terrible cliche and it is perfectly true. The night makes everything larger."
"Right."
"Second. Never fold the laundry together." Another finger. "I have no explanation for this. It simply does not work. Do it separately and you will live to be a hundred."
Wenxi laughed. Mei Lanying did not.
"Third," she said, and her voice dropped. "Say what you want in the morning. Before the day has a chance to talk you out of it. In the morning you are still honest. You have not yet had time to be clever. It is in the afternoon that we begin to explain ourselves, and by the evening, my dear, we have explained ourselves right out of the thing we wanted."
There was a pause.
Wenxi found that she was looking at her hands, which lay in her lap, quite empty. She had a strong and sudden desire to put them in her cardigan pocket, where the folded strip of red paper lay against her ribs.
"And fourth," said Mei Lanying. "The last one. Never let him think that you can do it alone. Even if you can. Even if you have been doing it alone for twenty years." She patted Wenxi's wrist. "And never, ever let him do it alone, either. He will try. They always do. They stand there with that face, and they say, it's nothing, I'm fine, and they carry the whole roof on their back until they fall over. It is a very stupid thing, and it is very much loved."
The water lapped at the stone. Somewhere behind them the crowd was dispersing, with a rising chatter like a flock of starlings.
"Mrs. Fang," said Wenxi slowly. "Do you think, "
"I don't think anything," said Mei Lanying. "I never do, in the matter of other people's marriages. It is bad manners." She rose, smoothing her coat, and looked down at Wenxi with her head on one side, and a faint, merciful, knowing smile. "I only know what a thing looks like. And I thought you ought to have the list."
She walked away across the square, small and straight and shining, with her basket swinging, and did not look back.
* * *
Wenxi found Chengyan at the foot of the bell tower, in conversation with Fang Dehai, and stopped at the corner to stare.
It was a small miracle. He was talking.
Not grunting, or answering in monosyllables, or saying Mm, but actually talking, in long sentences, with his hands. He stood with one boot on the lowest step of the tower, his arms moving in broad slow arcs, and in front of him the little round figure of Fang Dehai leaned on his cane, nodding with fierce delight, and interrupting every few words to say, "Yes! Exactly! That's what I always said!"
She crept a little closer, behind the cover of a willow.
"The trouble with a modern plane," Chengyan was saying, "is that it's too sharp. People think sharp is good. But if the blade is too fine, it takes the soul off the wood. You want it a little dull. You want it to leave the grain a bit alive."
"Alive!" cried Fang Dehai. "Yes! Forty years I built boats, you know. Wooden boats, for the canal. And the young men came, with their machines, and I said, you are taking the life out of it. And they said, old man, it is only wood."
"It's never only wood."
"It is never only wood!" The old man thumped his cane. "My boy. Do you know, you are the first person under sixty who has said that to me in twenty years."
Chengyan smiled. It was not the small, suppressed twitch of the corner of the mouth. It was a real smile, wide and unguarded, and it changed his whole face. She felt it go through her like a hand pressed flat against her chest.
"I have a hull," said Fang Dehai. "In my shed. Half-built. A river skiff. I never finished it, my knees went. Would you, "
"I'd like to see it."
"You would? You would come?"
"Whenever you like."
"On Thursday," said Fang Dehai, radiant. "Bring the girl. Mei will make a pot of tea." He lowered his voice, conspiratorially, but not nearly enough. "She likes her very much. She says she is the first person in this contest who understands what a dumpling is for."
Chengyan's smile faded a little. He glanced over the old man's shoulder, and saw her, standing behind the willow with her hand against the bark.
He did not look away.
They stood like that, across thirty feet of cobbled square, for what felt like a very long time. Then Fang Dehai, following his gaze, said, "Ah!" and waved, and Wenxi stepped out from behind the tree with all the dignity of a person who has not been caught doing anything at all.
"Thursday," said Chengyan, when she came up.
"I heard."
"You don't have to come."
"I like boats," said Wenxi.
He looked at her for a moment, in that grave, level, unreadable way of his, and then said, "Mm," with a warmth that did not belong to any dictionary.
She was still thinking about it that afternoon when she went to the market for flour.
It was a plain errand. A twenty-kilo sack, from the merchant by the east dock, to replace the one that had gone into the air on Saturday. She took her basket and her purse and a firm resolution to be left alone. She was standing in the queue at the grain stall, among the heaped baskets of rice and millet and dried beans, when she heard two women behind her begin to talk.
They did not lower their voices. People in Yunxi rarely did.
"I tell you," said the first, a thin woman in a headscarf. "I was there on Saturday. I saw it with my own eyes. He wiped her face."
"With his hand?"
"With his thumb. And I thought, well. That is not an act. Nobody could do that for an audience."
"I heard it was an act," said the second, a stout woman with a cabbage under each arm. "I heard it was a performance. For the campaign. My nephew works for the committee. He says they've all been at it. All the couples. It's the prize, you see. Five hundred thousand. People will do anything."
"Some of them," agreed the thin woman. "But not those two."
"Why not?"
"Because they are so bad at it."
Wenxi had been trying not to listen. She stood very still, with her eyes fixed on a basket of mung beans, and the back of her neck went hot.
"Think about it," said the thin woman, warming to her subject. "If they were faking, they would be good. They would hold hands like those young ones from the county town, with the fingers all laced up and the little looks. But those two, they walk down the street as if one of them is carrying an egg. They talk about bamboo shoots. They look at each other and then look at the sky. It is the worst performance I have ever seen."
"Terrible," agreed the stout woman.
"So it has to be real."
"Nobody could fake that badly."
"They are so fake," said the thin woman, with immense satisfaction, "that they must be true."
The queue moved forward. Wenxi moved with it, and bought her flour, and carried it home across the bridge with her face burning, and a strange small giddy sensation beneath her ribs, as though she had swallowed a bird.
So fake that they must be true.
It was not logic. It was not even sense. But it kept turning round in her mind all the way home, bright and sharp as a coin, and she could not decide whether she wanted to laugh or to hide in the flour sack.
* * *
He was waiting for her on the bridge.
It was a little after five, and the sun had gone low and golden, and the canal beneath the arch was the colour of strong tea. He sat on the low parapet at the crest, as he had a dozen evenings before, with his boots off and his feet drawn up. A long paper packet lay at his side, tied with string. When he saw her coming up the steps with the flour on her hip he stood at once, took the sack from her, and set it on the stone without a word.
"You didn't have to," said Wenxi.
"It's twenty kilos."
"I'm not made of glass."
"I know." He straightened up. "I know exactly what you're made of."
She did not know what to say to that, so she said nothing, and sat down on the parapet, and he sat beside her, a foot away. Below them, a long low barge went through the arch with a soft slap of water.
"I heard something today," she said at last.
"Mm."
"At the grain stall. Two women. They said that we are, that people think, " She searched for a way to put it. "They think we're real. Because we're so bad at pretending."
Chengyan said nothing. He was looking at the water.
"I thought you ought to know," said Wenxi. "Because it's the opposite of what we wanted. We wanted to be convincing. And instead we are, I don't know. Convincing by accident. And I wondered if you minded."
"Minded."
"That people think it. That they're saying it. About you."
He was silent for so long that she thought he had not heard. A moorhen paddled out from under the arch and disappeared into the reeds. The light shifted on the white walls.
"Ignore it," said Chengyan.
"Ignore it?"
"It's talk. It's what they do. It means nothing." His voice was perfectly level, low and calm, the voice in which he read out the dimensions of a window. "They'll say something else by Thursday."
But she was looking at his ears.
They had gone dark red. It began at the tips and spread down, slow and unmistakable, over the lobes and along the line of his jaw and into the open collar of his shirt, and he sat there with his shoulders square and his eyes on the canal, and not one muscle in his face acknowledged it. She had the dizzying, absurd conviction that he did not know.
She bit the inside of her cheek, very hard.
"Right," said Wenxi. "Ignore it. Of course."
"It's a clause," said Chengyan. "Sort of."
"Which one?"
"The, preamble. Keep a straight face."
"I'm keeping it."
"You're not."
"I'm keeping it very hard," said Wenxi, and it came out a good deal wobblier than she had meant, and he turned his head at last and looked at her, and the red in his ears seemed to flare, and for a second the straight face of both of them wavered and hung.
Then he picked up the paper packet at his side.
"Your grandmother sent these," he said. "To the workshop. At noon. She said you'd forget to eat."
He undid the string. Inside, nested in a sheet of greaseproof paper, lay two small round cakes, pale gold, still faintly warm. They were pressed on top with a pattern of plum blossoms, linked at the stem. Wenxi caught her breath.
She knew the shape. She knew the smell. It was honey and toasted rice and something dark and sweet she could not quite name. It was not Xi Xi's cake, the lost one with its missing page. But it was close, so close, an echo of it, a cousin, and she thought of Grandma at the stove at dawn with her hands moving in their slow fold, making cakes for the two of them, and humming.
"She said," said Chengyan, "that one is for each of us."
"She said that?"
"She said, one for each. Not to share." He cleared his throat. "She was smiling."
"She is always smiling."
"This was a different smile."
"Oh dear," said Wenxi.
He handed her one. She took it, and they sat side by side on the warm stone, in the long light, and ate.
It was soft and sweet and a little smoky at the edges, and the first bite brought the taste of her childhood rising in her like a tide. She kept her eyes on the canal. She did not trust them anywhere else. But after a while, because she could not help it, because it was a thing she had been wanting to do for weeks, she turned her head and looked at him.
He was eating slowly, with great concentration, the way he did everything. A crumb of cake clung to the corner of his mouth. The low sun lit the side of his face and turned the edge of his hair to bronze, and there was a smear of dust on his collar, and a shaving nick on his chin. He looked tired. He looked, in the soft evening light, like a man who has been carrying something for a long time and has just, for the length of one cake, been allowed to put it down.
He swallowed. He glanced at her. And he saw that she was smiling.
It was not the bright one. It was not the one she kept for the street. It was the other, the crooked one, the one she did not know she was wearing, and she watched him recognise it and watched something in his face stop, as if a hand had been laid flat across a string.
"What?" said Chengyan, quietly.
"Nothing," said Wenxi. "Crumb."
"Where?"
"Your mouth."
He wiped it with the back of his wrist. He missed. She did not tell him. She sat there on the old stone with her hands round a warm honey cake, and the swallows going over, and the whole slow gold evening settling on the water like a hand on a sleeping child, and a thought came to her, quite clearly, and with no particular fear.
The contract ran until the end of the Flower Boat Festival. That was seven weeks away. Seven weeks of hands and photographs and clauses and green dumplings and flour in her hair. It had only just begun.
And she did not, she found, want to be anywhere else.
You've reached the end of this chapter
From the Agreement of Temporary Cooperation, Clause 1: "This Agreement runs from signing until the close of the Flower Boat Festival. It may be extended by mutual written consent only."
The results went up on Monday morning, and by eight o'clock the committee hall looked as though someone had announced free dumplings.
Wenxi saw the crowd from the end of the alley and slowed down. It filled the whole of the little square in front of the hall, a dense, murmuring, elbowing mass of hats and shopping baskets and small children on shoulders, all of it pressed toward the long cork noticeboard that stood beside the door. Somebody had hung bunting. Somebody else had set up a stall selling sunflower seeds in paper cones, which struck her as the clearest possible sign that the street regarded the whole business as theatre.
"Courage," said Tang Rui, appearing at her elbow with a paper cup of soy milk in each hand. She passed one over. "You look like someone being led to the dentist."
"I didn't sleep."
"You never sleep. It's your best feature." Tang Rui tilted her head toward the hall. "Go on. I'll hold your cup."
"Where is he?"
"Chengyan? He's been here since seven. He's standing at the back with his arms folded like a man guarding a bank. Zhaoyu's with him, being unbearable."
Wenxi found them at the edge of the square, near the old stone well. Chengyan stood with his back against the wall and his sleeves rolled, and the expression on his face was one of calm, stern, entirely unconvincing indifference. Beside him, Zhaoyu was bouncing on his toes with a phone in his hand and a cowlick standing straight up.
"Ninety-one," Zhaoyu was saying. "I'm telling you. Ninety-one for the old couple, easily. The odds were never in doubt. But the second place, that is the interesting one. There are three couples at eighty-eight to ninety. It could be anybody."
"It's not a horse race," said Chengyan.
"It is exactly a horse race. I have a column for it."
"Zhaoyu."
"I'm only saying, if you want a word from your odds-maker, I put you at sixty percent for the top three, and, oh. Hello, Wenxi."
Chengyan's head turned. He looked at her, and she saw him take her in quickly and thoroughly, the way a carpenter checks a plank for warp: her loose hair, her pale green cardigan, her hands wrapped around nothing. His gaze lingered a moment on her face. She had not slept, and she knew that it showed.
"Good morning," said Chengyan.
"Good morning."
"Have you looked?"
"I was afraid to."
"Mm." It was a small sound, but it was warmer than usual. He pushed himself off the wall. "We'll look together."
There was no hand-holding in it. She noticed that, and noticed herself noticing. He simply walked at her shoulder, a pace behind and to the left, the way he had once walked her to school, and the crowd parted for the two of them with a ripple of whispers that ran ahead like a wave.
The noticeboard was huge.
The committee had pinned up a long sheet of cream paper, and beside it, mounted on a board of its own, a framed photograph the size of a small door. Wenxi stopped dead.
It was the bridge.
Sun Mei had printed it in black and white, and the effect was extraordinary. The low arch curved over the top like the inside of a shell. Beneath it, in a hush of dripping stone, sat two people, a woman holding a man's arm with both hands, her face lifted and startled, and the man gone rigid as a post, his eyes fixed on her. Underneath, in neat black capitals, ran the caption: SU WENXI AND GU CHENGYAN. A COUPLE OF THE OLD STREET.
She had seen it on a camera screen the size of a postcard. She had not seen it twelve feet high.
"Oh," she said, in a very small voice.
"Yes," said Chengyan, beside her.
"Everyone can see your face."
"Yes."
"Everyone can see what it's doing."
"Yes," said Chengyan, and she heard him swallow.
It was a terrible photograph. It was, as a work of art, extremely good. And it showed beyond any doubt the one thing that the Agreement was supposed to prevent, which was a man looking at a woman as though she were the only fixed point in a tilting world. She stared at it, and felt the heat climb from her collar to her hairline, and was only dimly aware that behind her a small child had begun to say, quite loudly, "That's the lady from the boat! That's her! That's the man!"
"Results," said Tang Rui, firmly, in her ear. "Look at the results."
She looked.
The sheet was headed COUPLE OF THE OLD STREET: ROUND ONE. Below it, in a neat list, ran the five couples who would go through to the Flower Boat Festival. The others, twenty in all, had been thanked, and consoled with a voucher for the noodle shop. She read the list from the bottom.
Fifth, the Pan sisters' nephew and his fiancee, who had sold roasted chestnuts and a very sad poem.
Fourth, the elderly couple from the paper-fan stall, who had been married fifty-three years and had held hands for the whole of the market without once being asked.
Third, DR. PAN YUE AND XU JING.
She read it twice. Beside her, she felt Chengyan go very still.
"The dentist," he said.
"And the cellist," said Wenxi, and a laugh came up out of her like a hiccup. "Chengyan, that's the dentist and the cellist."
"I know who they are."
"You turned them both down. You turned them both down, in one week, and they went off and found each other. They've got an entry. They're through to the second round." She had to press her fist against her mouth. "She must have played him something that showed her soul."
"I am not listening to this," said Chengyan, with great dignity, and his ears began to burn.
She made herself look at the top of the sheet.
Second, SU WENXI AND GU CHENGYAN. Score: 89.
First, FANG DEHAI AND MEI LANYING. Score: 91.
She stood there, with the whole square roaring behind her, and a feeling of warm, ridiculous, entirely unreasonable outrage came over her like a tide.
"Two points," she said.
"Yes."
"Two points behind two pensioners with a sign that says no fakes."
"They have forty years."
"We have a photograph! We have a photograph that is twelve feet high!" She flung out a hand. "Look at the judges' notes. Presentation, seven out of ten. Seven! Because of the flour! They marked us down because a sack burst!"
"It was a very large sack," said Chengyan.
"It was an act of God!"
"It was structural."
She turned on him, and found, to her helpless fury, that he was almost smiling. It was the faintest curve at one corner of his mouth, brought under control at once, but it was there, and so were the creases beside his eyes, and she felt her outrage give way underneath her like a wet step.
"Don't," she said.
"I haven't done anything."
"You're doing it with your face."
"My face is fine," said Chengyan, with great gravity. "It's only a face."
She read the judges' comments, pinned in a column down the right-hand side. Authenticity: high. Connection to community: high. Craft: exceptional. Chemistry: remarkable, and under it, in a slanting, elegant hand she thought she recognised, someone had added, The plainness of their story is its strength. The way they stand tells the rest.
She read that last line three times, and then looked away from it, quickly, in case it should read her back.
* * *
"Come with me, my dear," said a voice at her elbow. "I want a word."
Mei Lanying stood at her shoulder in her floral coat, with her gold hair clip gleaming and her basket on her arm. She looked as bright and neat as a new coin. Without waiting for an answer she took Wenxi by the elbow, with a grip astonishingly strong for such a small person, and steered her out of the crowd and across the square and down three steps to the shaded bench beside the canal.
"Sit," said Mei Lanying.
Wenxi sat. The bench was cool and damp from the night, and beneath it a family of ducks was conducting an argument. Mei Lanying settled beside her, folded her hands over the handle of her basket, and surveyed the water with the expression of a general before a battle.
"You are cross about the two points," she said.
"I'm not cross. I'm, a little cross."
"Quite right. I would be. It is a disgrace that we won. You are better than we are." She said it calmly, as a simple fact, and Wenxi looked at her in astonishment. "Oh, we're good. We are very good, we have had a great deal of practice. But you made that dumpling without trying, and I have not seen a dumpling like that since my mother died. Dehai cried. He will not admit it. But I saw him with the handkerchief."
"Then why did you win?"
"Because the judges are human beings," said Mei Lanying, "and human beings like to give a prize to a thing that has already survived." She smiled. "Forty years, you see. It is the same as an old teapot. Nobody asks if the tea is good."
They sat in silence for a moment. A boat slid by, laden with cabbages. The boatman raised a hand and Mei Lanying raised hers.
"I thought," she said, "that I might give you the secret."
"The secret?"
"Of keeping a husband forty years. Everyone asks. I tell them it's patience, and they go away disappointed." She turned her bright black eyes on Wenxi, and the twinkle went out of them, and what was left was grave and steady. "But I will tell you the true one, because you are young, and because I think you are in a hurry to be frightened."
Wenxi opened her mouth, and found that she had nothing to say.
"First," said Mei Lanying, holding up one finger. "Never go to sleep angry. It is a terrible cliche and it is perfectly true. The night makes everything larger."
"Right."
"Second. Never fold the laundry together." Another finger. "I have no explanation for this. It simply does not work. Do it separately and you will live to be a hundred."
Wenxi laughed. Mei Lanying did not.
"Third," she said, and her voice dropped. "Say what you want in the morning. Before the day has a chance to talk you out of it. In the morning you are still honest. You have not yet had time to be clever. It is in the afternoon that we begin to explain ourselves, and by the evening, my dear, we have explained ourselves right out of the thing we wanted."
There was a pause.
Wenxi found that she was looking at her hands, which lay in her lap, quite empty. She had a strong and sudden desire to put them in her cardigan pocket, where the folded strip of red paper lay against her ribs.
"And fourth," said Mei Lanying. "The last one. Never let him think that you can do it alone. Even if you can. Even if you have been doing it alone for twenty years." She patted Wenxi's wrist. "And never, ever let him do it alone, either. He will try. They always do. They stand there with that face, and they say, it's nothing, I'm fine, and they carry the whole roof on their back until they fall over. It is a very stupid thing, and it is very much loved."
The water lapped at the stone. Somewhere behind them the crowd was dispersing, with a rising chatter like a flock of starlings.
"Mrs. Fang," said Wenxi slowly. "Do you think, "
"I don't think anything," said Mei Lanying. "I never do, in the matter of other people's marriages. It is bad manners." She rose, smoothing her coat, and looked down at Wenxi with her head on one side, and a faint, merciful, knowing smile. "I only know what a thing looks like. And I thought you ought to have the list."
She walked away across the square, small and straight and shining, with her basket swinging, and did not look back.
* * *
Wenxi found Chengyan at the foot of the bell tower, in conversation with Fang Dehai, and stopped at the corner to stare.
It was a small miracle. He was talking.
Not grunting, or answering in monosyllables, or saying Mm, but actually talking, in long sentences, with his hands. He stood with one boot on the lowest step of the tower, his arms moving in broad slow arcs, and in front of him the little round figure of Fang Dehai leaned on his cane, nodding with fierce delight, and interrupting every few words to say, "Yes! Exactly! That's what I always said!"
She crept a little closer, behind the cover of a willow.
"The trouble with a modern plane," Chengyan was saying, "is that it's too sharp. People think sharp is good. But if the blade is too fine, it takes the soul off the wood. You want it a little dull. You want it to leave the grain a bit alive."
"Alive!" cried Fang Dehai. "Yes! Forty years I built boats, you know. Wooden boats, for the canal. And the young men came, with their machines, and I said, you are taking the life out of it. And they said, old man, it is only wood."
"It's never only wood."
"It is never only wood!" The old man thumped his cane. "My boy. Do you know, you are the first person under sixty who has said that to me in twenty years."
Chengyan smiled. It was not the small, suppressed twitch of the corner of the mouth. It was a real smile, wide and unguarded, and it changed his whole face. She felt it go through her like a hand pressed flat against her chest.
"I have a hull," said Fang Dehai. "In my shed. Half-built. A river skiff. I never finished it, my knees went. Would you, "
"I'd like to see it."
"You would? You would come?"
"Whenever you like."
"On Thursday," said Fang Dehai, radiant. "Bring the girl. Mei will make a pot of tea." He lowered his voice, conspiratorially, but not nearly enough. "She likes her very much. She says she is the first person in this contest who understands what a dumpling is for."
Chengyan's smile faded a little. He glanced over the old man's shoulder, and saw her, standing behind the willow with her hand against the bark.
He did not look away.
They stood like that, across thirty feet of cobbled square, for what felt like a very long time. Then Fang Dehai, following his gaze, said, "Ah!" and waved, and Wenxi stepped out from behind the tree with all the dignity of a person who has not been caught doing anything at all.
"Thursday," said Chengyan, when she came up.
"I heard."
"You don't have to come."
"I like boats," said Wenxi.
He looked at her for a moment, in that grave, level, unreadable way of his, and then said, "Mm," with a warmth that did not belong to any dictionary.
She was still thinking about it that afternoon when she went to the market for flour.
It was a plain errand. A twenty-kilo sack, from the merchant by the east dock, to replace the one that had gone into the air on Saturday. She took her basket and her purse and a firm resolution to be left alone. She was standing in the queue at the grain stall, among the heaped baskets of rice and millet and dried beans, when she heard two women behind her begin to talk.
They did not lower their voices. People in Yunxi rarely did.
"I tell you," said the first, a thin woman in a headscarf. "I was there on Saturday. I saw it with my own eyes. He wiped her face."
"With his hand?"
"With his thumb. And I thought, well. That is not an act. Nobody could do that for an audience."
"I heard it was an act," said the second, a stout woman with a cabbage under each arm. "I heard it was a performance. For the campaign. My nephew works for the committee. He says they've all been at it. All the couples. It's the prize, you see. Five hundred thousand. People will do anything."
"Some of them," agreed the thin woman. "But not those two."
"Why not?"
"Because they are so bad at it."
Wenxi had been trying not to listen. She stood very still, with her eyes fixed on a basket of mung beans, and the back of her neck went hot.
"Think about it," said the thin woman, warming to her subject. "If they were faking, they would be good. They would hold hands like those young ones from the county town, with the fingers all laced up and the little looks. But those two, they walk down the street as if one of them is carrying an egg. They talk about bamboo shoots. They look at each other and then look at the sky. It is the worst performance I have ever seen."
"Terrible," agreed the stout woman.
"So it has to be real."
"Nobody could fake that badly."
"They are so fake," said the thin woman, with immense satisfaction, "that they must be true."
The queue moved forward. Wenxi moved with it, and bought her flour, and carried it home across the bridge with her face burning, and a strange small giddy sensation beneath her ribs, as though she had swallowed a bird.
So fake that they must be true.
It was not logic. It was not even sense. But it kept turning round in her mind all the way home, bright and sharp as a coin, and she could not decide whether she wanted to laugh or to hide in the flour sack.
* * *
He was waiting for her on the bridge.
It was a little after five, and the sun had gone low and golden, and the canal beneath the arch was the colour of strong tea. He sat on the low parapet at the crest, as he had a dozen evenings before, with his boots off and his feet drawn up. A long paper packet lay at his side, tied with string. When he saw her coming up the steps with the flour on her hip he stood at once, took the sack from her, and set it on the stone without a word.
"You didn't have to," said Wenxi.
"It's twenty kilos."
"I'm not made of glass."
"I know." He straightened up. "I know exactly what you're made of."
She did not know what to say to that, so she said nothing, and sat down on the parapet, and he sat beside her, a foot away. Below them, a long low barge went through the arch with a soft slap of water.
"I heard something today," she said at last.
"Mm."
"At the grain stall. Two women. They said that we are, that people think, " She searched for a way to put it. "They think we're real. Because we're so bad at pretending."
Chengyan said nothing. He was looking at the water.
"I thought you ought to know," said Wenxi. "Because it's the opposite of what we wanted. We wanted to be convincing. And instead we are, I don't know. Convincing by accident. And I wondered if you minded."
"Minded."
"That people think it. That they're saying it. About you."
He was silent for so long that she thought he had not heard. A moorhen paddled out from under the arch and disappeared into the reeds. The light shifted on the white walls.
"Ignore it," said Chengyan.
"Ignore it?"
"It's talk. It's what they do. It means nothing." His voice was perfectly level, low and calm, the voice in which he read out the dimensions of a window. "They'll say something else by Thursday."
But she was looking at his ears.
They had gone dark red. It began at the tips and spread down, slow and unmistakable, over the lobes and along the line of his jaw and into the open collar of his shirt, and he sat there with his shoulders square and his eyes on the canal, and not one muscle in his face acknowledged it. She had the dizzying, absurd conviction that he did not know.
She bit the inside of her cheek, very hard.
"Right," said Wenxi. "Ignore it. Of course."
"It's a clause," said Chengyan. "Sort of."
"Which one?"
"The, preamble. Keep a straight face."
"I'm keeping it."
"You're not."
"I'm keeping it very hard," said Wenxi, and it came out a good deal wobblier than she had meant, and he turned his head at last and looked at her, and the red in his ears seemed to flare, and for a second the straight face of both of them wavered and hung.
Then he picked up the paper packet at his side.
"Your grandmother sent these," he said. "To the workshop. At noon. She said you'd forget to eat."
He undid the string. Inside, nested in a sheet of greaseproof paper, lay two small round cakes, pale gold, still faintly warm. They were pressed on top with a pattern of plum blossoms, linked at the stem. Wenxi caught her breath.
She knew the shape. She knew the smell. It was honey and toasted rice and something dark and sweet she could not quite name. It was not Xi Xi's cake, the lost one with its missing page. But it was close, so close, an echo of it, a cousin, and she thought of Grandma at the stove at dawn with her hands moving in their slow fold, making cakes for the two of them, and humming.
"She said," said Chengyan, "that one is for each of us."
"She said that?"
"She said, one for each. Not to share." He cleared his throat. "She was smiling."
"She is always smiling."
"This was a different smile."
"Oh dear," said Wenxi.
He handed her one. She took it, and they sat side by side on the warm stone, in the long light, and ate.
It was soft and sweet and a little smoky at the edges, and the first bite brought the taste of her childhood rising in her like a tide. She kept her eyes on the canal. She did not trust them anywhere else. But after a while, because she could not help it, because it was a thing she had been wanting to do for weeks, she turned her head and looked at him.
He was eating slowly, with great concentration, the way he did everything. A crumb of cake clung to the corner of his mouth. The low sun lit the side of his face and turned the edge of his hair to bronze, and there was a smear of dust on his collar, and a shaving nick on his chin. He looked tired. He looked, in the soft evening light, like a man who has been carrying something for a long time and has just, for the length of one cake, been allowed to put it down.
He swallowed. He glanced at her. And he saw that she was smiling.
It was not the bright one. It was not the one she kept for the street. It was the other, the crooked one, the one she did not know she was wearing, and she watched him recognise it and watched something in his face stop, as if a hand had been laid flat across a string.
"What?" said Chengyan, quietly.
"Nothing," said Wenxi. "Crumb."
"Where?"
"Your mouth."
He wiped it with the back of his wrist. He missed. She did not tell him. She sat there on the old stone with her hands round a warm honey cake, and the swallows going over, and the whole slow gold evening settling on the water like a hand on a sleeping child, and a thought came to her, quite clearly, and with no particular fear.
The contract ran until the end of the Flower Boat Festival. That was seven weeks away. Seven weeks of hands and photographs and clauses and green dumplings and flour in her hair. It had only just begun.
And she did not, she found, want to be anywhere else.
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