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

The plum rain came to Yunxi on the first of June, as it came every year, without apology.

It began as a mist that clung to the rooftops and softened the edges of the white walls, so that the whole town looked like a drawing someone had gone over with a damp thumb. By noon it was a drizzle. By evening it was a steady, soft, patient fall that did not stop for three days, and the canal rose an inch, and the stone steps went dark, and every cat in the old town retired indoors with an expression of profound and personal betrayal.

Chengyan had always liked it. It was the one season when the town slowed down enough to keep pace with him. The workshop was warm and smelled of damp cedar. The roof, for the first time in his memory, did not drip. He sat at his bench in the grey light with the doors open to the sound of rain on tile, and for a whole morning he did not think of anything at all.

Then Tang Rui came in, shaking an umbrella the colour of a boiled egg, and said, "Pop-up tea stall."

"No," said Chengyan.

"It's a task."

"It is raining."

"That's the point. Mr. Shen's people have decided that the best way to show the old town at its most romantic is to put a tea stall under the bridge during the plum rain." She lowered the umbrella. "Every couple, one afternoon each. You serve tea and a small cake to anyone who wants to shelter. You are scored on atmosphere. They said the word atmosphere three times."

"I do not do atmosphere."

"You do wood," said Tang Rui. "Build the stall."

He built it the next morning, under the eastern arch of Liu Bridge, where the stone made a long dry hollow above the water. It took him four hours, a bundle of green bamboo, a coil of rope, and the assistance of Zhaoyu, who held things and said that it looked like a coffin for a very thin man. The frame was simple: four uprights, a slanted roof of oiled paper stretched over split cane, a narrow counter of pale cedar that he had planed that morning and oiled so that it shone like honey. Two low benches. A small charcoal stove, for the kettle. Hooks along one side for the umbrellas.

It was a good stall. He stood back and looked at it, with the rain dripping from his hair, and felt a small, plain, uncomplicated satisfaction.

Then he noticed that the counter was very narrow.

It was exactly as wide as he had measured. That was the trouble. He had made it to fit the space under the arch, with room for the kettle and the cups and a single person to stand behind it. He had not, in any part of his mind, accounted for two.

"Zhaoyu."

"Mm?"

"How wide is this?"

"Oh, about a person and a half," said Zhaoyu, in the tone of a man who has measured it, and enjoyed it, and says no more.

He went home that evening and found his grandfather waiting at the kitchen door in his padded jacket, leaning on his cane.

"A-Yan," said the old man.

"Grandfather."

"Tomorrow, with the stall. You will take a second coat."

"I have a coat."

"Not for you." The old man tapped the cane on the flagstones. "The girl will have come out without one. She never remembers. Your grandmother, God keep her, was the same. Fourteen years I carried a spare in the cupboard. I had a whole system."

"It's only a task, Grandfather."

"Mm." The bright old eyes did not waver. "A cold in the rainy season takes a month to shift. Take the coat."

He took the coat.

The stall opened at two, in a downpour.

It was a grey, soft, whispering afternoon, the sky low and pearl-coloured and full of water, and the whole town had gone green and silver under it. The bridge stood above them like the roof of a cave. Rain fell in long curtains on either side of the arch and pattered on the paper roof and ran off the eaves in a bright broken fringe. The canal was brown and dimpled and ringing with drops. In the hollow beneath, the little stove glowed red, and the kettle began to sing.

Wenxi arrived at ten past two, under a yellow umbrella, with a covered basket on her arm.

She had on a pale blue raincoat and her hair was tied up, and there were beads of water on her lashes. She was smiling. She was very pink in the face, and breathing a little fast, and she carried the basket with the extreme care of someone transporting something alive.

"I've made little ones," she said. "Osmanthus, and sesame, and a plain one with salted egg yolk. They're only mouthfuls. I thought the visitors would want something to hold in one hand and a cup in the other."

"It's a good idea."

"It's a very good idea." She stepped into the stall, shook the umbrella outside, and closed it with a flap. "Oh, you've done a beautiful job. It smells wonderful in here. It's like the inside of a drawer."

"It is a drawer," said Chengyan. "I built it like one."

"Where do I stand?"

"There."

"There?"

"By the stove."

She looked at the width of the counter. She looked at the space behind it. He watched her do the sum, and he watched her reach the answer, and he saw the colour deepen very slightly in her cheeks.

"I see," said Wenxi.

"I measured for one."

"It's a very efficient design."

"It was not a design. It was an error."

"We'll manage," she said, and put down the basket, and squeezed in beside him with her shoulder against his arm.

The first visitors came in at half past two.

They were a family of four from the provincial capital, wearing matching plastic ponchos and carrying an expression of bewildered joy. They had been caught in the downpour at the east dock. They crowded under the roof with a rush of damp and a clatter of umbrellas, and then more came behind them: a pair of elderly women with a basket of bamboo shoots, three students with a guitar case, a man with a very large dog. By three the little stall was a hive. By half past it was a sardine tin, packed to the rafters with steaming bodies and wet coats, and the rain went on pouring around the arch as if the sky had developed a grudge.

"Two teas! One sesame, one osmanthus!"

"Three green, please! And is the egg yolk very salty?"

"It's very good," said Wenxi, over her shoulder, pouring. "Chengyan, the tray!"

"Here."

"The cups!"

"Left."

"Your left or mine?"

"Mine."

They worked in a space the width of a church pew. It was ridiculous. Every time she turned to the stove, her back brushed his chest. Every time he reached for the kettle, his arm went round her waist, not touching, hovering an inch off the cloth of her raincoat like a man passing a hand over a flame. She smelled of rain and sugar and warm osmanthus. He kept his eyes fixed on the cups. He counted them. He had never in his life been so concerned with the exact number of cups.

At one point, in the crush, a child squeezed between them to reach the sesame cakes and Wenxi was pushed back against him, and he put his hands on her shoulders to steady her. They were small shoulders. They were damp from the wet air and warm underneath, and they fitted into his palms with a bone-deep rightness that sent a slow pulse through his whole body.

He took his hands away at once. She said, "Thank you," without turning round, in a voice that had gone a little unsteady.

"It's the width," said Chengyan.

"It's very narrow."

"It's my fault."

"It's not your fault," said Wenxi. A strand of her hair had come down and stuck to her neck, and she tried to blow it away, and failed. He found that he was looking at the place where it lay, and looked at the kettle. "It's the rain's fault. And Zhaoyu's. He measured too."

He rubbed the back of his neck. It was getting to be a habit.

A little after four, the lights went out.

It was not just the stall. It was the whole of the canal, every house and shop and window, from the east dock to the bell tower, going dark in one soft collapse like a candle flame pinched out. There was a general gasp. Somewhere a baby began to cry. The only light left was the red eye of the charcoal stove and the dim pearl of the rain beyond the arch, and in the sudden hush the sound of water seemed enormously loud, drumming and dripping and trickling off the stone.

"Power cut," said somebody, in a tone of weary expertise. "It happens every June."

"Is there a torch?" said the man with the dog.

"There's the stove," said Wenxi. "We have the stove. It's very romantic."

She laughed. She stood in the half dark with the red glow on her face and her hair coming down and she laughed, a small, clear, delighted peal, and the sound of it rang off the stone of the arch and went out over the water. He had not heard that laugh since he was twenty-one. It was the laugh of a girl who had once climbed the willow in a thunderstorm for a dare, and been sick afterwards, and still said that it was worth it.

He thought: she was afraid of the thunder.

It came to him quite clearly, from nowhere, in the dark. She had been seven, or eight, and there had been a storm in July, and she had come across the wall from Su Ji in her nightdress, white as paper, with her hands over her ears. She had not said a word. She had simply sat down on the floor of the workshop beside his bench, and he had put his radio on very loud, and gone on sanding, and neither of them had said anything about it. It had happened a great many times after that. He had never told anyone.

She was not afraid now, he thought. She was twenty-six, and she was laughing in the dark.

He saw the flash a half-second before he heard it.

It lit the whole canal. Every raindrop hung for a second in white fire, and the stone of the bridge stood out like bone, and then the dark came down again, and then, enormous, overhead, with a crack like a splitting beam, the thunder broke.

The whole stall jumped. Someone screamed. A cup fell and shattered. And in the black, ringing silence that followed, something small and fierce took hold of the front of his shirt with both hands.

He did not move.

She was against his chest. He had not seen her come. She had simply been standing at the stove and then she was there, with her forehead nearly against his collarbone and her fists knotted in the cloth, breathing in short sharp breaths. She was shaking. It was very slight, a fine fast tremor like a wire in the wind, and she was holding on as though the ground had gone.

"Sorry," she said. It came out muffled and furious. "Sorry. I'm fine. It's only, it was loud, it was so, "

"I know," said Chengyan.

He did not touch her. He wanted to. It was the first time in his life he had wanted anything so much that it felt like a physical pain. His hands hung at his sides like weights, and he could feel every one of the thirty or so other people crowded round them in the dark, holding their breath, and the Agreement, with its limits and its clauses and its clean white lines, rose up in his head like a wall.

He reached behind him, instead, to the hook by the stove.

His grandfather's coat hung there, a long old waxed canvas thing the colour of wet slate, big enough for two. It smelled of linseed oil and tobacco and a lifetime of cold mornings. He took it down, and shook it out, and without a word, with infinite care, he laid it over her shoulders.

She went still.

He settled it round her, drawing the collar up around her neck, and smoothed down the folds so that the rain would not find her. He did it as he would have laid a cloth over a table that might be damaged. She did not move. She stood inside the vast dark coat, with her fists still caught in his shirt, and then, very slowly, her face lifted.

He could not see her eyes. He could only see the shape of her, the curve of her cheek, a glimmer of rain on her lashes. But he felt her look at him. It was the strangest sensation, a warmth that began in the middle of his chest and spread outward, as if someone had opened a small door.

"You brought a coat," said Wenxi, in a whisper.

"My grandfather made me."

"Did he say it was for me?"

"He said you'd come out without one."

"I did."

"I know."

The thunder rolled away across the rooftops, long and low and grumbling, like furniture being moved in a distant room. Somewhere behind them a child began, in a thin voice, to sing. Somebody else took it up. Then the old women with the bamboo shoots joined in, in cracked warm voices, and the students found their guitar, and in a moment the whole crowd under the bridge was singing a song so old and so simple that the words had worn smooth as river stones.

He stood in the dark with her hands in his shirt and the song going round them like smoke, and thought: this is not a performance. There is nobody here to see it.

There were thirty people. They did not seem to count.

The lights came back on at five.

They did it all at once, with a blink and a hum, and the whole canal sprang into view: wet roofs and wet walls and wet faces, the rain thinning now to a fine bright mist. The stall was a ruin. There were crumbs on every surface and a puddle on the counter and a broken cup in the corner, and the man with the dog was asleep, sitting upright, with his chin on his chest. A woman was tapping her foot to the end of the song. A boy had eaten four cakes.

Wenxi released his shirt.

She did it as if she had only just noticed, and stepped back with a rush of colour, and the old coat slid down to her elbows. For a moment she stood there, blinking, with the damp curls round her face and an expression of wide, naked confusion. Then she saw the faces turned toward her, all of them, like flowers to a window, and her hand came up and began, of its own accord, to twist the end of her ponytail.

Chengyan looked round.

It was a most remarkable audience. They sat or stood in a half-circle in the little stall, with their cups held forgotten in their laps, gazing at the two of them with expressions of the purest delight. They looked like people at the pictures. The student with the guitar had his mouth open. The elderly woman with the bamboo shoots had pressed her hand to her heart.

And in the corner, on the low bench by the umbrella hooks, with her gold clip gleaming and her basket in her lap and a paper cup of tea untouched in her hand, sat Mei Lanying.

She was smiling. She was not smiling at him. She was smiling at the rain, at the roof, at nothing in particular, with an expression of serene, private, tender amusement, like a woman looking at a photograph she has seen before. When she saw him looking she lifted her cup an inch, in a small salute, and then, with great tact, turned her head and began a conversation with the man with the dog.

He felt his ears begin to burn. He took the broken cup out of the corner and made a business of sweeping it up.

By seven the rain had stopped.

The visitors had gone, in twos and threes, with their ponchos folded and their pockets full of osmanthus cakes. The stall was swept. The charcoal had burned down to a dull red. The sky above the bridge had cleared from pearl to a deep, clean, rain-washed violet, and a single star hung over the willow, impossibly bright.

They stood side by side in the doorway of the stall, looking out. Water dripped from the eaves. The canal ran high and quiet and smelled of stone. Wenxi still had the coat round her shoulders. She had not given it back. He had not asked.

"That was the best day of the campaign," she said.

"We broke a cup."

"We broke one cup. In four hours. With the thunder." She looked down at her hands, which were holding the lapels of the coat. "I think we were rather good."

"The scores are Monday."

"I don't mean the scores."

He waited. She did not say what she meant. She stood there, wrapped in his grandfather's enormous coat, with the hem trailing on the wet stone and her hair coming down, and she was looking at the star.

"I should give this back," she said at last, and began to shrug it off.

"Keep it."

She stopped. "It's your grandfather's."

"He won't want it. He has four." He did not know where the lie had come from. His grandfather had one. "Keep it tonight. And tomorrow."

"Why tomorrow?"

He looked up. The sky was perfectly clear. The air was rinsed and cool, with the first soft smell of the summer coming. Not a cloud in it.

"Because it'll rain again," said Chengyan.

She laughed. She did not argue. She drew the collar up round her neck with both hands, and said goodnight, and went away up the wet steps of the bridge in the old dark coat, a small bright figure trailing the cloth behind her, with the star going over her head. At the crest she paused. She did not turn round. She lifted one hand, high, and held it there for a moment against the violet sky.

He lifted his own.

Then she was gone, and he was standing under a paper roof in the quiet, with the charcoal going cold, and an odd tight feeling in his chest, as though he had set down something heavy and found that it had not been the weight he thought.

He rubbed the back of his neck. He stood there a long time.

It did not rain the next day. It did not rain the day after that. And on the third morning, when the sun came up clear and white over the roofs of Yunxi, he found a small note folded in the door of the workshop, in a round hand that sloped uphill.

It said: It didn't rain. I'm keeping the coat anyway.