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."

Fang Dehai's boat shed stood at the end of a narrow path on the east bank, where the town gave up pretending to be a picture and went back to being a place where people kept things. It was a long low barn of grey planks with a roof of moss-covered tile, half sunk in a bed of reeds, and from the open end of it a slipway ran down into the canal like a tongue. Inside, in the green dusk, Chengyan could see the ribs of a half-built skiff standing on its stocks. They rose from the keel in a long pale arch, thin as the bones of a fish.

He had been coming here every Thursday for five weeks. He had not told anyone why, and nobody had asked.

"Sit," said Fang Dehai.

It was the first thing he said to everyone. He said it now from the doorway of the shed, in his spotless blue tunic, leaning on his cane with his silver head cocked to one side, to the two people who had just come down the path. Beside him, Mei Lanying had set a folding table in the shade of the willow, and was pouring tea from a brown pot into four small cups with the air of a woman officiating at a very small and serious ceremony.

"We're here to practise," said Chengyan.

"You are here to be told what is wrong with you." Fang Dehai beamed. "Sit. Drink. Then I shall tell you."

They sat. Wenxi took the stool next to his and tucked her skirt round her knees. She was wearing an old pair of linen trousers rolled to the shin, a faded blue shirt that had once been his, and a wide straw hat with a ribbon, and she looked so entirely, unselfconsciously at ease that he forgot to drink his tea. She caught him looking. She pushed the hat back on her head with one finger.

"It was in the cupboard," she said. "The shirt. Your grandfather gave it to me with the coat."

"He gave you my shirt?"

"He said it would be useful in the damp." She plucked at the sleeve. "I thought he was being kind. Now I think he was making a statement."

"He is very old," said Chengyan, "and very cunning."

"It runs in the family," said Mei Lanying, to the teapot.

The festival's second round, said Fang Dehai, when they had finished, was a boat race. It was not a serious one. It was the sort of race that the town had run every midsummer for four hundred years, in which each pair of lovers took a narrow flower boat down the length of the canal from the east dock to Liu Bridge, hung with blossoms, paddling with a single double-bladed paddle each, and the first to the bridge was crowned. There were rules. Nobody observed them. The point, he said, was not speed. The point was to find out, in front of a great many people, whether you could move through water in the same direction as another human being.

"It sounds simple," said Wenxi.

"It is the hardest thing in the world," said Fang Dehai happily. "I have watched four hundred couples attempt it. Perhaps six have managed. Come. I will show you the boat."

It lay moored at the foot of the slipway, a long slim shell of pale cedar, no wider than a man's shoulders, with a high curved prow and stern and a pair of low seats set one behind the other. She was beautiful. Chengyan bent and ran his hand along the gunwale and felt the grain beneath his palm, tight and clean, the work of someone who had loved what he was doing.

"Fifty years old," said Fang Dehai. "I built her the winter Mei said yes. We have not raced her since the year my knees went. She has been waiting."

"She's very light," said Chengyan.

"She will tip if you look at her unkindly. Wenxi, my dear, you will sit in front. Chengyan behind. You will take a paddle each. Mei and I will sit on the bank and enjoy ourselves."

Wenxi got in first.

She did it in one long step, her hand on his shoulder for balance, and the boat took her weight with a soft dip and a slap of water. She settled on the front seat with her paddle across her knees and turned her face up to the green roof of the willow. She was smiling. It was not the bright one. It was the slow, sleepy, unguarded smile of a child who has been put in a warm bath.

He stepped in behind her, and the whole boat sighed beneath him.

"Pull away," called Fang Dehai from the bank. "Gently. Gently!"

They pulled away. For about six seconds it was a great success.

Then Wenxi dipped her paddle on the left, and he dipped his on the right, and the narrow cedar boat, which had no opinions of its own and a great deal of momentum, swung round in a slow, stately, humiliating circle and drifted back to the bank, where it fetched up against the willow with a soft crunch.

There was a pause.

"That's one," said Chengyan.

"One what?"

"Revolution."

She began to laugh. It came up through her shoulders, and the boat shook with it. The laugh caught him, as it always did, somewhere low and unguarded, and before he knew what he was doing he had put his head down on the paddle and was laughing too, helplessly, in great rusty gusts, while the willow branches swung round them and a pair of ducks sailed by with their beaks in the air.

"You did that on purpose," said Wenxi, wiping her eyes.

"You turned left."

"You turned right!"

"I turned the way a boat goes."

"That is the one single thing that a boat does not do!"

From the bank came the clear, fluting, delighted voice of Fang Dehai. "Again! Again! You are marvellous! You have the worst stroke I have seen in forty years!"

They tried it nine times that afternoon.

The second attempt took them backwards. The third took them into the reeds, where a moorhen rose with a furious clatter and fled. The fourth was the best, a long shaky line that carried them almost to the first bend before Wenxi's paddle caught the water at an angle and flung a silver sheet of canal straight over his head. He came up spluttering. She was folded over her knees, speechless, with her hat over her face.

"I am so sorry," she said, into the straw.

"You are not."

"No," she agreed. "I'm really not."

It was a long time since he had been so wet, so tired, and so happy, and the last of these was a thing he did not intend to examine.

Fang Dehai called them in at five.

The sun had dropped behind the roofs, and the light on the canal had turned from white to honey. They drew up at the foot of the slipway, dripping, and sat on the cedar bench in the shed mouth with their legs stretched out. Mei Lanying passed them a plate of cold watermelon without a word. Fang Dehai lowered himself onto a barrel, folded both hands on his cane, and regarded them with the benevolent severity of a man about to announce a diagnosis.

"It is not the arms," he said.

"No?" said Wenxi.

"The arms are quite adequate. You, my dear, have a very good stroke, a little short, but willing. And you, young man, have the shoulders of an ox. No. The trouble is the breath."

"The breath," said Chengyan.

"You are both holding it." Fang Dehai nodded gravely. "I watched. Every time one of you dips the paddle, the other stops breathing. It is as if you are listening for something. You are each so concerned with what the other is doing that you have forgotten to do anything at all."

Wenxi opened her mouth, and shut it.

"A boat is not a thing you drive," said Fang Dehai. "It is a thing you agree with. Two people in a boat have to breathe in together and out together, and when they do, the paddles fall without anyone telling them. That is what I told Mei, in the winter, when we were building this one. I said, we shall never go anywhere if we pull against each other. And she said, then we shall have to learn to breathe." He chuckled. "It took us eleven years."

"Twelve," said Mei Lanying.

"Twelve. I stand corrected."

They went out again in the last of the light.

He sat behind her with the paddle across his knees, looking at the back of her neck. The ribbon of her hat lay against it in a loose tail. A strand of hair had come down beneath it, and the late sun lit it to a thread of copper. He had a great deal of time, in that position, to consider the line of her shoulders, which were narrow and square and held rather high, as though she were carrying something. He had seen her carry it all summer. He did not know what it was.

"Breathe in," said Fang Dehai's voice, small and clear from the bank.

He breathed in.

He heard her do it too. It was a very small sound, a soft intake like a sail filling, and it came to him across the three feet of cedar between them, and for a moment the two breaths ran together, one over the other, like two notes struck at once.

"And out."

He let it go. So did she.

"Now the paddle. On the in-breath. Together."

He dipped.

He did not look at her paddle. He did not look at anything. He had his eyes on the back of her head and his mind on the slow rise and fall of her ribs, and when she breathed in he drew the blade through the water, and the boat leapt.

It was the oddest feeling. The prow lifted. The water ran by on both sides with a long clean hiss, like silk being torn, and the cedar sang beneath him, and the whole slender shell went forward in one straight line as though it had been thrown. Neither of them spoke. They breathed. They dipped. The willows slid by on the left, green and gold, and on the right a row of white houses went past with their windows full of evening, and the canal ran ahead of them as bright and still as a road made of glass.

He forgot the paddle. It moved by itself, as the plane moved when he was lost in a board. He forgot the bank, and the old man calling something, and the tea. There was only the breath and the water and the narrow back in front of him bending and rising in the same slow rhythm as his own.

She turned her head. He saw the edge of her cheek, and her dimple, deep as a thumbprint, and her eyes closed.

She was smiling with her eyes shut.

They passed under the first bridge, the low one, with the green dripping dark above them. They passed the white heron on its post. They came out into the wide basin where the three canals met, and the sun was a red coin on the rim of the roofs, and without any word at all they stopped paddling and let the boat run out.

It drifted.

The water was still and rose-coloured, and the light lay on it in long shivering strips. A dragonfly hovered over the prow. Somewhere across the rooftops a woman was calling a child in to supper, and from further off came the thin sweet sound of an erhu being practised, slowly, the same four notes over and over.

Wenxi laid her paddle across the gunwales. She sat for a time with her hands in her lap. And then, quite without comment, in the way that a bough settles under the weight of a bird, she leaned back.

She leaned against his knees at first, a light warm pressure, and then she turned a little, and he felt her head come to rest against his shoulder.

He did not move.

He did not think he could. Every muscle in his body had stopped, as though at a word, and his heart had begun an enormous slow hammering that he was certain she must feel through his coat. Her hat had slipped back. The crown of her head lay under his jaw, with the smell of her hair, honey and warm bread and canal water, and one thin strand of it stirred in his breath. He kept his hands exactly where they were, on the paddle, white-knuckled, a careful six inches from her arm.

"I'm sorry," she murmured. "I'm just a bit tired."

"It's all right."

"I haven't been in a boat for eight years."

She said it so softly, so lightly, that for a moment he did not take in what it meant. It was Clause Seven again. She had gone straight through it, and he felt her go still, as if she, too, had heard.

Neither of them mentioned it.

"It's good," said Wenxi after a while, drowsily. "It's so good. I'd forgotten."

"Forgotten what?"

"That I could stop. That nothing happens if I stop." Her voice was blurred with sleep. "It's so loud in my head, all the time. And here it's, quiet."

He said nothing. He did not trust any word he knew.

He sat there with the whole slow weight of her against his shoulder, and the boat turning very gently on the water, and the sky overhead going from rose to apricot to a deep clear blue. He counted the minutes. At five he thought, my arm will go numb, and decided he did not care. At ten, he thought, if I move she will wake. At twelve she shifted, a little, and her hand came up and rested lightly on his knee, as a child's does on a table, without asking, and he stopped counting altogether.

Fifteen minutes, he would think, afterwards. Perhaps twenty.

He had spent most of his life learning how to hold still. He had learned it from the wood, which cannot be hurried, and from his grandfather, who held his tongue through thirty years of rain, and from the long grey years of waiting by a door for a step that did not come. He was good at it. He had thought, until that evening, that it was the only thing he was good at. But he had never until now held still for a reason. He had never been given something so light, so entire, and so easy to break, and told only to keep it safe.

He thought, with a kind of quiet astonishment: this is what the waiting was for.

The first star came out over the willow. The erhu stopped. In the sudden hush he heard her breathing, slow and even and warm against his collar, and he closed his eyes.

"Chengyan!"

The voice came thin and clear across the water, like a bird's, and the spell broke.

"Wenxi! Are you drowned? Mei has made supper!"

She sat up so fast that the boat rocked. She put a hand to her hair, and then her hat, and her hat was in the bottom of the boat, and she looked at it as if she had never seen one. Her face in the dusk was flushed to the roots of her hair. She did not look at him. She picked up her paddle with both hands and stared at the blade.

"I fell asleep," she said.

"Yes."

"For how long?"

"A few minutes."

It was a lie, and she knew it, because she glanced over her shoulder at the sky and saw how far the light had gone. Her mouth shook. For one moment he thought she would say something. He saw it rise in her face like a fish to the surface, the whole unsaid thing, and sink again.

"We should go back," said Wenxi.

"Yes."

"Breathe in."

"Wenxi, "

"Breathe in," she said again, very low, and dipped her paddle, and after a moment he dipped his.

They went home through the dusk without a word. The boat ran true. The paddles fell together like the two halves of a single clap, and the water spoke along the hull in a long hush, and he thought that it was the best stroke they had made all day and that he would have given the whole afternoon to be bad at it again.

Fang Dehai was waiting on the slipway with a lantern-free storm lamp, a gentle yellow glow in the blue. He took the painter and drew them in. He looked from one to the other, and his round face, in the light, was serene and very kind.

"Better," he said. "Much better. Mei, they have learned to breathe."

"Have they?" said Mei Lanying.

She stood behind her husband with her shawl round her shoulders and her head tilted, and she was not looking at the boat at all. She was looking at Wenxi's bare head, and the shirt that was too big for her, and the straw hat held in front of her in both hands. Then she looked at Chengyan, a long, level, quiet look, and he felt it go through him like a plumb line.

"It took us twelve years," she said softly. "I should say they are well ahead."

They ate supper at the table under the willow, on stools, with the storm lamp in the middle and the moths wheeling round it. It was a wonderful supper, fried fish and bamboo shoots and rice, and a dish of eggs with chives that Wenxi said was the best she had ever tasted. Fang Dehai told a long story about a pike. Mei Lanying corrected the dates. At the end of the meal, when the stars were out in force and the canal had turned to ink, Wenxi rose, and murmured something about the washing up, and went into the shed with the plates.

Chengyan sat on at the table.

He was looking at the lamp. After a moment he became aware that Fang Dehai had shifted his stool a little closer, and was looking at him with his head on one side.

"The rule," said the old man, mildly.

"Which rule?"

"There is always a rule. You two have a rule. It is in the way you sit. You sit like two people with a plank between them." He tapped the table gently with one finger. "I do not ask what it is. I only say that I built a boat once, with a plank like that down the middle, to divide the seats. Mei threw it in the canal."

"Dehai," said Mei Lanying, from the dark.

"I am only reminiscing."

"You are only meddling," she said, but her voice was fond. "Leave the boy alone. He knows."

Chengyan did not answer. He sat looking at the small gold flame, and his hands lay on the table in front of him, and he was aware, as he had been for a month, of a pressure in his chest like the bottom of the sea. The Agreement ran until the end of the festival. That was in nine days. After that there was a line drawn in black ink, and on the other side of it, nothing, and a woman in a blue shirt too large for her getting on a train.

The shed door creaked. She came out with the dishcloth over her shoulder, and her hair coming down, and she looked at the three of them at the table with a quick, sharp, instinctive brightness, the old shop-window smile sliding on like a lid.

"What have I missed?"

"Nothing," said Chengyan.

"Mei was telling us about a pike," said Fang Dehai.

"It's a very good pike," said Mei Lanying.

Wenxi laughed, and sat down. And Chengyan, watching her in the lamplight, saw the lid come off again, bit by bit, as the night went on, and the old crooked smile come up beneath it, and he thought: nine days. And then he made himself stop thinking, and passed her the last of the rice.