From the Agreement of Temporary Cooperation, Clause 6, with a line through it in carpenter's pencil: "Kissing is permitted only where strictly required for the performance, with not less than one hour's notice, and then on the cheek or forehead only."
On the morning of the Flower Boat Festival, the sun came up over Yunxi like a plate of butter, and by eight o'clock the whole canal was on fire with flowers.
Wenxi saw it from the bridge. She had gone up at dawn because she could not stay in bed, and she stood at the crest of the arch with her hands on the cold parapet and her hat dangling from one wrist, and looked down the long green waterway toward the east dock. The boats were coming out. They came slowly, in a line, poled by old men in their best blue tunics, and every one of them was a floating bouquet. There were boats heaped with peonies and boats heaped with jasmine, boats hung with ribbons of pink and gold and white silk, boats with arches of lilac and tall plumes of reed. Their reflections lay beneath them in the clear water, doubled and wavering, so that the canal seemed to be lined with a second, upside-down garden. The banks were already packed. Banners hung from every balcony. Children sat on walls with their legs dangling. A band at the foot of the bridge was tuning up with a great deal of squawking.
She had not slept. She had lain for hours under the rabbit on the ceiling, feeling her mouth, and at some point in the small hours she had decided that she would be sensible. She would be brisk. She would paddle the boat and smile at the judges, and afterwards, with the festival safely behind her and nothing at stake, she would take him by the sleeve and tell him everything.
She had it all arranged. It was a very good plan. It had only one flaw, which was that she had not yet seen his face.
"Good morning," said a voice behind her.
She did not jump. She had heard the step on the stair, heel first, with its small hesitation, and she had known. She turned. He stood three paces away at the head of the steps, in a clean white shirt and dark trousers, with his hands in his pockets. His hair was combed. His face was calm. And under his eyes lay two smudged violet shadows, exactly like her own.
"Good morning," said Wenxi.
"The boat's at the dock. Fang says the wind will drop at ten."
"Good."
"Zhaoyu is, " He paused. "Zhaoyu is in disgrace."
"Is he?"
"Tang Rui has made him wash every pan in the tea house."
"Good," said Wenxi again, and found that she was smiling, and so was he, a little, at the corner of the mouth, and the stiffness between them went out of the air like a held breath. "Chengyan, about last night, "
"After the race," he said.
She stared at him.
"Whatever you were going to say," said Chengyan. "After the race. Not before. I'd like to concentrate."
"I wasn't going to, "
"You were going to apologise. Or explain. Or invoke a clause." The corner of his mouth deepened. "I'd rather have it afterwards. I'd rather we did the thing first. All right?"
She looked at him for a moment, at the calm face and the shadows and the white shirt buttoned to the throat, and a feeling went through her that she could not have named. It was relief and tenderness and an enormous, unreasonable fear.
"All right," she said.
He held out his hand. She looked at it.
"One," said Chengyan. "For the walk to the dock. Palm to palm. No fingers."
She laughed. She took it.
The race began at ten past ten.
Twelve boats lined up at the east dock, nose to tail, in the glittering slant of the morning sun. The water was bright as hammered tin. The bank was solid with people, five and six deep, shouting and waving and holding up small children to see, and over the whole scene hung a great swelling roar, like the sound of the sea in a shell. Madam Gao stood on a raised platform at the head of the steps in a hat the colour of a ripe plum, with Mr. Bei and Ms. Rong and Mr. Hao ranged beside her, and at the end, a little apart, in a pale grey suit, with his notebook shut in his hand and his face turned to the water, stood Shen Haoran.
Wenxi sat in the bow with her paddle across her knees.
The garland arched over her head. She could smell jasmine, and warm cedar, and the green rank sweetness of the canal. Behind her she heard a sound like a man settling a plane on a board: Chengyan, shipping his own paddle, taking his seat. The boat gave a little dip. He said, very low, "Breathe."
She breathed.
On her left, in the next lane, the Fangs' boat lay motionless, a heap of yellow roses and trailing willow, and Fang Dehai sat bolt upright in the stern with his silver head thrown back and his cane laid across his lap like a sword. Mei Lanying, in front, wore a hat of white feathers. She caught Wenxi's eye and gave an extremely slow wink.
The gong sounded.
It was a deep, round, bronze note that rolled down the canal and was lost in the roar. Twelve paddles struck the water at once. Wenxi dipped on the in-breath, as she had been taught, and felt his stroke fall behind hers like the second half of a clap, and the boat leapt forward.
She forgot the crowd.
It went at once, in the first ten strokes, as a dream goes. There was only the water sliding by in a long white hiss, and the dip and pull of the blade, and the bend of her own back, and behind her the steady unhurried breath of a man she could have followed blindfold into the sea. The garland streamed. A tidal wave of faces went by on the left, mouths open, hands waving. A shower of petals came down from a balcony. She heard Tang Rui's voice, shrill and delighted, screaming "Left! LEFT!" and ignored it, because left was where the boat wanted to go.
They were third at the first bridge, and second at the second.
The Fangs were ahead. She could see the white feathers on Mei Lanying's hat, bobbing in perfect rhythm, and the pale blue back of Fang Dehai working like a piston, and she thought, they have been doing this for forty years. They know each other like their own hands. And then she thought, quite clearly, in the middle of a stroke, with her heart pounding and her shoulders on fire, so do we.
It was a thought without a clause in it.
"Now," said Chengyan, behind her.
She did not ask what he meant. She felt it, in the rise of the blade, in the sudden lengthening of the stroke, and she poured everything she had into the water. The skiff shot forward. The garland crackled. They passed the heron post and the low bridge and the willow-draped bank, and the white feathers came back, an inch at a time, and drew level.
The last bend was a hundred yards ahead. She could see Liu Bridge rising over the water, with a ribbon strung across its arch and a thousand upturned faces beneath. She could see the crowd packed solid on the steps. Fang Dehai had begun to shout something, in a high cracked fluting voice, and Mei Lanying had begun to laugh, and the two boats ran side by side, bow to bow, the cedar singing and the water roaring, like a pair of horses neck and neck in the last furlong.
She breathed in. She dipped. She breathed out.
The ribbon snapped.
There was a stupendous noise. It went up from the bank like the bursting of a dam, and the sky was suddenly full of petals, and a hundred hands were beating on the parapet, and Madam Gao on the far platform was shrieking something into a speaker that nobody could hear. The two boats shot under the arch and out the other side, still neck and neck, and drifted, slowly, to a halt, and lay rocking side by side in the green shadow of the bridge.
For a long moment no one spoke.
Then Fang Dehai threw back his silver head and began to laugh, a high joyous ringing peal like a bell, and Mei Lanying turned and put her arms round his neck, and there was a roar from the bank that shook the willows.
"A tie!" screamed Zhaoyu, from the top of the steps. "It's a tie! It's a dead heat! I had it at sixty-forty!"
Wenxi dropped her paddle in her lap.
Her arms were trembling. Her whole body was shaking, from the soles of her feet to the roots of her hair, and she was laughing, she found, she was laughing so hard she could scarcely breathe. She turned round on the seat. He was sitting in the stern with his paddle across his knees, wet to the shoulders, with petals in his hair and a smear of green on his cheek. He was laughing too. It was the whole laugh, the rusty cracked one, the one that came from the bottom of his chest, and it went through her like a chord.
"We tied," she gasped.
"We tied."
"With the Fangs!"
"With the, " He wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand. "Wenxi. We tied with the forty years."
"Do you think they'll be insufferable?"
"I think they'll put it on a sign."
And then, from the bank, someone began to chant.
* * *
It began as a single voice, a man's, hoarse and cheerful. It was taken up by a woman. Then a child, then a dozen, then a hundred, and in a matter of seconds the whole bank of the canal was beating a rhythm on the stone, and the word came down to the water like a wave.
"Kiss! Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!"
Wenxi's blood stopped.
It was the oldest tradition of the Flower Boat Festival. She had forgotten it. She had forgotten, in fact, that she had ever known it: that when the winners of the race were crowned, the pair in the lead were called to the quay to receive the garland, and the crowd demanded of them a kiss, and the couple, if they were true, gave it. It was a joke. It was a joke that every boy and girl in Yunxi had grown up with. And the stout lady from the tourism board, on her plum-hatted platform, was now holding up one plump hand for silence and announcing, in tones of enormous satisfaction, that the judges would take as their final item for the second round a moment of the couples' own choosing.
"A moment!" cried Madam Gao. "Of your own choosing! To show us what you are!"
The boats were poled to the quay. The Fangs went first. Fang Dehai climbed out with the dignity of an emperor and handed his wife onto the stone, and the two of them stood together under the arch with the garland about their necks, and Mei Lanying, with great composure, took her husband's face in both her hands and kissed him on the forehead. The crowd howled with delight. Fang Dehai turned pink to the ears.
Then all eyes turned to the cedar skiff.
Wenxi climbed out. Her legs were not entirely hers. The quay stones were slick and hot, and the crowd on the steps pressed so close that she could see the sweat on their faces, the shine in their eyes. Somewhere in the throng she saw Auntie Zhou, with her hands clasped, and the Wei sisters, hand in hand, and Mr. Qian with his binoculars. She saw Tang Rui, with her fringe in her eyes, standing very still. She saw Grandma Su.
She was in the front row, on a folding stool that someone had carried for her, in her good dark-blue jacket with the frog buttons, small and straight and perfectly composed. Beside her, in a wicker chair, sat old Mr. Gu, wrapped in a blanket despite the heat, with his cane across his knees and his bright old eyes fixed on the water. They were not chanting. They were not laughing. They were only watching, with the grave, tender, unhurried attention of two people looking at a loaf that has been a long time in the oven.
Then he was standing beside her.
She felt it before she saw it, the warmth at her side, the exact distance. The roar of the crowd seemed to recede, and recede, as if somebody were slowly closing a door on it. She heard it from a long way off, through glass. Kiss. Kiss.
She thought, Clause Six.
She thought it with great clearness, and with a small shock, because she could not remember what it said. She knew there had been a clause. She knew there was a rule. She stood in the hot bright morning with her hair coming down and the cheers beating at her ears and tried to call up the words, one hour's something, cheek or something, and there was nothing there at all, only a bright blank like a window full of sky.
She turned her head.
* * *
He had known it would come to this since the moment he saw the ribbon.
Chengyan stood on the quay in his wet white shirt with his heart going like a mallet, and for the first time in his life he did not have a plan. He had always had a plan. He had planned the joint before he cut it and the roof before he climbed it. He had planned the speech about the weather and the silence on the dock and the long careful architecture of eight years, and he had stood inside it like a man inside a house, and been safe.
It had burned down in about four seconds.
She was looking up at him. She had a petal in her hair and a smear of water down one cheek and her mouth a little open. Her eyes were enormous. In the full flat light of the festival he could see, quite clearly, every thing that she was not saying, as a man sees the whole shape of a tree when the leaves are off, and he thought, she has not remembered the clause. She is not thinking of the Agreement at all.
He knew then that he was lost.
There was a cheek. There was a forehead. They were respectable places, and they were written in black ink on a flour form. He had agreed to them himself, in the lamplight, in a kitchen, with his ears burning, when he was a man who believed he could stand at a distance from his own life and write rules about it.
He lifted his hand.
He touched her face.
He did it as he had at the stall, as he did everything that mattered, with great care, the pad of his thumb along the bone of her cheek. She did not flinch. She leaned, very slightly, into his palm, like a plant toward a lamp. He felt her breath catch. He felt, under his fingers, a tremor run down the length of her, and he thought: it is the same for her. It is the same as it is for me.
"Wenxi," he said, under the roar.
"Yes."
"I haven't given you the hour."
"No."
"I've had it," he said, "for eight years."
He bent his head, and he kissed her.
Not on the cheek. Not on the forehead. He kissed her on the mouth, slowly, with a kind of grave and shaking tenderness, as a man sets a piece of wood into a joint he has spent his whole life learning to cut. Her lips were soft and warm and tasted of salt and jasmine. For one second she did not move. Then she made a small sound in her throat, and her hands came up and closed in the front of his wet shirt, and she kissed him back.
The world went out.
It did not fade. It went out, all at once, like a flame pinched between finger and thumb, and there was only a great golden silence, and the taste of her, and the feel of her fingers knotted in his collar. He heard nothing. He heard the shouting of three thousand people as one hears the sea from inside a closed room. He heard his own blood. He heard, quite distinctly, a very small sound, a breath, a sigh, a half-formed syllable that might have been his name, and it went through him like a bell.
His other arm had come round her. He did not remember doing it. He held her against him in the sun, on the hot stone, with the petals falling on them both, a slow soft endless rain of white and pink drifting down from the arch of the bridge, where the schoolchildren had emptied their baskets. Her hat had fallen off. Her hair was loose over his wrist. She was shaking, or he was, he could not tell which, and he thought, with a wild and perfectly calm clarity, that if the whole of Yunxi fell into the canal at that moment he would not have noticed.
It lasted a very long time.
It lasted exactly as long as it took for the roar of the crowd to rise, and break, and rise again, and for him to realise that he was holding on to her as one holds the last plank of a wreck. Slowly, with a kind of reluctance that was almost pain, he lifted his head.
* * *
Wenxi opened her eyes.
His face was an inch from hers. She could see the pulse in his temple. She could see the black of his pupils, huge, nearly swallowing the brown, and a bead of water caught in one lash, and she saw that he was looking at her as he had looked at the mould, at the box, at the dark canal with her head upon his shoulder. As though she were something that he had been given and did not yet believe.
The noise came back.
It came all at once, in a wave. The cheering and the stamping and the whistles and the drums. Zhaoyu was screaming something from the steps. Someone was weeping with joy. A child's voice cried, quite loudly and clearly, "They did it! They did it for real!" Madam Gao had sat down heavily on her platform and was fanning herself with her folder, and Mr. Hao had given up all pretence and was sobbing into his handkerchief, and through the shimmering golden air she saw the single, quiet, grey-suited figure at the end of the platform, standing quite still with his notebook open in his hand.
Shen Haoran was not writing. He was looking at the two of them with a face of such naked and uncomposed feeling that she looked away at once, as from a window into someone's private room.
She turned back to Chengyan.
Her lips were burning. Her knees had gone. She stood with her hands still twisted in his shirt and the whole sky of petals coming down around them, and she knew that her face was open, that it was as open as a door, and that there was nothing in the world she could do to close it.
He did not let go of her.
"That wasn't," said Wenxi.
It came out a whisper. She tried again.
"That wasn't in the contract."
He looked at her for a moment. Something moved in his face, something slow and warm and astonished, like the sun coming up over a cold field. And then, for the first time since she had known him, in front of three thousand people, with the petals in his hair and the water running down his collar, Gu Chengyan smiled at her with his whole mouth.
"No," he said. "It wasn't."
A very long way off, on a folding stool in the front row, an old woman in a dark-blue jacket put her hand to her mouth. Beside her, an old man in a wicker chair slowly lowered his cane, and the corner of his mouth, under the white moustache, began very gently to shake.
Neither of them said a word. Neither of them needed to.
You've reached the end of this chapter
From the Agreement of Temporary Cooperation, Clause 6, with a line through it in carpenter's pencil: "Kissing is permitted only where strictly required for the performance, with not less than one hour's notice, and then on the cheek or forehead only."
On the morning of the Flower Boat Festival, the sun came up over Yunxi like a plate of butter, and by eight o'clock the whole canal was on fire with flowers.
Wenxi saw it from the bridge. She had gone up at dawn because she could not stay in bed, and she stood at the crest of the arch with her hands on the cold parapet and her hat dangling from one wrist, and looked down the long green waterway toward the east dock. The boats were coming out. They came slowly, in a line, poled by old men in their best blue tunics, and every one of them was a floating bouquet. There were boats heaped with peonies and boats heaped with jasmine, boats hung with ribbons of pink and gold and white silk, boats with arches of lilac and tall plumes of reed. Their reflections lay beneath them in the clear water, doubled and wavering, so that the canal seemed to be lined with a second, upside-down garden. The banks were already packed. Banners hung from every balcony. Children sat on walls with their legs dangling. A band at the foot of the bridge was tuning up with a great deal of squawking.
She had not slept. She had lain for hours under the rabbit on the ceiling, feeling her mouth, and at some point in the small hours she had decided that she would be sensible. She would be brisk. She would paddle the boat and smile at the judges, and afterwards, with the festival safely behind her and nothing at stake, she would take him by the sleeve and tell him everything.
She had it all arranged. It was a very good plan. It had only one flaw, which was that she had not yet seen his face.
"Good morning," said a voice behind her.
She did not jump. She had heard the step on the stair, heel first, with its small hesitation, and she had known. She turned. He stood three paces away at the head of the steps, in a clean white shirt and dark trousers, with his hands in his pockets. His hair was combed. His face was calm. And under his eyes lay two smudged violet shadows, exactly like her own.
"Good morning," said Wenxi.
"The boat's at the dock. Fang says the wind will drop at ten."
"Good."
"Zhaoyu is, " He paused. "Zhaoyu is in disgrace."
"Is he?"
"Tang Rui has made him wash every pan in the tea house."
"Good," said Wenxi again, and found that she was smiling, and so was he, a little, at the corner of the mouth, and the stiffness between them went out of the air like a held breath. "Chengyan, about last night, "
"After the race," he said.
She stared at him.
"Whatever you were going to say," said Chengyan. "After the race. Not before. I'd like to concentrate."
"I wasn't going to, "
"You were going to apologise. Or explain. Or invoke a clause." The corner of his mouth deepened. "I'd rather have it afterwards. I'd rather we did the thing first. All right?"
She looked at him for a moment, at the calm face and the shadows and the white shirt buttoned to the throat, and a feeling went through her that she could not have named. It was relief and tenderness and an enormous, unreasonable fear.
"All right," she said.
He held out his hand. She looked at it.
"One," said Chengyan. "For the walk to the dock. Palm to palm. No fingers."
She laughed. She took it.
The race began at ten past ten.
Twelve boats lined up at the east dock, nose to tail, in the glittering slant of the morning sun. The water was bright as hammered tin. The bank was solid with people, five and six deep, shouting and waving and holding up small children to see, and over the whole scene hung a great swelling roar, like the sound of the sea in a shell. Madam Gao stood on a raised platform at the head of the steps in a hat the colour of a ripe plum, with Mr. Bei and Ms. Rong and Mr. Hao ranged beside her, and at the end, a little apart, in a pale grey suit, with his notebook shut in his hand and his face turned to the water, stood Shen Haoran.
Wenxi sat in the bow with her paddle across her knees.
The garland arched over her head. She could smell jasmine, and warm cedar, and the green rank sweetness of the canal. Behind her she heard a sound like a man settling a plane on a board: Chengyan, shipping his own paddle, taking his seat. The boat gave a little dip. He said, very low, "Breathe."
She breathed.
On her left, in the next lane, the Fangs' boat lay motionless, a heap of yellow roses and trailing willow, and Fang Dehai sat bolt upright in the stern with his silver head thrown back and his cane laid across his lap like a sword. Mei Lanying, in front, wore a hat of white feathers. She caught Wenxi's eye and gave an extremely slow wink.
The gong sounded.
It was a deep, round, bronze note that rolled down the canal and was lost in the roar. Twelve paddles struck the water at once. Wenxi dipped on the in-breath, as she had been taught, and felt his stroke fall behind hers like the second half of a clap, and the boat leapt forward.
She forgot the crowd.
It went at once, in the first ten strokes, as a dream goes. There was only the water sliding by in a long white hiss, and the dip and pull of the blade, and the bend of her own back, and behind her the steady unhurried breath of a man she could have followed blindfold into the sea. The garland streamed. A tidal wave of faces went by on the left, mouths open, hands waving. A shower of petals came down from a balcony. She heard Tang Rui's voice, shrill and delighted, screaming "Left! LEFT!" and ignored it, because left was where the boat wanted to go.
They were third at the first bridge, and second at the second.
The Fangs were ahead. She could see the white feathers on Mei Lanying's hat, bobbing in perfect rhythm, and the pale blue back of Fang Dehai working like a piston, and she thought, they have been doing this for forty years. They know each other like their own hands. And then she thought, quite clearly, in the middle of a stroke, with her heart pounding and her shoulders on fire, so do we.
It was a thought without a clause in it.
"Now," said Chengyan, behind her.
She did not ask what he meant. She felt it, in the rise of the blade, in the sudden lengthening of the stroke, and she poured everything she had into the water. The skiff shot forward. The garland crackled. They passed the heron post and the low bridge and the willow-draped bank, and the white feathers came back, an inch at a time, and drew level.
The last bend was a hundred yards ahead. She could see Liu Bridge rising over the water, with a ribbon strung across its arch and a thousand upturned faces beneath. She could see the crowd packed solid on the steps. Fang Dehai had begun to shout something, in a high cracked fluting voice, and Mei Lanying had begun to laugh, and the two boats ran side by side, bow to bow, the cedar singing and the water roaring, like a pair of horses neck and neck in the last furlong.
She breathed in. She dipped. She breathed out.
The ribbon snapped.
There was a stupendous noise. It went up from the bank like the bursting of a dam, and the sky was suddenly full of petals, and a hundred hands were beating on the parapet, and Madam Gao on the far platform was shrieking something into a speaker that nobody could hear. The two boats shot under the arch and out the other side, still neck and neck, and drifted, slowly, to a halt, and lay rocking side by side in the green shadow of the bridge.
For a long moment no one spoke.
Then Fang Dehai threw back his silver head and began to laugh, a high joyous ringing peal like a bell, and Mei Lanying turned and put her arms round his neck, and there was a roar from the bank that shook the willows.
"A tie!" screamed Zhaoyu, from the top of the steps. "It's a tie! It's a dead heat! I had it at sixty-forty!"
Wenxi dropped her paddle in her lap.
Her arms were trembling. Her whole body was shaking, from the soles of her feet to the roots of her hair, and she was laughing, she found, she was laughing so hard she could scarcely breathe. She turned round on the seat. He was sitting in the stern with his paddle across his knees, wet to the shoulders, with petals in his hair and a smear of green on his cheek. He was laughing too. It was the whole laugh, the rusty cracked one, the one that came from the bottom of his chest, and it went through her like a chord.
"We tied," she gasped.
"We tied."
"With the Fangs!"
"With the, " He wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand. "Wenxi. We tied with the forty years."
"Do you think they'll be insufferable?"
"I think they'll put it on a sign."
And then, from the bank, someone began to chant.
* * *
It began as a single voice, a man's, hoarse and cheerful. It was taken up by a woman. Then a child, then a dozen, then a hundred, and in a matter of seconds the whole bank of the canal was beating a rhythm on the stone, and the word came down to the water like a wave.
"Kiss! Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!"
Wenxi's blood stopped.
It was the oldest tradition of the Flower Boat Festival. She had forgotten it. She had forgotten, in fact, that she had ever known it: that when the winners of the race were crowned, the pair in the lead were called to the quay to receive the garland, and the crowd demanded of them a kiss, and the couple, if they were true, gave it. It was a joke. It was a joke that every boy and girl in Yunxi had grown up with. And the stout lady from the tourism board, on her plum-hatted platform, was now holding up one plump hand for silence and announcing, in tones of enormous satisfaction, that the judges would take as their final item for the second round a moment of the couples' own choosing.
"A moment!" cried Madam Gao. "Of your own choosing! To show us what you are!"
The boats were poled to the quay. The Fangs went first. Fang Dehai climbed out with the dignity of an emperor and handed his wife onto the stone, and the two of them stood together under the arch with the garland about their necks, and Mei Lanying, with great composure, took her husband's face in both her hands and kissed him on the forehead. The crowd howled with delight. Fang Dehai turned pink to the ears.
Then all eyes turned to the cedar skiff.
Wenxi climbed out. Her legs were not entirely hers. The quay stones were slick and hot, and the crowd on the steps pressed so close that she could see the sweat on their faces, the shine in their eyes. Somewhere in the throng she saw Auntie Zhou, with her hands clasped, and the Wei sisters, hand in hand, and Mr. Qian with his binoculars. She saw Tang Rui, with her fringe in her eyes, standing very still. She saw Grandma Su.
She was in the front row, on a folding stool that someone had carried for her, in her good dark-blue jacket with the frog buttons, small and straight and perfectly composed. Beside her, in a wicker chair, sat old Mr. Gu, wrapped in a blanket despite the heat, with his cane across his knees and his bright old eyes fixed on the water. They were not chanting. They were not laughing. They were only watching, with the grave, tender, unhurried attention of two people looking at a loaf that has been a long time in the oven.
Then he was standing beside her.
She felt it before she saw it, the warmth at her side, the exact distance. The roar of the crowd seemed to recede, and recede, as if somebody were slowly closing a door on it. She heard it from a long way off, through glass. Kiss. Kiss.
She thought, Clause Six.
She thought it with great clearness, and with a small shock, because she could not remember what it said. She knew there had been a clause. She knew there was a rule. She stood in the hot bright morning with her hair coming down and the cheers beating at her ears and tried to call up the words, one hour's something, cheek or something, and there was nothing there at all, only a bright blank like a window full of sky.
She turned her head.
* * *
He had known it would come to this since the moment he saw the ribbon.
Chengyan stood on the quay in his wet white shirt with his heart going like a mallet, and for the first time in his life he did not have a plan. He had always had a plan. He had planned the joint before he cut it and the roof before he climbed it. He had planned the speech about the weather and the silence on the dock and the long careful architecture of eight years, and he had stood inside it like a man inside a house, and been safe.
It had burned down in about four seconds.
She was looking up at him. She had a petal in her hair and a smear of water down one cheek and her mouth a little open. Her eyes were enormous. In the full flat light of the festival he could see, quite clearly, every thing that she was not saying, as a man sees the whole shape of a tree when the leaves are off, and he thought, she has not remembered the clause. She is not thinking of the Agreement at all.
He knew then that he was lost.
There was a cheek. There was a forehead. They were respectable places, and they were written in black ink on a flour form. He had agreed to them himself, in the lamplight, in a kitchen, with his ears burning, when he was a man who believed he could stand at a distance from his own life and write rules about it.
He lifted his hand.
He touched her face.
He did it as he had at the stall, as he did everything that mattered, with great care, the pad of his thumb along the bone of her cheek. She did not flinch. She leaned, very slightly, into his palm, like a plant toward a lamp. He felt her breath catch. He felt, under his fingers, a tremor run down the length of her, and he thought: it is the same for her. It is the same as it is for me.
"Wenxi," he said, under the roar.
"Yes."
"I haven't given you the hour."
"No."
"I've had it," he said, "for eight years."
He bent his head, and he kissed her.
Not on the cheek. Not on the forehead. He kissed her on the mouth, slowly, with a kind of grave and shaking tenderness, as a man sets a piece of wood into a joint he has spent his whole life learning to cut. Her lips were soft and warm and tasted of salt and jasmine. For one second she did not move. Then she made a small sound in her throat, and her hands came up and closed in the front of his wet shirt, and she kissed him back.
The world went out.
It did not fade. It went out, all at once, like a flame pinched between finger and thumb, and there was only a great golden silence, and the taste of her, and the feel of her fingers knotted in his collar. He heard nothing. He heard the shouting of three thousand people as one hears the sea from inside a closed room. He heard his own blood. He heard, quite distinctly, a very small sound, a breath, a sigh, a half-formed syllable that might have been his name, and it went through him like a bell.
His other arm had come round her. He did not remember doing it. He held her against him in the sun, on the hot stone, with the petals falling on them both, a slow soft endless rain of white and pink drifting down from the arch of the bridge, where the schoolchildren had emptied their baskets. Her hat had fallen off. Her hair was loose over his wrist. She was shaking, or he was, he could not tell which, and he thought, with a wild and perfectly calm clarity, that if the whole of Yunxi fell into the canal at that moment he would not have noticed.
It lasted a very long time.
It lasted exactly as long as it took for the roar of the crowd to rise, and break, and rise again, and for him to realise that he was holding on to her as one holds the last plank of a wreck. Slowly, with a kind of reluctance that was almost pain, he lifted his head.
* * *
Wenxi opened her eyes.
His face was an inch from hers. She could see the pulse in his temple. She could see the black of his pupils, huge, nearly swallowing the brown, and a bead of water caught in one lash, and she saw that he was looking at her as he had looked at the mould, at the box, at the dark canal with her head upon his shoulder. As though she were something that he had been given and did not yet believe.
The noise came back.
It came all at once, in a wave. The cheering and the stamping and the whistles and the drums. Zhaoyu was screaming something from the steps. Someone was weeping with joy. A child's voice cried, quite loudly and clearly, "They did it! They did it for real!" Madam Gao had sat down heavily on her platform and was fanning herself with her folder, and Mr. Hao had given up all pretence and was sobbing into his handkerchief, and through the shimmering golden air she saw the single, quiet, grey-suited figure at the end of the platform, standing quite still with his notebook open in his hand.
Shen Haoran was not writing. He was looking at the two of them with a face of such naked and uncomposed feeling that she looked away at once, as from a window into someone's private room.
She turned back to Chengyan.
Her lips were burning. Her knees had gone. She stood with her hands still twisted in his shirt and the whole sky of petals coming down around them, and she knew that her face was open, that it was as open as a door, and that there was nothing in the world she could do to close it.
He did not let go of her.
"That wasn't," said Wenxi.
It came out a whisper. She tried again.
"That wasn't in the contract."
He looked at her for a moment. Something moved in his face, something slow and warm and astonished, like the sun coming up over a cold field. And then, for the first time since she had known him, in front of three thousand people, with the petals in his hair and the water running down his collar, Gu Chengyan smiled at her with his whole mouth.
"No," he said. "It wasn't."
A very long way off, on a folding stool in the front row, an old woman in a dark-blue jacket put her hand to her mouth. Beside her, an old man in a wicker chair slowly lowered his cane, and the corner of his mouth, under the white moustache, began very gently to shake.
Neither of them said a word. Neither of them needed to.
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