From the Agreement of Temporary Cooperation, Clause 1: "It may be extended by mutual written consent only."

The Agreement lay on her desk where she had left it, and it looked exactly the same, which Wenxi found unforgivable.

She sat on the edge of the bed in the grey light with her bare feet on the cold boards and looked at it across the room. A sheet of flour-merchant's order form, folded in three, soft at the creases, with Qiu and Sons Mill, Reliable Since 1952 printed on the back in letters that had never once been ashamed of anything. It had not changed colour. It had not crumbled. It had simply stopped being true at six minutes past five on a hot afternoon, and nobody had told the paper.

She had not slept. She had lain under the rabbit for most of the night composing speeches, and every one of them had begun with the words I have to tell you and ended in a long white silence, like a plate left in the sun. Somewhere around four she had stopped composing and simply listened to the house. Through the thin wall there had been no plane. No radio. No hum. The workshop had gone dark at midnight and stayed dark, and the quiet on the other side of the plaster had been so complete that she had begun to hear her own blood.

Now the sun was up. A thin gold bar lay across the floorboards. Down in the kitchen the first slap of dough hit the table, and then another, and she knew the rhythm of it as she knew her own pulse. Push, turn, fold. No humming. Grandma was still being careful.

"Right," said Wenxi, aloud, to the paper. "Right. We are two adults."

The paper made no comment. She picked it up, and unfolded it, and read Clause One in her own round uphill hand.

This Agreement runs from signing until the close of the Flower Boat Festival. It may be extended by mutual written consent only.

She had underlined written. She remembered doing it, with a small proud flourish, because he had looked at the word as though he meant to. It occurred to her now, with the slow cold clarity of the very tired, that she had built the exit into the door herself. If this was to go on, someone would have to write a sentence. Someone would have to pick up a pen and put it on paper that they wanted it to go on, and sign their name under it, in ink, like a person asking for a loan.

She did not know which of them could bear to do it.

* * *

Tang Rui was pinning a notice to the board outside the tea house when Wenxi came down the bluestone at half past eight with a basket of buns held in front of her like a shield.

She did not turn round. She had heard the step, and Wenxi saw her shoulders settle by a quarter inch, a small tightening of the back, like a cat deciding not to look at a dog. She went on pushing in brass tacks, one at each corner, with the heel of her hand.

"Good morning," said Wenxi.

"Good morning."

"I brought buns."

"How kind."

"They're the sesame ones. The ones you like. With the, " She stopped. Tang Rui had stepped back to read the notice, with her head on one side, and the thin silk sleeve of her green jacket lay perfectly straight against her arm. There was nothing wrong in her bearing at all. There was nothing wrong in her face. It was only that her face was a face one might show to a customer, and it had not occurred to Wenxi until this moment how many years she had spent being shown the other kind.

The notice was printed on cream paper. It said, in the committee's neat black type:

HARVEST FINALE. FIVE COUPLES ADVANCE. All finalists must submit a renewed entry form, signed by both parties, to the committee office by Friday at noon. Unsigned entries will not be considered.

"Signed by both parties," said Wenxi.

"That's what it says."

"Is that new?"

"It's from Mr. Shen's office." Tang Rui gave the last tack a final push. "He says that the finals are a more serious matter and he wants to be certain that everyone is, how did he put it, committed in writing."

Her voice was light and even. It was the voice of a woman reading out a menu. Wenxi stood with the basket against her ribs and felt every word land, and knew that she was being given a gift, and that the gift was the notice, and that if she said one wrong word the gift would be taken back.

"Tang Rui," she said. "About yesterday."

"I have to open the shop."

"I know. I only, "

"I have forty covers booked for the lunch and the cook has a cold." Tang Rui did not look at her. She was looking at the notice, very hard, as if it might change. "Later, Xi. Not now. I'd say something I'd regret."

"I'd deserve it."

"Yes," said Tang Rui, quite gently. "That's why I'd regret it."

She took one bun out of the basket. She did it with great care, with her fingertips, and held it for a moment as if it were still hot. Then she turned and went inside, and the door of the tea house shut behind her with a small, clear, perfectly polite click.

From the other side of the street, where he had apparently been standing for some time with a broom and no intention of using it, Zhaoyu looked at Wenxi with the face of a very large dog that has seen a fight in its own kitchen.

"She's not angry," he said, in a low voice. "She's hurt. It's a different colour."

"I know."

"I wanted to say. That is. I thought you'd want to know she cried a bit. In the pantry. Not much. About a spoonful."

Wenxi shut her eyes.

"I'm sorry," said Zhaoyu miserably. "I'm bad at this. I should go and sweep something."

He fled up the alley with the broom held in front of him. She stood where she was and felt the whole weight of her own cleverness, the lie that had come out so smooth and light, the bright small laugh, Zhaoyu says it's added four points, and she thought that of all the things she had said in eight years it was the only one that she would give anything to unsay.

* * *

He came at eight minutes to ten.

She knew it was eight minutes to ten because she had been watching the clock above the till for the better part of an hour, and when the bell rang she did not look up at once. She finished wrapping the bun she was wrapping. She tied the string. She put it into the customer's hand and said, "Thank you, that's very kind," in a voice that sounded to her own ears like somebody else's, and only then raised her head.

Chengyan stood in the doorway.

He had shaved. He had done it carefully, and had not cut himself, which she noticed because for six weeks there had been a small nick on his chin in the place of the old scar. His shirt was grey and clean and the sleeves were rolled to exactly the same height on both arms. He carried a flat roll of paper under his left elbow, tied with string, and he stood on the threshold like a man who has come to deliver an estimate and is waiting to learn whether the house is on fire.

The shop was full. Auntie Zhou was at the counter. Mr. Qian was at the tea table. Two of the Wei sisters were arguing quietly by the shelf of moulds. Every head in the room turned toward the door, slowly, with the smooth unanimity of sunflowers, and every mouth closed.

"Good morning," said Chengyan.

"Good morning," said Wenxi.

There was a pause of the particular length that she had come to dread, long enough for a whole room to enjoy.

"I have some drawings," he said. "For the back gate. I wondered if you had a moment to look."

"The back gate."

"It sticks."

"It does," said Wenxi. "It does stick. I'll just, " She untied her apron. "Auntie, would you, "

"Go, go, go," said Auntie Zhou, with her hands pressed to her heart. "Take your time. Take all the time you like. I will mind the shop. I have minded a shop before."

They went out through the kitchen and into the courtyard, where the jasmine was and the rain barrel and the green back door. It was quiet there. The morning had not yet got hot. A thrush was singing in the plum tree, a small repeated phrase, and the stone under her feet was cool. She stopped beside the jasmine pot with the chip in its corner. He stopped on the opposite side of it, with the pot between them, as though it had been placed there for the purpose.

"There is no drawing," said Chengyan.

"I assumed not."

"I needed a reason that would get us out of the room."

"It was a good one. Very structural."

The corner of his mouth moved. It was the smallest movement, and it vanished at once, and what was left was a man standing very straight with a roll of paper in his hand and a face that had been up all night. She saw that he had been sleeping as badly as she had. She saw the line between his brows, and the stiff careful set of his shoulders, and she thought, with a wild and useless tenderness, that he must have pressed his shirt himself again, at midnight, on the kitchen table, with the old iron.

"I have written something," he said.

He untied the string. He unrolled the paper and held it out flat between his two hands, and she saw that it was a sheet of the same flour-merchant's order form, with a ruled line across the top, and a heading in square black capitals, as neat as a title on a drawing.

AMENDMENT ONE.

"The first clause says in writing," said Chengyan. "So."

"So you wrote it."

"I wrote it at three this morning. I rewrote it at four. I have the first draft at home. It was longer." He cleared his throat and looked at the paper, rather than at her, in the voice she had heard him use at the interview to describe a window. "I have set out the terms. I will read them. You may stop me."

"I won't stop you."

"One. The Term in Clause One is extended from the close of the Flower Boat Festival to the close of the Harvest Finale. Two. All other clauses, except as amended below, remain in force."

She waited. He did not look up.

"Three. Clause Six is struck."

The thrush stopped singing. Or perhaps it only seemed so.

"Struck," said Wenxi.

"Deleted. It's been, " His jaw moved. "Overtaken by events."

"What replaces it?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"There's nothing to replace it with. It's, " He lifted one hand from the paper and let it fall. "There was a rule about a thing that has already happened. It doesn't need one. I thought it would be dishonest to leave it in."

"Dishonest."

"A clause nobody keeps is a lie on paper," said Chengyan. "I'd rather have fewer and have them true."

She looked at him, and he looked at the paper, and the thrush started up again in the plum tree, a small bright phrase, over and over, like someone trying to remember a name.

"What about Five?" she said.

He went entirely still.

"It's not on your list," said Wenxi. "You said all the others remain in force. Except as amended. And Five isn't amended."

"No."

"So it's still in force."

"It's, " He drew a breath. "I thought we would not mention Five."

"We won't mention Five."

"No."

"It's the most important one," said Wenxi, lightly. "I said so myself."

He finally looked up. His eyes were very dark and very steady and there was something at the bottom of them like a man standing at the edge of a frozen pond. She understood that if she pushed, it would break. She understood also that she was not going to push, because she was afraid of what was under it, and because the thing that frightened her more was that it might hold.

"Four," said Chengyan, and looked down again. "A new clause. Number Eight. In the event that the arrangement is to be ended, whether during or after the Finale, the Parties shall agree upon a script in advance, and neither shall, " He stopped.

"Shall what?"

"Make a scene." He said it to the paper. "The whole street is watching. If it ends, it should end quietly. And in a way that doesn't, that leaves the other, " He swallowed. "Standing."

She could not speak. She had written the first seven clauses at a kitchen table with her tongue between her teeth, with the lamp pulled low, and not one of them had been so kind as this.

"That's a good clause," said Wenxi.

"It's a practical one."

"It is," she agreed, and was dismayed to hear her voice shake. "It's very practical."

"There is a reason for all of it," said Chengyan, hurriedly, and she realised he had begun to talk faster, which he did not do. "The finals are in the autumn, and the prize is a great deal of money, and the money is the roof. Your grandmother's oven. My grandfather's ramp. Those are things that exist. They need to be paid for. I thought it would be sensible, practical, to continue until they are, since we are, since the arrangement has been, " He gestured with the paper. "Productive."

"Productive," said Wenxi.

"And the street expects it."

"Yes."

"And it would be awkward otherwise."

"Very awkward."

"I put those down as the reasons."

"They're very good reasons."

"I have more," said Chengyan, and stopped, and rubbed his thumb along the edge of the paper, back and forth, hard, until the corner began to curl. "I did not write them down."

The jasmine moved. A bee went past her ear.

She had the same reasons. She had them in her mouth, in the same order. She had been going to say them herself, if he had not got there first, in the same careful reasonable voice, the oven and the ramp and the awkwardness, and she saw now with a small hot shock that they were not reasons at all. They were a fence. They were a neat white fence built round something that neither of them could look at directly, and every post in it was true.

She thought of Mei Lanying, on a damp bench by the canal. It is in the afternoon that we begin to explain ourselves. By the evening we have explained ourselves right out of the thing we wanted.

It was ten in the morning. She was already explaining.

"Chengyan," she said.

"Yes."

"What do we call it?"

"What?"

"Yesterday." She heard her own voice, rapid and high. "On the quay. If somebody asks. If Auntie Zhou asks, or Mr. Qian, or the newspaper. We ought to have a word for it. Something we both say. So we don't, so it's consistent."

He seemed to think about it for a very long time. His face did not change, but she watched a series of small shutters come down behind his eyes, one after another, like the windows of a street going dark at closing time.

"An incident," he said.

"An incident."

"A momentary, " He looked at the sky. "A spontaneous response to the crowd. In the circumstances."

"A well-attended incident," said Wenxi.

"Yes."

"Three thousand witnesses."

"A very well-attended one."

Her mouth was trembling. She pressed her lips together, and something hot and fierce rose up in her, and it was not tears, it was something worse, it was laughter, the helpless laughter of the very tired. She heard a sound escape her. She bent over, with her hand on her stomach and the other pressed over her mouth, and saw over the top of her fingers that Chengyan's shoulders had begun to shake. He was turning his face away. He had put the back of his wrist to his lips.

"An incident," she gasped.

"Don't."

"They put it on the front page!"

"It was a very good photograph."

"It was eleven inches wide!"

He made a noise like a kettle coming off the boil. They stood on either side of a jasmine pot in a courtyard with a thrush singing in the plum tree and laughed at one another until the tears ran down their faces, and neither of them believed a word of it. She knew that, and he knew that, and the laughter went on a good deal longer than it should have, because as soon as it stopped there would be nothing left to stand on.

It stopped.

It stopped quite suddenly, like a tap turned off. She straightened up, wiping her eyes. He was holding the paper against his chest, and his face in the morning light was very pale and very tired and for just one moment quite undefended, and he said, in a low voice that nearly escaped her, "It was not an incident."

She stopped breathing.

"I know," said Wenxi.

"I only wanted you to hear me say it once."

"I heard."

"And now we can call it that."

"Yes," she whispered. "Now we can."

* * *

They signed at the kitchen table, because it was the only place in the house with a flat enough surface and a door that locked.

Grandma was at the market. That was what the note on the dresser said, in capitals, in the careful block letters that Zhaoyu had taught her: GONE FOR FISH. BACK AT NOON. DO NOT FOLLOW ME. It was a measure of the old woman's tact, Wenxi thought, that she had managed to make a note about fish sound like a blessing.

She fetched the pen from the dresser drawer.

It lay where she had put it after the first signing, in its soft cloth, a heavy black fountain pen with a gold nib that had signed every ledger in the house for fifty years. She uncapped it. The ink was still fresh from the night of the contract. She tried a stroke on a spare corner of the order form, and it ran out thin and then dark and sure, and something in her throat tightened at the sight of it.

She wrote the date. She wrote Su Wenxi at the foot of the amendment, below his square black capitals, and put a small flourish on the last letter. She set the pen down.

Chengyan took it up.

He held it as he held every tool, in the whole of his fist. She watched his hand come down toward the page, and she saw that it was not quite steady. It was a very small thing, a fine fast tremor in the tendons. He put the nib to the paper. He wrote Gu Chengyan in four slow strokes, each letter a plank laid flat, and when he came to the last one, the long final stroke of the n, his hand shook once, and a thin blot of ink spread across the paper like a bruise.

He stared at it.

"It's a blot," he said.

"It's all right."

"It's the first blot I've made since I was nine."

"I'll write beside it. We'll call it a witness."

He laughed, a short breathless sound, and reached for the blotter at the same moment she did. Their hands met on the cloth.

She had expected a touch. She had braced for it, as one braces for a step in the dark. But it did not feel like a touch. It felt like something much slower, a pressure that went on and on, his fingers lying over hers on the soft grey paper and neither of them lifting, the warmth of his palm coming up through her knuckles into her wrist. She counted. She could not help it. She counted to three, which was proper, and then to five, which was not, and then to ten, which was very much worse, and he did not move, and she did not move, and the kitchen clock ticked on above the dresser.

She looked up. He was looking at their hands.

His lashes lay on his cheek. The sunlight from the window struck sideways across his face and picked out the grain of his skin, the pale scar on his chin, the faint line at the corner of his eye. He looked like a man looking down at something at the bottom of a well.

"The ink," said Wenxi, weakly, "will smudge."

"Yes."

"It needs to dry."

"It does."

He lifted his hand.

He did it slowly, like a man lifting a board from a wet floor, so that she felt every inch of the leaving. The air came in cold across her knuckles. He folded the amendment along its creases, once, twice, and put it in the breast pocket of his shirt, over his heart, and buttoned the pocket, and she watched the button go through the hole with a feeling that she could not put a name to.

"I'll keep this one," said Chengyan. "You have the original."

"Yes."

"Then we are, " He seemed to search the room. "In order."

"In order," said Wenxi.

He went to the door. He stopped on the step with his hand on the latch, and for a moment she thought he would turn round. She saw the line of his back, and the stiff set of the shoulders, and the hand on the latch gone white at the knuckles. She thought, say it. Whatever it is. Say it now.

She thought, I will say it, if he does.

He lifted the latch and went out. The door closed behind him with a click as clean and polite as Tang Rui's. She stood in the kitchen with her hand still lying on the table where his had been, listening to his boots cross the courtyard, and the green door, and the cobbles of the alley, and then nothing.

She had signed. She had laughed, and argued, and called it an incident, and let him leave. And she had not told him one thing. Not the job. Not the night. Not the red paper warm in the pocket of the cardigan on the chair behind her, nor the letter in the grey font, nor the reason she had come home on the last train with her face in the window.

The promise lay in her chest like a stone.

After the race, she had told the jasmine. And the race was over, and she had not.

She went upstairs at noon because she could not bear to be in the kitchen when Grandma came back. She climbed the narrow stair with her head down, and turned at the landing, and stopped.

Outside the door of her room, on the worn boards of the passage, someone had set down a small parcel.

It was the old waxed coat. She knew it at once, the long slate-coloured canvas, the smell of linseed oil. She had left it on the hook in the kitchen the night of the festival, wet and stiff and in a rush, and she had meant to wash it and had forgotten. It had been washed. It had been dried in the sun, and folded in thirds, and laid over a small white cardboard box tied with a loop of red string.

The string was tied in a bow. It was a flat double loop, a knot that nobody else in Yunxi tied.

She knelt. She untied it. Inside lay four small cakes, pale gold, still faintly warm, pressed on top with two long drooping branches that crossed and crossed. She knew the pattern. She had it by heart. Under the cakes, on a slip of paper torn from the back of an order pad, was a message in careful capitals.

FOR WHEN YOU ARE READY. NOT BEFORE. NOT LATER EITHER.

She sat down on the boards in the narrow passage with the coat in her lap and the box on her knees. After a while she picked up one of the cakes and ate it. It tasted of honey, and toasted rice, and the faintest trace of a thing she could not name, and for the first time that day she was not trying to be anything at all.