From the Agreement of Temporary Cooperation, Amendment One: "All other clauses, except as amended below, remain in force."

Chengyan was at Fang Dehai's boat shed by four in the morning, and the skiff was waiting for him in the dark like a patient animal.

He had not asked himself why he was there. He had risen from a bed he had not slept in, dressed by feel, walked the length of the east bank under a sky still full of stars, and let himself into the shed with the key that lay under a flat stone, as Fang Dehai had told him to do five weeks ago. Inside, the air smelled of old cedar and canal water and tar. He lit the storm lamp. A circle of gold opened out on the planks, and in it, on its stocks, the half-built river skiff rose up out of the dark with its ribs bare.

It was a lovely thing. It was nineteen feet of unfinished promise. Fang Dehai had laid the keel and raised the frames and planked the lower strakes, and then, one winter nine years ago, his knees had gone, and the boat had stood in the shed ever since, with its upper ribs open to the rafters like the fingers of a hand that had been about to close. Chengyan put his palm on the stem. The wood was cold and fine and slightly damp, and under his hand it gave off a faint hum, as old wood does, a sort of patient attention.

"All right," he said. "Let's get on."

He took off his jacket. He laid out his tools on the board beside the stocks. A steaming box, for bending the planks. A set of clamps. A mallet. A block plane, which was his grandfather's. He lit the little spirit stove under the steaming box and set the water to heat, and then he stood for a moment, very still, with his hands at his sides, and listened to the shed.

It was quiet. It was the particular quiet of a place where something is being made.

He had come here to stop thinking. He had come because the workshop at home was full of a lamp that had burned at midnight and a courtyard where he had stood on cold cobbles under a dark window, and the long wall of old plaster that he shared with a kitchen. He had come to put his hands on something that did not talk back. He took a plank from the rack, a long clean strip of larch as thin as a ruler, and laid it in the steaming box, and shut the lid.

While it softened he walked the length of the hull with the plane, finding the places where the frames wanted fairing. Shhk. Shhk. A pale ribbon curled off the oak and fell on the floor. His hands knew the work. They went on without him, and for a while there was nothing in the world but the shed and the small hiss of the stove and the long slow pull of the blade, and the thing in his chest that had lived there for three days lay down, as a dog does, with its chin on its paws.

He did not hear the old man come in.

"You are early," said Fang Dehai.

Chengyan did not jump. He set the plane down and turned. The old man stood in the shed door with his cane in one hand and a covered pot in the other, in a quilted jacket buttoned to the chin, with his silver hair standing up in a soft cloud. The first grey of dawn was in the sky behind him.

"I could not sleep," said Fang Dehai, as though this were a joke. "Mei snores. I took the congee. She says I am not to eat it alone, so I have come to see who will help me."

"I'm not hungry."

"No. But you will eat." He stumped across the planks, set the pot on an upturned barrel, and began to lift the lid. "I have been watching you for five weeks, young man. I have learned that you do not eat unless someone puts the food into your hand. It is a trait of the very proud and the very lonely. I was the same, until Mei."

He handed Chengyan a bowl. There was a pair of chopsticks in it. Chengyan took it, since there seemed to be no alternative, and sat down on the keel block, and the old man lowered himself onto the barrel and took the second bowl on his knees.

They ate. It was plain rice congee with shreds of pork and a few threads of ginger, and it was extraordinarily good. The light grew. A heron flew over the shed with a soft creak of wings.

"Tell me about your father," said Fang Dehai.

Chengyan's chopsticks stopped.

"I have never heard you speak of him," the old man went on, mildly, scraping the bottom of his bowl. "Nor of your mother. I have heard of your grandfather and your cousin and the aunties and the cat. But a man has a father. I only wondered."

"There's not much."

"Then it will be quick."

He looked at the bowl in his hands. A bead of steam rose from it and broke. He could have said something dry, and closed the matter. He had a gift for it. He had spent twenty years refining the short flat sentence that made a conversation turn aside. But the old man was waiting without any hurry, as one waits for water to boil, and the shed was warm, and it was very early, and Chengyan heard himself say, "They work in a factory."

"Ah."

"In the south. Making switches. Light switches, for houses. They went when I was six." He turned the bowl a quarter-turn. "They were not unkind. It was money. My grandfather's shop was making less than it cost to run, and the school fees were going up, and there was a cousin who had a place for them in the factory. They thought it would be two years."

"And it was?"

"Twenty-three."

Fang Dehai said nothing. His round face, in the lamplight, had not changed. He only set down his bowl, very quietly, and folded his hands on the head of his cane.

"They come back at New Year," said Chengyan. "For six days. They bring presents. My mother cooks, and she cries a little on the second day, and my father stands in the yard and looks at the roof. He says it needs fixing. Every year. Then they go. And my grandfather and I stand in the door and watch them walk to the bus, and then we go in." He heard his own voice, level and low. He felt rather as if he were reading someone else's inventory. "I don't blame them. They had to go. I understand it perfectly."

"Of course you do."

"I just, " He stopped.

The old man waited.

"When I was seven," said Chengyan, "I asked my grandfather when they were coming back. He said, soon. And I understood that I was not to ask again. That asking was a kind of weight. They were already carrying a great deal, and it was not fair to give them any more." He put the bowl down on the plank beside him. "So I stopped. I stopped asking for things. It was easier. If you don't ask, nobody has to say no."

The stove hissed. The water in the steaming box had begun to talk to itself.

"That is an excellent system," said Fang Dehai gently, "for a boy of seven."

"It worked."

"It worked very well. You are twenty-nine years old and you have not been refused for anything since the Year of the Rat." He shook his head. "And I wonder, my boy, how much you have been given."

Chengyan did not answer. He sat with his big scarred hands loose between his knees, and looked at the grey light creeping across the planks, and said nothing, because there was nothing to say that was not true.

* * *

Wenxi had not meant to listen.

She had meant to bring tea. She had woken at five from a kind of doze to find the sky already turning, and Grandma already at the dough, and a small white box, with a coat folded neatly over its lid, on the floor of the passage where she had left it. She had put on her blue shirt, his shirt, and her linen trousers rolled to the shin, and she had filled the big flask with strong hot barley tea and carried it down to the east bank in the dawn, rehearsing as she walked. Good morning. I thought you might be here. Zhaoyu said. I brought tea.

She had stopped at the shed door because she had heard his voice.

It was a voice she knew and did not know. It was low and even, as always, but it was not the flat voice, the voice of the plank and the estimate and the clause. It had a roughness under it, a sort of weathering, like wood left out in the rain. It was saying something about a bus.

She stood against the grey wall of the shed with the flask held in both hands and her heart doing something peculiar, and she did not go in.

She heard all of it.

She heard six days at New Year. She heard a mother who cried on the second day, and a father who looked at the roof. She heard a small boy learn that asking was a weight, and she put the back of her free hand against her mouth, very hard, as though she were stopping a cough. She had known the boy. She had known him from the age of five. She had sat beside him on a wall in the long gold afternoons and eaten sunflower seeds with him and told him stories, and never once, not once, in all those years, had she understood why he had never said what he wanted for his birthday.

He had said, nothing, thank you. Every year. And she had thought it was modesty.

The old man's voice said something she did not catch, kind and slow. And Chengyan said, very quietly, "If you don't ask, nobody has to say no."

She had thought for eight years that she was the one who had left.

It was a plain fact, and it was true. She had left, in the dark, with a box on a step. But she saw now, in a single cold bright instant, from outside a door, that she had been walking out of a house that had already been emptied. She had been so afraid of asking him to come that she had never thought what it would be to ask him to stay. And he, so afraid of asking for anything, had stood in his doorway like a man who has learned to watch buses.

They had each been keeping the other safe from a request.

Something broke, then, low down inside her, very softly, like a knot untying in a rope. She pushed open the door.

"I brought tea," said Wenxi.

Both men turned.

Fang Dehai's round face lit like a lamp. "My dear! At last. We were just discussing the ancient art of congee."

Chengyan did not smile. He had half risen from the keel block, with a face drained of expression, and she saw him look at her, and then at the door, and then at her again, and she knew that he was calculating how much she had heard. She saw him arrive at the answer. She saw the flicker of dismay that crossed his face, and then, behind it, something she had not expected: a sort of helpless relief, like a man whose burden has been taken out of his hands without his consent.

"I'll, " said Fang Dehai, getting up. He did it rather fast for a man with bad knees. "I will go and see about Mei. I have remembered an urgent matter. A matter of, " He cast about. "Of a pike."

"Fang, "

"A very large pike," said Fang Dehai, and patted Wenxi on the arm, and stumped out into the dawn. They heard his cane on the path, tapping away faster than any cane had ever tapped.

Silence settled.

She set the flask down on the barrel. She did not know where to put her hands. The steaming box hissed. The light in the shed had gone from grey to pearl, and the half-built skiff stood between them with its ribs open to the roof, and she thought it looked like the inside of a sentence that nobody had finished.

"How much did you hear?" said Chengyan.

"Most of it."

"I see."

"I didn't mean to." She came and sat down, not next to him, but on the other end of the keel block, with perhaps a foot of oak between them. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry about the, about all of it. I didn't know."

"There's nothing to know."

"There is."

"It was a long time ago."

"It was last New Year," said Wenxi, gently. "You said so. They come in the winter. You told him they cry on the second day."

He was silent. He looked at the plank of larch lying in the box, and the faint ribbons of steam coming out round the lid.

"I want to say something," she said. "And I'd like you not to answer. Not yet. I'd like you to just let me finish. You said you could wait. You've been waiting for a very long time. And I promised you, before the race, that I would tell you what happened, and I haven't. I made you wait again. I'm so sorry. I've been trying for days." She took a breath. "I owe you a story. I'd like to pay it now."

He turned his head. In the first light his face was very quiet.

"All right," said Chengyan.

She did not look at him. She looked at the skiff.

"It was the last night in August," she said. "I was eighteen. I had a letter in my pocket. A place on a course in the city, one year, with a studio at the end of it. I had applied in secret and I hadn't told you. I'd been carrying it round for six weeks. I'd decided that night, I'd decided, that I would tell you, and ask. I had two questions. I had practised them in the mirror." She smiled, a small crooked pull of the mouth. "One was, will you come with me. The other was, will you wait."

He made no sound.

"I went to the workshop. It was about ten. The side door was open a little, and there was a lamp on, and I could hear your grandfather talking. I couldn't hear what. He was speaking low. It was a long sentence, and it went up at the end." Her hands, in her lap, had begun to twist. "And then I heard you."

"Wenxi, "

"Please."

He shut his mouth.

"You said, no. You said, I'm not going anywhere, Grandfather. I will never leave Yunxi." She said it in a flat small voice, quite without drama, as she might have recited a telephone number. "And I stood on the step, and I thought, there it is. That's the answer. He's telling me before I've even asked. He is never going to leave. And if I ask him to come, he'll say no, and if I ask him to wait, he'll wait, and he'll still be here in ten years, in the same place, and I'll be, " She drew a breath. "I'll be someone who went away. And he'll watch me get further and further off. And he'll never say a word, because he's you. He doesn't ask for things. I thought, I'll spare him. I'll go quietly. I'll make it easy."

The larch ticked in its box.

"So I went home and made six cakes," said Wenxi. "And I couldn't write a note. Every sentence asked you for something. So I wrote nothing, and I put the box on the step, and I left. That's all. That is the whole of it. It wasn't that I didn't care. It was that I cared so much I thought the kindest thing was not to ask."

She stopped.

It was out. It lay in the cool air of the shed between them, small and plain and eight years old, and she felt as though she had set down a basket that she had been carrying so long her arms had forgotten what it was to be empty.

She did not dare look at him. She sat with her hands pressed together and heard nothing, nothing at all, not the stove, not the heron, not the beating of her own heart. And then she became aware that something had changed in the quality of the stillness beside her, as the air changes before snow.

Chengyan had gone rigid.

He was staring straight in front of him at the ribs of the boat, and his face had lost all its colour. His lips were parted. His hands lay on his knees with the fingers spread, and she saw them begin, very slightly, to shake.

"Chengyan?"

"Say it again," he said. His voice was barely there. "The sentence. What you heard me say."

"You said, no. I'm not going anywhere, Grandfather. I will never leave Yunxi."

"And before that."

"Before that, I didn't hear. Only your grandfather's voice, and it was too low. A long sentence. Rising."

He shut his eyes.

It was a terrible thing to watch. She saw a man go back in time. She saw it pass over his face like the shadow of a cloud over a field, a series of tiny movements, the flicker of the lids, the muscle at the hinge of his jaw, the tightening of the mouth. She saw him find the night. She saw him stand in it, in a lamplit workshop with a whetstone in his hand and an old man's voice in his ear, and she saw him hear, from the other side, what she had never been able to hear.

"Chengyan," she whispered. "What did he say?"

He opened his eyes.

They were wet. He did not seem to know it. He looked at her, and it was the look of a man who has been shown, quite suddenly, that a room he had walked through every day of his life had a second door.

"He asked me something," said Chengyan.

"What?"

"I can't, " He pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead, hard. "Not like this. Not in a boat shed with the plane still warm. If I say it badly, it'll, " He shook his head. "I've been carrying the wrong half of that night for eight years. I thought I knew what it was. And you have been carrying the other half. And neither of us, "

He broke off. His breath shook.

"Let me think," he said. "Please. I need to put it in order. I need to say it so that you can hear all of it. I don't want to hand you a piece."

Wenxi looked at him. She thought of the box on the shelf, shut with its crooked bow. She thought of the words, I can wait, it's most of the trade. And she understood, with a rush of feeling so large and so gentle that it stopped her breath, that this was the other side of the same thing. He was asking, for the first time in twenty-two years, for something. He was asking for time.

She could have pressed him. She did not.

"All right," she said.

"Wenxi, "

"I said, all right." She reached out, slowly, and laid her hand on the oak between them, palm down, a little way short of his. "I can wait too. It turns out I'm not bad at it."

He looked at her hand. He did not take it. But he slid his own along the keel block until the very edge of his little finger lay against the edge of hers, hardly touching, a line of warmth no wider than a thread.

They sat that way for a long time.

The sun came over the roofs. It struck through the open end of the shed and lit the rafters and the long ribs of the hull, and the shavings on the floor, and the steaming box with its small white plume. Somewhere on the canal a boat bumped a landing. A bird began in the reeds. She looked at the unfinished skiff, with the light going through its open frames, and thought: there are two halves. We each have one. And it frightened her a little, and it made her want to laugh, and underneath both there was something steady and quiet, like a keel.

"Wenxi," said Chengyan, at last.

"Yes."

"The tea."

"Oh!" She snatched her hand back to the flask. "Yes. It's, it's gone cold, I expect, it's barley, it's not very good cold, "

"I'll drink it."

She poured. She put the cup in his hand, and he drank it all, steadily, to the bottom, as a man drinks who has been a long time in a dry place. When he gave her back the cup his fingers closed round hers, around the china, for the space of one breath.

"Thank you," he said. "For telling me."

"Thank you for not hating me."

"I never did."

"I know," said Wenxi. Her voice cracked. "That's the part I couldn't stand."

He almost smiled. He picked up the larch plank, steaming and supple, out of its box, and held it up in the light, and the long pale curve of it glowed like a bent bow. He gave her one end.

"Hold that," said Chengyan. "Against the frame. Don't push. Lean."

She leaned. The wood bent to the shape of the hull as if it had always known where it was going. He clamped it, quick and sure, one clamp, two, three, and the strake lay along the ribs in a single clean line.

"There," he said. "That's one."

She looked at the plank, and at the open frames above it, and at the man beside her with the sunrise in his hair. It was one strake out of nineteen. It would take weeks. And all the same, standing in the warm shed with her hand on the wood, she felt for the first time in her life the odd sweet certainty of a person at the start of something long.

She had told him half. She still owed him the rest, the job and the grey email and the cardboard box. She knew it, with the part of her that kept ledgers. But she had come into the shed that morning with a stone on her chest, and she was going out of it with her hands full of wood, and that, she thought, was progress.

It was not until she was halfway home along the east bank, with the empty flask swinging from her hand and the sun warm on her neck, that she realised she had been so busy confessing that she had forgotten to be afraid. And that he, who never asked for anything, had asked.

She began, very quietly, to hum.