From the Agreement of Temporary Cooperation, Clause 4, underlined three times in Wenxi's hand: "Neither Party shall enter the other's residence after nine o'clock in the evening. No exceptions."

The storm was announced three days before it arrived, and by the evening it came, the whole of Yunxi was ready for it except the weather.

Wenxi had watched the town prepare with the bemused respect of a person who has been away long enough to forget that this happens. On the first day the radio said the word typhoon, and Auntie Zhou went from door to door with a notebook. On the second, the shutters came down on every window along Sixth Alley, one after another, with a long wooden clatter like a row of books being closed. Men on ladders lashed down the tiles with wire. Women carried sacks of rice up the stairs. The cobbler from Fifth Alley sat on his roof ridge with a hammer and a flask, looking at the sky with the face of a man who has met this particular enemy before and is not impressed. By the third afternoon the canal had risen a hand's breadth over the bottom step of every landing, brown and swollen and oddly silent, and the swallows had all gone.

The sky turned the colour of a bruise at four o'clock. At five, the wind dropped completely.

"It is holding its breath," said Grandma Su, at the kitchen door, with her padded jacket buttoned to the chin and a bundle in her arms.

Behind her, in the alley, Zhaoyu stood between the shafts of a two-wheeled handcart, in a yellow oilskin that came to his ankles, with old Mr. Gu enthroned in the middle of it on a heap of blankets like a very dignified parcel. The tailors' shop on Second Street, where the Wei sisters lived above the cutting room, stood two steps higher than anything else in the old town, and half the elderly of the alley were to spend the night there on cushions with a pot of tea and a pack of cards. The arrangements had been made by committee. Wenxi had been outvoted.

"I'll follow at nine," she said again.

"You will come now."

"The moulds, Grandma. And the book. They're on the low shelf. If the water gets in, "

"It will not get in."

"It got in in the year of the flood."

"That was a bad year," said Grandma. "This is only a storm." But she looked at the shelf of wooden moulds for a long moment over Wenxi's shoulder, at the dark pearwood fish and the lotus and the new pale willow with its two crossed branches, and Wenxi saw something cross her face that was almost fear. It was gone at once. She shifted the bundle in her arms and said, in a quite ordinary voice, "The book first. Then the moulds. Then yourself. In that order."

"In that order."

"Nine o'clock."

"Nine," Wenxi promised.

Grandma looked at her. She put out one small brown hand and touched her granddaughter's cheek, once, with the back of her fingers, in a way she had not done since Wenxi was nine years old and had a fever. Then she turned and let Zhaoyu hand her up into the cart beside her old friend, and said, "Gu, move your elbow," and the cart creaked away down the bluestone with a storm lamp swinging from its pole.

The first rain fell at ten past eight.

It was not a gentle rain. It came all at once, as though a lid had been taken off the sky, a great roaring sheet of water that struck the courtyard flagstones like gravel and bounced a foot into the air. The jasmine bent flat. The rain barrel overflowed in a heartbeat. Wenxi stood in the kitchen doorway with an armful of oilcloth and watched the alley turn into a river, and felt, for the first time that day, a small cold finger of unease.

She worked quickly.

She wrapped the recipe book in its oilcloth, tied it with Grandma's flat double knot, and carried it up the narrow stair to the room under the rabbit, where she laid it on the top shelf of the wardrobe among the dresses she had outgrown at seventeen. She went down for the moulds. She took them off the wall one by one, the fish and the lotus, the coin and the peony, and wrapped each in a clean cloth, and carried them up three at a time in a flour sack. The willow she kept until last. She held it in both hands in the kitchen, for a moment, in the flat yellow light of the one bulb, and felt its small warm weight and the tiny ridged notches on its back. Twenty-two. Eleven and eleven.

The thunder came then.

It did not begin far away. It began directly overhead, with a flash that turned the kitchen window white, and a crack so loud and so close that the dresser rang. Wenxi did not remember dropping the mould. She found, a moment later, that she was on her knees under the work table, with her back against the cold stone wall and her hands clamped over her ears, and the willow lying on the floor an arm's length away like something she had been told to guard.

It was a ridiculous thing. She was twenty-six. She had a degree and a portfolio and a recipe for a three-tier lavender cake that had won a regional prize. She had stood in the kitchen of a five-star hotel while a bridal party screamed in the next room and held a steady piping bag. She told herself so, in a clear brisk voice, in her head, and the sky split again, and her whole body flinched like a struck bell.

The lights flickered.

I'll count, she thought. You count between the flash and the bang, and it tells you how far away it is. Grandfather taught me that. One. Two. The bang came before three.

She pulled her knees up against her chest, and put her forehead on them, and shook.

* * *

Chengyan had been in the workshop since six, and he was not thinking about the storm.

He had spent the evening doing what a carpenter does when the sky is about to fall, which is to make sure nothing he owned could be carried away. He had lashed the long cedar planks to the rafters. He had roped the pear to the racks and stacked the finished work on the highest bench and thrown a tarpaulin over the lathe. He had done the boat shed at four, with Fang Dehai standing at the door in a raincoat, shouting instructions into the wind; the half-built skiff was on its stocks with a sheet of canvas pulled over her ribs, tied down at every frame. Now he stood alone at the bench in the dim yellow light, with the doors shut and barred and the rain drumming on the roof like a thousand fingers, sanding a board that did not need it.

The radio was on.

He had not decided to turn it on. It stood on the shelf above the bench, a squat old wooden set with a cracked dial and a cloth speaker, and its volume was turned all the way up. Out of it, at a roar that rattled the chisels, came a soprano, a great swelling sorrowful aria that filled the whole workshop to the roof. He had a distinct recollection, now that he looked, of reaching for the knob when the first thunder came, and turning it, without thought, as far as it would go.

He stopped sanding.

He stood quite still with the block in his hand. The soprano soared. The rain beat. And he realised that he had done this on every night of every storm since he was nine years old, in this room, at this bench, with his back to the door, waiting for a small barefoot figure in a white nightdress to come in across the wall with her hands clapped over her ears and sit down on the floor without a word.

He had done it for eight years after she left. He had never admitted why.

The workshop felt suddenly very large. He looked at the empty patch of boards beside the bench, and he heard Zhaoyu's voice, at six o'clock, in the doorway, in the rain. She's staying to move the moulds. She'll come over at nine. Auntie Su made her promise.

He looked at the clock. It said ten past nine.

He put down the sanding block.

Through the high window over the lathe he could see across the courtyard wall to the back of Su Ji. A single bulb was lit in the kitchen, small and yellow and wavering. The rain slanted across it in silver lines. Nobody was crossing the yard. Nobody was coming over the wall. He stood there and listened, to the aria and the roar and the drumming, and under it, thin and clear, through the thick old plaster of the wall that the two houses shared, he heard a sound that did not belong to rain.

It was the sound of something falling, and rolling, and falling again. It was wood. It was a small, hard, light thing, and it went across a floor and stopped.

And then nothing.

He did not remember deciding. He was aware of a number of things in very quick succession, and none of them was the clause. He was aware that the aria was still playing, and that it would do no good where it was. He was aware that the old battery radio, the tiny black one with the leather case that he kept for the boat, was hanging on its hook by the door. He was aware that the water in the yard, seen through the window, had risen above the second paving stone and was creeping toward the green door in the wall, brown and thick and smooth as oil. He thought of Clause Four for exactly as long as it took him to cross the workshop floor, and it was a very small time.

He took the little radio down from its hook. He thrust it into the pocket of his coat. He took the torch. He unbarred the door.

The wind hit him in the face like a hand.

It was a wall. It knocked the breath out of his chest. He bent his head and went forward into it, across the yard, with the rain driving through his shirt and the water already over his boots, cold as iron, tugging at his shins as if it wanted to take him somewhere. He reached the green door. It was swollen in its frame, and he put his shoulder against it, and it gave with a groan, and the whole courtyard of Su Ji opened out in front of him in a flash of white fire.

The jasmine was flat. The rain barrel was a fountain. And the kitchen door, which she had left open a hand's breadth to listen for the wind, stood wide, with a brown tongue of water sliding in across the sill.

"Wenxi!" he shouted.

The thunder took it.

* * *

She did not hear him come in.

She heard, at some distance, as through a thick wall, a door bang, and a splash, and a long rattling sound that might have been the dresser. She thought it was the storm. She had her face in her knees and her arms round her head, and the whole kitchen was one white roar, and she had been counting for what felt like an hour and had lost the number.

Then there was a shape in front of her.

It was dark and tall and streaming. It crouched, very carefully, as one crouches in front of an animal that has been hurt, and she saw the water run off it in rivulets and pool on the flags. She saw a pair of boots, black with wet. She saw a hand, large and scarred, come down slowly and lay itself on the stone beside her, palm flat, not touching.

He did not speak.

That was the first thing she understood, and it went through her like warmth. He did not say, are you all right, or what are you doing, or it's only a storm. He did not say her name. He simply folded himself down, under the edge of the table, into the narrow dark space beside her, with his back against the wall and his knees drawn up and his shoulder an inch from hers, and sat there, dripping, as if this were the place he had been going all evening.

The sky cracked. She flinched. Her whole body jerked against his arm, and he did not move away.

Then he reached into his coat.

She heard a small click. It was a very faint sound. There came a rustle of static, a hiss like a handful of sand thrown on paper, and then, suddenly, tiny and tinny and enormously loud in the dark under the table, a high clear voice began to sing.

It was an opera. It was a thin piercing aria from a little leather-cased radio the size of a loaf, turned up as far as it would go, and the sound of it filled the narrow space around them like water in a cup. It was not beautiful. It was scratched and cracked and wavering, with a crackle of lightning in every high note. And she knew it. She knew it so well that her breath stopped. It was the same station. It was the same terrible, tuneless, wonderful old soprano who had sung through the wall of the workshop on every stormy night of her childhood, at a volume that shook the plaster, so loud that no thunder could be heard above it.

She took her hands away from her ears.

The thunder came. It came from far off, a long low rolling grumble, muffled in the music, and she heard it as one hears a thing in another room.

She looked at him.

He was looking straight ahead, at the black underside of the table. Water ran down his face from his hair. His shirt was plastered to his shoulders, and his chest was heaving, as though he had run a long way, and there was a cut on the back of his hand where the green door had caught it. He had not looked at her. He was holding the radio on his knee in both hands, steadily, like a man holding a lamp.

Wenxi began to laugh.

It came out of her in a wet hiccup, and then another, and then it would not stop. She put the heel of her hand to her mouth. Her eyes were running. She was laughing and weeping at once, helplessly, in the dark under the kitchen table, with her shoulder against his and a flood coming in over the sill and the whole sky falling in.

"You remember," she said.

He said nothing.

"You remember the radio."

"It's a good radio," said Chengyan, to the table.

"It's the worst singer in the province."

"She's very loud."

"That's the point."

"Yes," said Chengyan, and turned his head at last, and looked at her, and in the faint blue flicker of the window she saw that his face was streaming with something that was not entirely rain. "That is the point."

The laughter went out of her. She sat with her hand pressed against her mouth and looked at him, at the wet black hair and the cut on his knuckle and the steady dark eyes, and the words came up in her throat before she could stop them. "You came across the yard."

"It's thirty paces."

"It's gone nine."

"Ten past."

"Clause Four," said Wenxi, and her voice cracked in the middle of it, helpless and shaking and light. "No exceptions. It's underlined three times."

"I know," said Chengyan. "I was there when you did it."

"You could be in breach."

"I'm aware."

"I could have you before the committee."

"I'd plead," he said gravely, "structural."

She made a sound that was not quite a laugh. Her eyes were swimming. The aria went up and up, thin and bright and awful, and the thunder cracked behind it, and she put out her hand in the dark, across the inch of air between them, and laid it flat on his sleeve.

"Strike it," she said.

"What?"

"Four. The clause. Take it out. I'm giving you notice. In writing, if you like. I'll sign it in a minute." She was crying, and her voice came out low and fierce and very clear. "I don't want a rule that would have kept you on the other side of the wall tonight."

He was silent for a very long time.

The soprano reached a note that no human throat could have held. The little radio rattled on his knee. He looked at her hand on his wet sleeve, and then, slowly, as if the movement hurt, he turned his own over beneath it, and closed his fingers round hers.

"Struck," said Chengyan.

* * *

The water was above the second step of the dresser by the time they came out from under the table.

He felt it before he saw it. It was an inch deep on the kitchen floor, brown and thick and cold, moving with the slow weight of something that has made up its mind. Rain hammered on the window. The single bulb above the dresser swung on its flex, throwing great shadows up the walls. There was a drift of leaves on the flagstones and a dead branch in the corner. The back door was open to the black yard, and through it he could see a sheet of pale water, rising, rising, with the jasmine pot bobbing in it like a boat.

"What do we save?" said Wenxi.

She had pulled herself together. He watched her do it, in the space of one breath: the wet face wiped on a sleeve, the shoulders squared, the jaw set. She stood in the rising water in her bare feet, with her hair coming down and her chin lifted, and she was shaking, and she was giving orders.

"The flour first. The sacks on the floor. Then the ledgers, they're in the passage cupboard, my grandfather's, "

"I'll take the flour."

"There are eight sacks."

"Then eight times."

He took the first one on his shoulder. It weighed twenty kilos, and it was dry, and it smelled of wheat. He carried it up the narrow stair and stacked it on the landing and came back down two steps at a time with the water slapping at his shins. She was already at the passage cupboard. She had the ledgers in her arms, six fat green books with broken spines, and she was wading toward him with her face bent over them like a woman carrying a child through a river.

"Take them," she said.

"Take them where?"

"Up."

He took them. They worked without speaking. Up and down the stair, with the thunder rolling over the roof, and the water creeping up the treads, and the little radio chanting tinnily on the kitchen table where he had set it down. She went up with the tray of cooling racks. He went up with the sack. She came down for the cutting boards, and the big copper bowl, and a basket of eggs that she carried against her chest as though they were the crown jewels. They passed on the stair. Her shoulder struck his chest. She said, "Sorry," and he said, "Don't," and she went on up, and for a moment, in the dark of the landing, he stood with his hand flat on the wall and his heart going like a mallet and did not move.

The last sack went up at ten to ten.

He came down for the willow mould.

It lay on the flags where it had fallen, in two inches of brown water, and when he picked it up it was cold and heavy and slick. He wiped it on his shirt. He held it up to the bulb. There was a tiny new chip in the rim, hardly bigger than a grain of rice, in the fringe of leaves. He turned it over, and ran his thumb across the back, and the little ridged notches were all there, twenty-two, eleven and eleven.

"Is it all right?" said Wenxi.

She had come in behind him. She stood in the kitchen door with the water at her ankles and her arms full of rolled oilcloth, and she was looking at the thing in his hand.

"A chip," said Chengyan. "On the edge. I can fill it."

"It's perfect."

"It's not."

"It's perfect," said Wenxi, "because you can fill it."

She crossed the wet floor. She took the mould from him in both hands, as she had in the workshop, and held it against her chest. Her fingers were smeared with mud to the wrist. Her feet were bare. There was a long dark stripe of water down the front of her blouse. He looked down at her, and she looked up at him, and a cold finger of draught ran in at the door and the bulb swung on its flex, and neither of them said a word.

Then her hand came up and rested, mud and all, against his jaw.

"You've got a cut," she said. "On your hand."

"It's nothing."

"It's bleeding."

"Water," said Chengyan. "It'll wash."

She took his hand anyway. She turned it over. Her thumb passed across the knuckles, across the long pale line that had been there for ten years and the new red line across it, and her fingers were gritty with silt and shaking with cold, and he felt her touch go through the whole length of his arm like a drawn wire.

Their hands were filthy. They were smeared with mud and flour and a little blood, and where they met the grime ran together, brown on white, and neither of them let go.

The bulb flickered once, twice.

It went out.

The kitchen fell into total darkness. There was a roar of rain and a rush of water, and the little radio gave a hiccup, and the soprano broke off in the middle of a note, and the hush that followed was enormous. He heard her breathe in. He felt her fingers tighten on his.

"Chengyan, "

"The electricity's gone. It's the whole street. It'll be the transformer."

"The water's still coming."

"I know."

In the dark he could hear it. It was a thin steady sound, a lapping, like a cat drinking, from every corner of the floor. It was over his ankles now. It was rising. He could feel it, slow and cold and patient, climbing the edge of his boots, and he stood there with her hand in his and the mould crushed between their chests and the storm walking about on the roof, and he thought very clearly: she cannot stay here. Not tonight. Not another hour.

The tailors' shop was a quarter of a mile away across a street that was now a river. The upper floor of Su Ji was filling with every precious thing she owned. And across the courtyard, thirty paces off, up a flight of stairs that he had built himself at the age of nineteen, there was a loft under the rafters of the Gu Family Workshop, high and dry and snug as the inside of a drum, with a stove and a stack of blankets and a window that looked out over the whole drowned town.

"Come to mine," said Chengyan.

He heard how it sounded. He heard it go out into the dark, plain and low and without any ornament, like a plank laid across a gap.

"The loft's higher," he said. "It's dry. It's got the stove. It won't flood." He swallowed. "I'll carry what you want to take. I'll carry you, if you like. I did before."

She was silent for a moment.

Then, in the dark, he felt her laugh. It was not a sound at all, only a small shake through the whole length of her, from the hand in his to the shoulder against his chest. "You carried the cake," she whispered.

"I carried you."

"I carried the cake." Her fingers tightened. "Yes."

"Yes?"

"Yes. Take me." She drew a breath, and then, in a rush, as though it had been waiting at the back of her throat for a month, "Take me to yours."

The lightning came, then, a long white blade of it that lit the kitchen like a photograph. He saw her face. It was upturned and wet and very close. It held no clause, no performance, no polish, nothing at all but a plain unguarded trust, as open as a door in summer.

The dark came down again. He took the little radio off the table, and clicked it on, and the thin cracked aria began again, a scrap of music in the roaring night. Then he bent, and slid one arm behind her knees, and the other round her back, and lifted her out of the rising water as if she weighed nothing at all.