He had not, at any stage of his preparations for to-day, envisaged the possibility that they would ‘go on the river’. It was too much the expected, obvious thing, a cliché embodied in action; young love, the murmuring water, the shared isolation of the boat, holding them together within its hard, flat narrowness. He was getting a little too old for such a formula to keep its appeal. But actuality, once again, proved him wrong, showing up the shallow stupidity of his post-adolescent rejection of the ‘romantic’ paraphernalia, with all its significance and strength still to be drawn out of it. They found themselves walking by the river as it flowed between the moist, level meadows: it invited them: a man handed Charles a pole, wrote a number in a book, and pushed them out into midstream: and the expected, trite setting was immediately mustered, ready once again to produce the expected, trite emotion.

Except that the setting and the emotion were not expected and trite. After so many false starts, so many occasions when the equipment was all in order but the product stale, factitious, mis-shapen, the mixture worked at last. The magic spell, mumbled wearily and with less and less conviction, suddenly rang out sharply and turned the frogs and rats back into men, the fairy came down from the Christmas tree, the straw was spun into valuable gold. Was it just because he was with her? Charles wondered; but no, there was, really and genuinely, an element of luck or magic (two names, same thing) which had whisked up the tired ingredients and made everything vital and beautiful. The sunlight on the water knew exactly how to behave; after so many centuries it could produce the precisely needed effect as it flickered in reflection on the dark underneath of the leaves which the trees held out at just the correct height above it. The birds were rehearsed, the flowers and grass knew precisely what to do; the cool grey shapes of revered buildings formed, in the background, a perfectly contrived contrast and balance for the calm, heavy cattle lying down in the fields. So slick, so confident in its much-photographed guide-book-and-calendar charm, the ensemble ought to have been a flop. But in fact, it worked, and Charles had to admit that its method was the only one; like all beautiful old fakes, it had ended by believing in itself, and that conviction could not, ultimately, be resisted.