The hatch is open a hand's width, and through it comes the smell of coal smoke and cold water. You stand on the short flight of steps with one hand on the painted jamb, looking out along the cut. The towpath has gone the colour of wet bark. A few late midges turn in the air above the rushes, slow as motes in a jar. Beyond the bow, the canal bends out of sight under a brick bridge, and the bridge's reflection sits unbroken on the surface, a dark second arch laid down beneath the first. You step up another tread. The wood gives the small familiar creak it has given every evening this week, and the stove behind you sighs once as a coal shifts.
Inside, the kettle sits on the iron top, not yet ticking. You can hear it preparing itself, that low metallic patience that precedes any real sound. You leave it. The cabin smells of woodsmoke and old varnish and the faint tar of the rope coiled by the door. You take down the enamel mug from its hook, set it on the shelf beside the spoon, and turn back to the hatch. The light outside has gone one shade further toward blue. On the far bank, where the alder leans low, a heron stands in the shallows, grey on grey, its long neck folded into the shape of a question mark laid on its side. It does not move. You watch it for the length of a slow breath, then another. The water at its feet shows no ring, no ripple. A leaf, yellow and curled, drifts past the heron's stillness and goes on under the bridge without hurry.
You come up onto the deck. The boards are damp and cool through your socks, and you stand for a moment at the tiller, hand resting on the brass where the varnish has worn through to a paler ring the shape of a thumb. Someone before you stood here often enough to leave that mark, and someone before them. The canal stretches ahead in its straight cut between hedges of hawthorn and blackthorn, the berries on the hawthorn dark as old wine. A wood pigeon calls from somewhere behind the hedge, four notes and a pause, four notes and a pause, the rhythm of a clock that has forgotten to chime the hour. Further off, beyond the lock, a single yellow window shows in the lock-keeper's cottage, low and warm against the slate roof. Smoke rises from its chimney in a thin grey thread that bends sideways in the upper air and then disappears.
You step down again, crouch by the stove, and open the firebox door with the cloth folded for that purpose. The heat comes out in a soft wall. Inside, the coals are red at their hearts and dressed in fine white ash, and a small blue flame walks along the edge of one of them, then settles, then walks again. You take a piece of split apple wood from the basket and lay it across the bed. The bark catches almost at once, a thin curl of smoke rising and being drawn straight up by the flue. You close the door. The kettle has begun, very faintly, to tick. You straighten and put your palms to the small of your back, and the boat rocks once, the smallest possible movement, as a moorhen somewhere out in the reeds shifts its weight on whatever it is standing on. Then the boat settles. The kettle ticks again.
A sound now from the water, low and wet, as a fish takes something at the surface — a small dimple appearing and widening into rings that run out to the hull and pat against the steel below the waterline with the softest knocking. You hear that knocking through the floor as much as through the air. Beyond it, the larger sound of the evening is the sound of wind being absent. The hedges do not stir. The reeds do not rattle. Only, very far off, the noise of a tractor moving home along a lane, a sound so distant it could be mistaken for the breath of the cabin itself. The pigeon calls once more and stops. From the reeds at the bow, where the moorhen has tucked herself in, there comes a single small chirruping note, a private sound, not meant to carry, and then nothing.
You take down the tin and shake a measure of leaf tea into the pot. The leaves are dry and dark and smell of warm earth and something faintly smoky, and a few of them miss the pot and lie on the wooden shelf, where you brush them into your palm and tip them into the stove's draught. They flare for an instant and are gone. The kettle is louder now, working toward its proper voice. You rest your hand on its handle to test the weight and find it nearly ready. Through the hatch the sky has gone the deep grey-blue of pencil lead, and the first true star has come up above the alder, though you cannot say when it arrived. The heron has not moved. Or it has moved and then become still again in the same shape, which is the same to the eye. The water around its legs is darker than the water further out, as if the bird were standing in a small pool of its own evening.
The kettle begins its rising note, and you lift it from the plate. The whistle never quite happens; you take it off in time, as you always mean to. The water goes into the pot in a steady silver rope and the leaves lift and turn and settle. You put the lid on. Steam comes up around its rim in a thin halo and lingers above the pot a moment before drifting toward the hatch and out. You watch the steam go. It thins as it rises and is taken into the larger air above the canal, where it joins, perhaps, the chimney thread from the cottage, and the breath of the heron, and the slow exhalation of the water itself, which all evening has been giving back the warmth it took from the sun. You pour the tea. The mug warms in your hand at once, and the smell that comes up is malt and hay and the faint bitterness of bark.
Mug in hand, you climb back to the hatch and lean on the doorframe. The light has dropped another notch. Across the cut, the cottage window has been joined by a second window, smaller, upstairs, and the two yellows together make the cottage look as if it were keeping watch on the water with patient half-closed eyes. The lock gates beyond are black against the last paleness of the western sky, their timbers crossed in the shape they have held since long before you came. Water seeps through the gap between them in a quiet steady run, a sound like a tap left barely on in another room. You drink. The tea is hot and clean. Down the towpath, a bat flickers out from under the bridge and crosses the cut twice and is gone, and the air it cut through closes behind it without trace. The heron at last lowers its head and lifts it again, slow as a hand on a clock, and the small motion is the only thing the far bank does.
You finish the tea slowly. A barn owl calls once, very thin and far, from the field beyond the cottage. The reeds at the bow rustle once where the moorhen settles deeper. Inside the cabin the stove gives its small workings, the soft tick of metal cooling on one side and warming on the other, and the apple wood, well caught now, makes the low steady breath of a fire that will keep till morning. You set the empty mug on the shelf. The hatch you leave open the same hand's width. Outside, the canal has gone the colour of slate, and the bridge's arch and its reflection have closed into a single dark oval through which the water passes without sound. The yellow windows of the cottage hold. The heron stands. The star above the alder has been joined by another, and another, and the sky goes on quietly filling, and the boat rests on the water, and the water rests on whatever it is the water rests on, and the evening goes on putting itself away, fold by fold, along the length of the cut, toward the lock, and past it, and on into the fields beyond, where the mist is beginning, very slowly, to come up off the grass...