You take the last step up into the upper room and the smell finds you first — varnish warmed all day by the south wall, hemp rope softened in its coils, and beneath these the lake itself, mineral and cold, coming up through the floorboards. The room is long and low. A single chair has been set near the window. Outside, the water has gone the colour of pewter and holds the shape of the far hills inside it, upside down and perfect. You rest your hand on the sill, which is broad and pale where the varnish has worn thin from other hands resting there. Below you, two rowing boats float on their painters, not quite touching.
The boats are clinker-built, the overlapping planks dark with linseed and damp, and they sit so still that the lake beneath them might be a sheet of glass laid over them rather than water holding them up. One is the deeper green of moss after rain; the other is a faded red, the red of a barn that has been a barn for a long time. Their oars are shipped neatly along the thwarts. A coil of rope on the green boat's stern has been coiled the same way so many times that the rope remembers the loop and lies in it on its own. You watch a small ripple travel out from beneath the red boat's hull, slow and circular, as though the wood itself has shifted half an inch in its long afternoon of floating. Then the lake closes again and is still.
A sound comes from the far bank, thin and clear across the water — the dry rasp of a heron lifting one leg and setting it down. It stands where it has been standing, a tall grey shape at the edge of the reeds, neck folded, beak half open to the cooling air. You can just make out the pale stripe down its breast. It does not move for a long while. When it does, it is only to turn its head a fraction, as if listening to the bottom of the lake. Closer in, beneath the boathouse floor, the water laps once against a piling, then once again a minute later, the slow tongue of the lake tasting the wood it has tasted every evening since the boathouse was built. Somewhere above you in the rafters, a swallow shifts on its mud cup and is quiet again.
You let your fingers travel along the sill. The wood is oak, you think, or something close to it, the grain raised where weather has eaten the softer parts and left the harder standing proud. There is a worn place exactly where your palm settles, a low hollow polished smoother than the rest, and your hand fits it without your having to choose. The chair behind you is plain, rush-seated, the rush gone honey-coloured at the front edge and darker at the back. When you sit, the joints make a small sound and accept your weight. A folded wool blanket has been left across the chair's arm, smelling faintly of cedar and of the lake. You draw it across your knees. The weave is loose, the colour of oatmeal, and one corner has been mended with a different yarn, finer and a shade paler, the stitches small and even.
Outside, the light is going by degrees. The hills across the water lose their detail first, becoming one long soft shape, and then the shape itself softens at the edges and begins to merge with the sky above it. The lake holds the last of the brightness longer than the air does. For a while it is paler than anything else in the world, a flat pale road laid between the dark banks. A moth comes to the window and rests on the outside of the glass, its wings the colour of dry birch bark, its body very small against the pane. You can see the fine combs of its antennae. It stays a long moment, then lifts away without your seeing the wingbeat that took it. Down on the water, a fish rises somewhere out near the middle, and the ring it leaves widens slowly outward and is gone before it reaches the boats.
Then, one by one, the lamps along the boathouse rail begin to come on. They are old brass lanterns with frosted glass, set at intervals along the wooden walkway that runs around the building at water level, and they wake in order from the near end to the far. The first throws a circle of warm light onto the planks and onto a small patch of lake beside them, where you can suddenly see every fibre of weed drifting beneath the surface. The second wakes a moment later, then the third, then the fourth, each one finding its own pool of water to lay a hand on. The light is yellow and unhurried. Where it touches the lake it lies on the surface rather than sinking into it, and the lake holds the lanterns as faithfully as it held the hills, each lamp doubled, each pair of lamps connected by a slow ladder of brightness down into the dark. The heron, on the far bank, is now only a paler vertical against the reeds.
The boards beneath your feet give off a last warmth from the day. Through the soles of your shoes you can feel the long grain of them and the cooler line of a nail head where one plank meets the next. Somewhere in the rafters the swallow stirs once more and resettles. The rope smell deepens as the air cools — coils of it hang on pegs along the back wall, thick brown hemp and thinner sisal, and an old painter line gone soft and grey with use. A net is folded on a shelf, its float corks worn down to the shape of thumbs. The smell of the varnish on the sill has gone quieter as the wood cools, and the lake smell has come up to meet it, and they sit together in the room without disturbing each other. The blanket on your knees has taken on your warmth and given some of it back. Out on the water, the red boat and the green boat have become two soft shapes the colour of the dusk between them.
A small wind moves once across the lake and does not quite reach the boathouse. You watch its track — a long darker breath travelling from the western shore toward the middle, ruffling the surface into the faintest gooseflesh and then smoothing again behind itself. The lanterns' reflections shiver and reassemble. The heron has gone, or has become the reeds; you cannot tell which. The hills are now only an idea of hills. A single star has come out above them, low and uncertain, and the lake has found it already and is holding it too, very small, very steady, between the green boat and the red. Beneath the floor the water laps once against the piling. You let your hand rest on the worn place in the sill. The wool of the blanket is warm. The lanterns burn steadily along the rail, each one keeping its own circle of water lit, and the water keeps the lanterns, and the night, very slowly, comes down across the lake from the far side, drawing the colour out of the boats, drawing the colour out of the reeds, settling into the room as softly as the blanket settled across your knees, and the swallow above you does not stir again, and the moth does not return to the glass, and the small ripple that crosses now beneath the boats moves outward, and outward, and outward across the dark water, slower than you can follow, fainter than you can follow…