The oar dips, and the lake accepts it without complaint, closing over the blade in a swirl of liquid glass. Each stroke leaves a pair of small whirlpools spinning behind us, twin signatures that unravel almost as soon as they are written. We are barely moving, and yet the far shore turns slowly, imperceptibly, the way the hand of a clock moves — never seen, only ever noticed after the fact.

The water here is not one colour but a conspiracy of them. Near the boat it is tea-brown and secret, thick with the shadows of weed that sway below like the hair of something sleeping. Further out it hardens to pewter, then to a hammered silver where the sun lies down flat upon it, too bright to look at, a long blade of light pointing straight back at us wherever we go.

Sound arranges itself into layers. Closest is the intimate slap and gulp of water against the hull, a patient, greedy noise. Above it, the creak of the rowlocks, rhythmic as breathing. Beyond that, the whole ring of the valley: a wood pigeon’s five soft notes repeated like a question no one answers, the distant complaint of sheep, and under everything the enormous, cushioned silence of a great body of water, which is not silence at all but the sound of space itself.

A dragonfly stitches the air above the gunwale, an electric-blue needle drawing invisible thread. It hovers, considers us, and is gone. The reeds at the margin bow and whisper as we pass, and a moorhen bursts from them in a scandal of flapping, skittering across the surface on comic, urgent feet before deciding, halfway, that flight is simpler.

I trail my fingers over the side and the cold climbs my arm like a rumour. The lake is deeper here; the weed has vanished, and beneath my hand is nothing but a green-black going-down, an unlit cathedral of water in which my own pale fingers are the only visitors. It is beautiful and faintly terrible at once, the way all deep water is — a surface that mirrors the friendly sky and hides, just beneath, a cold that does not care about us at all.

Then the boat glides into the shadow of the far bank, and the temperature drops a degree, and the light stops dancing. The reflections gather themselves into leaves and branches, solid again. The oar lifts, dripping, and for one long moment we simply drift, held between the sunk sky below and the real one above, belonging fully to neither.