The first dry place is the centre of the path. The wall is still dark, and the water has no reason to tell us whether the rain has stopped.
A path at water level
There is a useful difference between a street beside water and a path that belongs to it. On the street, the canal is something to look across. Down here, its surface sits close to the ankle. A passing ripple changes the light under the wall, and the damp edge of the paving asks for a little more care. The walk becomes narrower without becoming shorter.
The warehouse offers no grand frontage to this side. Its windows are high, the lower courses of brick uneven, the joints repaired in several colours. The wall runs beside the walker like the back of a long room. Across the canal, trees interrupt the houses rather than hiding them. A kitchen window and a bare branch share the same trembling rectangle in the water below.
Leaves gather wherever the line of the bank hesitates. Some lie flat against the wet brick; others turn slowly in a pocket of water beside a drain. The movement is small enough to mistake for stillness. Only after looking away and back does the yellow leaf sit on the other side of the dark one. Nothing has arrived, but the arrangement has changed.
The wall after rain
Brick is not one colour after rain. The exposed faces begin to lighten while the mortar keeps its dark outline. Under a projecting sill, a strip remains almost dry. Lower down, the wall meets the towpath in a green seam. It is tempting to turn each mark into a history, but the marks do not supply dates. For now, differences in colour are enough to follow.
An iron ring stands away from the wall just far enough to catch a cuff. Its lower curve is darker than the fixing above it. Water waits at the lowest point, grows heavy, and leaves without ceremony. The ring does not need a rope to give the wall a scale. It places the surface within reach of an arm and interrupts the longer rhythm of the brickwork.
The path has its own patchwork. A repair of smaller bricks makes a rough square near the drain. One edge sits a little proud, enough to collect a narrow border of grit. Rain brings out these modest disagreements between materials. From standing height the paving looks continuous; closer to the ground, it becomes a series of decisions about where one surface should meet the next.
A bridge changes the sound
Near the bridge, footsteps acquire an extra edge. The sound returns from the underside of the span before it has quite left the ear. A bicycle passes on the road above, heard first as a brief rattle and then as nothing. There is no need to see the rider. The bridge has supplied an upper storey to a place that otherwise seemed almost entirely horizontal.
Under the span, water looks darker but sounds closer. Small waves touch the masonry with a hollow note, each contact slightly different from the last. The eye adjusts and finds a line of reflected sky along the opposite bank. It is the brightest thing here, though it belongs to the least solid surface. Looking at it for a while makes the overhead structure feel unexpectedly heavy.
Beyond the shadow, the far bank seems newly lit. Nothing in the sky has changed; the short passage beneath the bridge has done the work. The same trees now hold more separate greens and yellows. A narrow band of open water divides their reflections from the wall. The canal is not a mirror so much as a second, less settled arrangement of everything standing beside it.
A canal has two evenings: the one above the wall, and the one that remains in the water.
Walking back
Returning along the same stretch is not quite repetition. The wall that occupied the right shoulder now lies on the left, and the gaps in the paving become visible from their other edges. An unnoticed opening leads up between two buildings. From below, its steps frame a small piece of street: a kerb, the bottom of a door, a rectangle of light beyond the last riser.
The rain is no longer the main event, if it ever was. It survives in sheltered joints, on the back of the ring, and beneath leaves that keep their own small patches of paving wet. Above the wall, a window has become warmer than the sky. In the canal that warmth breaks into short vertical strokes. They move with every ripple but never travel far from the window.
At the steps, there is a choice between one more bridge and the street above. The path continues with no particular promise. Another wall, perhaps another drain, a different arrangement of leaves. That is enough to make leaving feel slightly early. The evening on the street will belong to lit rooms and passing traffic. Down here it still belongs to the surfaces, taking their time to dry.