The Lake at Seven

The water is flat at seven. Not calm in a general sense, flat, holding the far shore in it the right way up, because the southerly that puts texture on the surface has not filled in yet and the light air that comes down the length of the lake overnight has mostly dropped. This is the condition the lake is in for a good many of the hours in which nobody is looking at it.

The first boat out is usually a workboat, and it is going somewhere specific. A flat barge with a small crane on it, taking a pallet of something to a house the road does not reach. A boatman repositioning a hull before an office opens. A man standing up in an open boat with an outboard, going out to look at nets and not looking at the mountains at all. Nothing on the water at that hour is out for the view.

Sound behaves differently over flat water, and it is the reason the hour feels emptier than it is. A single engine two villages away arrives clearly and takes a long time to go past. Bells from the opposite shore land a beat behind the ones in your own village, so the hour gets struck twice. A shutter going up somewhere below sounds as if it were in the next room. By eleven, with wind on the surface and traffic on the road, none of this is audible.

Everything a lakeside village will consume in a day arrives in the first two hours of it, and almost none of it arrives comfortably. The van stops on the road, because the lanes behind the road are stepped, walled and about wide enough for two people to pass, and the last part of the journey is done by hand: crates on a sack barrow, gas bottles, bread stacked in plastic trays, bottled water, ice for a bar that has not opened. In the places with no road at all, it comes off a boat and goes up the same steps everything has always gone up.

The caf opens in the plainest way available. The shutter goes up, the chairs come off the tables and out onto the flagstones, the machine is switched on long before anyone wants it, and the first three customers stand at the bar, drink a coffee in under two minutes, put down coins and go. Nobody sits down. Sitting down happens later, with different people, at a different price.

Above all this the gardeners have already started, because a terrace in full sun is unworkable by the middle of the morning and the cutting and the pruning have to be got out of the way first. A strimmer somewhere high in the trees is one of the standard sounds of a Como morning. It stops before lunch and does not resume.

They go in wherever there is a way in: a slipway, a set of steps with a rail bolted to the wall, a strip of shingle beside a jetty. They are mostly not young. They swim parallel to the shore, out to a fixed point and back, in a straight line, without stopping to look at anything. They are dressed again and gone before the first ferry that matters.

The water has kept the previous day's heat and the air has not, which is the practical argument for going in before breakfast rather than after, and they know the temperature of the lake the way other people know the weather. They will tell you what it is without being asked.

The change is quick enough to watch. A ferry comes in with a crowd on it rather than a dozen commuters, the car ferry across the centre starts loading properly, the coach parking takes its first arrivals, and the lanes begin to fill from the bottom. Within about twenty minutes a square that held four people holds a great many. The tables that were set are sat at. The road stops flowing and starts queuing.

None of the morning has gone anywhere. The barge is still working, the gardeners are still on the hill, the shop is still selling bread to the same people it sold bread to at half past seven. It has simply been covered over, and it will be uncovered again in the evening, when the last of the day boats has gone south.

Nothing about the hour has to be arranged and nothing about it is seasonal; the details change between February and July but the shape does not. It costs an early alarm. That is the entire entry price, and it is the reason the lake its residents live on and the lake its visitors describe are not quite the same lake.