Richard went stiff as ice before he cried. She saw the tears rushing to freeze in his eyes. And then he went red and they melted. But Jonny showed nothing. At first she looked at his blank face and wondered if he understood. He was just seven. What did a seven-year-old understand of death? (Everything, perhaps, or nothing. Perhaps no less than a grown woman understood. He’d seen dead things after all, birds, rabbits, rats. He knew what dead things were. Simply that when a person was dead he just wasn’t any more.)
The dog had come into the room with them, crowding against their legs where they sat all three on the sofa. She had her arms around the boys and then she held the dog. She felt the dog’s warmth, and the slight shiveriness within her, smelled the world outside that she had brought to them inside. She sensed that the dog understood. The dog of course had been there.
Daddy’s had an accident, she said. That voice again, that might not have been hers. She said that he tripped when he was climbing a fence and the gun went off. It seemed a plain enough story for boys to understand, even if boys knew that a man shouldn’t be climbing a fence with a loaded gun. But clearer because of that, because they would assume that if a man were to do such a thing, and the gun were indeed to go off, then he might well die as a consequence. It was the sort of thing one said, wasn’t it? At the time, in her world, among people like herself – themselves.
Only much later did she think about the mud on Jonny’s boots. It was too late by then. Her lie was told, fixed from that first moment as fact. It wasn’t the sort of lie one could go back on. If he had been outside that morning, if he had followed his father, if he had seen what might have been seen outside, then one could only hope that he hadn’t noticed that what she said was different from what was there; he was only seven, after all. It wasn’t meant as a lie, but as a way to make truth gentle. An accident, she had said it was, with the two boys beside her on the sofa, and the dog, who knew but didn’t know her words, before them. And Jonny was closed in on himself, but so was his brother with the tears like ice in his eyes; the two boys, each so different, each closed away. And she would be closed too, only the dog shivery but warm between them. But did they really understand? And the dog? Did Jess know he was gone for ever or was she looking for him each time that she went to the door and whimpered? Jess attached herself most to Jonny after that, though it made Richard jealous. Every day Jonny took her for a walk when he came back from school. If it was raining and Claire said he couldn’t go, he was angry with her.
But, Mummy, Jess has to have her walk. She hates to be in the house all day.
I’ve already taken her. We walked to the village this morning. All right then, you can go out for a short walk, when the rain stops. She’s an old dog now, she doesn’t need to go too far.
It helped to take the dog with her when she went to the village. The dog was a shield against the kindness of the people who stopped to talk. A golden place for them to put awkward and pitying hands.
Cricket
The Green, they called it, the place where they played. That was what it was, green. Men in white stood in a pattern on the green. She was a Japanese girl in a picture postcard of England, sitting on a striped deckchair watching cricket. Wearing sunglasses. Sipping lemonade through a straw.
Claire sat in a chair beside her. Now and then one of her friends came and sat with them. Jonathan had been lying on the grass until a short time before but he had gone to prepare to bat. His trousers were too big. They were Richard’s. He looked comical in the baggy trousers that now had green stains on them from the grass. His team had been batting for a long time. He was one of the last to go in. She could see that he was afraid that he would do badly. He had not played cricket since he left school. It was Richard’s game, he said, not his, it had always been Richard’s game. Richard was good, even Kumiko could see that. He looked good playing. He looked tall and strong in the white clothes and his hair was bright in the sun. He stood very still as the bowler ran in, and then he raised the bat and hit the ball a long way. He went out to bat at the beginning of the match, second or third, and he was still there. Claire had explained the rules to her, but she didn’t think you needed to know the rules to watch. She didn’t mind about the rules. She watched the men moving across the Green, and the little clouds, and the swallows flying over. And the other people watching, children running about, mothers calling them back.
No one would have guessed they were brothers, seeing them there, Richard looking so heroic, Jonathan dark and tense and restless, fidgeting with his bat while the bowler got ready, tapping the grass with it as if that would make a difference. Then looking up, facing the ball, hitting it away just a short distance so that he scored a run and went to the other end and Richard could take his place.
He looked exposed there out on the grass. Yet he
