Do you know, Claire said, sometimes when he was away he didn’t write home for months. We had no idea where in the world he was.
She said, I think he was on the move a lot, travelling. Maybe some letters did not get to you.
She could understand why he didn’t mention it when he went to Vietnam. He would have known how much that would have worried her. She let the words drop and didn’t speak them. Easy to do that, as the bowler bowled and Richard tapped the ball away, and the bowler bowled again, and Richard hit hard and clean, Jonathan running forward a couple of steps and then relaxing as the ball flew out across the grass to where the spectators were on the other side of the ground. It was careless of him, Kumiko thought, not to write. For Claire, here in the permanence of their home, it must have seemed that he had disappeared from the face of the earth.
As all the white figures moved around and settled again, Claire said something else. She said that his father had been missing for a long time in Asia, in the war, in the Second World War. I wasn’t married to him then, she said, only engaged, and there was no word for a long time. I don’t know if Jonny ever told you. No, I don’t imagine that he did.
No, Kumiko said, he didn’t tell me that.
All the more careless then.
The cricketers played on.
He sat on the bench in front of the pavilion, put down his batsman’s gloves and then stretched out his legs, one after the other, to remove his pads.
These things he had not done in years: fastening and unfastening the worn leather straps of cricket pads, holding a bat in his hands with that scent of oil on wood, facing a ball, playing opposite his brother, knowing that there were some things that his brother had always done better. Watching his brother show off.
Was Richard always man of the match? He saw his brother walk in the midst of a group of men in white towards the pavilion entrance, throwing back his head to laugh. The women clapping, his Japanese girlfriend and his mother in colourful dresses and sunglasses like pretty ladies in the South of France.
Now I know why they made you captain, he said to Richard as he passed, and Richard waved his bat towards him as if to fend off some irony that he expected to follow.
You did OK yourself. Richard was unusually complimentary, not winding him up like he used to do in the past; perhaps things had changed just so much.
I survived. Don’t say any more. Didn’t let you down anyway.
This was coming home. To old patterns. Old selves that he hadn’t known for a while but just about fitted, like the clothes in his cupboard. A summertime self, the mediocre batsman whose purpose was simply to be safe and not to be out. There was almost a comfort in it, finding that this old self fitted and that the others fitted around him.
He crept down the passage to her bed, the whole length of the house, from his room to hers. I heard you coming, she whispered. He thought he had been as quiet as ever but she had been listening for him.
You played well, at the cricket, she said.
Kind of you to say that, but it’s not entirely true.
Well, Richard was better.
Richard’s always better.
There was a sound at the window. For a moment she froze.
What’s the matter?
There’s something at the window. Like someone scratching against the glass.
They listened.
Oh, I know what it is, she said. It’s only a rose. It’s Madame Alfred Carrière. She must have come loose again. Your mother told me her name.
Afterwards they lay with the sheet away to the side of them.
You never told me about your father, she said. What happened in the war.
His hand was in her hair. She loved to feel his hand in her hair.
I said he was in the Burma campaign.
You didn’t say that he was missing. That everyone must have thought he was dead.
Oh, didn’t I?
And then he said, Does it matter?
I don’t know, she said. I think it does.
He pulled up the sheet then and wrapped himself around her but they didn’t sleep for a while. There was the white rose scratching at the glass of the open window, and beyond it, the night. The night lay over the house and all the fields and the woods, and there were sounds in it. The sounds were strange to her. A lone raw cry, eerie, came from somewhere beyond the garden, towards the wood.
What was that? Was it something being killed?
It’s a fox.
A fox killing something? It sounds like the cry of whatever the fox killed.
Just a fox being a fox, I think.
Calling its mate?
Mating.
Can’t foxes mate silently?
His laugh ran through them like a tremor.
Next time we come, I’ll tell Mum we’ll both sleep here in the spare room.
Yes, she said. Yes, that will be much better.
We’ll still be quiet.
Of course.
Seeing like Capa
In Tokyo there had been no need to carry his past with him but only his camera. When people asked, What are you, Who are you, he might say no more than his name, that he was English and a photographer, or an English teacher when he didn’t feel like saying that or the photography didn’t pay. There was a whole community of English teachers. Some of them weren’t even English but that didn’t matter because the Japanese who were
