It had been strange to see it all here, out of the envelopes, here in the red-papered dining room with the carriage clock ticking on the sideboard and the dull Norfolk winter outside. An American called Jim who was his friend in Tokyo. Jim with two girls in the forest. One of the girls recurring in picture after picture, in the park, by the river, on the shore.
Who’s the girl?
He held up a print of the girl smiling beneath a red umbrella; fine drops of rain on the lens.
That’s Kumiko.
Pretty girl. Are Japanese girls pretty?
Not all of them.
She looks nice.
She is nice.
Putting out his hand to take the picture back. Maybe she’ll come here sometime, then you and Mum can meet her.
When Richard looked up from all those photos and asked where were the others, for a moment Jonathan stalled. Which others? Oh, you mean the ones from Vietnam. But those are ages old, I’ve moved on from that now. I boxed them up ages ago and there’s no need to look at them again. It’s only the more recent ones I’m going through now – but anyway, you’ve seen them already. They were published, you saw that.
They were good.
They were an accident, he said, and he thought, no, in truth, they weren’t good, whatever they were, in fact were a kind of failure, that brought him all the way back to where he was now, come back here to spread out these last few years on the table. And not the full years, edited years at that.
No, surely not, Richard was saying. Not an accident, not at the time?
It was all a crazy thing, he said, some of the cool of those days coming back to him, being cool again as if he still had the camera slung about his neck, light meter dangling, though he was here at home in the dining room and with only his brother to see — and you never quite grew up at home, you were never so free as elsewhere, always aware, wary, of what had gone before, what might pull you back, always the danger there that your big brother would see through you to someone smaller.
That’s how it was out there, he said, trying now to be accurate. Truthful, not tough.
I was just travelling, and I met someone who was going to the war and he said it was easy, easy to get there, easy to go, and it was, and there it was before me. I was only in the country for a few weeks. I just struck it lucky, that’s all.
People who stayed home, people like Richard, didn’t understand how easy travel was. Even to a place like that. Because everything was immediate, every decision and move made for the moment, for that day. Eat, travel, find a place to sleep. Move on. A day at a time. Or maybe consider just the day after or the day after that.
Those pictures were great. Aren’t you going to do more like that?
That war’s over now.
There are other wars.
No.
People, people all over, wanted to see what he had seen. They looked, and they might remember those images he had taken through all the rest of their lives, in place of other images, even in place of first-hand ones that might have made them happy. He had told himself there was meaning in it. Purpose. And then the cheque came in, and he moved to Tokyo where there was no war, and bought a leather jacket, and packed away the prints and the negatives into their boxes. He took them out once to show Kumiko and afterwards regretted it.
No, I’m not going to do that again, he said. Too much maumau.
‘Maumau’ shut Richard up. ‘Maumau’ was a word they had between them, just in the family, one of those words that holds a family together and closes it against the world. ‘Maumau’, crushed roadkill. ‘Maumau’, the entrails of a poached deer thrown into a ditch. Billy knowing the sight, explaining how a deer when it was shot must be disembowelled on the spot or its meat went bad. ‘Maumau’, a sheep’s skull he found once when they went on a walk, or Jess found it, snuffling in the bushes. He didn’t know what had happened to the rest of the sheep, there was only this skull, half of it bared to the bone but the other half with dry skin still clinging to it tight and leathery, and the eye gaping through. His mother’s distaste. You’re not carrying that home, are you? Yes. Well you can’t bring it in, it’ll have maggots in it, you’ll have to put it on the bonfire or bury it or something. He persisted, holding it by the bare jaw all the way back. It was interesting, weird. He thought he might do a drawing of it, strip off the rest of the skin maybe, or preserve it in something. What was it people used, formaldehyde? Do we have any formaldehyde, Mum? No, I told you, you’re not bringing that smelly thing in here. Take it away, it’s maumau, I’m not having it in the house. The word was shorthand. Once it was said nothing more needed to be said. Though of course the thoughts would remain, the unsaid images that couldn’t be forgotten. Richard knew that as well as he did. So now Richard shrugged and turned away from the photos. He went to the window, put his big hands to the frame and stared out through the glass. They both stared out. The garden was bare. Only the black hedge to see there, the stripped trees, the dead stalks of plants and the leaves on the lawn that hadn’t been cleared away.
I don’t think it was as easy as you say. You really worked at getting there, didn’t you?
Perhaps.
Why did you go?
I don’t know. Adventure. A challenge. Robert Capa.
Who’s he?
A famous war photographer. He was one
