They walked through the garden, taking more pictures. Her dress became garish beside his mother’s old-fashioned flowers. It was disconcerting to have her here, this girl whom he had photographed so many times, changing the perspectives in every direction, this girl who was the same girl as in all those other pictures from the year before, brought into this present which was also his past. She pushed her long black hair back behind her shoulder which was bare save for the strap of the dress and smiled her big smile. He did not know why he was taking so many pictures when she had just arrived. As if each of these moments must be recorded. When what was there came here. The shock of putting two pieces of his life together.
I did not expect, she had said, this house to be so big. Yet he thought that he had told her that before she came. The farmhouse was big and rambling. He had described all of that, and he had described the village, and the Hall where his family had once lived, which was rather more grand. The day she arrived they had gone for a walk around the village after lunch, he and his mother and Kumiko, not Richard who was out on the farm. The three of them had walked the half-mile to the village through the fields, entering the churchyard through a gate at the back where the gravestones stood nameless, head-high in grass. Are your family here? she asked. Yes, he said, but he would not show her the graves now, not with his mother here and when she had just arrived. He showed her instead the memorials inside the church, that went back five or six centuries; an opulent slab of Victorian marble commemorating his great-grandparents who had first come to the Hall; more austere twentieth-century memorials listing villagers who had died in two world wars.
The church was tall and white, bright with the day, and silent. She walked down the aisle to the altar rail, her steps crisp on the stone floor.
May I clap, she said, or is it too quiet? Would you mind?
Go ahead.
She stood in the pool of light that fell through the east window and clapped her hands together, twice, into the white space. That’s what we do when we enter a shrine, she spoke across the church to Claire. To wake the god.
So fresh and free she looked, in the yellow dress. Sunlight to blaze away the shadows. Snap.
Stay as long as you like, Claire said. It’s lovely to have you here. It was lovely to be there, she said. She said how beautiful the place was, the house, and the garden that Claire had made, the church, the village, the way of life. Jonathan did not tell me, she said, that he grew up in such a beautiful place. She stayed the weekend and then through the following week, and then the weekend after. Jonathan had planned for them to go to London and do some sightseeing, they had even talked about going to Paris, but the summer weather continued so perfect, day after day, that it seemed a pity to leave. So they took Claire’s car and went for day trips to the seaside or across the county.
They went to Swaffham on market day. To Norwich to see the cathedral. To Castle Acre and Castle Rising, those names she would remember, and to other places whose names she would forget. One day they drove past the walls of Sandringham where Jonathan said that the Queen spent her summer holiday but he didn’t know if she was in residence or not. I think they have a flag flying if she’s there, he said. But they did not see any flag. They did not see the house even, only those long walls and trees behind them. Maybe it was just at Buckingham Palace, he said, that she flew the flag to show when she was in. Or maybe she was not there at all, now he thought about it, he thought now it must be Christmas that she spent in Norfolk, or Easter. She had a place in Scotland for the summer.
One day that promised to be particularly fine, they went to the beach and he took pictures of her in the English dunes as he had taken pictures of her on a beach in Japan a year before. They went for a long walk out through the marshes and to the dunes and then on, making their way across mud and clumps of marsh grass and wet sand to a piece of land that became an island when the tide rose, and at the point at the tip of the island they saw seals playing in the sea. Then they put down their things and changed, and swam in the sea themselves. She wore the same red swimming costume as the year before, but there was a sting of wind and the sea was cold, despite the sunshine. It was a few degrees cooler on the coast than it had been inland, with that breeze and a hint of cloud coming in over the sea. This beach on the side of the island that faced the sea was long and the colouring cool, the sand pale and the beach grasses a bleached green. They ate the picnic they had brought with them and then he took pictures of her with the long pale strip of sand stretching out behind her and the endless sea horizon. No shadows, as the thin cloud moved in across the sky. The wind just so gently blowing her hair and blowing sand against her. She wrapped herself in a towel. It’s cold, your English seaside. They moved back into
