They stayed while the other trippers began to walk back.
Can’t we stay here, just the two of us, she said, and play like the seals? This is so much nicer than your spare room.
But look at the time.
It won’t get dark for hours.
It’s not the time that matters, it’s the tide. If the tide comes up we’ll be cut off.
We’ll have to swim.
With the picnic things?
But we have it all to ourselves now, we can play for a while.
So they did, until they saw how far the sea had come in.
They had to run for it, in their swimming things and carrying their stuff, he with his camera held high, she with the picnic basket over her head, wading through the incoming water that seemed to come so much faster once it had rounded the tips of the island. Then putting on their clothes with the wet swimming things beneath, and back across the marsh, dishevelled, wet, sandy, muddy, laughing. Driving like that home to the farm, Kumiko’s black hair salt-dry and grainy with sand. Loving her like that. Not wanting to show her like that to his mother, his brother, somehow indecent as if it showed on her, the sex they had had in the dunes. But only his mother to see them when they got in, Richard not back yet.
Is there time, he said, for a bath before supper?
Yes, if you’re quick.
Kumiko bathed and washed her hair, and they had supper outside because inland there was no wind and the evening was warm.
Did you have a good day? Richard asked.
Yes, he said. A very good day.
He looked across the table at her in the dusk and wanted her as much as at any time in that day. He saw her talking in that open way she had to his brother, his mother. And wondered at her, that he had brought her here or that she had come all this way for him. It was getting too dark to see the look in her eyes but he knew the heavy fall of her hair and the delicate movements of her hands. He knew all her surfaces. He had touched them and he had photographed them a thousand times. Yet here she was, foreign in his home, present and yet somehow escaping him. Here with his family about him, even at the end of this particular day, he felt that he knew her less than before. He was less sure of her, distracted by the others, by their awareness of her, by her foreignness that he noticed all at once again now as he had previously ceased to see it. He wanted to take out his camera and catch her, only the light right now was too dim for that, she sitting facing out into the garden with the light from the house, all the artificial light that there was, behind her, the light from the windows that spilled out across the lawn. It was an obsession, perhaps, photographing her. The more photographs he took, the more he realised that he would never catch her. Even though she seemed so immediate. He would catch only her stilled surface between one moment and another, never her moving self. Like those painters who paint endlessly portraits of their wives. It might be that their wives were the only people with the patience to sit for them for so long and so often, or it might be that they were trying, really trying, to capture them. Because people need to catch hold of those that they love, because even when they’re very close and have been with them for a long time they can be strangers too. Only their surfaces have ever been captured, what can be painted or photographed, and their words perhaps, that can be written and recorded. Not who they are.
Was that what he was doing, taking these pictures, pictures that had no purpose, so many more hundreds of pictures than he would ever print? Fixing no more than instants, holding them in time. Now here she sat in the dusk, in light too dim for any photograph, escaping him.
What are you doing tomorrow? Richard was asking. Richard sat on the same side of the table as he did, with the window light falling clear on his face.
I don’t know yet, she was saying from the shadow. Jonathan, do we have a plan for tomorrow?
Before he could think to answer, Richard said, Then you must let me show you round the farm. You haven’t done that yet.
Oh yes, she said, I’d like that. Her answer came quickly. He could hear her brightness if he could not see it.
And his mother was passing the salad bowl around. Do you think it’s got too dark to finish the meal out here? We could go inside for pudding. Though it’s such a lovely night.
They agreed they would stay outside. A warm night such as this was rare. The moon had risen. Bats flecked the air above their heads. If no image, then a memory at least to fix. Talking across the table, darkness between them. Making the spaces that were there, the secrets and absences that their words crossed, almost tangible.
She went out with Richard next morning. It seemed to him that they were gone for a long time.
What took you so long?
It’s a big farm, she said when she came back. I didn’t know it was so big. I thought that we would walk but Richard drove everywhere in the Land Rover. He says farmers don’t walk their land, they always drive.
Well, yes, that’s Richard for you. Let’s go for a walk ourselves this afternoon. We’re not farmers so we can walk.
The weather got muggy after lunch, the sky overcast. It wasn’t a great time for a walk. Only the dog was eager to be out. He was getting attached to this new dog. Perhaps she was silly like people said
