She said to him once, Tell me about your family.
She had known him only a short time but already he had met some of her family, her mother’s parents, in the old house in Kamakura. They had been to Kamakura sightseeing, walking round temples in the rain.
He had a mother and a brother, he said. His father died in a shooting accident when he was seven. (Not the truth, then. Only something close to the truth. He would not tell her the truth until much later, when he was about to go home to England.) They had a farm. His mother had kept the farm for them – at least, for his brother who wanted to farm, if not for him.
Oh, she said. She did not quite know what to say. She just had an ordinary Tokyo life. Nothing bad had ever happened to her and she had never even been on a farm. Didn’t your mother marry again?
I guess she didn’t meet anyone, he said. There weren’t so many men for her to meet, out there in the countryside.
So she asked him to tell her about the farm. The house where he grew up.
He said the house was a big, rambling old farmhouse. His voice was slow, a little distant, though he lay close beside her. It was the first time they had spent a night together. They had come back from Kamakura and gone to his apartment, in a tatami room bare of things and with the windows open to what seemed like those days’ unending rain, and made love there. They had the conversation the next morning when they woke. Or maybe pieces of it came at other times. At least, this was how she would remember it. Talking while their bodies were soft with the sex and the rain, as if they might melt, one into the other.
What’s ‘rambling’? she said. It was a difficult word for a Japanese to pronounce.
‘Rambling’ meant that the house had no plan, and rooms ran into rooms as it had been extended, piece by piece, over centuries, as the owners had bigger families or made money and wanted to be stylish. There was a symmetrical brick front, added in the eighteenth century, but a muddle of earlier rooms behind. And there were two staircases, one main one and an old steep back staircase for servants.
You have servants? she said. It was a puzzle to her, the England where he lived.
Oh no. Only the house had servants once.
It sounds grand.
Not so grand. All sorts of houses had servants in those days. A cook, or a maid to sweep and clean, make the fires, I suppose, carry water in jugs up those stairs, do whatever it was maids did.
She could not picture it. Do you have any photos to show me?
No.
If you’re a photographer then you should have photos to show.
Not from home. I left home to take pictures of other places. I didn’t bring pictures with me.
Oh.
He had brought only the camera. His eyes. As if that was all he wanted to be when he travelled away from home, eyes. (He used his eyes and his lens. On her. On Tokyo. On all the places where he went. Before he came to Tokyo he had used them in a war. And he had run away from the war to come to Tokyo. He did not tell her that in the tempura restaurant. She had to know him a long time before she learnt about Vietnam, so well hidden he kept what he had seen. Even when she knew that he had been there, it was some time more before she saw the pictures he had taken. Jonathan was trying to live only some moments and not others, the present moments and not the past ones. It made him complex, much more complex than he had seemed at the start, her Englishman. Elusive. Maybe that was a part of why she was in love with him. But also it kept her at a distance.)
You have all those other photos. Don’t you have any of your family? Your mother?
Why should I bring photos? I know who they are. I know what my home looks like. I don’t need photos to remember them by.
You might have brought them for me.
Why, he said, and rolled over towards her. Their faces close, eye to eye. Breath to breath. All they could see was each other. They could hear rain soft outside, the occasional movement of wind chimes. Why should I bring somewhere else with me? Isn’t here enough?
There can be one moment in the year, Claire said, turning back to the girl even as she led her out into the garden. One moment, she said, looking back, speaking clearly as one speaks to a foreigner, one moment when everything falls just right, the irises still in bloom, the roses just coming out. Some week at the start of June, so long as the weather is kind.
The girl said, Then I am lucky to come here just now.
Yes, it’s perfect now. Last year we had a wet start to June and it was all ruined by the rain. These old roses can’t bear too much rain, the wet gets in and the petals spoil and begin to rot even in the bud.
The daffodils were long gone. There were roses instead. When Kumiko stood where he had stood to take the photo, she could scarcely see the house for leaves.
It was late in the day
