He looked out of the open window as Richard drove, the track ahead, the spinney receding. The wide sky. Wide land. When he spoke his voice was flat, commonplace.
That old oak’s still there.
It’s lost a few branches these last years.
There’s a grave underneath it.
Rosie’s grave. Billy’s dog, remember?
Yes, I remember Rosie.
Their words were hollow of meaning as if they needed translation.
I hadn’t been there in years.
I go and shoot there sometimes. It’s always been a good spot for pigeons. Dad used to go there, remember?
Yes I remember that too.
She sat in the centre seat of the Land Rover crushed between them, her knees to Jonathan’s knees, Richard’s hand against her knees as he reached to the gear stick.
There’s a big rookery there now.
What was a rookery? She didn’t know. They spoke across her as if she was not there.
It was so big, the sky. Empty. He felt the huge emptiness weighing on them as if the longer they remained the less they would move, like Richard and his mother, held here on the flat. That was how it had always been. And now here was Kumiko beside him, and he could only make empty talk.
Later, when they were alone again, Jonathan said they had stayed at the farm long enough.
Let’s go away somewhere, he said.
Where, she said, Paris?
He was thinking of the Lake District.
That’s still England.
It’s a different kind of England. And I always promised I’d take you there.
Because I read Wordsworth in my English lessons at school.
For other reasons too. Because it’s wild and romantic. Because I don’t have enough money for Paris until I’m paid for harvest. And when it rains in the Lakes it really rains.
Later, she would think that he was trying to save them. Whether from the past or the present she didn’t know. She didn’t think that he knew either. Only that they should go away from there for a time.
Out after dawn
Richard had noticed his wet boots. Probably there was wet on his face too, and in his hair. Richard was bigger than him, dark against the light, blocking his way to the light of the kitchen, or even upstairs, to safety, where he might have run into his room and held the door shut. The only place left for him to run to was his father’s study, and that way he would not go.
Where were you?
When?
This morning, I looked in your room. Where were you?
Nowhere. I wasn’t anywhere.
His brother had been still asleep when he went out. His mother must still have been asleep. He had heard his father go down the stairs to the kitchen, like on every morning, though this seemed earlier than every morning. Maybe that was only because there was so little light outside. It was November and the days were slow to start, and besides, there was fog. He had heard his father go out, the soft thud of the back door closing, seen through his bedroom window, which looked out at the back onto the yard, his father go out across the yard carrying his gun. The house was all asleep, though he had seen his father go out. He had taken off his pyjamas and thrown on yesterday’s clothes which lay on the chair by his bed, thrown them on any-old-how, and his coat and his gumboots from the passage downstairs, and run out after him. No gloves. His fingers would be cold. No hat either. He had left behind the stillness of the house and run into the cold and stillness of the fields where his father had disappeared. The fog covered everything, caught and stilled it. Coated his skin and his hair with cold dew. He might have gone no further if he hadn’t heard the shot.
You went out, Richard said. Where were you? He held his arm up tight behind his back until the pain stabbed through. Your boots are muddy. I’ve seen them, down there in the passage where you took them off. The mud’s wet.
There was a time later when Richard would say, You saw. It was almost a statement by then and not a question, but even then Richard did not know what it was that he had seen. A year later, Richard was still asking him to tell, hating him for his secret, and he couldn’t tell him because his secret didn’t have any words to it, it was only the thing that he had seen. This time Richard didn’t touch him. He looked. His look was so hard that it hurt. But he couldn’t look away. He just stared back, and he didn’t give in. He didn’t speak a word, only let the tears make their way down to his clenched lips. He knew that it mattered. It mattered all the more because Richard thought their father was his, more his than Jonathan’s, because everyone said that he looked like him, was the spitting image of him, because he was older and did everything first, was trusted with a gun and would be a farmer
