Richard was right. He saw. What did he see? The fog, the plough, the spinney, the tree, his father’s body. The leaves beneath him. The consequence of the shot. The dog. Then his mother’s face as they sat on the sofa. Her lie. He tripped and fell, she said. He was climbing a fence in a field, and he must have tripped, and the gun went off. That made a different picture. He could see that picture, and he could see the other one, which was true, though nobody said it was true, he could only see it and not speak it. He had been seeing such things ever since: things that were and weren’t true, the appearance of things and what was said to be the appearance of things and what was missing from the appearances. How the appearance could be empty. How what was present could show what was absent. That knowledge had become a part of him and all that he did. It went into his relationships with people and the world. It went into his photographs. Perhaps it was what made his photographs good, when they were good: not only what they call ‘eye’ or composition or technique, but his understanding of what was beneath, behind, not there. Where the shadows went and where shadows didn’t fall.
There was this difference between himself and Capa. Capa had photographed the moment of death. The shot. A Republican soldier thrown back by the impact of the bullet, arms outstretched, rifle just let go. The most famous photo he ever took. (If the photograph was true, of course, if Capa, who somewhat invented himself anyway, who invented his name and the life that went with his name, if Capa had not somehow set up the shot which was so like a Goya, which might have been composed by Goya.) Jonathan saw the scene after the shot, but it was only the aftermath; the image imprinted on him but never exposed to the world.
Go-aan, you up there
Now Jonny was taking her off to the Lakes. He saw his mother drive them away then he walked across the yards to the barns; out of the back door, across the cobbles there and past the empty stables and the mounting block, past the old flint barn and through to the wide concrete yard and the new barns where the machinery was kept.
He had one of the lads working with him and they were servicing the combine. The combine came out once a year, and once it was out you didn’t want to lose a minute of its working time. You wanted it to run without a fault twelve hours a day, if you could go that long, intensively over just a couple of weeks. You brought it out from the barn. You washed it down, vacuumed the drum, checked sieves, straw runners, knives, belts; tightened and oiled and replaced. You put your hand to a spanner, wrenched at a too-tight nut. Hammered out a bent piece of metal. The work was purposeful, physical, absorbing in its way. The sound of it clattered between all the hard surfaces of the yard. In an hour or so – longer depending on how much shopping she decided to do – she would be home from dropping them off.
When they came back from their holiday there would be pictures. He could imagine how they would be. The girl on hilltops blown by the wind, her smile in the sunshine, her black hair across her face, her hand reaching to pull the hair back. Or perhaps there would be only rain. It was the Lakes they were going to, after all.
She was the only Japanese he had ever met. He had never known anything much about the Japanese apart from the war. Most of what he had come to know he had learnt from Jonny, from what he had said and from his photographs. When Jonny first came back from his travels there were so many photographs. It had been amazing to think that his brother had been making a living as a photographer. There were masses of prints, and then rolls and rolls of film that he had developed, and he had laid them out on the dining-room table. It was like the National Geographic spread there, so many places he’d been. All they’d seen at home till then were the war pictures that had made it to the papers; but Jonny had put those away somewhere, there weren’t any of soldiers or fighting. There were others of Vietnam that made it look quite a nice place. Jonny said that Saigon was a much nicer place than you’d think. Old houses with balconies, wrinkled old ladies on the balconies smiling down, pretty girls – pretty as, prettier than, Kumiko. Of course there were the pictures of Kumiko. Jonny didn’t say who she was at first. She was just this one Japanese girl smiling, in the city, on the beach, under the trees. He worked it out easily enough. Richard went in now and then when Jonny was sorting them. Jonny let him look at the prints and the contact prints and the slides, gave him a glass that he held unfamiliarly in his hand as he looked at the slides on the light box.
Who’s the girl?
That’s Kumiko.
She looks nice.
She is nice.
She had this big smile and she wore bright colours, appearing again and again here and there in the sunshine.
Maybe she’ll come here in the summer. Then you and Mum can meet her.
He had envied his brother this girl, the apparent ease she felt with him in the pictures – or maybe that was what made him a good photographer, that he was a quiet sort of bloke who made people feel easy around him. Richard didn’t know anything about
