What were you doing? she said.
Just looking, he said, as if he had been caught doing something he shouldn’t.
That wasn’t the only time. He went in again after that. Early in the morning when no one else was up, he’d just walk into the room and see that the images were there. Jonny wasn’t hiding them, after all. They were out there on the big mahogany table for anyone to see. Sometimes the door wasn’t even closed.
What was the point of all these pictures? Was this work? This, Jonny’s work? So many images, that was all they were; they had no purpose. There was the girl; she was nice. There were the war photos; he had seen the point of those, though Jonny said he wasn’t going to take war photos any more. The rest of it didn’t seem to be work but only life. The streets he passed through. The people who passed by. Tokyo. He didn’t like the look of Tokyo. It was so crowded, so full of Japanese. Everyone said the Japs did terrible things in the war. They said his father had had a terrible time because of the Japs, though they never got round to explaining precisely what that meant. But the Japanese looked so neat in Jonny’s pictures, in their business suits in front of shiny buildings, and the girl had this big smile.
So when the girl came he knew her already but he didn’t know her at all.
She was small and poised and neat in her movements. A lightness to her that seemed very feminine. That made him feel heavy. Many of the pictures he had seen of her showed a house, a Japanese-style house, not one of those shiny modern ones. Was it her house, or Jonny’s, or maybe some other place they went to, where Jonny took the pictures? It was a house made of wood with paper windows and sliding screens inside like paper walls. It was different from any house he knew. He felt that he would be clumsy in such a house. Must he bend his head to go through the doors? Would it shake to the tread of his feet or his touch?
Her voice was like that too. Soft, with a simplicity in it, but that might have been just the way she spoke English. When they went out in the Land Rover it had been difficult to hear what she said over the sound of the engine. He had to get her to repeat herself a couple of times. So he stopped, and shut off the engine, and then it was his voice that had seemed too loud, when they got out and he showed her everything. It had been nice to be showing her things. She asked if he had learnt his farming at college but he told her how he had just seemed to know some of it, from the beginning, how he must have learnt as a child when he used to go round the farm with his father, sitting where she did, sometimes getting out, sometimes just sitting and watching out of the passenger window, learning like that. Oh that’s nice, she said, I think that Jonathan doesn’t remember his father very much. Of course he remembered, he said. He was bound to remember, wasn’t he? Because he was older. That was what he said to her, taking the opportunity to set himself apart from his younger brother who had brought this girl here. But there was no more than a vague figure in his mind as he spoke, the memory of a man’s big hands lifting from the steering wheel, pulling the handbrake, opening the door, of a tall man in a cap and a blue shirt or a worn tweed coat walking out away from him into the field. There would be a decision for a boy then, whether to watch or whether to run after, fitting his running steps to the man’s slow strides. If you wanted to see how a crop was growing you didn’t look only at the edge, on the headlands, but you walked in towards the centre of the field. You walked in and then about, this way and that, and stopped at different points. You looked where you knew the soil was light, and where it was heavier and where the water stayed. And the man did that, silent ahead of the boy – if the boy had followed and not only watched – always moving on ahead so that the boy would see his back and his hands more vividly than his face. Then he was back in the Land Rover, and if the boy had got out then the boy climbed in too while he waited, and there was that hand on the brake, on the gear, and the smell of the outside, and a little of the smell of the cigarettes that he smoked, which clung to his clothing, brought back into the cab. Of course, he told the girl. Yes, I remember him well. And so they got back in, where the doors on each side had been left open, and he put his own hand to the gear and
