People said he was like him. He didn’t know about that. Physically he was like him; anyone could see that from family photos. Jonny didn’t resemble him at all. But Jonny was the one who had gone looking while he kept to the farm. Jonny had gone to Asia and to war, like their father. He had stayed at home and worked the farm like their father. There was no telling which one of them had come closest.
His mother was home. They had an everyday lunch like they usually did when it was only themselves at home. Bread and cheese. Not much to say. The radio, the news, the weather forecast. Dry in Norfolk; rain in the north-east. It didn’t sound good for the Lakes.
Did they say when they’d be back?
They weren’t sure.
Better that they didn’t come back, not for some time at least. Perhaps the weather would clear, in a day or two. When there was rain in the Lakes the cloud came down and there was nothing to see. He imagined them walking in cloud across the Lakeland hills, seeing nothing, the girl’s red coat showing at a distance, Jonny opaque beside her, the path fading into the mist before them. After lunch, he would go out where it was flat and bright. His mother would take her gloves, her secateurs and her trug, and go to the garden. Everything would be normal, as it had always been, or as it had been these last few years, since he had been working the farm and since Jonny went away. It was the start of July. It was a day like the days when they first came home from school for the summer holiday. When he went away to school he had wanted to come home to a place where nothing changed. That was how he had liked it. That was still how he liked it. Fixed. He remembered how it was when he came home from school. The place had to be the same place that he had remembered each day when he was away. He would come back from school and look at the room where he and his brother slept, or, later when they slept in separate rooms, his room alone, and then go downstairs and outside, walk the bounds of the place and check that everything was still there and nothing had been moved, and no one had come and meddled in it. He would go to the garden where his mother came out with her trug and her secateurs, or where she knelt weeding, and climb the walnut tree from which he and his brother could see everything at once, all around: their mother, the garden, the hedge around the garden, the house, the drive, the fields, the church, the village, other fields and woods, and the sky over it all.
Those first holidays when they came home from school the two brothers were close, though at school they had been apart, divided by age and dormitories and forms. They came home a pair and changed out of their uniforms and left them on the floor for their mother to pick up, and wore their home clothes, and often Jonny’s clothes were clothes that used to be his but that didn’t matter because they were anybody’s clothes, the clothes of a boy at home. Jonny walked behind him as he made his tour of the place. Jonny climbed the tree with him. A rope hung from the lowest branch of the tree so that they could climb. It had hung there all through the term untouched, and now they climbed it. Their father had put the rope there, and tied knots in it, one big one at the base and two others on the way up to make the climb easy. Jonny could climb the rope as easily as Richard could. They climbed onto the branch and along to where it joined the trunk and sometimes up onto one of the adjoining branches and watched. They spent hours in those first few days that they were home in the tree watching their world, astride the branch or with their backs to the trunk, watching their mother gardening, watching who came and went. They were home, but the walnut was home within the home. Like the place you called home when you played It. Where you could be seen but not be caught. Where all three of them could be seen. Because they each of them knew that any day any one of them might walk out of the house and disappear.
The leaves of the walnut were long and oval and green. They had a strong dark smell. The smell was there in the tree even when the leaves were green. It would be stronger when they fell and blackened and grew greasy in the autumn and Billy swept them up. In the tree it was as if you could smell that blackening already though it was summer. Perhaps it was the sun shining through the leaves that made the smell come out. It you looked up through the tree the leaves were a bright apple-like green despite their odour, and the branches between them were elephant grey but smooth, smoother than elephant skin would be, if you were to touch and climb an elephant. If he stood on one of the lower branches he could put two hands to the one above and pull himself up, rest his tummy on the branch, lift a leg astride it while Jonny stayed below as he wasn’t tall enough to reach. From that point the branches were more closely spaced so he could go higher. Don’t go any higher, Jonny said, from his safe branch below. It makes the tree move when you go higher, I can see the top of the tree moving, it’s scary, you’ll fall. It’s fine, he said, finding a place
