Jonny had taken a step closer.
Didn’t you hear what I said? If I put it in your food you won’t smell it or taste it, any more than a rat does.
It’s blue. I’ll see it, won’t I? I don’t eat in the dark.
How long?
As long as it takes
It rained in the Lakes, and the hills were grey. When the rain stopped and the sun came out the hills were purple and the sky was blue. Jonathan took pictures in black-and-white. Why do that, she wanted to say, when there are these colours? It’s the colours that make the place so beautiful. But he was seeing the curves of the hills and the sheen of the lakes, and the way the light came between the clouds and fell across them. It made her aware of things like that, travelling with Jonathan. She started to see what he saw, what she might not have seen for herself. She began to see where he would take his pictures – or if not where, then when. What concerned him might be the light or the shadows, not the colours or even the forms. The moving things, the moment, the places between, and how he might catch them.
One day they climbed a mountain into a big wind. She stood at the top with her arms out like an aeroplane falling forward into the wind but the wind kept her upright. She could see the horizon where the wind came from, and a lake dark in the valley deep below, and cloud moving through the valley. She called to Jonathan, her words carried back on the wind, and he came and stood there too and put out his arms. Then the wind blew the cloud up from the valley. They could feel the cold and the moistness of it before it reached them, swirling up and hiding the lake and then all the land below until there was no view any more but only cloud, and he pulled her close and put his arms around her.
Do you still love me? she said. She said it again, loud. She had to speak loudly as the wind took her words away.
Of course I love you.
Do you love me as much as you did in Japan?
Of course.
Sometimes I think it’s different, now you’re in England.
Why should it be different?
His face was cool, damp with the mist.
Just that things are different here.
Maybe it’s you that’s different.
Wind. Cloud. Words blown about in the cloud. He. She. One of them. Different.
Maybe he was no different, she thought in that moment. Only the place. That was what was wrong. What seemed free in Japan was no longer freedom once he was home.
She remembered why he had left Japan, or why he said he was leaving. I’m not Japanese, am I? I’m outside of it all. I can only watch and not touch.
But that’s your job, she said, that’s being a photographer. That’s who you are. You watch. You look. You see, and you show us things about the world we live in that we don’t know we’ve seen.
It seemed OK there, in Tokyo, that he was doing that.
And besides, you touch me, she said. You touch me lots.
He laughed then, as if she was right and he was silly to have had that idea.
OK, he said, maybe you’re right, but I still have to go home, for a while at least, and you can come too, and then we’ll go from there.
The walk took them on along a ridge and through bare stretches of land. They had to watch the ground carefully for the path. It was only a thin beaten track that had been made by the people who had walked it before. No one but the two of them up there that day but she was aware of all the others, walking that path looking for the cairns, or some of them building the cairns, picking up stones to mark where they had been so that other people could see and follow. If it hadn’t been for the cairns they might have got lost, up there on the top of the mountain. She went behind him in the mist, his dull green coat that blended with the rocks. She had come all that way to be with him but he receded before her, camouflaged in his green coat, closed into his thoughts. She ran to catch up with him.
Wait for me, she said. I don’t want to lose you up here.
There was a time in Tokyo when he showed her his photos from the war. They were horrible pictures that she didn’t like to see and liked less to remember, but all the same she could not pull herself away from them. He gave her a magnifying glass and let her see all of them, the contact prints, the pictures that were not published as well as the ones that were, standing behind her, watching her look, as if each of the pictures was a confession that he had to have her see, showing her things that she did not want to see, that he did not want ever to have seen himself, as if he thought that she would not want to see him if he had seen those things. That’s who I am, he said. A spectator. A taker of pictures. He said that he had felt cold, taking those photos, even when he had been sweating with fear. And it was cold of him, to show them to her. I did not mean to be cold, he said. It’s something in me.
No, she said. It’s only the camera. You put the camera in front of your eyes.
It was raining in
