Let’s go into the garden, she had said. Just until Richard comes in. It’s such a nice evening. She thought, Richard should have been back by now. It was rude of him not to have come in sooner to meet Jonny’s girl. Rude to keep her waiting when she must be tired after her flight.
Oh, the girl had said, so smoothly and lightly, I would love to see your garden.
Really, this Japanese girl was quite disarming. Not what she had expected.
Have my mother show you her garden, Jonathan had suggested, when they were on their way in the car. He had come to Heathrow to pick her up. It was six months since she had seen him. She had been a little afraid of how it would be when he was back in his own country. There had been a few phone calls, but international calls were difficult in those days, with echoes and time lags. She would hear her own voice coming back to her, which sounds like the voice of a schoolgirl, more Japanese, more accented in its English than she has realised, and then the other one, an Englishman’s voice that surprises as if she never heard it before. Hear the voices waste expensive minutes speaking of the time and the weather. Put the phone down with a sense of what was not said. Then a photograph comes in the post, bright with daffodils, and written on the back of it, Come and see me. And she holds it and plans, puts it on the shelf where she looks at it for months. She goes to work in the morning and comes back in the evening, alone to her one-room flat. It’s still there, beside the teapot, propped up between the teapot and the bills, the thought of Jonathan but also of the adventure, of doing what he did when he came to Japan, going away not just for a holiday but for longer. There are other letters. At last she calls and they speak again. She says the name of an airline, a flight, a time. She has bought her outward ticket but kept her return open. She is taking a great step out into the open. She has savings. She has left her job and she is going to England, and then the two of them will go travelling, all of Europe before them. I’ll come and meet you, he says, I’ll be there. (So is she going out to the known, or the unknown? Somehow, she wants it to be both, the man she knows and the unknown place.) Now and then on that long flight, she wonders if she will recognise him, when she lands. If he will recognise her. Why she has gone all that way to see a man she may not recognise. But he was there at the barrier, when she walked through, looking, looking first at faces that seemed like his but not like his at all. He was standing there, real, known. Present. His touch, the smell of him. His voice without distortion or echo. Even his clothes, clothes that she knew (and that were also the past), that they had bought together in Tokyo the summer before, that looked quite worn-out, but he was English and Englishmen liked to wear worn-out clothes. Then they were in the car. They were driving through England. It was not so very different, at first. She had wanted it to be entirely different. It could have been anywhere, at first, from the car, only a place of cars and motorways. And then when they left the motorway and were driving in the countryside she saw the villages, the trees and fields, green and soft beneath the changing sky. He said that they’d had a spell of lovely weather, that it was a good time to come. They talked a lot at first, in the car. Once they were on those country roads they didn’t say so much, only as they got close to his home Jonathan talked about his mother.
She’s put you in the spare room, I hope you don’t mind. (She did mind. She minded very much. She minded the distance that was put between them, from that beginning.) Mum’s a bit old-fashioned about things like that, a bit out of touch. But she’s looking forward to meeting you. Let her take you around the garden, she’ll like that.
He wanted to please her. He wanted her to please his mother. She understood that. He wanted the two women, his mother and his girl, to meet and talk in the garden, two women walking, and he would see them from the window inside, these pieces of his life running one alongside the other.
It had been easy to see that she was Jonathan’s mother. She was small and slim and dark like him, quite dark she thought for an English person, a pretty woman still. Her face was lined, from being out in all the weather, she thought, in the garden and the countryside, lines about the eyes and grey in her
