They walked out from the house across the lawn. Jonathan stood at the window. No need to come with us, Claire had said in her crisp clear way, and he had said no, fine, he’d seen the garden so many times; though he didn’t turn away, he didn’t seem to be wanting to do anything else.
There were double doors that opened into the heart of the garden, onto flagstones, a little area where there was a table and chairs, and then onto the lawn and the flower beds and the hedges. It was late in the day so there were long shadows. There was this one moment in the year, Claire said, stopping and turning to look at her, when the garden was its best. And Kumiko said then she was lucky to be there.
Claire smiled, out there in the evening sunshine, a neat little English smile that went quickly away, that was like the smile of an Englishwoman in some old movie. (But also like Jonathan’s smile, so many of her gestures like Jonathan’s.) It was perfect now, Claire said. Kumiko saw that her hands could not resist breaking off a dead rose head as she spoke. She did not even seem to notice that she was doing it.
The girl spoke English well, but with slight pauses where she looked about or her hands moved as she sought a word. What she said was expressed very simply. Claire couldn’t tell if this was because this was specific to her or because she was speaking English, or because this was the way that all Japanese girls spoke.
Charles de Mills, this rose is called. It’s one of my favourites.
It’s beautiful. An English rose.
This one isn’t English, actually, this rose is from France. Many of my roses are French. People don’t think that. People think this garden is classically English, but it isn’t really, not the plants at least. Or perhaps it is, she might have gone on, it was, classically English, just because of that, because the plants came from everywhere, because the mild English climate was so tolerant of plants from other parts of the world whose climates were more extreme, even here in Norfolk, in the east, where it could be so much colder in the winter than in the west, and because the English were tolerant of the way they grew, unlike the French who might have grown all of the same plants but made their gardens so much more formal. But she didn’t say any of that. She let her words fade. Perhaps it is, she just said, classically English, looking at the tangle of plants, and left it there. The girl was tired after her flight. One could see that. Tact then, not rudeness, to walk on a little in silence.
She looked like a pretty little doll, Claire had thought when Jonny came home and showed them his photos. Or was that just a mother’s resistance to her boy’s foreign girl? And this girl wasn’t just foreign. She was Japanese. Her son had been away three years, and had spent much of that time in Japan, writing her occasional rare letters from there that said that the cities were vast but the gardens were lovely, and when he came back he had shown them his photos; and now this girl had come to visit them, suggesting that she was important to him, that she wasn’t just some girl to be known and loved and photographed abroad and then left behind, this Japanese girl with a bright face, who was yet so obviously tired after her long flight. And here she was, speaking to this girl, making conversation, letting conversation pause, noting how the greenfly gathered on a rose shoot, and how composed the girl seemed, despite her evident tiredness. She didn’t really know anything about the Japanese, she thought; only what Jonny had said, in his letters and since he had come home. She had been used to thinking of them mainly as the people whom her husband had fought in the war, hating them even, for that – though Charlie had said so little; what knowledge she had was drawn mainly from what others said, others who had been in Burma or been prisoners, or more often others who had known other people who had been there, as no one who had actually been there seemed to say very much. Slowly over the years, over the time that Jonny was away, she had come to revise her understanding, to see that his Japanese were different from theirs, to accept that the one thing didn’t necessarily connect with the other, the history and how things were now. Even so, that didn’t quite dispel the distrust. Though she had to admit, really it did look as if the two of them had had a happy time, Jonny and his girl out there in Japan, this pretty girl always smiling her wide open smile, on the beach or in the park or in the mountains or wherever it was they went.
Now that they had met she saw that the girl was neither quite so pretty nor so doll-like as in the photos. Her nose was perhaps too small, mouth too wide, for prettiness, features somehow too irregular for a doll. Women like Claire had been brought up to regard themselves and their kind critically. To think, if her legs weren’t her best feature then should she wear her skirt so short? But the brightness of her expression made up for much of that. She managed some brightness even as she shook away a little yawn that showed how tired she was. She put up a hand to stifle the yawn, shook off her tiredness and looked about her some more. How long have you lived here? she was asking. Did you make all this garden yourself? Since I was
