She was awake a long time the first night. This was not surprising, after the flight. She had never flown long-distance before. She felt the night grey in her head, not black, never quite black. The night was grey and the room where she did not sleep was spare and the house where so many people had passed in the past sounded of emptiness even though Jonathan’s mother and his brother were asleep in the rooms along the passage, and Jonathan himself asleep where he had slept through his childhood – and the dog downstairs, which was a new dog, Jonathan had said, that his mother had got while he was away, not the kind of dog they used to have, big golden dogs, retrievers, but a spaniel, black-and-white and long-eared, which slept in a basket in a corner of the kitchen. She had an idea that the emptiness she heard was not only inside her jet-lagged head but also the wind in the hollow of the chimney above the fireplace in the room. And that was black. In the winter, she thought, in the past when those others had lived in the house, there would have been a fire burning, smoke filling the chimney in the nights, and inside it would be black from that, soft and black from soot; but now in the summer the chimney was empty. The wind brought the sound of the clock from the church across the fields. The sound came through the open window and down the black chimney also. She put on the light and saw that the time on her watch was still the time in Japan. One a.m. in England, by the clock. Nine in Japan. She corrected her watch and lay awake some more.
She thought about the day. She thought about the past that was all around her in the house, and was connected to Jonathan but not connected to her; the past of people she had never known. They had gone for a walk that afternoon, she and Jonathan and Claire. They had lunch, and then they took her around and showed her the village and the church, tall and white in the sunshine that came through its long windows, and close to the church, the Hall, at the end of a long drive. Claire said that the family used to live in the Hall. And then in the 1930s Jonathan’s uncle had sold the Hall and come to the farm, and brought with him to the farm all the stuff that they had in the house – not everything from the Hall of course, she said, because the farmhouse was so much smaller, but whatever was best and most valuable or meant something to the family. I imagine the rest got lost along the way, she said. Sold or burnt, she said, disposed of; you know how these things happen. But how was a girl like Kumiko supposed to know a thing like that? She pictured a bonfire in the fields, of furniture, of whatever it was that a family did not value, old brown cupboards and chairs, and broken picture frames and books and bookcases and dishes, lost between the Hall at the edge of the village and the farmhouse in the countryside, flames and an upturned table, and the hedgerows and the church behind.
She didn’t hear him coming, only the door when it opened. He knew how to walk those old floors without making a sound.
Did you always walk around this house at night, she whispered, without anyone knowing?
Was that what he had done as a boy, creeping down the passage, down the stairs? So that his mother didn’t hear, his brother didn’t hear.
The stairs have carpet on them now, he whispered back. It’s much quieter since the carpet was put down.
They were like naughty children, excited to be doing secret things in the dark. Giggling as they tried to be silent, biting fingers, hands over each other’s mouths. It was so long since they had made love.
Are you happy to be here?
Now I am.
And she was at that moment, everything about her foreign and new, even though it was so old, except for the feel of his skin and the smell of him against her.
He was gone before she woke up. (Why could he not have stayed until she woke, she thought, so that she might wake beside him?) It was six a.m. and light like day. The church clock sounded, a minute ahead of her watch. In Japan it was afternoon already. She went to the window and pulled back the curtains. There were no other houses to see. There was no one to hear, not inside the house or outside of it. There were birds singing. She felt she was the only person anywhere. She was a city girl. She had never had that feeling before, that she was the only person in the world, getting up out of bed and drawing the curtains onto a bright day where no one was. She stood at the window looking down at Claire’s garden. There was
